Elliot Moss
Welcome to the Jazz Shapers Podcast from Mishcon de Reya. What you are about to hear was originally broadcast on Jazz FM however the music has been cut due to rights issues.
Welcome to Jazz Shapers with me, Elliot Moss, bringing the shapers of the business world together with the musicians shaping jazz, soul and blues. My guest today is Jacqueline O’Donovan, Managing Director of O’Donovan Waste Disposal, the family run waste management and demolition services company. With ambitions to build a successful business in London, Jacqueline’s father, Joe, emigrated to the city from County Cork in the 1950s and started a demolition company. After his tragic death when Jacqueline was just seventeen, she and her three older siblings decided to run the business together, to continue their father’s legacy. Michael, Caroline, Anthony and Jacqueline have helped build the O’Donovan company into a multi award winning, multi sector business, proud of their environmental impact. They process over one million tonnes of waste annually and divert a 100% of all waste from landfill. I haven’t had many waste disposal experts on Jazz Shapers, it’s a real pleasure to have you here.
Jacqueline O’Donovan
A first for you, at your age?
Elliot Moss
At my age. What are you saying? I mean, you are right, fine. The years have been fine, Jacqui, I’m actually 104, you just haven’t realised. Now, the business obviously, as I said earlier, set up by your dad and here you are running it. You started running this business at the age of nineteen.
Jacqueline O’Donovan
Yes, I was MD at nineteen, yes. It was, I suppose looking back I didn’t think I was nineteen, I suppose when you are nineteen you think you’re a big person and you know, you’re older than you are. I realise now back when I was nineteen, I didn’t think probably further than the week ahead, as opposed to now in my latter years, I probably plan months ahead so, yeah, quite strange but yeah, I wouldn’t have changed anything.
Elliot Moss
There’s a tradition of hard work in your family and you were, I imagine you saw that from a very young age, I read a bit about the fact that before you’d even reached the age of nine you were involved in cleaning and all sorts of stuff. Was that an immigrant thing? Was that an O’Donovan thing? I mean, what do you think that was about?
Jacqueline O’Donovan
I think it was an immigrant thing. When my mum and dad arrived from West Cork and came to London, they were discriminated against, you know, it was the times of the ‘No blacks, no dogs, no Irish’ in the pubs, so the only thing for them to do was to work to make money; one, to send some back and two, to make a successful business and to provide for their own family. So I think it, it was borne out of the fact that they needed to make money because otherwise they couldn’t feed us or themselves, so yeah, very strong work ethic, had to clean the offices, no qualms about it. When I finished school, I used to have to go and do the nightshift and do my homework in the office on my own, which was down in King’s Cross at the time and we did a job in London Wall – London Wall didn’t look like London Wall does now – and I was probably fifteen then and when I think back to that my dad gave me that responsibility of locking the yard up, which was full of lorries, taking the keys of the lorry off the driver and seeing him off and then going home, to get up and go to school the next morning, that does surprise me. I would never have done that with my own son at the age of fifteen, so, yeah.
Elliot Moss
Was it needs must or was it ‘I’m going to educate my children about work’?
Jacqueline O’Donovan
I think times were different and I think it was, I don’t know if it was needs must, I think it was ‘they need to work, they need to understand how much a pound note’s worth’, so I think it was great for us all, we’re all very, very grounded, no job’s too big or too small. If a photocopier has to be done, we do a copy. You say it has to be filed, we file it. You know, there’s no airs and graces within the business even this far.
Elliot Moss
And expectations of people then that work for you, which we’ll talk about more, but you must have pretty high standards?
Jacqueline O’Donovan
I do have high standards because I think it’s important in our industry that standards are, at best practice, minimum. I like to go above best practice. I like to demonstrate… I’m the only female MD in London in a waste management company so I like to demonstrate to the other SMEs (Small Medium Enterprises) that I, yeah, I can do it, so you can do it. So, it’s not, you know we’ve got these massive plc companies that have got pots of money to throw into training and technology and innovation where, you know, at the end of the day, in a small company, independent company, you have a bottom line that you need to keep your eye very, very closely on. So, I just like to go out and demonstrate that by doing the right thing and going above best practice that it adds to the, adds to the sales figure, so therefore then adds to the bottom line.
Elliot Moss
I mentioned your dad and I mentioned that he passed away when you were, how old were you at the time?
