It is a steep drive to the entrance of Lough Dan Lodge near Roundwood in Co Wicklow. The elevation however allows sweeping views of the fields and the forest that surround the headquarters of Crown Roofing and Cladding, a family-owned pan European contractor that has grown quietly to €40 million in annual revenues.

Crown’s headquarters hugs the landscape – a mixture of one and two storeys in height. It is a short distance from the original family home of Owen O’Gorman and Emma O’Gorman Wall, the brother and sister team who lead the business today.

I am greeted warmly at the entrance to Crown’s offices by the executive assistant to the siblings, who explains the duo are just finishing a video call with a customer. But when they come downstairs there is an immediate friendliness to them too as they greet me.

They’re not used to telling their story outside of some press with trade publications. Instead, they prefer to let their projects do the talking, and those projects include some of the best-known buildings in Dublin, as well as data centres and pharmaceutical plants across Europe.

We start the interview by talking about the early days of Crown. “Our father Oliver used to work in contracting for another company in Dublin before he started out on his own in 1993,” Emma O’Gorman Wall said. “His original office was here at the house in Wicklow.”

The brother and sister grew up talking about business at the kitchen table, as their father expanded the family company to have revenues of between €7 and €8 million. They remember from an early age hearing their father discuss its travails with their mother Julie.

Owen, Crown’s managing director, started in the company at just 21 while he was studying construction economics and management in DIT. He was just 23 when his father passed away in 2009, a big loss to the family and to the company.

“We had been involved in the business before that but from then on we got more and more involved. We had to. It was either that or there was no business,” Emma O’Gorman Wall recalled. 

“The business was professionally run but we had no managing director,” Owen O’Gorman adds. “From the start, we were really focused on continuing to build, and on doing things properly as our father always did.”

By then Crown had developed a reputation for its industrial work, commercial properties and apartment blocks – and it had also begun to look overseas. “Our father had worked in Scotland on meat plants, and he’d have worked on many commercial buildings in the city centre along the quays and in Smithfield,” Owen O’Gorman said.

It was, he admits, daunting for the siblings to take over the company. “It was the middle of the recession, and I was 23,” he said.

His sister was 30. “There were a lot of decisions that had to be made but we put the right structures in place – and we set the business up for growth,” she said.

Scaling in a financial crash

The O’Gormans say they were never afraid of asking for advice in those early years. “We knew we didn’t know everything,” Emma O’Gorman Wall said. “At every point on our journey we’ve reached out to people to help us – whether it is HR or finance.”

Despite the financial crash, Crown kept growing. “There was only one point, I remember in 2009, there was one day when I went to the tray to look for new tenders and all the tenders had been priced,” Owen O’Gorman said. “That was just one day. After that, it was a constant stream of work.”

As the crisis deepened, some of Crown’s competitors went bust, and the Wicklow business found itself being invited to pitch for more and more work. “From 2011 we started to grow and take on more complicated projects,” Owen O’Gorman said.

He says that between 2013 and 2014 Crown implemented a business plan that identified where it had gaps in its offering. “This allowed us to focus on building the business from then on,” he said. “We could see the light at the end of the tunnel and projects kept coming.”

“It was very tough,” O’Gorman remembers. “But we were fortunate that we had lots of good clients. Some big-name clients went bust and we had a number of bad debts but we navigated our way through it.

“We did hurt, and we suffered a lot of pain during those years like everyone else but we got through it.”

“We survived the recession,” Emma O’Gorman Wall said. “As our competitors went out of business this meant there were fewer people to do work – and we remained busy.”

To position itself for growth Crown has built up its board and advisors. Leo Harmon, a director of construction giant BAM and an industry veteran, is an advisor to Crown.

Crown’s chairperson is Gemma Lynch, a former director of corporate and institutional lending in Ulster Bank. Lynch’s banking experience has helped the business to expand overseas.

