Free Michael O'Leary by Alan Ruddock

Cathal Ryan at the helm of the new UK operation. In January 1988, however, LEA was relaunched as Ryanair Europe, and began to cooperate with Ryanair, allowing the Irish airline to sell services from Dublin through to Brussels using Luton as a hub. Despite a steady trickle of Ryanair passengers, Ryanair Europe’s attempts to start profitable services from London to Amsterdam and Brussels founderedquickly and the airline limped to eventual closure at the start of 1989.
    The profit Ryan had envisaged for Ryanair remained similarly elusive, and by mid-1987 his airline had racked up losses of more than £2 million. The money itself wasn’t a problem for Ryan – in 1987 alone his dividend from GPA had been in excess of five million – but he was becoming increasingly frustrated with Ryanair’s swelling losses despite its rising passenger numbers, and with its failure to provide a serious challenge to Aer Lingus beyond the Irish Sea.
    O’Leary too was getting restless. In the previous two years he had made about £200,000 from the newsagents – ‘serious twine’ as he puts it – but his interest in shopkeeping was waning. ‘I was bored,’ he says, ‘but it was very good money. I wasn’t overly concerned about the future. I just wanted to make a lot of money by the time I was thirty.’
    He had, he says, no grand plan, just a hunger to make money. The shops were sold, and O’Leary invested his money and his energies in property dealing. ‘I’d made very good money in the newsagents,’ he says. ‘I’d had enough of them and I sold them, bought some property, was making some nice money. That was the first time I didn’t need to work for money.’
    He felt invincible. Barely three years out of university, with a short career in tax affairs already in his past, he now had more money in his pockets than any of his contemporaries – and more, indeed, than many of the partners in the accountancy firm that he had left behind. He could choose his own future and decided that he still had plenty to learn. Smart, driven and ambitious, he decided to see whether Tony Ryan, who had courted him in the past, was still prepared to offer him a job – on O’Leary’s terms.
    O’Leary wanted to learn at the feet of a master, and money gave him the freedom to try his luck. He decided to offer his services to Ryan for free, asking only for a 5 per cent cut of any money that he made for Ryan in a year. Ryan didn’t hesitate. O’Leary was hired as a personal assistant or apprentice with a bizarre arrayof duties ranging from the menial to responsibility for overseeing Ryan’s private investments.
    â€˜I just wanted to see how somebody at that level operated,’ he says.
    Ryan was working at an international level; I had been working at a newsagent in Walkinstown. I’d already worked at SKC, so I’d seen a lot of big Irish business. But here was a guy who was going across the UK, across the US, across Asia. He had a global business and I don’t think there was another business like it – maybe Jefferson Smurfit [the packaging giant] was close – but there certainly wasn’t another business like it in Europe. He was the guy who started with nothing and was going all the way across the world. And I thought if I can’t learn off this guy in a year or two…
    O’Leary’s learning curve was steep in his first year with Ryan.
    Ryan’s style was abrasive: he did not suffer fools, ruled his company aggressively and regularly savaged his senior executives at their weekly management meetings. He demanded excellence, worked obsessively long hours and was at the peak of his considerable powers. A consummate salesman and superb negotiator, Ryan also understood the dynamics of the airline industry better than the men who ran it. His ability to predict the industry’s fortunes and to plan for future