In 1992, Marc’s entrepreneurial spirit led him to set up his own business, Irish International Sales (IIS). Initially, this company was a reseller for Take 5 Accounts and Payroll software. Within four years, IIS became the largest reseller of Take 5 in Ireland, acquiring four other Take 5 resellers.
In 2001, he bought the majority share in a small Irish software business, Big Red Book at a time when the company was losing money. The company became profitable within two months, and Marc then acquired a payroll company to compliment Big Red Books Accounting products.
Marc launched Big Red Cloud in June 2012, the online version of Big Red Book. To date, the company successfully converts 59% of trials into sales and the number of customers is growing rapidly. He continues to run both Big Red Book and Big Red Cloud which now support 75,000 businesses.
Can you give us a brief history of Big Red Cloud?
Big Red Cloud is part of the Big Red Book stable of products, a business that specialises in developing simple and easy to use Accounting, Bookkeeping and Payroll software.
Big Red Cloud enables small business owner’s access to their accounts online, always accessible, and with free access for their Accountant. We also offer telephone support to our thousands of customers. Our company’s motto is to keep things simple. We strive to help small businesses succeed by enabling them to use an accounting system without any knowledge of accounts and run a more profitable business.
Big Red Cloud was established by Marc O’Dwyer and Paraic Nolan to bring the Big Red Book company into the 21st century. We are based in Glenageary in Dublin with 25 employees, based across Ireland, with some developers based overseas.
In business for 28 years and 100% Irish owned, we have developed a vast knowledge in this area and bring an expertise unparalleled in accounting software to all our 75,000 customers.
What are the challenges that you face in your business and how do you work to overcome them?
Like all Irish businesses, employing and retaining staff is always a challenge however we are very lucky within Big Red Cloud to have an excellent core of loyal staff that have been with us for many years and are key to why we are so successful.
Regulation and changes to tax and payroll updates are always a challenge in our industry as we need to re-develop our software to ensure it complies with all Irish revenue requirements in order to make our service as seamless as possible for customers.
Competition is an interesting challenge; we compete against some of the largest businesses in our sector and the fact that we are 100% Irish is a huge benefit in helping us be successful. For example, not all our accounting software competitors align their software with the relevant Vat and Tax regulations specific to the Irish market, unlike us.
Can you tell us a bit about current and upcoming trends in cloud accounting software industry?
At the moment AI and machine learning are the current trends. We have built both into our accounting software to make the life of small business owners even easier by automating a lot of the mundane tasks involved in bookkeeping, such as automatic posting of purchase invoices, automatic import of bank transactions, automatic payments, the list goes on. We have now integrated a payment link on all invoices to enable our customers get paid quicker. We have partnered with some of the largest companies in the world to enable us achieve this functionality such as PLAID and Square on the payments side.
No doubt integration of Crypto payments will be on the agenda for upcoming feature requests, we also reckon Revenue will move to require automatic VAT like the HMRC did in the UK with the introduction of making Tax Digital. That would mean the moment you purchase a coffee the VAT paid would automatically be sent (via the Café’s accounting system ) to the revenue.
What has been your greatest achievement and biggest risk?
Launching Big Red Cloud has been my biggest achievement. We were very early adopters in Cloud technology, we set off on the journey back in 2009 when very little was known about the Cloud. I reckoned it was going to be the way people did business and I bet our companies future on that hunch I had. In the early stages it was a real challenge, firstly the way the software had to be developed was completely alien to anything we had developed before, choosing the correct platform to launch on (thankfully we chose Microsoft Azure) was important and convincing our customers that they wouldn’t “own” their accounting software but that they would be renting it was interesting to say the least. Lastly, convincing Accountants that both their data and the data of their customers would be “safe” in the cloud was a big challenge all on its own.
Taking this chance to bet what was back then an 18 year old successful businesses future on a whim that I had, was without doubt the biggest risk I took in my business career. One I am happy to say has paid off handsomely!
What drives you as a business?
We are driven on a daily basis to help make business owners lives easier by supplying very simple and easy to use accounting and payroll software. This helps them get on with doing what they are best at running their business and ensures they have a better chance of being profitable. We aim to give first class customer support, delivered directly from our offices and homes (due to Covid) here in Ireland to these businesses to ensure they have no concerns whatsoever.
This was all driven by my needs when I set up my business originally to have an accounting package that was easy to use, to let me do what I was good at, running the business! I am not an accountant contrary to most people’s belief and hence Big Red Book/Cloud helped me achieve this goal and now helps thousands of Irish and UK business owners do the same.
What made you decide to become a member of Guaranteed Irish?
It was really important for me to join Guaranteed Irish initially because we were a 100% Irish owned and managed business, but then to promote Irish businesses within the island of Ireland. I think it is absolutely essential that Irish business and the Irish public support Irish businesses as much as possible. We can guarantee the future of our economy by buying Irish. These businesses make up the backbone of our economy, they are supporting jobs, paying taxes and will ensure the future for our island.
Can you tell us how it felt to win the Guaranteed Irish Business Advocate Award?
Winning this prestigious award in its inaugural year was an absolute honour. With so many other worthy advocates for Irish business that could have been chosen, it was a real privilege. I am a huge advocate for Irish business and am very outspoken about why people should buy Irish, so to receive this award as recognition of that, absolutely blew me away. Every Irish business person should promote Irish as much as possible by default. Winning the award is just the icing on top.
What’s next for Big Red Cloud?
Before Covid happened we had done quite a lot of research into other markets, mainly Malta and Cyprus. Both of these countries which are in the European Union have a very high percentage of English speakers and more importantly have the same accounting rules as Ireland. Our software would work very well there. It would be our intention to look at these markets again in 2023 when Covid-19 hopefully will be gone or at least every country will be on top of it. The UK is our nearest neighbour and we have been in discussions to buy another company over there. That would give us a platform to grow from without having to start from scratch. We do have a small percentage of customers in the UK and our software is fully compliant with all UK regulations.
We are also about to launch Big Red Web, a simple ecommerce designer. With the government grant available for €2500 available for businesses to go online and with so many Irish businesses losing out to foreign online competition, we wanted to bring our simple way of doing things like we do with the accounts in Big Red Cloud to web design and ecommerce and hence Big Red Web will be launching soon! Watch this space
Learn more here: https://bigredcloud.com/