The siblings said the company has also been lucky as its team has often stayed with Crown for decades. It employs about 100 people directly and another 100 contractors split between offices in Wicklow and Tallaght in Dublin as well on-site in the different geographies Crown works in.

The business has been recognised two years in a row by The Irish Times and Great Place to Work as one of Ireland’s Best Workplaces. It has 15 mental health ambassadors spread through the business and sees that as important as maintaining physical conditioning. 

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As the business has scaled, Owen O’Gorman said his role as managing director has changed also. For years, he said he acted as contracts manager on jobs and priced his own work. This meant he was always flat-out and not always able to plan as well as he’d like. “You’d go through a period where you were really busy running projects and then suddenly you’d have no work as you didn’t have time to price the next one,” he said.

As a result, he said Crown’s revenues would go through peaks and troughs. Patrick Keaveney joined Crown in 2014 as a contracts manager and since then each member of Crown’s team have focused more on specific roles.

“We went from each person doing everything on a project to suddenly having defined roles,” O’Gorman said. “After that, we could see turnover start to increase as we were constantly working on pricing projects. The peaks and troughs began to flatten out and we really grew.”

Over the years, the business has also expanded its services to much more than roofs and now it can offer its clients the full building “envelope,” delivering cladding, facades, green roof systems and rain screens.

The O’Gormans said their experience of the financial crisis encouraged them to seek out opportunities overseas. “We always knew we needed diversification,” Owen O’Gorman said. “We didn’t want to be fully dependent on any one market.”

He said Crown had worked in Britain from his father’s time and gone back there again in 2014 to work on a mixed-use development in London. Soon, it was winning contracts across Europe for pharmaceutical plants, data centres and other clients. In some cases, it was following a customer it already had in Ireland, but it was also increasingly winning new business from scratch. It went into Scandinavia, for example, in 2016.

“We were working for a multinational client in Ireland, and they contacted us about a data centre in Sweden,” O’Gorman said. Crown has worked on data centres in seven European markets since then. “It was too risky to have all the business here,” Emma O’Gorman Wall said.

The geographic diversification paid off for Crown during Covid-19. Even when Ireland shut down many building sites, Crown still had plenty of other work overseas. “Sweden was fully open when Ireland was closed,” Owen O’Gorman said. “It was more difficult to get there but we kept going.”

“Traditionally we usually knew the client (from Ireland),” Emma O’Gorman Wall says. “But we have a proven track record now. We are a trusted partner for Irish companies (working overseas) but also non-Irish companies as well.”

Data centres and going green

Data centres are a core part of Crown’s business, although it does much more besides. On its website, Crown lists 25 data centre projects it has worked on in Europe but for confidentiality reasons, the company does not identify its clients or discuss particular projects. O’Gorman said that the biggest roof Crown has worked on to date was for a 300,000 sq ft building.

“We are very good at data centres, but we have a wide range of capabilities,” Emma O’Gorman Wall said.

I ask the O’Gormans about critics of data centres who complain about their energy usage which in Ireland has led to concerns about temporary blackouts. 

“There is a lot of criticism about the energy consumption of data centres, but they are critical pieces of infrastructure,” Owen O’Gorman said, adding that Crown has worked on gas power turbine generators to help power data centres and has used the greenest techniques to reduce their energy requirements.

He said data centres are not the only reason for energy shortages. “Data centres have got a lot of bad press, but they are here to stay. They are critical to the world we live in now. They are essential to the knowledge economy. I think we need to work on being adaptable to these projects,” he said.

“They are just going to go somewhere else if we put a moratorium on them here. They are key projects, and they provide an awful lot of employment.”

“People forget how reliant they are on data centres,” Emma O’Gorman Wall said. “They are cutting down on travel (by allowing people to work remotely or meet by video).”

Crown, she said, has helped datacentres reduce their energy needs and carbon footprint by installing the best insulation and using green materials and solar panels. She says the business is also working on its own green plan. “By quarter one of next year we will have a plan in place to go carbon neutral,” she said. 

