“Tell us then, Robert, what exactly is it that you do? But frame your answer in words that your Grandmother would easily understand.”
Robert Carpenter, chief commercial officer and one of the four founders of the award-winning digital services agency, Granite Digital, chuckles as he considers his response, before he finally settles on the following:
“If your business is operating online,” he says, “or has the ability or desire to operate online, then we will help you increase your opportunity for success and make a net positive contribution to your business with our capabilities. We will drive increased customer traffic to your business.”
That’s about as ‘granny proof’ as you will get these days and a welcome oasis of precision in an industry infamously addicted to inscrutable jargon. This pragmatic approach to communication could prove to be a valuable asset to Carpenter who along with his wife, Siobhan and their four children aged ten and under, have recently relocated to New York State. His mission is to grow both the footprint and revenue stream for Granite in North America.
To paraphrase Winston Churchill, America and Ireland are two countries divided by a common language, but Rob Carpenter is blessed with an ability to communicate his meaning with clarity, even if it is delivered with a layer of Leeside lilt.
“Hang on there a second, hang on just a second” says Carpenter, interrupting this lazy assumption. “I’m not from Cork, I’m from Kilkenny. But I’ve lived in the county for half my life and people often mistake the accent. If we play each other in the hurling I’m cheering for Kilkenny, one hundred percent, although the children support Cork!
With a craven apology graciously accepted and Carpenter outlines how the success of Granite is a story seeded in Cork, even if he personally isn’t.
“When I finished college,” he recalls, “I went to spend what was supposed to be a week or two working on a building site with a friend of a friend, but this turned into eighteen months, which wasn’t part of the plan at all. So, I thought, right, I need to go an apply myself to what I studied. There was pressure from the family as you might imagine.”
‘What he’d studied’ was Computer Science in SETU, and another ‘friend of a friend’ had developed a travel services business operating out of West Cork called My Guide Ireland and through that contact he was hired into a role with the now cutely archaic title of ‘webmaster’. The early years of the noughties were the pioneering days in the emergence of ecommerce as an operationally usable technology which could provide a competitive advantage to early adopters. His job was to find leads from online sources and leverage this information with their local partners to convert these into high end inward tourism to Ireland.
“We weren’t booking online,” he continues. “It was all about generating inquiries and following up with phone calls, but the websites provided real equity for the business. We were working essentially from a farm in West Cork, one of the founders of the business took space from his parents, and we grew the business to fifty people from all parts of the world, eventually.”
His rebound from a building site to the digital world proved to be a pivotal life event for Carpenter. It was here that he met the three colleagues with whom he identified a service gap in the local market and realised that they had the drive, ambition, and skills to exploit it.
Granite was officially born in late 2008 but their new baby was delivered into a world that was financially imploding. Banks and investment funds were going down like skittles at the time and Ireland Inc had taken its first steps on the path to the painful triumvirate bail out. Were the fearless foursome terrified about the timing for the launch of their shiny new enterprise?
“Everybody was telling us we were mad, but things were taking off in that particular space and we saw an opportunity,” Carpenter explains.” We didn’t have big economic ties at the time, we were very different in our backgrounds and we backed ourselves. We started with a handful of clients in Skibbereen, including the renowned film producer David Puttnam, and momentum grew from there. We started winning more customers, we were soon in Cork City with a number of bigger clients.
“Their early growth was fuelled, as it generally still is, by a combination of internally generated demand creation and a series of partnerships, acquisitions, and agency agreements with some of the more serious players in the online marketing space, including Digital Crew and Teamwork.com.
“When we acquired the Digital Crew website development business it was a step change for us because up till then we were mostly focussed on marketing solutions but now we were in development,” continues Carpenter. “We then acquired another agency in Cork, another in Dublin and we now had significant scale, and we were building ‘sticky’ relationships with clients.”
With larger institutions such as CIT, Bon Secours along with multinational and commercial clients now on the books, growth was quickly finding to Granite. They were winning business in the UK and clients in Ireland with headquarters or operations in North America were beginning to pull them across the Atlantic.
But surely the head spinning speed of acquisitions, (fourteen to date and counting) partnership building and geographic creep must have caused many scary sleepless nights from a capability or financial risk perspective?
Carpenter addresses the question with the calm certainty of a man who doesn’t do too sleepless nights, unless of course there is a howling child to be fed. “Scary? Not really,” he responds.
“Most of the acquisitions were on an earn out basis, there was no big money involved and there was a few of us to share the risk, so it wasn’t overly daunting. Then we found ourselves coming very close to winning a major university client, in California, despite having no connectivity to the west coast as most of our clients were on the eastern seaboard or the mid-west. Many of these were extensions of clients we had here, or referrals from here, although one or two were coming in organically through the websites.”
“So, the move was always on the horizon, but there was no single ‘eureka’ moment. Then we came second in that tender for the University, and we were thinking ‘how did we get that close, because they had come to us. It was then we realised that there was an opportunity for us to win more clients in the US and in truth we all had a ‘gra’ for the place anyway. We had that travel background, and two of the four of us who had started the business, Conor and Seamus, had done their Masters in Philadelphia and had worked there for a couple of years before they came back to Ireland.
