The Big Interview: Cormac Shiels – optimism underpinned by strong core values

Bidvest Noonan, is Ireland’s leading provider of facilities services and one of the country’s largest employers. Bidvest Noonan CEO Cormac Sheils, shares how the company’s culture and credo enabled it to keep people safe, support clients and achieve exceptional growth during the pandemic. Sheils shares his confidence in Irish business and his belief that Irish optimism can drive Ireland’s post pandemic recovery.

Bidvest Noonan was founded in 1977 to provide services to both the public and private sectors in Ireland. Today, with 27,000 employees, it is a market leader in in both Ireland and the UK and has a group turnover of some €830 million. Its range of complementary offerings encompass cleaning, security, decontamination, M&E engineering services, electronic security, industrial services, reception and facilities management. It also operates across a range of sectors – from education, retail and life sciences to healthcare, agrifoods and the public sector.

The company has grown through a combination of strong organic growth and strategic acquisitions. Over the past two years Bidvest Noonan doubled in size and in Ireland it welcomed four new businesses into its group, Interact, a market leading provider of M&E engineering services, H2O Solutions, a specialist water services company, Ancove, a specialist waste management business, and Amber, an industrial cleaning services business in Northern Ireland.

Cormac Sheils, CEO of Bidvest Noonan in Ireland, has a vivid recollection of when COVID-19 hit. “March 12, 2020 was a day like no other. We were experiencing a real crises and this was a moment we had never encountered before”

For so many companies across Ireland and around the world it was a big shock to the system. “Initially many of our customers in education and retail sectors closed their doors completely, as did some in the transport and aviation sectors. However, others such as in the manufacturing life sciences and healthcare sectors needed to remain open. They had critical work to do and they needed our support more than ever before,” Cormac Sheils recollects.

“So we had to adapt very quickly, moving staff between contracts and doing our best to keep people working during that time and being sensitive to their personal situations, too. So it was a time of being as adaptable and flexible as we possibly could be, and being much more innovative with how we resource contracts. Our rosters had to change completely, as did our staffing levels and the way that we managed contracts.

“In our healthcare sector our focus on infection control increased and included new measures. It was challenging time for our people. People working in the healthcare sector are very empathetic and will speak and engage with patients. But unfortunately that had to stop, it was an absolute imperative that they couldn’t do that anymore, which was distressing for them.”

Overall, the business has grown during the period of lockdown, partly through acquisition but also by continuing to build its service offering to customers. “We’re seeing positive momentum in our businesses at the moment, because we’re increasing our service offering and also increasing how we use technology as a resource to improve efficiency for our customer base.” Cormac Sheils says.

Core values

According to Cormac Sheils, the company’s credo has contributed to its success. The company’s credo comprises six principles: putting people first, consistently getting the basics right, earning trust, being adaptive and agile, supporting local communities and operating sustainably and using imagination to create new ways of working and designing solutions that create value.

“We would say those principles have always been inherent to the business but we’ve just put more and more focus on them in recent years. And we try to spell them out to people, to say this is what we feel we’re about. It’s an important part of our culture”

It was this high-performance culture that lead to South African services, trading and distribution company, Bidvest Group, investing in the business in 2017. “To be really fair, Bidvest said part of the reason they bought us was because it was a culture and credo they could see themselves aligning with. And because of that, they’ve encouraged this culture as well.”

That sense of cultural continuity has also extended into Bidvest Noonan’s own approach to recent acquisitions. “In each of the three businesses we acquired this year we saw something that we felt was similar to us in the way they delivered services and the way they looked after their people. For us that’s the critical piece. We only acquire businesses that we believe can fit into our model. It’s too difficult otherwise, it takes up too much time and you lose focus on what you really want to do.”

Building communities

Discussing the challenges during the pandemic of leading a large team of people spread across Ireland, Cormac Sheils talks about the way the group has addressed a variety of issues – from procurement and innovation to social responsibility, for example – by setting up “communities”. “In the early days of the pandemic we established a number of online communities to enable diverse groups of people, drawn from across our business, to work together to analyse and solve problems. They developed solutions and the narratives around how we would tackle different problems in the business. We accessed the wider strength of our people to allow us to continue supporting clients and keeping people safe.

How did he cope personally with the challenge of leading this team at such a challenging time? Family life, with a wife and three young boys at home, provided a great balance to the demands of the job, he says.

“Initially I was working from home, which was difficult. A day or two is fine but when it’s all day, every day it can be very hard to mark the separation point between work and home life. I think when you’re working from home you can you can step away from the laptop for a minute but you’ll gravitate back to it very quickly.

“For me, it was actually understanding that the longer I stayed active on calls, the more other people within the business felt they had to stay active too, and that wasn’t necessarily healthy for everybody. So I began to think about that differently and I have tried to make sure that what I do doesn’t impact significantly on other people’s lives. People need their own space and their own down time and we try to encourage that as much as we possibly can here.”

Mental wellbeing

Cormac Sheils has concerns, too, about the way COVID has affected people’s overall wellbeing. “I don’t think we’ve seen the true impact of the last year and a half on people’s mental health,” he says. “Just look at the number of students who missed their first year in college and now they’re starting second year. You could say that this year we’ve two years of first years starting college. Even in our own Apprentice Academy people couldn’t get the mentoring and coaching that they should have had. All of those things have been missed by people.

“You know, time can be a great healer, but it can also be can be quite the opposite if you’re on a downward path. So, as human beings we need to be really, really reflective on the impact that we’ve had on each other. I think in the first couple of months when the pandemic struck we had to run at 100 miles an hour just to try to keep the business stabilized in some way. But now I do think it’s time to put the brakes on and take a look at our people and how this has been impacting them. We need to give people time. We simply don’t need the amount of meetings and calls we’ve been having, nor do we need to have everybody on every call. That’s been an important learning for us as a business.’

Bright future

Looking to the future, Cormac Sheils says: “I always feel a great positivity around Ireland purely because we tend to look at the brighter side of things and to look at where opportunity exists. All the companies we’re speaking to at the moment are talking about other avenues of opportunity for growth. There’s quite a lot going on in construction, for example, with redevelopment of sites to support foreign direct investment. There’s lots happening within this country and plenty of opportunity. We believe Bidvest Noonan has a very bright future ahead of it and we are very optimistic about Ireland and the future for Irish business in general.”