In Fitzgerald Power’s interview series, we’re speaking to people with different perspectives who feel they can offer more to the workplace, from the water cooler all the way up to the C-Suite. Today, it’s Orla Hennelly of Ireland’s premier beauty hack destination, ItsBeautyCheats.

Becoming an entrepreneur, for Orla Hennelly, kind of came out of the blue. “I always loved fashion, and I wanted to work in it, so I ended up doing Communications in DCU, because I thought I wanted to do fashion journalism,” she says. “But that was a long time ago.” Looking back, it was actually through her time in retail that she first realised a penchant for figuring out how the sausage gets made. “I used to like seeing what was coming in and thinking about what would sell and what wouldn’t, so, from there, I realised I wanted to work further back in the supply chain.” She enrolled in a Master’s in Fashion Buying and Management, and from that, got an internship in Dunnes Stores’ Buying Department, where she stayed for seven years. “I loved it, I loved buying things, designing products and seeing them come to life.”

It was around that time that Hennelly was making the professional personal, by choosing the outfit she’d wear for her own wedding. “I really wanted to wear these heavy, vintage earrings for my wedding, but I hated how they were dragging down my earlobes, so I thought, why isn’t there a product that solves this issue?” With a quick Google to see that no such product existed in the Irish marketplace, ItsBeautyCheats was born in November 2023, with a chunk of Hennelly’s own savings and a desire to fix problems for women with similar needs. “In terms of actually launching the business, it wasn’t a hugely expensive product for my first, so I took money out of my savings, and I just thought to myself that if this doesn’t work, whatever. I’ll wrap it up.” Now three years later, ItsBeautyCheats is stocked in Arnotts, One Dame Lane, Ór Jewellery and a suite of pharmacies. Not to mention, it closed 2025 with 100% revenue growth YOY. “It’s going well,” she smiles, bashfully. “Ups and downs, but good overall.”

ItsBeautyCheats bills itself as the ultimate beauty-hack destination and the home of LobeLifts, the innovative earlobe protection patch that prevents earlobe stretching and tearing from heavy earrings. Their products seek to address a range of beauty-related grievances, from necklaces that don’t tangle to discreet, comfortable body tape. Once the success of LobeLifts, the business’s original name, took off – by way of Hennelly’s own marketing and a bit of luck with TikTok virality – eight months later, the business took on its current moniker. “I built the website myself. I kept costs really low, and suddenly I had this niche product that was doing really well,” she says. “As a result, I had to lean into the randomness of it all, and then started listening to consumers who had other beauty-related problems that needed fixing. To this day, I take all my ideas and theirs down in the Notes app on my phone.”

A business penned as a discrete problem solver proved enough to impress the Pitch team at Arnotts – a business accelerator initiative from Arnotts, created to empower innovative start-ups and entrepreneurs based in Ireland or Northern Ireland – and indeed the women of Ireland, many of whom thank Hennelly regularly for catering to needs in a way no one had before. “I remember coming home from a wedding with a friend and helping her take this body tape off, which was literally ripping her skin,” Hennelly says. “I just thought to myself, there has to be a better version of this.” ItsBeautyCheats’ subsequent body tape, priced at €18.95, includes 5 oil-based removal wipes for effortless, skin-friendly removal, and is now one of the brand’s best-sellers. “I’m fortunate enough that every product is close to best-seller status at the moment,” she says. “It feels like whichever one I push the most becomes the best seller, and I’ve had to restock everything. Like, there hasn’t been one product that I haven’t had to purchase multiple times, so it’s been brilliant. What I really love to see, though, is when someone buys one thing and within a matter of weeks they buy another for their friends.”

With just Hennelly at the helm, aside from the occasional contractor, her job spans a multitude: from the back-of-house – quality control, market research, customer service, to the front – courier, social media, marketing. “My family is great,” she says. “My brother has been packing orders, and my husband drives around the place delivering stock. I’m hoping to take someone on soon, but until then, it’s just me.” It seems ludicrous, then, that among her biggest competitors is Amazon. “I do think the people who follow my story and my social media accounts are willing to buy Irish over Amazon,” she says. “It is tough to compare, though, especially with shipping. Like, I ship with An Post, and it randomly went from €5.95 to €6.95 last month, which was huge. For my products that are €12.95, asking for €6.95 shipping is huge, so I didn’t put it up, I’m just taking the hit on that euro.” In times of panic, Hennelly turns to other female entrepreneurs in the business for help. “I can’t get over the support from women in particular,” she says. “I say this all the time, from the influencers and micro-influencers I work with, to those who run pharmacies and helped me get it in stock, to anyone going through the same thing. I had a disaster with a TikTok Shop video two weeks ago, and I wrote to so many other women business owners, and they couldn’t have been more helpful. Then customers with reviews and comments… My biggest takeaway is that Irish women are incredibly supportive all around.”

Today’s SME landscape is undeniably difficult, and despite a wealth of available resources out there – like Enterprise Ireland’s Going for Growth, the programme for ambitious female entrepreneurs across all sectors in Ireland that Hennelly is currently enrolled in – many continue to face significant operational challenges. “The number one thing for me at the moment is just trying to find the time to do everything before I can afford to hire someone,” she says. “I’m lecturing in Buying and Merchandising at the Portobello Institute two days a week to help pay the bills, we have a 10-month-old at home, and my husband works full time, so it’s just finding the time. Apart from that, I would also say it’s hard to get funding. I’ve been working with the local Enterprise Office, which has been great, but it’s just the cash flow issue that is really difficult. I would love to inject a load of cash into the business, and I know it would come back, but just getting it that’s the issue.”

Just last month, Hennelly announced that ItsBeautyCheats closed 2025 with 100% revenue growth YOY and tripled their online sales. How has that informed Orla’s vision for 2026? “I would say, year one, I didn’t have much wholesale at all,” she says. “Year two, I really pushed the wholesale aspect, and that was kind of increasing the revenue. Underneath that, profit wasn’t a 100% increase, so this year, I’m back to pushing direct-to-consumer sales. The wholesale is brilliant, and obviously, I won’t give that up, but to be honest, the big push for me now is back to the consumers and getting them directly to the website, because the dream is to be the number one beauty hack destination online, competing with the likes of Look Fantastic. But my own products that people come back to because they’re reliable, high quality, and they know their work.”

You can follow Orla and ItsBeautyCheats on Instagram here or on the brand’s official website. 

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In Fitzgerald Power’s interview series, we’re speaking to people with different perspectives who feel they can offer more to the workplace, from the water cooler all the way up to the C-Suite. Today, it’s Colin Harmon, founder and CEO of 3fe Coffee.

Eighteen years ago, Colin Harmon took a pretty big gamble. He made the decision to quit his job as an investment broker, sell his car, and pursue his dream of opening a coffee shop. A hospitality stalwart since his teens – jobs like McDonald’s on Grafton Street funded Harmon’s third-level education – he decided that the finance life wasn’t for him. “Probably boredom,” he laughs, citing the reason behind it. “I got a job working in investment funds, working mainly with regulations, and I got two years into that and sort of felt like I needed out.” At the time, the finance world was booming. “There was lots of money in that industry,” he says. “And lots of safety, too. People would regularly leave their jobs to go travel to places like South East Asia or Australia, and then get a bonus to come back. Because that was on offer, I decided to leave my job and try to do something I wanted to do. I told myself that if I couldn’t figure it out after a year, then I’d take my old job back. Then, three months in, the economy collapsed.”

