Rob Kearney's rugby career ended last November, but he had been planning for his exit from the sport long before that. The former Ireland international tells Nick Mulcahy about his myriad investments and his career plans for the future.
Bit by bit, cannabis is entering the mainstream. It already has in Canada and parts of the US, and in Europe medicinal cannabis use is surging in Germany and England in particular.
Prohibition Partners (PP), who specialise in consulting with cannabis enterprises, estimate that c.€350m of unlicensed medical cannabis will be sold in Europe in 2022, and they project this market to grow to over €2bn by 2026.
Cannabis was officially approved as a medicine in Germany in 2017. PP report a 43% increase in sales of cannabis in German pharmacies in 2021, while France began its pilot scheme in 2021 as Denmark voted to extend theirs.
In Ireland, a Medical Cannabis Access Programme was introduced in July 2021. This is restricted to medical consultants who are treating patients suffering from multiple sclerosis, nausea associated with chemotherapy, and severe epilepsy.
During Covid lockdowns, the Minister for Health even enabled qualifying patients to secure their medicinal cannabis products, sourced from a pharmacy in the Hague.
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Much more mainstream than medicinal cannabis is cannabidiol (CBD), a chemical compound that acts throughout the body, including parts of the brain. Like hash, CBD is a cannabis plant compound, and once extracted it is diluted with oils and other substances.
To be legal, CBD oil has to contain very little tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the substance that generates the marijuana high. The THC limit in CBD is 0.2%, and if the product comes in under that ceiling then it can be sold on shop shelves across Europe.
In 2020, the European Court of Justice ruled that CBD should not be considered a narcotic as it does not ‘have any psychotropic effect or any harmful effect on human health’. The benefits of CBD are open to debate, but the products are an expanding health and wellness category, and former Irish rugby international Rob Kearney is hoping the category will grow even faster.
With his wife Jess Redden, a wellness influencer, Kearney is an investor in Irish skincare brand Poko. The couple are also brand ambassadors for Poko, which markets CBD-infused beauty products that promise users better skin.
Poko’s luxury facial oil, with 300mg of CBD, retails for €27, and a three-item hydrating skincare gift set is priced at €79. Though the THC content in these products may be non-existent, enthusiasts for CBD oil say that mellow feeling after application is part of the appeal.
Rob Kearney is backing Poko because he knows founder David Hughes from the Cooley Kickhams GAA club. Poko Innovations is listed on the Canada Securities Exchange after Hughes engineered a reverse takeover to secure the public listing.
The venture styles itself as a complete ecosystem that brings innovative solutions to the CBD industry, from supplying businesses with high-quality CBD-derived products and other natural health supplements to providing a CBD-focused marketplace.
Rob Kearney hasn’t bet the farm on Poko. He retired from playing professional rugby in November 2021, at the age of 35. The full-back’s glittering career spanned playing for 15 years with Leinster and over a decade with the Irish team, garnering 95 caps. He saw the end of his sports career coming a long way back, and planned accordingly, though moving on from the regimented routine of the pro player is not straightforward.
Besides his Poko involvement, Kearney has five company directorships. One is for personal operations such as media work, one is an events business, and three are related to bars. Kearney is a shareholder and director in the companies that operate the Bridge 1859 bar in Ballsbridge and Lemon and Duke on Royal Hibernian Way in central Dublin.
The lead partner in these pubs is Noel Anderson, and the others are Rob’s brother Dave Kearney, and rugby veterans Jamie Heaslip and Sean O’Brien. The quintet’s latest pub venture is taking on what used to be Wetherspoons in Blackrock, hopefully with some capital provided by their business interruption insurer FBD.
However, these are passive investments, to the extent that Kearney isn’t behind the bar every evening pulling pints. “Professional sports is very much a bubble,” he reflects. “When I was playing I could have told you exactly where I’d be on a Thursday in three months’ time at three o’clock in the afternoon. I was lucky with the extent of my career, which was just shy of 17 years.
"Full-back is one of the harder positions for career longevity because your speed is generally the thing that goes first.
