Business Builders

Produced by Jetbooks, Chartered Accountants Ireland.

Subscribe to the Business Builders Newsletter for the very best ideas I've discovered on business and personal growth.

This week I had a chat to Rónán Ó Dálaigh, Founder and CEO of Thriftify, a social enterprise on a mission to bring the world’s charity shops online.

Thriftify’s software platform enables charity shops to accurately value the donations they receive such as books, clothing, jewellery and everything in between. 

Charity shops can then use Thriftify to sell these goods online; thereby increasing their sales volumes and ultimately, the return to the causes that they support.

In this conversation, Rónán talks about starting a business straight out of college, how he went about raising €500 thousand in seed funding and the huge opportunity that Thriftify is pursuing, across charity retailing, sustainable fashion and climate change.

Find out more about Thriftify here: https://partners.thriftify.com/

Irish Business Builders is brought to you by Jetbooks. Jetbooks provides online bookkeeping services for Irish Businesses. For a free 15 minute online consultation, visit www.jetbooks.ie

Produced by Jetbooks, Chartered Accountants Ireland.

Subscribe to the Business Builders Newsletter for the very best ideas I've discovered on business and personal growth.

This week I interview Paul McClatchie, Founder of Engage People, a specialist recruitment firm, aligning Businesses in Ireland with Financial Talent.

Paul was a director in CPL recruitment up until 2016, when he left to set up his own firm. 

In the short period since starting Engage People, Paul has built the business to a team of 8 and over €1 million in annual revenue. 

In this conversation, Paul talks about why he left a leadership role in a well established company to start his own business, the books he’s read that have shortened his path to success and Engage People’s ambitions for international expansion. 

Find out more about Engage People here: https://engagepeople.ie/

Irish Business Builders is brought to you by Jetbooks. Jetbooks provides online bookkeeping services for Irish Businesses. For a free 15 minute online consultation, visit www.jetbooks.ie

Produced by Jetbooks, Chartered Accountants Ireland.

Subscribe to the Business Builders Newsletter for the very best ideas I've discovered on business and personal growth.

This week I chatted to Niall Wall, Executive Chairman of Enva – a leading provider of waste management and recycling solutions, operating across 30 facilities in the United Kingdom and Ireland, employing over 15 hundred people.

Between 2006 to 2016, Niall was the CEO of the The Ardagh Group, an Irish packaging PLC listed on the New York Stock Exchange. 

Over that ten year period as CEO, Niall and the team grew the business from €650 million to €8 billion in annual revenues.

In this conversation, Niall talks about investing in large public companies, what the key strategies were when growing Ardagh, and the learnings he gained running his very first start-up – a quail farm, in his early 20’s.

Find out more about Enva here: https://enva.com/

Irish Business Builders is brought to you by Jetbooks. Jetbooks provides online bookkeeping services for Irish Businesses. For a free 15 minute online consultation, visit www.jetbooks.ie

Produced by Jetbooks, Chartered Accountants Ireland.

Subscribe to the Business Builders Newsletter for the very best ideas I've discovered on business and personal growth.

This week I had a chat to Brian Hogan, owner and former CEO of Kylemore Services Group, a restaurant and hospitality business operating in over 100 locations nation-wide in both retail and commercial catering.

Brian’s grand parents opened the very first Kylemore Bakery in Dublin in 1920 which eventually became the largest fresh bakery in Ireland under Brian’s management.

In this conversation, Brian talks about starting out in the family business at age 17, learning from their very best, multinational suppliers and why partnering with DCC was the best deal he’s ever done in his life!

Find out more about KSG here: https://www.ksg.ie/

Irish Business Builders is brought to you by Jetbooks. Jetbooks provides online bookkeeping services for Irish Businesses. For a free 15 minute online consultation, visit www.jetbooks.ie

Produced by Jetbooks, Chartered Accountants Ireland.

Subscribe to the Business Builders Newsletter for the very best ideas I've discovered on business and personal growth.

FleishmanHillard, if you haven't heard of it, is one of the world's largest PR & communications agencies. This week I talked to Rhona Blake, Managing Director of FleishmanHillard, who works with clients from large multinational corporations to start ups.

In this conversation, Rhona talks about her early days in Public Relations,  what it takes to build a successful PR agency and how an early opportunity led to gaining a crucial mentor and eventually a career long business partnership.

