Remarkable train of events sees rail networker get her business on track

She was at the railway station, waiting for the train back to Cork, not knowing if the meeting she had just completed in Dublin had been a success or a failure.

Success would mean getting the capital she and her business partner desperately needed if they were going to get their latest idea off the ground and turn it into a money-making business.

She had a pattern of dreaming up businesses, having set up MyTradesman.ie. In America, she would be called a serial entrepreneur. In Ireland, she would sometimes joke, that translated as “chancer”.

One thing was sure. Being a serial entrepreneur in a recession in Ireland was not an easy job. It certainly had not made her rich, thus far. Rather the opposite. Now and then she would find herself needing to go to a pretty crucial meeting, without enough money to put petrol in her car to take her there.

At least on this occasion, standing in Heuston Station, she at least had a ticket for the journey in one pocket and some small change in another. Enough small change to buy a treat for the couple of hours’ travel. Waiting in line, she knew what she wanted. She wanted a magazine full of celeb gossip and handbags she couldn’t afford. Total escapism to take her away from the daily grind of business plans, potential investors, grants and seed capital.

The other treat she wanted was a big bar of chocolate with enough squares to last all the way to Cork, if she spread it out a bit. She checked her change. She had enough money for one, but not both. She opted for the magazine, tucked it under her arm, got onto the train and walked through carriages until she found one with only a few scattered individual passengers and one four-seater completely empty. Down went the magazine on the central table, up went the briefcase into the overhead container, and in she slid, idly watching the people on the platform.

Just as the requests to stand away from the doors and the final announcements as to where the train was heading were happening, she saw a man running along the platform. When he moved out of her line of sight, she guessed he had climbed in the door that was just behind her carriage. Please don’t let him come in here, she prayed. The door behind her slid open and he came into the carriage. Please don’t let him sit down here, she pleaded as he walked the aisle between the seats. He sat down opposite to her.

She slapped open the magazine and, as the train began its slow slither out of the station, indicated in body language letters a foot high that this magazine was of vital importance to her and that the newly arrived passenger would interrupt her attention to it at his peril. He seemed to get the message and was silent. She read about romances, break-ups, and weight losses as the locomotive clocked up the kilometres. Then she made her mistake. To check how far they’d got, she lowered the magazine, glanced out the window — and then met his eye. He smiled. She smiled back, but it was a time-limited conditional smile: Yes, I’m prepared to be civil, but please don’t think that means I want to start a conversation with you. No offence, but silence has a lot going for it, you know?

He didn’t get the point. Or if he did, he ignored it. “So what do you do?” he asked.

She told him, readying the magazine for a return engagement. But he asked another question, and of course she rose to it, because her fledgling business was what she thought about first thing in the morning and last thing at night. It was a talent tech company, she told him, that was going to save companies time and hassle and money by making recruitment quick and easy.

She didn’t add: “If we get lucky. If we get the million we need to capitalise it.”

Instead, she explained how it would work, how it would take over many of the routine tasks HR people and recruiters spent hours on each and every week.

He asked smart follow-up questions that stopped her feeling she was pointlessly rabbiting on. Up to a point. When the point came, she turned the conversational tables.

Why on earth, she asked, did he want to know all this stuff? He told her she had sold him on her company. Since she had no interest in selling a total stranger on her company, she cast him a cynical glance: OK, I hear what you’re saying. Now, what are you talking about?

HE WAS talking about money. About investing in her proposition. Yeah, right, she thought. Strangers on trains often come up with the make-or-break half a million euro her company would need if it was to get matching State money.

He was genuinely interested, he told her, before giving her his business card, gathering his belongings and leaving the train.

Now, no sensible businesswoman, left looking at a stranger’s business card, would believe it held the possibility of future contact or — more to the point — future investment money. It did, though.

That’s the marvellous thing. It did. The stranger came through with the half mill, which allowed draw-down of matching money from Enterprise Ireland, which means that the entrepreneur, a human dynamo named Lorraine Scroope, got her company, WizZky, up and running and it’s employing eight people right now.

Ms Scroope told the story on Friday to entrepreneurs and wannabe entrepreneurs attending the final session of a four-week programme at the Centre for Entrepreneurship and Enterprise Development, based in the Tom Crean Centre in IT, Tralee and managed by Breda O’Dwyer.

The session itself was about networking, about which more drivel is talked than about any other current topic except, perhaps, that worthy tosh, “work/life balance”. Professor Antoin E Murphy pointed out, at the start, that networking is not new, telling the story of an Irishman named Richard Cantillon who not only linked up with the most profit-making individuals of his time, but also worked out how to make money in an economic bubble. Other speakers dealt with topics like generating sales through your network.

Then came Lorraine Scroope, who lifted the hearts of anyone listening who could not get enthusiastic about constantly swapping business cards with other entrepreneurs and attending networking events. She admitted she wasn’t much for that kind of thing, either.

Where her talk was instructive was in reminding everybody present of the unstoppable value of enthusiastic story-telling, because that’s her key skill.

Inevitably, the investor was a bit of a mystery. We didn’t learn where or how he made the money he invested in WizZky.

We did learn, though, that he had one trait which is to be found in the majority of successful people in any business at any time: Curiosity, and the capacity to keep asking questions.