Nevertheless, he persisted. So much so that one year to the day after Harmon left his job, he came fourth in the World Barista Championships. (This was after he’d secured the national title, one he’s since won three other times.) “It was a bit mad,” he smiles. “One of the judges told me afterwards that I shouldn’t tell people that, because the guy who won it had, like, 30 years of experience. So I think they were like, we can’t let this guy win, he’s only been at it a year.” Dublin at the time had practically no coffee culture, something that became glaringly obvious at the event. “Other teams from say the US or UK had sponsors, as well as someone to organise the cups, another to organise the beans,” Harmon says. Conversely, he arrived with friends to take a chance. He left with an impressive final result and an understanding of the growing power of speciality coffee worldwide. “You had 4000 people in tiered seating cheering for cappuccinos, it was mad.”

Harmon was born in Cork City, but spent most of his life in the capital. At university, he accrued a Business and Law degree as well as Fund Investment, Tax and “a few other finance-based courses,” all of which came in handy for a start-up in the thick of a recession. Not to mention a coffee start-up in a nation of tea-drinkers. The first iteration of 3fe – named for the simulator he built from his third-floor apartment to practice for competitions – came in by way of Middle Abbey Street’s Twisted Pepper nightclub (now Wigwam) with a loan of €5000 from Harmon’s father and a promise to the owner that he’d pay rent when he made some cash. Business hardly boomed. “The first day I sold 16 cups of coffee,” he laughs. “There were days where I stood for eight hours and sold nothing.” Filter coffee at that stage was a hard sell; it was often only ever ordered by the city’s baristas, who were typically too busy with their own work to visit the premises week-on-week. Bit by bit, however, Harmon figured things out. “Honestly, that’s how I’m still doing this – figuring little bits out day by day.” A year and a half later, 3fe’s flagship space on Grand Canal Street opened. “We ran the two spaces concurrently for about six months, then sold our gear to the then-manager of Twisted Pepper, who now runs Vice coffee, and started roasting. Roasting seemed like a much more scalable thing to do, and today roasting is the bigger part of the business.”

Today, Dublin’s speciality coffee scene is vast and varied, a shift many credit to Harmon and his peers. “I don’t think people realise it, but for such a small city, Dublin’s scene is quite astounding,” he says. “Like, you don’t see this calibre of places in New York, which is mad to say.” Those behaviour shifts started modestly, he says. “I remember a bit of resistance,” he says. “There was this article in one of the papers about how much a cup of coffee was in different cafés, which is mad because you’d never do that for, say, a glass of wine. People know there are so many variables at play. But at that stage, trying to convince people the same for coffee – that it tastes different from different places and is a seasonal product – was a huge part of it.” The main reason he believes that behaviour change was successful? “Honestly… just being nice to people.” He likens this to an analogy of a bookstore. “If you’re into books and you go into a bookshop for a certain one, and the guy behind the counter rolls his eyes at your choice, chances are you’re not going to go back. Engaging people, and bringing them on a journey, and as much as I hate the term, educating people, was really important for us in the early days. Because we’d often come up against people who were like, I’ve been drinking coffee a certain way all my life, why would I change that? But honestly… being nice was the way to do it.”

Today, 3fe has eight shops, “about 80” staff and an 8500sqft roastery in Glasnevin. Last year, they roasted about 250 tonnes of coffee for products shipped worldwide. The company also runs a subscription service, an online shop and hosts a series of workshops on making the perfect brew. As a result of their expansion, the business’s biggest customer is actually themselves. But increasingly domestic and international businesses and clients – “loads of Irish people living abroad” – call on their beans for their morning pick-me-up. A lot of this can be linked to Harmon’s own intellectual acumen; people trust his brand to be good because they know he’s put in the hours. “It’s easy to open a food business,” he says. “The barrier to entry is quite low. But whether it’s pizza or wine or burgers, you want people to trust you. When people see you as an expert in that field, they’re more likely to gravitate towards you. I enjoy getting right into the heart of something and devoting myself to it, and being able to leverage that. I just don’t think you should be a big player in something if you’re not in it completely yourself.”

Much has been written about the difficulties of running an SME in Ireland of late. In hospitality, the difficulties are more pronounced still. 3fe, according to Harmon, is protected from some of the harder parts because they’ve managed to scale, but he sees peers time and again unable to protect themselves because “the government is creating an environment that is more suitable to larger companies.” “All of our staff are paid more than minimum wage, but when minimum wage goes up, there’s an expectation that all wages go up, and that affects everything we do. It means all the prices of coffee have to go up, and then that means people stop having three coffees a day, and they’ll start having one… or that kind of thing. It’s a lot of stealth factors that people don’t realise. Construction, pension contributions, and insurance costs are all going up, and all of these things don’t impact big businesses in the same way.”

The consequences of that are tenfold, Harmon insists. “Small businesses are huge employers,” he says. “And even if people don’t want to work in coffee shops their whole life, they’ve often developed the skills to become excellent marketing people or sales people from their time there. It’s a great sense of learning, and I think the government needs to do more, because the environment is becoming very, very inhospitable.” This consideration colours the advice Harmon gives today, particularly towards those who look at his career change and subsequent success with rose-tinted glasses. “I’ve been very lucky,” he admits. “I’ve worked hard, but I’ve also been lucky. I think it’s the Irish Times that love the stories of somebody giving up their job to pursue their passion, but sometimes, you’re better off just keeping your hobby. Like, if it goes wrong, you can end up with a job as your hobby, and then you start hating your job, and you’ve got no hobby. Don’t presume that just because you’re passionate about something that will be a successful business. If you find the time and figure it out, that’s brilliant. But, yeah, I think the perception is that just because it’s your passion, it would make a great business. And unfortunately, that isn’t always true.”

You can follow Colin Harmon can on Instagram @colinharmon and 3fe on @3fecoffee.

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In Fitzgerald Power’s interview series, we’re speaking to people with different perspectives who feel they can offer more to the workplace, from the water cooler all the way up to the C-Suite. Today, it’s Ciarán Gaffney, founder and CEO of storytelling night, Seanchoíche.

Much has been written, said and shared about Ireland’s unique storytelling talents. People say it’s responsible for a myriad: our intrepid entrepreneurs, our beguiling actors and the unmissable Green Wave that dominated mass media through film, literature and song in recent years. Though storytelling has been central to all aspects of the Irish identity internationally, perhaps none of it has been applied so potently as in Seanchoíche, the Irish storytelling night that’s gone global by way of CEO, Ciarán Gaffney. Founded in 2021, Seanchoíche – a portmanteau of Irish words “seanchaí” (storyteller) and “oíche” (night) and pronounced “shanna-key-ha” – began as a friend-only event in Dublin 8, inspired by the desire for connection during a time of isolation. “I was living in Argentina in 2017, and while there, I attended a spoken word night held by a friend,” Gaffney says. “I first just went as a regular punter, then began to volunteer, coordinating speakers, MCing, that sort of thing.” Gaffney then moved to the US and largely forgot about it, but soon came to realise how few spaces existed in Ireland to meet new people and create connections this way. Particularly post-COVID, when connection felt like the rarest gem.