Jacqueline O’Donovan
Seventeen.
Elliot Moss
Seventeen. And the youngest of four.
Jacqueline O’Donovan
Yep.
Elliot Moss
As I said as well, this may sound like a strange thought but it, as I was preparing for meeting you, I thought would I be sitting here now with you if he hadn’t have died at such a terribly young age?
Jacqueline O’Donovan
Probably not, no. We, as we were growing up, we all thought that the eldest brother, Michael, would just naturally take over from dad and I suppose naively I thought I’d be married by 21, have six kids, the old people carrier because obviously I’d six kids and I was going to be a housewife. So that’s what I thought I was going to do. I had got a job being a childminder at the RAF camp in Germany, so the children were saved. God bless them!
Elliot Moss
But then, but then obviously your dad dies, he’s 51, then there’s the four of you and for the youngest, as you said, to then become the boss, how did that happen? Why did it emerge that Jacqueline was best placed to do that?
Jacqueline O’Donovan
I think it evolved over a period of about two years. It took us about two years. First of all I was left at home to keep an eye on mum. Mum was 48, we thought she was ancient, obviously, past that now, it isn’t an ancient age but when you are seventeen, you think your parents are ancient.
Elliot Moss
They thought I was ancient for quite a long time, Jacqueline.
Jacqueline O’Donovan
Yes, quite. So I was left at home for a while. There was a bit of sorting out to be done. A couple of years passed. My sister went off to have my niece and I just assumed the role in the office. It was me and a girl that went to school with my second younger brother, Anthony, and basically it was us two in the office and I just assumed the role as MD and it went from there. They never questioned it, we didn’t have a vote, it wasn’t a deliberate thing, it was just something that happened, I just morphed…
Elliot Moss
Why though? Why do you think that was?
Jacqueline O’Donovan
I think it was because I was in the office and things were starting to move, the bank manager had called me out of the queue – in them days you used to have to go and bank and queue quite badly, the queues were – and I remember he called me out and he said that, ‘Look, none of you are old enough to run this business. None of you have got the business acumen of your father’ and they were right, you know, I’d run out of school at sixteen, two fingers to the teachers, don’t need you, didn’t get on with school, didn’t understand it and he said, ‘We’ll have to close the account’ and I said, ‘mm, right okay’, so that was the first challenge. Off I had to go and think right, well how am I going to get a bank account? So, I had to do those tasks because my sister was off on maternity, so…
Elliot Moss
But how did you, by the way, on that one? How did you keep him?
Jacqueline O’Donovan
I, so, I’m very passionate about our Irish roots, so there was another Irish bank in England and I went to that bank and they were quite happy to take on the account. Now, I’m not going to say it was easy. It took me years, years to persuade the bank manager to forget that I didn’t play golf, forget that I didn’t have an Irish accent and forget that my balls haven’t dropped. Just to look at the numbers, please just look at the numbers and I think that probably took in excess of eight years and then he announced he was going to retire. And I, you can imagine what my thoughts were and when he introduced me to the new manager, I turned round and I put it straight out to him that ‘I’ve done my apprentice with your predecessor, I’m not doing it again, I’ve worn my L plates, just look at the numbers, don’t look at me’.
Elliot Moss
And?
Jacqueline O’Donovan
He did. We got on like a house on fire, yeah, and then he retired. So, yeah, so people now very much, you know, we talk about male dominated industries, you know, and some people don’t like the word ‘male domination’ you know, predominantly male, whatever way you want to put it, they were and they still are and the only thing that’s going to change that, is time because we can’t change history.
Elliot Moss
Stay with me for much more from my guest today, Jacqueline O’Donovan. She’ll be back in a couple of minutes. Right now though we’re going to hear a taster from the Mishcon Academy Digital Sessions, they can be found on all the major podcast platforms. Mishcon de Reya’s Victoria Pigott and Dr Rebecca Newton, Organisational Psychologist and CEO of Coach Advisor, discuss the impact of women in positions of leadership and on boards. Pretty appropriate.