£So, it was an easy conversation internally to say: ‘let’s look at this.’ And look at it they did. The conversation soon moved on the practical questions; what and where is their market, how would they get there, who should go? How does a small West Cork domestic ‘start up’ resolve the torrent of variables involved in such a complex decision that will inevitably prove profoundly important to the future of Granite, its owners, customers, and employees?
“There were a few key pillars on how we went about making those decisions,” says Carpenter. “Firstly, we talked with our clients. Asked them ‘what are your needs’ and the overwhelming feedback was that we needed to get out there, to understand what we’re going to do, what locations we need to be in, just to immerse ourselves in it. We targeted the leaders we knew, to get as much feedback, guidance, and advice as we could.”
Using LinkedIn and other business connectivity platforms they found Irish people who had lived and worked there that were in now in ‘C-Suite’ positions in big organisations, specifically on the east coast and found that a lot of them were in New York city because of the sheer size of the place.
“We met as many as them as we could, told them about us, what we could bring, we met loads of people and took a lot of feedback,” continues Carpenter. “The common advice was that we needed to have one of the founders, if not two of them, on the ground and to commit fully to it. You can be ‘over and back’ as much as you like but you’ll never get that toehold and build momentum around it unless you are permanently here.”
Rob Carpenter is still in awe of the power of the Irish business diaspora and their willing generosity to welcome and help incoming compatriots to find their feet. He is specifically thankful for some tough love from the Enterprise Ireland New York office and urges attendance at’ The SelectUSA Investment Summit’ a yearly event in Washington that the promotes inward FDI by connecting international investors with U.S. counterparts.
Then crucially, in June 2023, Granite acquired a 75% stake in the digital division of LCM247, a New York based creative agency and television production company owned by Pat Heaphy, a leading agency in the local market with extensive experience in design, marketing automation, film production, and branding. Heaphy remained on as chief creative officer which gave the Granite project significant new heft and opportunity as well as a much deeper client contact book. Recognition for the new alliance arrived quickly when Granite was shortlisted for ‘Best Large Agency of the Year’ at the 2025 US Agency Awards.
“Pat had a strong view on the capabilities and level of service that was in Europe versus what he was seeing in the US. This guy was running a big marketing firm and had a background in music and entertainment, he had Emmy nominations, had worked with the likes of Bruce Springsteen and Cheryl Crowe – a proper player,” says Carpenter. “He liked the quality of what we were doing, especially around trust in compliance, data management, and governance.
“He wasn’t finding that same level or anything close to it in the US market so he was trying to find partners he could work with. He did some research on us, we had a phone call, we met him, we talked it over. In the end we worked together on a few projects and we created a partnership. We ended up acquiring clients from the marketing side of his business which gave us a toehold in the New York area and that’s why I’m living where I’m living.”
With the cost and level of competition in New York Carpenter is focused presently on winning business on the outskirts of the city, on the ‘tri-state’ belt of New Jersey, Connecticut and on the east coast generally. The intent is to try replicate their original development pattern – Skibbereen first, then Cork, then Dublin. Like a line picking of antelope at the edge of the herd before hunting at the middle.
“We arrived in Rocklin County just outside the city, we have intentionally targeted upstate New York and the tri-state area of New York New Jersey and Connecticut, but not to specifically Manhattan, yet, which would be saturated with competition anyway. We focussed on secondary cities, being able to roll up business there.”
So far, he’s built a team of twenty-five with diverse skillsets and will continue to recruit when he finds the appropriate talent. Recently a private equity firm, BGF, invested $10 million in Granite and Carpenter believes will add significant firepower to their ambitious growth plans in America.
He and Siobhan had paved the way for the move for their children by spending two summers in the States in advance of the permanent move and is particularly appreciative of another global Irish institution for smoothing the disruptive family upheaval.
“The GAA in New York state is brilliant. The GAA is really the home away from home. Getting the kids involved really helped them settle.” He finishes his story where he started, with back again in Kilkenny, with a warm and simple recollection of the two worlds he holds in equal esteem. He sounds as if he is still processing the world he found when he forsook a building site for an out-building on a Skibbereen farm.
“I had helped Puttnam go live with a studio in Hong Kong or somewhere that morning,” he recalls, “and three hours later I was walking behind a tractor picking stones from a field in Kilkenny with my old lad. I went from a high-end deployment of global communications technology to picking stones. Who would have believed it?”
Do the market research.
Talk to your clients, really spend a lot of time understanding the sector or geography.
Take care of the family, make sure that they are well orientated; there is a lot of stuff that you just don’t see that you take for granted.
The most important thing is to spend time here. If you think that ‘I’ll hire a salesperson, or hire a team,’ forget it, it isn’t going to work.
One of the founders has to be on the ground and you need to ensure that there is a shared commitment among the full management team, that they all really understand what’s happening, that there are no gaps in support. That’s where you get the momentum.
And understand the costs. It’s very easy to underestimate the costs here.