Find out more about FleishmanHillard here: https://fleishmanhillard.com/

Irish Business Builders is brought to you by Jetbooks. Jetbooks provides online bookkeeping services for Irish Businesses. For a free 15 minute online consultation, visit www.jetbooks.ie

Produced by Jetbooks, Chartered Accountants Ireland.

Subscribe to the Business Builders Newsletter for the very best ideas I've discovered on business and personal growth.

For our second episode of 2021, I had a chat with Bart Kane, who is the Regional Director of The FD Centre, a provider of part-time CFOs and Financial Directors with a passion for growing businesses.

With over 25 years experience as a key Finance Executive, Bart has a strong understanding of how to manage a growing business to ensure success. Surprisingly, this isn't always a straightforward strategy and growth can sometimes hurt a business more than it can help.

Bart talks to me about the key things we must think about when scaling a business, how this exponential growth can actually kill an organisation and why the financial director is an entrepreneur's secret weapon!

Find out more about The FD Centre here: https://www.thefdcentre.ie/

Irish Business Builders is brought to you by Jetbooks. Jetbooks provides online bookkeeping services for Irish Businesses. For a free 15 minute online consultation, visit www.jetbooks.ie

Produced by Jetbooks, Chartered Accountants Ireland.

Subscribe to the Business Builders Newsletter for the very best ideas I've discovered on business and personal growth.

This week I had a chat to Andrea Reynolds, whose time spent in the finance industry allowed her to start Swoop Funding, which provides assistance to small and medium-sized businesses (SMEs) to be linked with funding providers.

Starting her career at KPMG, Andrea later became a corporate finance advisor to smaller businesses in the UK, which is where she saw how difficult it was for these SMEs to navigate the funding world themselves.

We talk about how Andrea grew Swoop from 1 to 50 employees in 3 years, how she became a non-executive director at Berkshire Hathaway European Insurance and what it's like to have Warren Buffett as your boss!

Find out more about Swoop Funding here: https://swoopfunding.com/

Irish Business Builders is brought to you by Jetbooks. Jetbooks provides online bookkeeping services for Irish Businesses. For a free 15 minute online consultation, visit www.jetbooks.ie

Produced by Jetbooks, Chartered Accountants Ireland.

Subscribe to the Business Builders Newsletter for the very best ideas I've discovered on business and personal growth.

This week I had a chat to Chris Burge, founder and CEO of Spark Crowdfunding, a platform that allows companies to raise new funds from accredited investors who are interested in growing businesses with high potential.

Chris's journey from engineer to entrepreneur is very interesting, and he shares the challenges of growing a marketplace platform and what is daily life as a startup CEO looks like.

Find out more about Spark Crowdfunding here: https://www.sparkcrowdfunding.com/

Irish Business Builders is brought to you by Jetbooks. Jetbooks provides online bookkeeping services for Irish Businesses. For a free 15 minute online consultation, visit www.jetbooks.ie

Produced by Jetbooks, Chartered Accountants Ireland.

Subscribe to the Business Builders Newsletter for the very best ideas I've discovered on business and personal growth.

You'll notice that I've talked to a lot of entrepreneurs in the hospitality industry. That's mainly because I love food, but it's also a fascinating area of business with people doing exciting things. Peaches Kemp is no exception.

Peaches and her sister Domini started Itsa Bagel in 1999, and haven't slowed down since then, as you can tell by the impressive list in the title of this episode.

Peaches talks to me about the highs and lows of her entrepreneurial life, and shares advice she's learnt along the way. No matter what industry your business is in, you'll get something from this episode.

Find out more about Itsa Bagel here: https://www.itsa.ie/

Irish Business Builders is brought to you by Jetbooks. Jetbooks provides online bookkeeping services for Irish Businesses. For a free 15 minute online consultation, visit www.jetbooks.ie

A big heartfelt thank-you to all of the listeners who have tuned in this year.

It's been a tough one for many businesses, but having conversations about highs and lows with all of my guests on the podcast has definitely helped me to get through.

Enjoy these highlights from this season's conversations and join me for the first episode of Season 3, coming next week!

Produced by Jetbooks, Chartered Accountants Ireland.

Subscribe to the Business Builders Newsletter for the very best ideas I've discovered on business and personal growth.

Thanks for listening and see you all for Season 3!