He quickly mobilised to hold the first event, in the Fumbally Stables, for an audience of 60. Five speakers were pre-booked, and three audience members chose to speak on the night – an opportunity Gaffney offers to the audience at each event. It set the tone for the future and a path for Gaffney he hadn’t anticipated. “At the time, Seanchóiche was just a hobby,” he says from West Cork, where his latest event is being held. “There were two turning points which changed that. The first was, I made a mistake in my actual job. Like I made a mistake that maybe cost us a couple of days on a deadline, and I couldn’t sleep for two days. I was so anxious. It consumed everything about me. I conflated all of my self-worth with this one mistake I made at work, and I completely just lost faith in myself. And then, like, a week later, I made a far bigger mistake for Seanchoíche, where I basically sent an email to all of our mailing lists with the wrong ticket release times for the entire Christmas tour in Dublin. This mistake went down to 4000 people, and we got stinker emails back from people calling me all sorts, and I actually just laughed and thought, okay, that was bad, but I’ll know better for next time. Then I kind of sat down and was like, hold on a second. One mistake I see as detrimental, whereas this one I see as a learning experience. And I think that was a sign to say that I actually love this, and I absolutely hated what I was actually doing. That was kind of what made me say, right, I need to quit my job and do this.

“The second turning point was when I still wasn’t confident enough to quit my job, so I started interviewing for other ones. And so I got to the final round of this tech sales job, and the guy interviewing with me emailed me to say that I didn’t get the job, but he asked if I could still take a phone call. So he called me to say I didn’t get the job because it was so clear I shouldn’t be working in anything apart from Seanchoíche. He was like, the way you spoke about this storytelling concept, it’s just so worlds apart from the way you spoke about anything else. He actually said he wouldn’t be able to sit with himself if he gave me the job. So that was the final turning point for me.”

Today, Seanchoíche hosts sold-out events around the world – Gaffney is just back from Accra, Ghana, and Seanchoíche runs in Vancouver, New South Wales and Dublin in November – to produce the same kind of event and atmosphere he did on that first night, five years ago. Audiences and speakers range from all walks of life, and all commit to the same thing: listening, openness and creating a space for vulnerability to thrive. It is a testament to this energy that most speakers will begin a story with “I’ve never done anything like this before”. Mercifully, for Gaffney as well as his team’s sake, it’s a concept that has translated elegantly across multiple countries and industries. “Going out on my own pushed me to start organising events in multiple cities, countries and employee workshops within organisations, to generate even the bones of an income. Today, we do a lot of work in companies that want to offer their employees ways to improve their public speaking or storytelling skills. We’ve run events in Google, ad agencies, law firms, and that’s been really great because it’s allowed me to expand what Seanchoíche is while also paying my team.”

The challenges of running a creative business are well-documented, but few took Gaffney by surprise. “So many people abroad have asked if the name is a misspelling of Seán’s Choice,” he laughs. “But that is just going to happen when you’re working with an Irish name. And that said, there are plenty of people who know now what it means – and to think there are people in Australia who have a bit of Irish is quite special.” As with most new concepts, however, Gaffney often finds that Seanchoíche participants and speakers tend to fight the mind last. “When we come to a new city, people will see an international organisation and expect the speakers to be at a really professional level or that it’s a night where you need to be a writer to speak,” he says. “And the whole point of Seanchoíche is that it’s ordinary people telling their extraordinary stories. So I think, given a new country, oftentimes people will be a little bit nervous to apply to speak, because they won’t see themselves as the right fit. But then, when they understand what Seanchoíche is all about, they regularly find themselves drawn to the concept.”

Gaffney’s first targets for countries and cities to bring Seanchóiche to were Irish diaspora hubs – London, Sydney, New York, Vancouver, etc – cities where Irish residents could explain the draw of storytelling to friends and partners. “When we visit a place a second time, it’s actually usually mostly non-Irish in the audience.” Today, he and his team have scaled successfully to countries that rarely boast an Irish diaspora, something he credits to the power of social media advertising. “Putting spend behind our posts is another way of reaching a whole new wave of audience members and speakers as well, because you then can actually reach an audience that never would have actually discovered us before. It’s allowed us to diversify our audience entirely.”

To date, the secret of Seanchoíche’s success has never been money. And if Gaffney has his way, it never will be. “I never wanted it to be this million-dollar story,” he smiles. “What I love about generating income with Seanchoíche is that I can just put it straight back into the business to get to do more creative things.” Marrying creativity with an idea that is economically viable is a well-worn balancing act for CEOs, but acting as Gaffney’s North Star is exactly what the business is about: people. “We do a huge amount of fundraising events throughout the year,” he says. “We’ve raised around €10,000 for medical aid for Palestine this year alone. And we’re hoping to work with the Irish Refugee Council in January. And then we’ve done lots of charity initiatives, we’ve worked with prisons, and we’ve also given away tickets to people who don’t have access to them. I think toeing the line between being an event that is for-profit, which Seanchoíche for all intents and purposes is, but also giving back to the people who have kind of allowed it to grow, is really important to me. It’s been a huge learning opportunity for us to meet people who maybe are a little bit more voiceless than others, and give them the toolkit to go back out into the world. We’ve also been pretty strict on who we partner with. Because, you know, we have all these big brands and companies who have loads of money to throw at organisations like us, but it needs to feel right, to feel ethical as well. And you know, that’s something that we are constantly monitoring and being really conscious of.”

Is AI storytelling an issue yet? “God, I hope not,” Gaffney laughs. “We’ve had one guy take the piss out of a story ChatGPT wrote for him, but apart from that, no. Maybe I’m being naive here, but I think most people who attend would have a level of hesitation to write a ChatGPT story and then read it out in front of the audience. However, in the back of my mind, I have wondered: Jesus, could that happen? But I think Seanchoíche is the antidote to that – or at least we hope so, anyway.”

The scenes in Seanchoíche that Gaffney responds to most strongly are regularly from people from different places, with no previous idea of the concept, who stand to speak, despite not even being able to pronounce the event’s title. It is this desire, this bald push at empathy, that keeps him pushing for Seanchoíche to be available to anyone who wants to attend around the planet. “I’d like to be on every continent,” he smiles. “Flying the Irish flag, and the storyteller flag in every single continent. Antarctica might be a stretch, but the other six I would love. On a personal level, I’d love not to be travelling so much. To get to a place where there are people in all parts of the world who are managing it, and getting it to a place where I can be a little bit distant. That comes with time and the right funding, which we’re always hesitant to ask for, but I think that that’s something we need to start doing more of – to embed ourselves a little bit more in other parts of the world.” He is also, crucially, hesitant to compromise. “We need to keep it as intimate a space as we always have. I never, ever, ever want Seanchoíche to feel like something that the speakers have to rehearse for, or perform at; it’s a space to be yourself or tell your own personal story. When it’s a performance, it becomes a very different thing. We want everyone there to be able to look into the eyes of each other – because that’s when the magic happens. Each and every time.”