"Now I don’t watch a game with any sort of envy - I’m grateful for the time I got to spend on the pitch. Of course, you miss the changing room, the lads, the camaraderie and all of that, but the actual playing of the game is not something I miss too much, thankfully.”
Kearney owes his business smarts to a knee injury in 2010 which sidelined him for a year. He filled in the time doing an MBA at UCD. “The natural progression after that was to try and put the learning into practice and get involved in some businesses,” he recalls.
The Bridge 1859 was established in 2014, followed by Lemon and Duke two years later. Bars in Dublin 4 aren’t cheap. Accounts for the Bridge operating company show the freehold property valued at €2.5m, and €300,000 invested in fixtures and fittings. In the year to February 2020, before Covid, net profit excluding depreciation was €260,000, and the company paid down €230,000 in bank debt.
Bridge 1859 broke even during the first year of Covid lockdowns, though the directors collectively shared only €29,000 in remuneration. According to Kearney: “In Ballsbridge we could keep the window open and do a little bit of takeaway service. This meant we were able to keep on some more staff and let it wash its face.”
Pre-Covid, Lemon and Duke, a leased property, booked a net profit of €150,000, followed by €70,000 in the year to February 2021. The bar was part of a small group of pubs that took FBD to court when the insurer disputed Covid-related business interruption insurance claims.
Kearney explains: “We had a discussion at the time as to the wisdom of taking on a big insurance company. We decided that there’s right and wrong, and we were on the right side. Noel Anderson drove the case for us and was on the stand as well in court, which can’t have been very nice for him.”
Last year Justice McDonald ruled against FBD, but the case is still dragging on. The two sides can’t agree on the amount of losses to be paid out for the business disruption, and what account should be taken of state aids. The judge signalled recently that a further hearing will be required this summer.
There are other strings to Rob Kearney’s bow. He is an investor and Director of Wellbeing at Snack Farm, a healthy snacks enterprise led by Padraig Staunton. The business targeted the office market and had to pivot when workplaces were emptied by Covid.
“Snack Farm fits my own profile in terms of wellbeing,” says Kearney. “I’m a big believer that we need to eat better and snack better. I was introduced by Dan and Linda Kiely, who have invested in the business too. Invariably these things come around from having a coffee with someone and just shooting the breeze.”
He was a founding director in 1986 with Andrew Lynch of recruitment company Mason Alexander, and stepped down from the board in 2012. He is still a shareholder, and remarks that he might become more involved in the future.
“The main thing for me now is finding a purpose again, and finding something that I’m really passionate about,” says Kearney. “That was very easy with rugby, when the purpose was to train every day of the week, because you want to play in the team at the weekend and become better at your job.
"I want to be in full-time employment eventually, but I also want to be patient. I’ve seen a lot of instances down the years of guys who’ve come out of the sport and jump into something. They realise it’s not for them and then they jump into something else. You can find yourself going through four or five different jobs pretty quickly.”
In his playing days, Kearney chaired the players’ association, Rugby Players Ireland, which assists the pros with the life transition out of the sport. The support spans helping players to complete their studies and teaching them how to network.
According to Kearney: “Sports people have a huge amount of value to add to companies and to organisations in terms of the transferable skills that they’ve learned playing in a high-performance environment. I think sometimes sports people undersell themselves in terms of some of what they can bring to business.
“In a corporate environment, there will be lots of stuff that sports people won’t know. But there’s a real good basis there in terms of leadership, resilience, communication, and teamwork - all of those things that are really important for the culture of an organisation and to help them perform.”
Kearney doesn’t plan on being an angel investor for the next 20 years. He says the pubs and other investments were affected so that when his playing career concluded he would have something to keep him busy in the initial transition period.
“If a few of those businesses can give off a little bit of passive income, then you’re not putting so much pressure on yourself to find something quickly,” he adds. “That allows you to be a little bit more diligent with your decision making.
“I want to get involved in a company that has a clear vision and something that gives me a purpose again to go and strive for, and to be a part of creating and building something. I want to be sure that I make the best decision that I can, and find something that I'm going to enjoy and be happy with.”
