Well he never mentored me as such, but Feargal Quinn really impressed me over the years, mainly because of his attitude to customer service. I tried to put a lot of his ideas into my own business.

Anything in particular?

Well, I would have gone into his supermarkets and seen the way that the staff there were always happy, and I would have always strived for the same with my own people. As a business person you have to remember that you're only as good as your staff. If your staff aren't happy then your customers aren't happy, and your business won't succeed. There has to be a bit of flexibility. I think there are a lot of businesses out there that are run too much by the book. There needs to be give and take for the employees.

What else did you learn from him?

He reinforced for me the importance of treating the customer very well. I had that ethos anyway, but that level of customer service wasn't being delivered to the same extent elsewhere until Feargal Quinn came along. Then, of course, a lot of people tried to copy it, but what they didn't realize was that to copy it properly you had to work very hard, and not everyone was able to doing that.

So it's also about hard work?

Yes. He worked really hard at his business. And not for the money!

It's about pride in your job and pride in what you do. If your customers feel that pride, then they'll come back to you. He calls it 'the boomerang'. He had groups of customers telling him about his mistakes so that he could go and fix them. He was doing that before focus groups were a big thing, but unlike a lot of modern focus groups he was there listening himself.

So it was about the personal touch?

Yes. When you rang up Superquinn, his voice was on the machine, which was a nice feeling for customers. It didn't feel like a big cold business. It felt like it's was somebody's vision and that was very important. Businesses now are losing that personal connection.

In conversation with Patrick Freyne