Bolands Mills is hosting its first-ever Seanchoíche on the 1st November, as part of this year’s Bram Stoker Festival. The event is sold out, but speaker slots (and plus ones) are still available – Apply here: seanchoiche.com/tellyourstory

The post An interview with: Ciarán Gaffney appeared first on Fitzgerald Power.

In Fitzgerald Power’s interview series, we’re speaking to people with different perspectives who feel they can offer more to the workplace – from the water cooler all the way up to C-Suite.

The idea of building a personal brand can often feel like a game designed for a certain kind of person. The advice is always the same: post incessantly, share it all, network everywhere and be everywhere at once. For most, this rightfully sounds exhausting. And, without a clear goal, it is.

But what is one to do when they don’t know where to start? What is a personal brand anyway – and why should anyone care about one? “I feel the personal brand concept has been a little bit co-opted by the tech bros,” speaker, consultant and business amplifier Jennie McGinn says. “And as a result, people have been given the wrong impression. First of all, it’s not about being an influencer. It’s not about having thousands of followers on different social media platforms. And it’s also not a hack to get a job you don’t have the qualifications to back up. For me, personal branding is the process of understanding what you’re really, really good at and communicating that repeatedly. Then, the end goal is to either acquire a job or progress in your career or industry. It can also be a security blanket that can give you an exit plan for when you’re about to sell a company or pivot your career. At the moment, the job market feels a bit wibbly-wobbly, and if you have been building your personal brand consistently in the background, it gives you an edge if something happens unexpectedly.”

McGinn is insistent that, even unbeknownst to ourselves, we all have personal brands in the modern age. “This is another misconception,” she smiles. “Everybody has a personal brand because we live in a digital age. The personal brand process is taking control of that and owning your own narrative. It’s very easy to find out information about you, so instead of ignoring that, carving out a personal brand is taking control. I think people get really scared of this concept, especially in Ireland, but I want to repeat again: it’s absolutely not about being an influencer. Yes, it might be about demonstrating influence at some stage, because of your knowledge and skills, but the goal is not to become an influencer. It’s simply taking what is already out there about yourself, and either adding to it, curating it or carving out what you want people to know.”

Personal branding is something McGinn knows about acutely. She describes herself as “the ultimate portfolio careerist,” a recognition of the myriad roles she’s committed to to date, founder, brand strategist, consultant and writer, among them. For those not in the know, McGinn’s background is largely entrepreneurial; you might remember her first venture, Opsh, formerly Prowlster, the 2010s darling of e-commerce she founded with her sisters. Opsh was a disruptive site that allowed consumers to shop the high street by using one account and payment method. The concept, which caught the eye of Brett Palos, then director of the Arcadia Group and Philip Green’s stepson, among others, was revolutionary at a time when e-commerce was just that bit too early to really thrive. She learned “everything” from that time, including the art of standing out in a saturated field.

This will make sense to anyone who’s met McGinn. Maximalism is in her bones – leopard print, wide-circumferenced hoop earrings and bold colours are her calling cards – but as a woman working in oftentimes male-centric arenas, she knows what it’s like to feel overshadowed, overwhelmed and underappreciated. How did she learn how to take back control, you ask? Personal branding. “I think it’s actually essential to build your personal brand now,” she says. “I think maybe before, like five years ago, it was a bit of a luxury. It was a bit of a novelty. And maybe it was kind of the preserve of people in the media and influencing. But now, I think it’s essential. It is the new CV. Particularly now that ChatGPT is deeming CVs irrelevant. If everyone is writing theirs using AI, and thus they’re all exceptional, what sets the people behind them apart? Personal branding.”

In 2023, McGinn founded Sister The Agency: an ecommerce, branding and social media agency. Alongside this under her own brand name Jennie McGinn, she also gives talks and workshops on topics such as building a personal brand online, utilising social media to stand out and how professionals can highlight their best qualities through the clothes they wear. Her work centres on pushing people, particularly women, to step into the role they’ve often dreamt of in private. Personal branding is something that, naturally, regularly comes up, meaning teething pains are plenty. “It does take a little bit of a while to understand,” she says. “Especially if you’re not very comfortable putting yourself out there. But one of the first mistakes I see, and especially in the corporate world, is posting about something without your own point of view. You might commit to yourself to post twice a month on LinkedIn, maybe through ChatGPT, but if that lacks your point of view, your personality or your thoughts, it won’t stand out. I could read the synopsis of the point you’re talking about anywhere – I want to hear your take, because that is something I’ll keep coming back for.” Personality sets people apart, McGinn says. “Nobody has taken the steps that you have to get to where you are,” she says. “That is your IP, and it is so valuable, and you need to own it and embrace it.”

The second most important thing? Consistency. “Platforms expect consistency,” she says. “Online audiences expect consistency. Because if you’re not at the top of people’s minds, you’re forgotten. That doesn’t mean you have to go in all guns blazing and be active on every single platform, or put your name forward for everything. You can do one thing, as long as you do it consistently. It gets a little easier, I find, when you realise that this version of yourself that you’re putting out there is a commodity, it’s a product. People can feel uncomfortable about that, but understanding that this is what that product needs to do can help.”

The final realisations one must come to in this game, according to McGinn, are patience and realism. “You should not expect something to happen overnight,” she smiles. “Or in three months or six months. Overnight success is not the aim; this is the long game. It is a habit, a process. It is something that you need to do in tandem with your job and work, whatever that is. Otherwise, you’re just creating content for the sake of it, and you are just cluttering up people’s feeds with irrelevant noise.”

If the idea of sharing your life with strangers still worries you, fret not. Curating a personal brand doesn’t mean sharing a public diary. The world doesn’t need to know what you had for breakfast, your dirty laundry or your relationship status. It’s fine to separate professional value from personal exposure. “Ultimately, it is a personal decision,” McGinn says. “There’s no one-size-fits-all. Even in the corporate world, there has been a shift in seeing CEOs taking the warts-and-all approach, which is quite a pendulum swing from pure corporate talk. So for me, that says there’s range to do everything. Personally, however, I think it’s really important to ask yourself some questions about boundaries before you start: What do I want to talk about? What do I want to be known for? What is my mission? What are my values, my goals? And then what are my red lines: What do I not want to be known for? What do I not want to be asked? etc. Then you’ll know how comfortable you are with sharing personal stuff instinctively. That said, for those who are, there are ways to do it in a really insightful, aligned way. Take Platform 55, a company founded by Michelle O’Keefe and Tracy Gunn, whose whole focus is on redressing the work environment to be more equitable for working parents. They’re an excellent insight into how personal you can be on the more corporate channels, without diluting your point.” In that way, and others, the sky is the limit for those who want to venture out of their already existing personal brand that lives on the internet. “Just don’t talk about how brilliant you are right away,” she smiles. “Let people glean that from your output themselves.”

For more information on Jennie McGinn and her work, check out her LinkedIn here.

The post An interview with: Jennie McGinn appeared first on Fitzgerald Power.

In Fitzgerald Power’s interview series, we’re speaking to people with different perspectives who feel they can offer more to the workplace, from the water cooler all the way up to the C-Suite.

Compassion is often discounted in discussions about leadership. Regularly overshadowed by hard power terms like resilience, strength and decisiveness, the message about acting with kindness often gets overlooked. However, a recent BMJ Leader scoping review shares that kindness and compassion are equally essential to improving workplace culture, employee engagement and organisational success. Echoing this in both theory and practice is Irish HomeCare’s CEO Teresa McNally, who believes that compassion is a vital leadership skill.