You can enjoy all our former Business Shapers on the Jazz Shapers podcast and indeed you can hear this very programme again if you pop Jazz Shapers into your podcast platform of choice. My guest today is Jacqueline O’Donovan, Managing Director of O’Donovan Waste Disposal, the family run waste management and demolitions services company. So, if you were listening earlier, and I hope you were, you would have heard you Jacqueline talking about being a woman in a man’s world, about being Irish at a time when there was huge amounts of prejudice and arguably, actually, there’s still an undertone of racism in all sorts of ways in our society unfortunately. Adversity seems to be a massive motivator in your business, you strike me as someone that the harder it gets, the harder you go at them. Is that still true?
Jacqueline O’Donovan
Yeah, it is still true, yeah, I’m, I know I’m very lucky to be able to sit here, 36 years later, in…
Elliot Moss
I don’t think it’s lucky.
Jacqueline O’Donovan
Okay.
Elliot Moss
I think you’ve earned…
Jacqueline O’Donovan
I have earned my stripes, I’m not going to lie, I have earned my stripes, I’ve done, I’ve done my graft but I think I’m lucky to say that I’ve got no regrets in my business decisions and I’ve had to make many in the 36 years behind the desk and I’ve got no regrets in my personal life and I think I’m extremely lucky to be able to say that I think there is very few people on the planet that don’t have a regret of some sort so, I’ve obviously done something right. I’ve got to be honest, I tend to get what I want and I think that’s a mindset, I think I’ve got a very positive outlook and very realistic goals and I go for it and I don’t stop until I get it.
Elliot Moss
Now there’s been some tough stuff which you’ve talked about before around postnatal depression and suffering with that for a number of years so, you talk about getting what you want, how did you get through that or does it just pass? I’ve had some phenomenal guests in the past who’ve had different forms of depression and eventually, I remember Sir John Timpson on this programme said, ‘One day you just wake up and the black cloud has lifted and you don’t know why’.
Jacqueline O’Donovan
I think for me, coming from an Irish background, it was very common in Ireland for families to have fifteen to twenty children. I had one, so it was a case of just get on with it, it’s one, you’ve got one child, so it was very much not discussed, it was very much just get on with it and the way I got on with it was, I threw myself at work. I could do work, I could control work, I knew what I was doing. With a child, I didn’t know, I didn’t know what to do, I was extremely lucky that my mum was there to help me and between us, we brought him up because not only did I get postnatal depression but postnatal depression ended my marriage so, by the time my son, Joseph, was three months old, my marriage had ended but I’m a firm believer, you leave that at the front door and when you go to work, you will go to work, to work, and that’s what I did and I continued just, yeah, punching everything that came my way.
Elliot Moss
How did you do that? How did you leave it at the front door because many people listening will go that’s incredibly hard, you’re obviously very good at compartmentalising your life?
Jacqueline O’Donovan
Yeah, I think I am and I think I’ve had to. When you’re, when you’re running a multifaceted business, you’ve got so much going on so you’ve got HR issues, you’ve got sales, you’ve got sustainability, you’ve got drivers, you’ve got clients, so I think for me, I have to put everything in it’s own little box and I have to look at it when I take it out. So when we’re talking about PR and marketing, that’s all I’m thinking about, is PR and marketing. When we’ve got HR issue, I’m only thinking about the HR issue but I can quite easily, as I’m talking about that HR issue, listen to the person that’s beside me or in front of me and what they’re saying to someone about a sales issue and I can quite easily still be typing my emails. So, I’m a massive multitasker, I don’t think I would be where I am today if I wasn’t a massive multitasker but I can put everything into its own box and the correct box.
Elliot Moss
There’s an interesting juxtaposition for me, Jacqueline, in that when you talk about managing stress and we’ve talked about compartmentalising and leaving stuff at the door, there’s also a very empathetic side of you that understands that people struggle. You’ve created this mental health programme called The Dynamo Project which is central partner and award winning, I mean you’ve won a billion awards but an award winning project that you’ve created. You say that you don’t believe that stress is a thing and yet you acknowledge that people suffer from mental health issue, so just help me understand the gaps if you like in between those two thoughts.
Jacqueline O’Donovan
Okay, so my thinking is that stress something that you manifest in your head and so you make that crumb of bread into a loaf of bread because you take your mind to that place. Anxiety is a reaction, a chemical reaction in your body. So anxiety all day long is real, I get it particularly when I am flying, I’m not a great flyer.
Elliot Moss
You can feel it.
