A suite success

Veteran hotelier, Eugene McKeever crowned a successful career in hospitality recently when he collected an MBE from the Queen. Here, he reflects on a lifetime spent in the trade and tells Russell Campbell why he believes that his family’s business model has been so successful…

The backbone of the business community in Northern Ireland is its small and medium-sized firms, a great many of which are still in the hands of the families that first founded them. That’s particularly true across the hospitality sector here, perhaps because traditional family values fit so well with the image that many customers have of a smartly-run establishment.

The burgeoning McKeever Hotel Group is an excellent example of just how successful the formula can be.

Late last month, Eugene McKeever was at Buckingham Palace with his wife, Catherine, and their five children to receive an MBE for his contribution to hospitality and tourism in Northern Ireland – a far cry from his early days in the trade when, at the age of just 12, he first donned his overalls in the kitchens at Corr’s Corner on the outskirts of Belfast.

Full of youthful exuberance, Eugene was determined to follow his parents into the hospitality trade and he spent the next 17 years of his life in the kitchens of the Newtownabbey venue, eventually, buying the roadhouse from its former owner, John Corr.

In fact, Corr’s Corner wasn’t Eugene’s first foray into the hospitality trade. In the mid-80s, he and Catherine had bought The Granagh House, a restaurant in his home village of Randalstown, which they ran successfully for almost a decade, eventually selling it on in 1996.

These days, Eugene and Catherine along with two of their children, Bridgene and Edward, own and run four mid-sized and very successful venues – Corr’s Corner; the Dunsilly Hotel near Antrim; The Adair Arms Hotel in Ballymena and their most recent acquisition, Dillons Hotel in Letterkenny, County Donegal.

“I think that ever since I can remember, I’ve always wanted to own my own business,” Eugene told LCN recently. “Getting to the stage we’re at now, I think that’s a great achievement. When we had The Granagh House, we had two part-timers and my wife worked nights and weekends while raising a family. Now we employ 220 staff.

“Like many in the hospitality trade in this country today, we worked right through the Troubles…I think we never really paused long enough to realise how bad things were. Today, when things take a step backwards and there’s a bit of trouble, it really scares me, it reminds me of how things used to be.”

His Troubles experience is similar to that of another local hotelier, Sir Billy Hastings and their shared experience has brought the two men together:

“I remember playing golf with him once and he got word that The Stormont had been blown up,” Eugene recalled. “I asked him how he coped and he told me that he knew it wasn’t a personal attack on him, if someone had been hurt, that would be awful, but buildings can always be rebuilt. I just admired that and I admired him, he built good hotels here despite everything that was going on and before all the big groups had arrived.”

The McKeever’s latest acquisition is the ailing Letterkenny Court Hotel. Once a bustling venue at the heart of the busy Donegal town, it had fallen on more difficult times and the family bought it from Nama for an undisclosed sum, immediately investing £700,000 to refurbish the ground floor and add two new function rooms before relaunching as Dillons Hotel in late October.

By his own admission, the Letterkenny purchase “wasn’t terribly strategic”: expansion is a constant within the family’s business model and Eugene’s son, Eddie, was due to re-join the family business following a stint with Maldron Hotels.

As well as that, of course, the hotel itself fitted easily within the McKeever Group model:

“All our hotels are very much what we call family-focused and locally-based,” explained Eugene. “You can see that at Corr’s and at the Adair in Ballymena, they are all situated within communities, that’s deliberate, that’s how we work. We’re a successful corporate business, but we work off that base.”

But that focus on family isn’t just for the customers’ benefit, it’s a modus operandi that runs throughout the business itself:

“The family model is very important in everything that we do,” confirmed Eugene. “We’re on hand, we’re working with the staff and I think that they feel they work for individuals because of that. I would be in all of our hotels in Northern Ireland most days. I’m on the ground and I know what’s going on, I can see that standards are being maintained. It’s also a big responsibility because I know that whatever I say to a staff member, that can make the difference between them just leaving the business or staying on and building a successful career.”

And like most hoteliers, Eugene is firmly focused on cost control in his business and “keeping things simple”. He also believes in keeping management to a minimum:

“As you get bigger, things get harder to achieve,” he remarked. “But it’s still important to keep things simple and small. And examine every cost rigidly. I think that the bigger hotels sometimes let costs run away with them, they bring in things that they don’t really need. It can be as simple as the number of papers they have in reception. Why have 10 if you only need two?”

Plans are now in hand to refurbish the bedrooms at Corr’s Corner and the lobby and reception at The Dunsilly Hotel in 2015. In The Adair Arms, there are plans to install new CCTV and some new business equipment in the venue’s six corporate suites.

“In the past, I will have tried to go up some road but someone will have come up to stop me and I’ve realised that it was the wrong direction,” remarked Eugene. “I remember my mother saying that if something is meant for you, it’ll come to you and often I’ll just have gut feelings about the way to go with things, even right down to a menu choice. I’m not always right, but it works out most of the time and I don’t have any regrets about anything that I have done. There’s nothing I can honestly say that I wish I had done differently.”

After receiving his MBE from the Queen in mid-December, Eugene said that he was “absolutely overwhelmed”, “I’m not sure what I did to deserve this,” he commented.

Eugene isn’t one of those business owners who struggles with the notion of retirement – at 61, he’s just beginning to relish the prospect of a diminished role in the business. Bridgene and Edward will take more responsibility for the business while Eugene turns his attention to the golf course and his beloved holiday home in Wexford.

Looking a few years down the line, Eugene says he’d like to think that the group will have grown again:

“Billy Hastings is in his eighties and he’s still going,” he points out with a hint of mock defiance. He readily admits, however, that a recent sojourn in hospital was – at least in part – related to stress:

“I have to be aware of things like that, but I have Bridgene and Edward, both of them are very capable and very tuned in to the business,” he adds. “As I step back and take more of a secondary role, I’ll be very happy to see them take more of a say in the business going forward.”