Garret Flower’s amazing journey from Longford family farm to Wall Street
Entrepreneur Garret Flower grew up in Colehill, County Longford and he said he ‘grew up hearing that you can do great things in life’.
Longford man Garret Flower recently completed a multi-million dollar deal to sell the business he spent a decade building, and he is now venturing into the AI market.
Flower grew up in Colehill, Longford and had the entrepreneurial bug from a young age.
After seeing his parents run their own fruit juice business in which they were regularly selling to Sainsbury’s in the UK, Flower decided he was going to follow in their footsteps.
He said: “Growing up, I would sit on the pallets and sneak some of the bottles out for myself, thinking I was helping sales, but actually I was just robbing their stock. In school I would sell sweets for cash and noodles.
“I was always resourceful, my parents gave me the gift of ambition and optimism. I always, I grew up hearing that you can do great things in life and you can build and achieve anything that you put your mind to. I think that's very important for parents to say as their kids are growing up.”
When Flower finished college, he decided to start a bakery business called Krust Bakery.
“We had 50 employees when I was 25 so it scaled really quickly. We set up three coffee shops in the city centre of Dublin and then I sold the business.”
A month later when driving around Dublin and struggling to find a parking space, Flower got the idea to launch Parkpnp.
“I thought, wouldn't it be cool if you could put a thousand parking spaces in your pocket? So I started parkpnp.com. That grew and then I started getting phone calls from businesses.
“They were having trouble managing their parking spaces and so we started Wayleadr.com. That grew really quickly and we scaled it across 36 countries around the world. I got the biggest clients in the world like Netflix, Google, OpenAI and Amazon.”
“We helped manage parking spaces, the access control, carpooling and bus management for these companies and really it became a US business with the scale.”
The business grew so much in the US that Flower decided to move from Longford to New York after Covid.
“I went from the farm to the financial districts and I was on Wall Street.”
Flower said Longford and New York are complete opposites.
“You go from green to grey, the biggest thing you notice is how much larger everything is and not just the buildings. It’s mind-blowing how big the US market is.”
Flower explained the culture difference between Americans doing business and Irish people doing business.
“In Ireland, everyone chit chats at the start of a conversation and then they get to business. But in America, it's very much to get to business first and then if they like you, you chit chat at the end.
“There's also been a huge swell of support for Irish entrepreneurs coming over to the US and we're lucky that the Irish brand carries a lot of weight.
“There's been other good Longford entrepreneurs that have scaled into the US like John Mahon. He set up a chain of very successful bars, among others.”
Flower praised the network he built in the United States, as he raised $10 million and scaled the business.
“I sold the business in December of last year. Which was 10 years to the day of when I started it. It was a win for all who invested.”
Following the sale, Flower decided his next venture was going to be in AI.
He said: “I’m focused on building Immensity. It’s an AI platform that brings digital workers to your workplace.”
Flower believes that there’s a big misconception around AI.
“I believe that AI has the ability to save lifetimes of time for people in a productive way so that they can focus on their best work.
“AI is accelerating companies and they end up hiring more. We're approaching it in a human way, where we understand how businesses work and we're going about implementation in a thoughtful way.”