As a nurse, Teresa explains that compassion has always been core to her work. She says, “I have witnessed firsthand the benefit of compassion for both those delivering care and those in receipt of care. We employ people to care for people, so our people must be at the core of everything we do.” Back in January, McNally became the second person and first woman in Ireland to sign the Compassionate Leadership Pledge, a commitment to creating workplaces and communities where compassion thrives. By signing it, Irish HomeCare has joined the Global Compassion Coalition, a network of healthcare professionals worldwide dedicated to building a more compassionate world. “For us, this pledge is a commitment to our employees and our clients,” she said at the time. “It’s a promise to lead with empathy, to foster trust, and to create an environment where everyone can thrive.”

McNally first learned the importance of a compassionate work culture as a child on the family farm. “I’m an only child,” she says. “And when you’re brought up on a farm, you quickly develop a strong work ethic.” At 12, she gained part-time employment in a local shop – ”I often joke that I had qualifications for being the best potato-bagger ever” – before discovering at 15 that formal education no longer served her. “Transition Year came around and I just found it very unstructured and boring,” she says. “So, I took the opportunity to work instead, with the intention of returning to school in fifth year. Two weeks into fifth year, I was struggling to adapt back to school life. I missed the social side of work, the interactions and connections. I reevaluated, and at the age of 15, I decided to leave school and pursue a career in care.”

McNally grew up in Co. Monaghan, near the border of Northern Ireland, where she gained her first job in care. “At the age of 15, I took my first role as a Healthcare Assistant in a nursing home, where I worked for 3 years. The people I cared for during these 3 years helped shape my career. I met so many wonderful people, and 20 years on, I can still recall the names of every resident,” she says. “Despite being an early school leaver, with a passion for care and a love for learning, I enrolled in many courses and at the age of 17, I achieved a diploma in social care. Following this, I completed a pre-nursing course, which provided the opportunity to travel to London to study nursing. It actually worked out that I enrolled at the same time as my school friends who had done their Leaving Cert. I just took a different path.” McNally returned to that nursing home with a degree three years later, only to quickly assume a management role. “That was a difficult transition. I was a young manager and I was returning to a place I started out in at the age of 15 and working with people years my elder. “You know what? It was challenging but it was also enjoyable, fulfilling and rewarding. I worked with amazing people, and we cared for amazing people. I already had a relationship with the majority of staff from working together previously so we just needed to navigate a change in dynamics. For me, what worked was open and transparent communication, clarity on roles and a relationship built on mutual respect. We were all there for the same outcome, we wanted to deliver good care, so it didn’t really matter the role, we were a team.”

McNally has been working in various management and leadership roles within health and social care ever since. She joined Irish HomeCare in 2019 as Head of Quality and Clinical Governance and held Director roles before being appointed Deputy CEO in October 2023 and CEO in October 2024. Day-to-day, her work varies – but she is a nurse by nature, striving to innovate in healthcare and support healthcare reform to better meet societal needs. Homecare demand is increasing year on year as people long to stay in the comfort of their own homes and communities and with an ageing population it is a vital service as part of the overall health ecosystem. McNally explains that it routinely goes back to one thing: the right way to treat people. As a labour shortage crisis shows no signs of slowing down, how does she manage? “It’s not just about attracting the best, but retaining the best,” she says. “And that’s not always about renumeration, it’s about the simple things; kindness, understanding, psychological safety, and promoting an open culture where people can put their hands up and say, “I need help, or I’ve made a mistake,” without fear. We’re all humans. We all have our own lives. We all have our own challenges. And it’s very hard sometimes to separate that from work. So, it’s all about looking out for each other. It’s about 4 principles – attending, understanding, empathy and helping. It is about being present, listening to understand and not to respond. In the words of Nancy Kline “listening with fascination” She cites the work of Michael A. West, Professor of Organisational Psychology at Lancaster University Management School and an expert in the topic of compassionate leadership, as a North Star. “He’s written over 20 books and published over 200 papers about compassion, leadership, teamwork and cultures,” she says. “And through his research, there’s evidence to show that if you’ve got a more compassionate culture, you’re in turn delivering a more compassionate and quality service.”

Healthcare is never without its challenges. From a lack of resources, workforce shortages, access and integration challenges and bureaucratic system. However, it is one of the most rewarding careers, explains McNally “It is a privilege to care for others, often during times of vulnerability. The ability to relieve pain, provide comfort and make people smile is an honour and to be able to facilitate this for people in the comfort of their own home and communities is so rewarding”.

Homecare in Ireland is in high demand, with supply currently exceeding demand.  There are currently over 5,500 people in Ireland approved for homecare package but there are no staff to deliver nationally. While high demand is positive for business, the reality behind the numbers is people. People who deserve care and support. So, supply is where it is at and the key to this is recruitment and retention. Culture plays an integral role in every organisation, the way you treat your people changes everything for better or worse. Since embracing a culture of compassion, we’ve seen significant improvement in our attrition percentage; we are retaining our best people – prevention is better than cure.”

In many ways, McNally brings with her an energy that is the antithesis of traditional CEOs. She leads with soft power and embraces her imperfections openly, serving as an inspiring example for others to accept and celebrate their own. “I try to be the least important person in the room and use my interactions to bring out the best in others”. Is there any way she thinks business leaders can learn from this? “I firmly believe if you look after your people, your people will look after you,” she says. “When you build a quality team and promote a culture of compassion and understanding, growth is inevitable. You know, we are delivering thousands of visits a week? So that’s thousands of times we have one human entering the home of another human. And from my perspective as CEO, that interaction between them is so critical to our business. Our vision is to transform the lives of our people through compassionate care and leadership. As a national health and social care provider, it is vital that compassion enters every home we enter. Those we serve deserve the highest quality of care, and our care is our reputation.” She pauses. “To lead with compassion takes courage; compassion isn’t all about the soft things, it is not all hugs and kisses and chocolates and candles. For me, compassion encompasses three key aspects: demonstrating compassion for others, embracing self-compassion, and leaning into pain and challenges. In life, not everything’s going to be perfect all the time, and that’s okay. We are all human, and we are not perfect. Self-awareness is also a crucial aspect, and providing a place of psychological safety for others to openly discuss challenges is key to promoting a compassionate culture and embracing the opportunity for learning and development. As leaders, how we deal with challenges influences the culture. One of the principles of the compassionate leadership pledge is to deal with challenges positively, openly, courageously and ethically.”

When scaling, the logistics of implementing a system like this can prove difficult. McNally insists that trust and patience in these instances are paramount to moving forward in a way that feels right. “I met the team last week, and I said that the culture of this organisation is not down to me, it’s down to each and every one of you,” she says. “I need each and every one of you to commit to compassionate care, compassionate leadership and compassionate cultures, because you are all leaders in your role and you control your interactions. You know, between teams, it’s essential to lean on each other for support, ask questions, and embrace learning. It’s also important to let someone know if you’re having a tough day. When scaling and growing, you just have to remind people of that.” We can all get lost in the humdrum of the everyday, she continues, but consistently reminding people they are valued and that they are making a difference reaps dividends. “It’s about making people stop every now and then and check in with themselves to say, from a care perspective: ‘How am I doing today?’ Leaning into the challenges, asking difficult questions and being open to feedback. Working in healthcare is not without its challenges, but it is an incredibly rewarding role. We need to care for our workforce, so our workforce cares for others.