Jacqueline O’Donovan
I can feel it. But stress, I think, I think people just make a crumb of bread into a loaf of bread through their own thoughts and that’s why I don’t believe that it’s a chemical reaction or something that people have or get.
Elliot Moss
So the mental health piece, when you’re thinking about that, it’s issues around what? Depression, anxiety?
Jacqueline O’Donovan
Depression, yeah. I think that’s more what is actually happening in someone’s life. So, postnatal depression was brought no because I had a baby. I think, you know, people suffer from depression because their marriage has failed, their career has failed, they’ve lost their job, things like that, so I think it’s different. I suppose if you, if you wanted to put depression, anxiety and all the different other names that they put, I suppose you could put the big umbrella of stress over the top of it but stress in itself, no, I don’t, I don’t.
Elliot Moss
But that care, the fact that you’ve created, you know, lots of organisations regardless of size, think about the mental health of their, of the team. It feels like, is it quite personal to you because of what you went through and the acknowledgement that that can really affect people, forget, forget practical things because again I think I’ve heard you talk about listen, someone comes in, they’ve got a problem, I say well there’s three options, off you go, you decide and there all super happy, that isn’t mental health, a mental health issue, that’s a kind of a low level…
Jacqueline O’Donovan
Challenge.
Elliot Moss
…challenge, right. But for you, is it, where does that empathy come from for what we were calling mental health issues?
Jacqueline O’Donovan
It comes from the fact that my staff are our biggest assets. It doesn’t actually come from my experience, it comes from the fact that I look at everything, so I’ve looked at the safety, so we’re predominantly London based, so I’ve looked at the vehicles and how safe I can make the vehicles for vulnerable road users around London and the next natural thing for me to look at was the person behind the steering wheel, you know what are they going through, so we’ve looked at the lorry, we’ve put sensors, CCTVs and all sorts, we’ve looked at safety for vehicles as a whole, we’ve looked at noise impact and we’ve reduced that by 20% by simple methods. So for me it was the natural next phase was, right, the person behind that steering wheel, and I say person because we have got female drivers.
Elliot Moss
I was going to ask you about, actually numbers, the percentage of women in the business.
Jacqueline O’Donovan
Yeah, we’ve only got one female, we did have two. It’s a dirty industry, our industry, and I don’t think they’re attracted to it but I do think that females should look at lorry driving as a profession because for the likes of the plc companies that trunk up and down the motorway, it’s shift work, it’s flexible and it could fit in with still the ability if they want to do their school runs and things like that. Our industry isn’t that flexible. We have to deliver to the client, as opposed to delivering to a consolidation centre so, it’s A to B every day from this time to that time, we have to do what the client wants, when they want it. So, I looked at the anxiety that the drivers were getting because in London traffic, as you well know, is a nightmare to get round London, the average speed used to be 7 miles an hour, I don’t even think it’s that, you know London is nearly at a standstill because we’ve got so much traffic. So, you imagine in an HGV vehicle trying to actually drop a skip off at a job in a street that’s only wide enough for one care and you’ve got people behind you wanting to do their deliveries etc, etc, horns bibbing, so their anxiety levels gonna rise so that’s why we looked at The Dynamo Project and we describe it like a battery, so we just teach them breathing mechanisms to keep their battery full of energy, so that when they go home at night, it’s not a [sigh], it’s the right, let’s, what are we going to do as a family now? So, it’s all to do with keeping their anxiety at a minimum to alleviate road rage and to maintain a stable, mental health.
Elliot Moss
Yeah, have stable conditions.
Jacqueline O’Donovan
Whilst they go through their whole day in London.
Elliot Moss
I kind of wanted to do some breathing exercises but we won’t have time for that, it’s a shame but we will however, also got my final chat coming up with Jacqueline O’Donovan and some blues from Big Mama Thornton, that’s in just a moment, don’t go anywhere.
Jacqueline O’Donovan is my Business Shaper for just a few more minutes. Thinking about your life, Jacqueline, and you’ve lived a hell of a life already. Community, I keep coming back to this thought of community, whether it’s the Irish community, whether it’s the people that work for you, whether it’s your family. Why is community so important and I know you are, you present as this really independent, powerhouse of a person and yet, I think you love the connection with people, where you feel like you belong. What’s that about?
