Pat Crotty's Journey to the Job: 'Whether baking bread or selling cocktails, the customer needs to have confidence'

Early in our conversation, Pat Crotty shares an anecdote about a friend of his parents, who worked as a professor of philosophy in New Orleans. Years ago, he gave Pat a piece of advice that has remained with him to this day.

“When our kids were very small, he visited us, and he said to me ‘make sure your children do three college courses’. I asked him what he meant, and he said “the world is changing, and they will have three careers”.

“None of us ever thought about that,” Pat says. “We thought once you got a job, that was your job for life. But they were ahead of us in the States, and that friend of ours believed that the world was changing, that a person wouldn’t be having a job for life.

“By doing three college courses, you become more employable, and the more things you do, you gain a much broader understanding of things. But you could also do that in the university of life itself.”

The Crotty family business started out with their bakery shop in Rose Inn Street, where Pat’s father had been born. “My grandfather put the name ‘Crotty’ over the door,” says Pat.

“In my grandfather’s time, Rose Inn Street would have been one of the busiest shopping streets: two butchers, two bakers, two clothes shops, everything. It was a buzzing street. The entirety of the Parade was a car park at that time, which helped Rose Inn Street in its business. But then the 1980s came along, and High Street took over, and Rose Inn Street stopped being such a busy trading place.”

There was never any doubt what Pat was going to do, being the next generation of the Crotty family, a well-known name in Kilkenny. Pat’s school subjects included languages and business.

“I tailored my subjects in secondary school, because I knew I was going to be going into business.” Alongside these business subjects, Pat studied languages, one of which was Latin.

Pat applied for a bakery school in London. Course requirements involved a science subject, which Pat hadn’t studied. However, he had studied honours maths for his Leaving Cert, which was accepted as a science subject, and so he qualified for the course.

Pat’s first job was working in the family bakery business, but Kilkenny and the bakery business were changing. “We decided we need to get into the value-added piece connected with bread and cakes,” says Pat.

“A coffee shop business was the next thing. So, instead of selling someone a bun and putting it in a bag for them to bring home, we put it on a plate and gave them a cup of tea, which gave them more for the same product. The one big change that defined my days in business was when we bought Woolsworth’s when it closed in 1985. That became a bakery and coffee shop, which would become Paris Texas ten years later.”

One of Pat’s greatest achievements was to be a member of what was then Kilkenny Corporation.

"To me, it was a fantastic thing, because it was twelve people of different backgrounds, sitting around a table with no other interest other than the city of Kilkenny,” says Pat. “To put the cherry on top, I got to be mayor twice, in the ten years that I was part of that Corporation.”

Eventually, Pat felt like it was time for his two children, Rachel and Kieran, to take over the family business, so he stepped aside from his role at Paris Texas. It was during the process of looking for another opportunity that the job for CEO of the Vintner’s Federation came up.

“I was lucky and I got the job, possibly because I was as passionate about the pub business as I was about Kilkenny,” says Pat, who now describes himself as a ‘poacher turned gamekeeper’. “I’m not just representing my own pub now, I’m representing all the publicans,” he continues.

“I was president of the Vintner’s Association a number of years ago, but that was a voluntary job; I was still a publican and spokesperson at the time. But now I’ve given up the pub to the kids, and I’m a spokesperson for the publicans full time”.

Hearkening back to the life advice given by his family friend, Pat laughs, “that’s my third career now!”

His background in the industry has proved advantageous to Pat’s work with the Vintner’s Association.

“If I end up talking to suppliers or government officials, and they have supplementary questions, I can be prepped on any given subject, but only a publican could answer the supplementary questions that are very specific to the industry,” says Pat. “So that’s the advantage I have: I won’t be caught out, I won’t have to say ‘look, I’ll go away and find out the answer for you’, I have the answer for them there and then.”

Pat describes it as a challenge, but he looks forward to the difference he can make in the industry. “I have 3,500 members, and they all have issues. The pub trade is a tough place to be now for a lot of people, so to try and represent their case, make their job a bit easier, or their living a bit better, it can be a challenge. Put it this way, I didn’t get into the job to be getting slaps on the back,” he says.
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“But I still have a few years in me, and by the time I leave the job, I hope we’ll have improved a lot for these members. We have an organisation itself that needs to change. It’s an old, settled organisation, and it needs to become more dynamic and more adaptable and more agile too.

“Just to make the actual operational structure we have work better is a job in itself. That’s my legacy, I hope, is that we’ll be healthier, stronger, better able to represent and better able to serve the members by the end of my time,” Pat continues.

The quality of his products and its consistency has always been an aspect of the job that Pat is most passionate about. “Whether it’s baking bread or selling dinners and cocktails, the customer needs to have confidence in it, because they’re paying money for it,” says Pat.

“If a customer walks in the door or recommends you to a friend, they’re doing it because they know they can trust what’s going to be on the plate or what’ll be in the glass. The experience will be what they’re happy about.

“It’s the same with the Vintner’s Association,” he continues. “It’s knowing your subject, the quality of what you’re saying, and the value of it to the person on the other side of the conversation. Your instinct or your opinion or your homework on the subject have to be good, and you can’t do any of that without passion!”

Pat finishes by sharing his own piece of advice, what he’s learned on his journey. “Every decision you make, if you take into account all the information you have available to you, you will make the best decision you can make for today. You might be proven to be wrong tomorrow or next year, when the facts become different, but you can still sleep easy in your bed knowing that you made the right decision at the time.”