For more information on Irish Homecare and Teresa’s work, check out their website here.

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In Fitzgerald Power’s interview series, we’re speaking to people with different perspectives who feel they can offer more to the workplace, from the water cooler all the way up to the C-Suite.

The trajectory from a budding startup to a scaled enterprise is a transformative one. Never linear, those who tread that path will face ups as well as downs that few outside this world will understand. As someone who has navigated this path with FinTech Dimply, CEO Jac Dunne can attest that each stage of growth demands a unique blend of leadership, strategic acumen and operational agility. Dunne began her career in the UK, working as an assistant dealer on a Unit Trust dealing desk at Lincoln National, before progressing to lead a Fund Accounting Department. “Back then, I genuinely didn’t know what I wanted to do,” she says today. “But I’m a firm believer in things coming your way for a reason. At that stage, when I was in the UK, you were rewarded for hard work. I was very quickly made a manager at a young age.” She returned to Ireland in 1994 to work with Bank of Ireland Securities Services (BOISS) for the next six years and then joined Setanta Asset Management for seven years, before a stint at HSBC as Head of Custody. From there, she became a Managing Director at BNY Mellon in Dublin, and eventually pivoted to the FinTech space; Dunne became the CCO of AssetLogic, the CCO at Compliance Solution Strategies, the Global Client Lead for Delivery at Confluence and, finally, the CEO of Dimply today. “In terms of movement within my career,” she says. “These opportunities presented themselves to me. It wasn’t like I wasn’t happy where I was, but I was very much personal-growth-orientated. And when you’re part of large organisations, that’s one thing that is sometimes not necessarily allocated for.”

When speaking, it becomes clear that Dunne’s passion for creating workable solutions is her north star. “I didn’t have a technology background when I moved into FinTech,” she smiles. “But I could always design what we needed to do.” She insists she got the job at Dimply through one of her old mentors, “who knew I had a strong interest in technology that could make a difference within the Financial Services sector and in particular in personalisation”. However, it’s hard not to recount her ability to see the job from all angles. “I’ve been the front of office, back of office, middle of office. I’ve been the vendor. I’ve been both the client and the provider. In my career, I’ve led and managed teams, worked with clients, and collaborated with diverse products, regions, and people. And that has been something that has been exponential in terms of my own personal growth, and framing the person I am today.”

Dunne is just over a year in the role at Dimply, a company currently undertaking huge scaling plans. What has she learned along the way? “When you’re scaling, there are a number of facets you’ve got to consider,” she says. “For entering new markets, you need to understand the market. Another aspect is the regulations surrounding that market, as well as the nuances of clients in that region. Culturally, how would you do business? I’m talking about potential biases or concerns that may exist. You’ve got to ensure that you’re building trust with those entities within the markets that you’d want to scale. My background and experience working in large multi-nationals have truly helped me attain the necessary skills. But there are still multiple other considerations: your people, your tooling, your strategy. Does your strategy support what you’re trying to do? Is there an appetite for change? Is there any form of resistance to change? And if there is, how do you solve that?” Having internal alignment is essential when scaling into new markets.

When scaling, international regulations can turn what could be a quick fix into a long, laborious process. Navigating the complexity of potential legal and compliance issues is something Dunne strongly advocates for. For that, she recommends partnering with an expert. “Someone who can give you the whistlestop tour of things that you need to consider,” she says. “So, for example, in financial services, there are multiple different forms of regulations; an example from a European perspective is GDPR. Also, in the global regulatory space, there are various regulations that have regional nuances, among other things. Partnering with a local consultant who has the intel and experience is a must to ensure compliance and speed to market.

Dunne’s work is strikingly people-first for the CEO of a tech firm. I ask her about AI-led solutions and the challenges they bring to these industries. “My personal view is that AI has been here for a very long time. We all know it’s hyper prevalent. AI, in my view, is an enabler, an assistant. And when I say enabler, I mean it will expedite research and processes. If you’re using AI, it has to be bulletproof. You need to ensure that the processes it replaces are fully compliant. The controls within the technology that’s using the AI should have a trail of exactly what you’ve used, how you’ve used it, and be able to go back to a point in time and evidence: this is the result, and we can stand over it. For me, that’s a huge component of.” She pauses before saying: “I think there are aspects within all industries that there are functions that AI can more or less do… But in terms of control mechanisms around that, and the ability to use it by credible organisations, they will need to ensure that they can evidence the quality of what they’re using, how they’re using it, and ensure it conforms to anything from a security, or risk or a regulatory perspective.”

The financial services industry is on the cusp of a profound regulatory transformation. With shifting political and economic landscapes, regulatory bodies across the globe are rethinking their approach to financial oversight, bringing both challenges and opportunities for FinTechs and traditional institutions alike. In the U.S., the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) are evolving in response to market dynamics. Meanwhile, international markets are grappling with emerging frameworks that could redefine FinTech’s competitive edge.

In Dunne’s view, regulatory transformation continues to present both a challenge and a strategic opportunity for FinTechs. As political and economic headwinds continue to shift, regulators are introducing technology-focused oversight, such as the EU’s Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) and governments, like here in Ireland, the financial literacy national framework strategies introduced by the Minister for Finance this year promoting inclusion and equity, reduce vulnerabilities and promote better financial decisions.

For startups, these changes can be resource-intensive, often requiring a significant investment in infrastructure, legal support, and operations while simultaneously striving to innovate and scale. However, the evolving regulatory environment also creates opportunities for FinTechs to differentiate themselves and partner with enterprises to facilitate speed to market in maintaining compliance with changing regulations.

Dimply, under Dunne’s lead, currently boasts a framework bolstered by a mission to help people feel and think better about their money and financial position and a passion for financial literacy and inclusion.

Dimply is a no-code product that helps financial teams build and embed personalised customer interfaces – without writing frontend code or changing backend systems. We give designers, product managers and business analysts the tools to move faster, without waiting on internal engineering teams. Dimply lets organisations create personalised applications that embed directly into their existing app or portal. These experiences and insights connect to their data or an API, reflect their design system, all without the usual engineering overhead.

Our technology isn’t just about providing a hyper-personalised financial experience, it’s about providing insights that help educate and support making more informed financial decisions,” she says. “We’ve been fortunate to work with our clients and prospects to incorporate experiences and insights that support informed financial decisions and literacy; it’s about empowerment, stability, and providing opportunity at every stage of a financial decision. We firmly believe financial literacy begins at an early age. In Dunne’s view, access to financial literacy at an individual level is the way forward. Dunne says. “For me, in a nutshell, financial literacy is critical, and it should start at a very young age.”

For more information on Dimply and their plans to revolutionise the FinTech space, check out Jac’s LinkedIn here.

The post An interview with: Jac Dunne appeared first on Fitzgerald Power.

In Fitzgerald Power’s interview series, we’re speaking to people with different perspectives who feel they can offer more to the workplace, from the water cooler all the way up to the C-Suite.