A lot still to achieve

Owen O’Gorman and his sister Emma O’Gorman Wall clearly get on. They joke together and finish each other sentences on a few occasions. Their mother, who lives near to their offices, helps instil family values within the company.

They are definitely proud of building on their father’s legacy. They lost their brother Stephen to a brain tumour in 2015 and think he might have liked to have worked in the business. They’re very close to their sister Claire too, but she doesn’t work in the company. 

What is it like working together as siblings? “It is a little bit yin and yang,” Owen O’Gorman laughs. “We do complement each other. Emma is very systems, procedures, and compliance. I maybe come up with the ideas and then Emma has to deal with it!”

“We do have differences of opinion but that is healthy,” Emma O’Gorman Wall said. “We are not the Waltons.”

“Our values align,” Owen O’Gorman said. “We have the same way of looking after staff and clients.”

“We might disagree on trivial things,” Emma O’Gorman Wall added. “But we agree on the big-ticket things.”

“The culture of our business is honesty, transparency and openness,” Owen O’Gorman said, adding that Crown is “not a contractual company” that does only what it is contracted to and no more.

“We are collaborative and adapt to the needs of our customers,” Emma O’Gorman Wall said.

“A lot of companies talk in buzzwords, but it doesn’t mean anything unless it is put into action at work.”

“It is about having empathy for people,” Owen O’Gorman said.

“We are really proud of our people and there is a family feel to what we do,” Emma O’Gorman Wall said.

There is interest among private equity and trade buyers in buying successful Irish firms like Crown. Is a sale something they’d ever consider?

“I am only 35. No,” Owen O’Gorman said. “We have a lot of things to achieve still. We want to continue to deliver projects. There are always things to fix and improve upon. That’s what we are interested in.”

Crown’s turnover will be €40 million in 2021. Does it set itself revenue targets like getting to €100 million?

“Chasing turnover is dangerous,” Owen O’Gorman said. “We want to focus on always improving the business and working on our areas of weakness. We want to deliver for our customers. Growth needs to be organic and steady.”

Shaping Dublin

Crown’s work has already left its mark on Dublin. It is an impact that is best appreciated from the air. Start with the roof on Miesian Plaza, the Larry Goodman owned series of offices blocks on Baggot Street that houses the Department of Health. Crown installed a 5,000 sq metre flat roof there complete with a green sedum roof finish that enwraps it with living vegetation as well as below it a high-tech waterproofing system for its outdoor podium areas.

A few streets over you will find another client, LinkedIn, with its new headquarters at Wilton Place. Across the Grand Canal, it has carried out work for Amazon while in the docklands it has helped create the homes of Facebook and Google. Into Dublin 8 and you get the iconic Guinness Storehouse where Crown installed a zinc roof, soffit cladding, metal decking and special mineral wool insulated panels. It has also worked for Diego nearby on its new brewhouse where Crown installed both its flat insulated roof and green Kingspan wall cladding.

I ask Owen O’Gorman what was the hardest project Crown worked on? He said each project brought its own challenges that could relate to the building or design itself or to different regulatory environments or the needs of clients. He said the Grenfell tragedy has changed his industry for the better in terms of fire ratings.

Responding to climate change too had increased the specifications required in buildings. “Solar PV is very big now,” he said. “Clients want green buildings, and it is increasingly tied into planning guidelines too. There is a big shift towards green.”

O’Gorman said blue roofs – with sustainable drainage systems – is another emerging trend. Specifications for data centres too are rising not just in terms of trying to make them greener but also in trying to make them more aesthetically pleasing.

“The most complicated projects we have ever worked on wouldn’t be the biggest,” O’Gorman said, adding that it is currently working for IPUT on the Tropical Fruit Warehouse, a former warehouse dating back to the 1890s that is being reimagined as an 80,000 sq ft modern office building while retaining its historic features. “It is a beautiful building,” O’Gorman said. “We’re working on a composite panel roof that will be green and striking. It is a challenging project, but that’s what we enjoy doing.”