Jacqueline O’Donovan
Oh yeah, I do, yeah. I would hate if I was in a locked office at the top of this glass tower and no one could get to me. I get a real kick out of being in an open planned office and having the crack and interacting with the staff and even the clients that come in.
Elliot Moss
But it’s more than that, I think all these accolades you’ve got for doing stuff in the Irish community, being really connected, there’s, it’s broader than the work thing.
Jacqueline O’Donovan
Yeah, I suppose I think that you know what my mum and dad suffered through discrimination of the Irish, and thousands others, I think is really important, it’s shaped us as a family, me and my siblings, and I think there’s a real risk because I haven’t got an Irish accent, there’s a real risk of all of that disappearing unless we keep it in history and keep referring to it. So, I’ve done a few projects, the most recent one is with the London Irish Centre where we’ve funded the London Irish Centre to get the archives from back in the ‘50s and the ‘60s and the people that came over and built Britain because, you know, predominantly Britain was built by Irish people that were good on the tools. It’s not now, it’s a different kettle of fish now, you know they’re coming up with degrees and they’re solicitors and accountants and all sorts but back then, it was the Irish that built Britain and there’s so many stories and so many untold stories that when we launched it only a few weeks ago, we’re now looking at doing the next chapter in the ‘70s and my older brother would be part of that and I think it’s paramount that we get those stories of how tough life was and what we had to go through. I mean, back in the day, I mean I was far too young but you know my brother tells stories about you know when it was a frosty day, they would have to actually, physically build a little fire under the diesel tank to defrost the diesel before, so the lorry would start, and I mean that sounds absolutely mad and ludicrous but you know that’s what they had to do, you know, it wasn’t as easy as now, lorries are automatic you know, lorries driving them, autonomous lorries, they drive themselves. So, I think it’s, history is great and it should be remembered and I am doing my utmost to make sure that our industry and our heritage is remembered.
Elliot Moss
There was something you said earlier when you said about the compartmentalising of personal life and when your marriage fell apart and you had you know postnatal depression and all that, you said, and you looked at me and it was a very steely look, you said, ‘You’ve got to keep fighting’. Do you get tired of fighting? You talked about the bank manager all those years ago, you talk about the fact there aren’t women, enough women in the industry, you’re talking about prejudice and helping correct or at least helping people understand the past. Isn’t there just a moment when Jacqueline goes ‘alright, I’m done now’?
Jacqueline O’Donovan
No. I see it as a challenge, I love a challenge. Every day is different for me. I really rise to a challenge. I absolutely love anything that’s thrown my way. What I do think is that the doors for females in the transport or construction world are firmly opened and that song is sung. If you want to join, join, if you don’t want to join, don’t join. I don’t think we can keep hammering that home. I think we’ve done fifteen years of explaining to women, if you want to join us in this industry, it’s a fantastic industry, come and join us and I think companies done an awful lot with segregated changing areas, welfare facilities and looking more inward at their operation as opposed to outward just at the clients, so there’s been an awful lot done but no, I don’t, I consider any, any challenge, not a fight, a challenge.
Elliot Moss
Been great talking to you, thank you.
Jacqueline O’Donovan
Thank you.
Elliot Moss
Good luck as you go in, off in the sunset and find the next challenge, I don’t think it will take very long, you like them don’t you.
Jacqueline O’Donovan
Yes.
Elliot Moss
Just before I let you disappear to do that, what’s you song choice and why have you chosen it?
Jacqueline O’Donovan
I have chosen Dave Brubeck, Take Five, because when I leave work, I leave work and when I go home, I just want to be transported to a different world and that’s what that song does.
Elliot Moss
Dave Brubeck with Take Five, the song choice of my Business Shaper today, Jacqueline O’Donovan. She talked about her attitude, ‘I can do it, so you can do it’. In other words, she can do absolutely anything in the business, nothing is beneath her. She talked about the importance of compartmentalisation, that ability to focus on one thing at a time and not everything bleed into one another, whether that’s a personal project or a box as she called it, or whether that’s a professional one. And finally, she talked about loving challenges and the fact that she rises to them and it never feels like a fight. That’s it from me and Jazz Shapers, have a lovely weekend.
We hope you enjoyed that edition of Jazz Shapers. You’ll find hundreds of more guests available for you to listen to in our archive, to find out more just search Jazz Shapers in iTunes or your favourite podcast platform or head over to Mishcon.com/JazzShapers.