It’s hard to believe it has been over 6 years since former RTÉ political correspondent Martina Fitzgerald left journalism, after working in the media and RTÉ for almost twenty years. But post journalism, Fitzgerald has been very busy to say the least, running Scale Ireland since late 2020.

For those not acquainted with Scale Ireland – and it would be difficult given its reach and reputation – it is the not-for-profit representative organisation for the Irish tech sector. In fact, while it is a relatively new organisation, it is now the biggest industry body for the Irish tech sector. No mean feat in just over 5 years. So it’s no wonder ahead of an EU meeting in Brussels on start-up and scaling companies, Fitzgerald says her career in journalism feels like a lifetime ago. “Both sectors (media and the start-up sector) are fast-paced and dynamic. But away from the cameras, I am very proud of what we have achieved over the last five years. We now have around 800 members… but we started with zero on our dashboard in late May 2021 and we launched (a membership model) in the middle of the pandemic with no marketing budget and a tiny but dedicated team. But that’s how many founders begin – look at John Purdy, who started from an office in his bedroom.”

So what does Scale Ireland do for its members? “We try to create the right conditions for start-ups and scaling companies to thrive, and to make Ireland a leading location for innovation and entrepreneurship. So, what does that mean? We highlight, promote, and advocate for founders and the sector. Ultimately, we want this sector to be the leading economic driver of our economy. To achieve that, we look at the key issues and challenges that they are facing. We are just finalising our 2025 State of Start-up Survey to get the sentiment of founders and CEOs on a range of issues. We also conduct extensive research, make submissions and advocate to government, state agencies and officials on their behalf. And when I say start-ups, I mean that we represent start-ups of all sizes, stages and sectors, all around the country. We are not exclusive and do not exclude anyone. That is very important to us and I believe to the community. I think it’s a strong endorsement from the sector that we have built an 800-strong organisation from scratch”.

As most readers will be aware, scaling a business is an enormous task. In practice, it can feel like attempting to harness an octopus, a task that feels ever-changing and slippery. That said, it’s high risk, high reward. What are the risks and challenges entrepreneurs should be aware of? “For the last two years, 80% of founders and CEOs have identified funding as the key issue, which is aligned with the findings of Atomico’s State of EU Tech survey last year,” Fitzgerald says. “The retention and recruitment of staff is another big issue, and unfortunately, red tape. It is so frustrating for our members that many of the schemes and supports that are out there, dedicated to benefiting start-up and scaling companies, are so difficult to navigate. So the participation levels aren’t where they should be. We believe that we don’t necessarily need new schemes and supports – we just need the current ones to work. Start-ups don’t have the time and resources or deep pockets to appoint financial experts to help them. A more balanced approach is needed, and report after report from the Commission on Taxation to the White paper on Enterprise has highlighted this as an issue.

Turning to the retention and recruitment of staff, Fitzgerald says, ‘a recent quote by Index Venture’s Vojtech Horna said that Ireland really needs to take action in relation to our share option schemes if we are to keep recruiting and retaining staff in the tech sector here. Index Ventures conducts the annual global ranking of share option schemes, so we cannot ignore this.  (“We’ve been talking to the Irish for many years,” Vojtech Hornahe said. “Obviously, there’s very little take-up of the KEEP scheme. I think there are fixes that the new government can make, and that would make it attractive. But then, you effectively keep having this conversation about making it better in Ireland, making it better in the Czech Republic, making it better in Sweden, etc. The opportunity is to create something that creates this pan-European scale. So suddenly you’re not creating an Irish startup with Irish employees, then maybe making a move and opening in another country, but from the start, building a pan-European business.”

Fitzgerald and her team have outlined a number of suggestions that they think would boost the start-up economy for Irish-based and international businesses. “We need to attract more private investment and diversify the funding options. For instance, we really need to unlock pension funds’ investment to finance growth innovative companies by putting a small portion of our pension funds’ savings into indigenous companies through VCs. We have seen many of France’s leading institutional investors committing billions through the TIBI one and two initiatives. So France has done it well. Denmark has done it well, and England is adopting it. It would be a real game changer here and indeed across Europe. We’d also love to see more spending and support for R&D activity,” she says. “There have been some positive moves with a rate increase in the Budget before last, but we need to accelerate the level of support and spending in this vital area if we want to be a global leader in research and development. They’re just some of the key areas… I could keep going on for hours if you let me.”

Though Fitzgerald is keen to express the superlatives – ”We have great hubs, state agencies, talent, universities, founders and great teams, and we’ve done a lot when you look at our size proportionate to other countries” – her focus is on the future, and particularly the innovation gap between China, the US and Europe. As a member of the advisory board of ENSA – the European Commission agency dedicated to best practice for start-up and scaling companies and a board member of the biggest representative group for start-ups in Europe – she is well placed to comment on the wider European picture.

“The Draghi Report [on EU competitiveness] has really put a spotlight on innovation” she says. “Europe really needs to concentrate its attention on closing that gap, on providing more funding, on spending more on research and innovation with a concerted plan and roadmap to increase our competitiveness at this critical stage – especially given the opportunity created by transformative technologies. So, I would say we need to be more ambitious. We need to look at what’s happening in Britain and France. They’re bigger countries, but we need to be more ambitious for this sector because our founders are ambitious. They’re going out, they’re creating great companies, they’re scaling them internationally. They’re creating employment in their communities and globally. We need to match that, but we also need to look at what’s happening in other countries.”

‘There is strong momentum, the Draghi report has really focused minds that Europe needs to act – and especially now, given what is happening with the US. This is a real moment for Ireland to look at how it can significantly and strategically support our indigenous tech sector. We were delighted to see the ambitious targets in Enterprise Ireland’s new strategy. Bottom line – we have to be as ambitious as our founders.

For more information on Martina, check out her LinkedIn here, or find out more about Scale Ireland’s work, collaborations and annual surveys on their website here.

The post An interview with: Martina Fitzgerald appeared first on Fitzgerald Power.

In Fitzgerald Power’s interview series, we’re speaking to people with different perspectives who feel they can offer more to the workplace, from the water cooler all the way up to the C-Suite.

Business growth – be it in terms of clients, services or production – is a major achievement. That said, with larger-scale operations come larger-scale problems. There’s no denying that, in business, the best way to go is up. However, a challenge that many companies face as they grow is losing sight of the thriving culture that made it a great place to be in the first place.

Advisor, scaling expert and Galwegian Jarlath Dooley is no stranger to creating change. The youngest of six, he grew accustomed to watching his older siblings and friends dread work and live for the weekend. “I thought to myself,” he smiles via Zoom from his Dublin home. “I could never do that.” He left for the University of Limerick as a teenager, hoping to postpone the dread of working life by attending university. There, he discovered HR and Organisational Psychology. “I thought to myself, maybe I could use this to change workplaces. And shift a job from being extrinsically rewarding by way of paycheques to being intrinsically rewarding by way of being a place you actually wanted to go and succeed in.” And so his passion for culture and change began. “I realised when working in a multinational that they’re just too big to change. They’re not really going to change until they fail. And that’s been proven many times over my career. I’ve seen a lot of them go that way. So, I saw that I could really have an impact on SMEs and, particularly in IT, where there were a lot of really exciting SMEs growing. I ended up being  fortunate enough to work in three of Ireland’s most successful IT companies and I count myself very lucky in that.”

