Gillian and Michael Beare of Finn Lough on the ups and downs of running a business as siblings

Walking around the grounds of the Finn Lough resort, it is easy to see why siblings Gillian and Michael Beare opted to continue running the family business rather than sell it when they took over from their parents in 2013.

Situated on Lough Erne near Fermanagh’s border with Donegal, there is a tranquillity to the forest location.

But there is also a sense that something is being built.

The Beares’ resort has grown from just two small holiday cottages and a marina in the 1980s to an expansive site offering a range of accommodation including its famous transparent ‘bubble’ domes, a bar and restaurant, an extensive spa and outdoor recreation facilities.

“I used to spend my summers swimming in the lake, climbing the trees, acting feral basically,” Gillian says.

The location and the business has attracted the siblings back home from their international careers, Gillian in pharmacy in Australia, and Michael in finance in Australia.

That said when they came back to Ireland in 2013, the plan was the sell the resort.

“I’d left HSBC, there was a window where I could come back, my parents were in their 60s,” Michael says.

He put together a sale pack but “valuations were incredibly low. It was pretty apparent that there wasn’t a market for what they had. So I stayed on, helped them do some refurbishment and really got into the swing of it.”

The summer of 2013 proved to be a busy time for the locality as Fermanagh hosted the G8 Summit.

And it was while running the business that summer that the siblings realised how much they loved the place.

Gillian says: “We thought is there something we can do? Can we bring some sort of expertise and try to do something special?”

Development

Fast forward almost 11 years and the resort has been transformed. Today it compromises eight villas, five suites, 18 domes, and new river cabins. It can accommodate almost 100 guests per night.

Finn Lough opened its first spa in 2017, followed by its shoreline spa, which was opened last year and third spa is currently being developed. Guests can also take advantage of the lake and use paddleboards and kayaks.

At the moment about 60 per cent of guests come from the Republic of Ireland, 20 per cent from the UK, and 20 per cent are international.

In addition, the business has seen “huge growth” over the past couple of years in people coming for the day to use the spa facilities, according to Gillian.

We have to keep making sure we are giving value, if we do that then we can compete

“People will drive up from Belfast, Dublin, anywhere in the surrounding areas. You can do morning yoga, a lake swim, sauna, lunch, they might do a spa [treatment], go and have a cocktail in the cinema,” she says.

“We are trying to give people a comprehensive day that makes them feel like they have had much more than five hours away to switch off.”

The growth and success of the business over the years has come down to “bucking trends”, Michael says.

He recounts sitting with his friend’s mother and talking about why he was considering going back to the family business.

“She was a high-profile recruiter, the sort of person we would target now, and I remember her laughing and saying ‘who the hell wants to go to Fermanagh, Michael? Don’t be silly, nobody’s interested in that’,” he recalls.

“It stung me a bit, because we grew up there and we know how beautiful it is.”

But it also made him realise that in order to attract its target market, the resort had to become something unique.

“Relying on a view or fresh air is never going to pull the sort of clients that you need to make a business like ours work, so we just kept trialling things. When the bubbles [domes] were put in, there was a lot of negativity around ‘oh, these will never work’, but they resonated with people, this way of being in this really unique forest in a different way than you could anywhere else,” he says.

The success has been clear and the domes typically run at about 90 per cent occupancy, having won intentional attention from the likes of National Geographic.

Challenges

The hospitality sector across Ireland has been hit with rising food, energy, and labour costs, and Finn Lough has not been immune to those challenges.

In fact, it has to bear more than many given how close it is the Irish border.

The resort is subject to a UK Vat rate of 20 per cent, considerably higher than the 13.5 per cent rate applicable to the tourism and hospitality sector in the Republic of Ireland.

“It’s really hard to compete, it’s difficult when it’s not even two minutes up the road paying significantly less, that’s the challenge to draw people here. We have to keep making sure that we are giving value, if we do that then we can compete,” Gillian says.

“It's a bit of a frustration, that's just something that we have to work through and make our peace with.”

The location of the resort, some two hours 40 minutes from Dublin, is both a benefit and a challenge for the company, Michael says.

The resort has now been in the family for over 40 years, and Michael and Gillian have been through succession in taking over from their parents, and also through the process of managing a business together as siblings.

“Hospitality is the hardest, you are only as good as your last performance. If you slack off for a week, that’s the week you get slated in reviews, having someone that you can pick up the phone to that is family, that you know has your best interests at heart,” Michael says.

However, he adds that there are challenges to it: “every family dinner does descend into a business meeting.”

The siblings say they fell into different roles in the business quite naturally. Michael’s background is finance and he also studied engineering, which enables him to look after the accounting and commercial side of the business, as well as “the design stuff.”

Meanwhile, Gillian has a more operational role, managing the team on the ground, while also working on sales and marketing.

“I would be lying if I said we hadn’t had ups and downs,” Gillian says. “But there is definitely more of an openness. Stuff rolls off your back, you can be very honest and frank, and we can make a decision really quickly.”

In the early days of the business, Gillian believes it was hard for their parents to see the work they had done “not undone, but completely re-imagined and re-done in a different way, and that was a real challenge. But as it progressed and they saw the vision we had and how we brought it into fruition, they were happy.

“For us, it’s the legacy, we don’t want to disappoint our parents,” she says. “We've seen it first-hand how much they put into it and what it meant to them. We wanted to really do them proud, create something that we could stand over, and they could stand over as well.”