Mobile shop and substantial home for bargain basement €395,000

ENTREPRENEUR Jonathan O’Grady has so much get up and go, he is already gone. Well, almost, he’s on the way out the doors.

His 32’ long mobile shop isn’t big enough for his energy or enthusiasm. Neither is his family 3,000 sq ft home and revamped local general shop and deli, nor can the recently added Route 73 22-seat restaurant contain his plans, any more than the post office business can contain his envelope-pushing activities.

Even the house, and shop/restaurant site — and which has full planning on part for a pair of semi-detached houses — isn’t big enough to contain his positivity and verve.

So, he, his partner in business and life Dr Deirdre Walsh O’Grady, and their six children are selling up the whole Marshalstown, Mitchelstown kit and caboodle, including the cash-earning mobile shop which is a lifeline for the dispersed rural community, and all for an asking price of just €395,000 via agent Lorraine Spillane of Eyeopener Properties in Fermoy.

The Walsh O’Gradys bought the shop only a few years ago after they’d sucessfully sold another business, distributing artisan cheeses nationwide, which grew from one delivery van to lots of trucks and drivers. With the shop secured they quickly built up all of the retail elements to cover all angles and needs

Next, the Walsh O’Grady clan will focus on their new and current business, Coolmarket, importing and distributing fridge and freezer vans for the Irish food trade. Just a year or two into this next business, he is turning over 150 recession-friendly second-hand imported van sales a year, and sees that growing to 500 very shortly. “I’m run off my feet, back and forth to the UK all the time, we so we need to slow down a bit with the shop.....” he says, and then jumps back into another possible source of business for his five bedroomed house, doing B&B breaks for mountain-bikers on the demanding Ballyhoura hill trails.

Phew. Even talking to him is like broaching a whirlwind, as Jonathan reveals he had his first business venture at age 17 when he leased a Cork city pub and he bowed out of studying Commerce in year two in UCC to go straight to, well, commerce.

The couple have a 20-year-old son, Sean, and then a clatter of five younger children culminating in 18-month old Sadhbh, and as PhD food scientist Deirdre “is thinking of going back to work soon” — Jonathan’s words — they are offloading the Marshalstown mini-empire. Even the 32’ shop van is capable of netting €400 a week, as running costs are minimal, says Jonathan, advising anyone laid off a job or looking to start up a business to consider going mobile. “I saw them mostly in the Peak District, Lake District and Cumbria in the UK, they have mobile shops all over there, mobile butchers, even mobile dentists,” he enthuses. Interested? He’ll do you a van like his for €15,000, and off you go. In his route around Shanballymore he sold everything, food, papers, chilled and frozen goods, newspapers, briquettes and coal.

“With so many villages losing shops, there’s such an opening a service such as this, and the shop/cafe is another well-placed opportunity, as it is just a mile or two off the N8 Cork to Dublin road,” notes Eyeopener Properties’ Lorraine Spillane of the €395k, all-in vanguard deal.

“With Abbeyleix about to be bypassed, my place is the first shop you’ll come to off the motorway coming from Dublin, if you’re going to Mallow or Killarney,” says Jonathan. It’s the way he tells them.