This yearning to succeed fuelled the idea for his firm which, since its inception more than 30 years ago, has become one of Ireland’s largest indigenous tech companies.

He started the business with a £5,000 loan from a leasing company because the bank wouldn’t give him the money. Today the company has more than 700 employees and revenues reaching €175m.

The journey to that point wasn’t a smooth one though. Hourican said the competition was fierce as he tried to expand his client portfolio and break into the multinational space.

“We used to just lose one deal after another,” he said.

“But, it’s like playing football. You can kick the ball against the wall and not play against anybody. But I thought to myself, at least I’m losing, so I know I’m playing."

Hourican said that the low times were probably the most important when building his company as “you learn more from losing than from winning”.

However, the company scored a big win earlier this year when PFH Technologies was sold to Japanese electronics company Ricoh for a large but undisclosed sum.

“We interviewed a number of potential acquirers and got quite comfortable with Ricoh,” said Mr Hourican.

“The last 18 months were really interesting. Understanding how you sell a business and making sure you get the right buyer,” he added.

The deal came about after PFH Technologies decided to conduct a strategic review of the firm.

“We could continue along the acquisition route, meaning we would have to expand the business beyond Ireland because it's grown to that scale, or we could be acquired and plug into a bigger global player,” said Mr Hourican.

The entire staff, including those who have worked with PFH for more than 25 years, will be absorbed as part of the deal except for Paul himself.

He decided to step back from the company, almost entirely, after orchestrating the acquisition, but will serve as an advisor to the company as it enters its “new chapter”.

“There's a time to move on,” he said just days after he officially resigned.

In 2015, he stepped down from his position at the helm as CEO which eased him into taking “more of a strategic view of things and not to be too operational”.

“I took some chips off the table and created a good board structure and became responsible for strategy and acquisitions,” he said.

“That was a good learning curve for me. To stop trying to solve every problem yourself and to be more strategic and to mentor other people,” said Mr Hourican.

From humble beginnings

Mr Hourican moved from Dublin to Cork in 1976 to work for his brother PJ who was a builder while he studied accounting through the Institute of Cost and Management Accountants. Instead of qualifying, he switched to property sales with a company that built one-off houses in Munster.

His interest in tech began when he got a job in the computer division of Bryan S Ryan (BSR) in 1981 but left to create his own agency selling computers in 1982.

His first big dealership with his agency was with Japanese firm Sord. He said that the eventual sale of PFH Technologies to a Japanese firm signified his career had gone full circle.

He then formally set up PFH Technologies in 1985 after noticing a gap in the market for simple digital accounting services for SMEs.

“My vision at the time was to be the biggest computer company in Munster. And then a couple of years later I wanted to become the biggest in Ireland,” said Mr Houircan.

The company got its first big break in 1990 after it secured a contract with IBM, which made them more equipped to provide digital services to larger multinationals, especially in the pharmaceutical space.

By the early noughties, he realised it would be quite difficult to continue to grow the business organically and that mergers and acquisitions were the logical next steps for PFH Technologies.

“Every acquisition you do gets riskier and riskier as you go on. We've been lucky with the ones we’ve done. They’ve worked out very well."

In 2006, he merged his company with Dublin and Galway-based IT infrastructure provider CK Solutions and grew combined company turnover to €36m.

In 2010, “when things were on the floor” post-financial crash, he remained bullish and pressed ahead with two acquisitions – the networking and telco arm of Siemens in Ireland and storage specialist Redstone Technology – giving PFH Technologies “the full gambit” of ICT services.

In 2017, he completed another investment by taking a stake in another tech company called Client Solutions but it was sold shortly after.

The last major deal by PFH Technologies before its sale to Ricoh was the acquisition of Amazon Web Services (AWS) provider consulting firm TerraAlto in 2021.

“So the business continued to grow but our customer profile changed a lot from selling accounting solutions to SMEs back in the early 90s,” Hourican said.

“Now, our customer base has a had lots of SMEs but also lots of very large government departments in the State from health to agriculture, as well as large global multinational corporations,” he added.

After each deal was completed, Mr Hourican did not rush to the next opportunity and suggested each individual acquisition had to be carefully considered with the customer at the fore.

“You have to be careful in business that you know what problems you’re going to solve and that your customers know what problems you can solve,” he said.

“Leadership in any business needs to spend at least two days a week in front of a customer because, at the end of the day, the customer will tell you what are doing and what you’re not doing,” he said.

The tech space in Ireland 

After working in the Irish tech sector for more than 30 years and evolving a company along the way, Hourican is optimistic about its future despite recent turbulence that has led to mass layoffs in the industry.

“What has helped Ireland a lot is the presence of multinationals and the processes and methodologies that they use have been very good for the Irish tech industry because you're learning from them. And you've been exposed to those standards,” he said.

“Generally, we're about a year to 18 months behind the US in terms of say, outsourcing services so you can learn from those trends. But I think we're up there with the best in the world,” he added.

In relation to those who have lost their jobs due to redundancies in the sector, Mr Hourican believes they’ll be “very quickly absorbed”.