Dooley boasts extensive senior leadership experience in the Irish IT landscape, specialising in People & Culture, Business Performance and M&A (Integrations). During his time, he’s worked with some of Ireland’s most successful companies, including Iona Technologies, FINEOS and Version 1, and has operated at board level for many years. His passion lies in scaling fast-growth, high-potential Software/IT businesses with a focus on creating high-performing cultures, aligning management teams focused on business performance and integrating newly acquired businesses. “So, if we take Version 1, for example,” he says. “I would say that the strategy was a very good strategy, but it wasn’t genius… or even very clever. We knew our business model, we knew the customer pain we were solving, and we said we would become the best at solving that and then that would feed our growth. Obviously, there was more detail than that, but it was nothing inventive or novel. But what was central was that culture was going to be the accelerator. We used culture to drive growth. Even Ryanair’s strategy at the beginning was this simple. It was about short-haul routes, using one type of plane, etc. But they were outstanding in their execution, and that’s where culture comes in. If you can build a culture that supports executing your strategy, then growth is easy.”

There are a number of things that help scale at pace, Dooley says. “We were obsessed about core values,” he says. “In that, we totally understood what they were, and no matter how big we got, we never lost sight of them. That ensures excellence is built into the culture very early on.” Ambition sat at number two. “I think the first thing I say to people is to be really ambitious. People overestimate what they can do in a year and underestimate what they can do in five years. Before I left Version 1, the CEO set a goal of being a billion-euro business – and everybody laughed. Yet, it’s far, far exceeded that today. It’s probably closer to one-and-a-half billion. So, you know, if people don’t snigger or laugh at your ambitions, they’re probably not big enough.” Promoting from within, building an organisation that could sell, ensuring a no-ego strategy – where everyone sat at the same table, and CEOs had to book meeting rooms just like graduates – and making decisions based on data also proved really important when scaling. But above all, investing in people proved to be worth its weight in gold, time and time again. “If it means you have to give away some of your shares to get the right people, give away your shares and get them,” Dooley says. “Because remember, at the end of the day, you want to make a big cake, not a small cookie. If you make a big enough cake, everyone gets to benefit. And you know, it’s so much easier for an entrepreneur if he or she surrounds themselves with good people. It immediately takes the pressure off.

“It’s an excuse for people to say that we can’t do what the multinationals do – don’t be looking at what the big guys do. What I say is, look at what you can do, and there’s nothing out there stopping any company building a high performing culture with a winning team that will drive the business forward.”

Identifying core values is not as simple as selecting words or phrases that look nice on a boardroom poster. In essence, they should become a way of life. But, how does one choose the right core values – is it about what you want to create, or what you have now? “It’s about what you have done to date,” Dooley says. “What stands out about your business? So it’s part of what made you successful, and the words people use to describe it. It’s what behaviors are evident all the time – which is why you can’t make them up. And that’s where people go wrong.

“Every business is unique. And, you know, I would never have put down the core value of “Have Fun” in Version 1, like other businesses did, because that just wasn’t true. We were hard-working, and the reward came from achieving and growing and learning, not from having fun. Don’t get me wrong, yes, we had fun, but it wasn’t a core value. So it would have been a good one to put down to attract talent, but then people would’ve come in to say this is different to what I was promised. What we wanted were people who were keen to accelerate quickly, to learn and to grow. And that was one of the key points in our growth; we were always looking for talent; we were always ruthless in our decision making and we always hired the right people. If you get the right people coming in, then you protect your culture. If you hire people just to fill jobs, your culture starts to fall apart.”

When it comes to what not to do for scaling SMEs, Dooley’s answers are simple. “Owners need to understand finance and capital, as well as learning the difference between investment and cost,” he says. “You know, many SME owners see everything as a cost. But it may cost you a lot more money not to invest in things like recruitment. Spending money on fancy offices is a cost, I don’t think you get much back for that, but you will certainly get a lot back for building a recruitment engine or building a sales engine.

“I think the first thing is that too many founders are happier to have 100% of a cookie than 20% of a cake. It’s about understanding capital finance – that’s a big one. The second one is thinking that growing revenue is about hiring sales guys. It’s not. Real sales success is building an organisation that can sell, and the sales guy takes the order. A lot of SMEs rely on a hero sales guy or two, but selling is about the organisation – it is about pre-sales, marketing, brand, technology, data, process – it’s about how you deliver excellence and how you manage the customer. Selling is a complex organisational exercise that needs to be nurtured and mastered.

“Finally, after building a high performing culture, there are two things a company needs to grow: one is a sales engine and the other is a talent engine. If you have both of them, you can fix everything else. If you’re missing one of those, you’re not going to grow. That’s just something I find; people don’t fully understand the growth impact of building a sales engine and they don’t fully understand the criticality of being excellent at talent acquisition. But yet, I think those are the two most important things in scale – without them, you’re done for.”

For more information on Jarlath, as well as his thoughts on scaling, check out his LinkedIn page here.

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In Fitzgerald Power’s interview series, we’re speaking to people with different perspectives who feel they can offer more to the workplace, from the water cooler all the way up to C-Suite.

As most will already be aware, the housing market stands at a pivotal point as 2025 rolls on. Chief among the key forces at play? Remote work, fluctuating interest rates, housing supply challenges and evolving consumer demand — largely driven by millennials; the average Irish homebuyer was 35.3 years old in 2023 — will continue to reshape the real estate landscape. Recent research published by MyHome.ie suggests that the average mortgage loan for a house purchase in Ireland exceeded €300,000 for the first time last year, coming in at €308,200 in the third quarter of 2024. In October, the report noted that the average mortgage approval rose to a new high of €321,000, up 8% on the year. In addition, house prices were 8.7% higher in December than in the previous year, according to the Central Statistics Office.

Shane Quinlan, MD of Sherry FitzGerald’s Financial Services business, spends a lot of time thinking about first-time buyers and the economic landscape they find themselves in. “If you look at the last few years in Ireland, the post-COVID economy has been very resilient,” he says. “Particularly if you look at the domestic economy. GDP is typically the key measure of economic growth but that’s skewed by the strength of the multinational sector. If you strip that out, modified domestic demand has been growing steadily for the last four years, and that’s been driven by real income growth and Government investment in the economy. We’re in an environment of pretty much full employment, and there has been increased investment in domestic sectors such as housing, even though it hasn’t been at the pace required. If we look to 2025, the ESRI are forecasting 4% to 4.5% growth in both domestic demand and GDP this year. Why is that? Inflation is under control, interest rates are coming down, and real incomes will continue to grow. So the outlook for the next 12 to 24 months, certainly from a domestic point of view, looks positive. There are, of course, some black clouds on the horizon: Trump’s proposed economic policies, the potential for a global trade war, ongoing geopolitical instability, and potential tariff increases for the EU… but overall, the outlook is positive. We have a strong labour market, and consumer confidence is improving.

Quinlan grew up in Waterford before transferring to University College Cork in 1997 to complete an Economics and Computer Science degree. He moved to London for a period following his Master’s in 2001, only to return to Dublin following the dot com bust. “At that stage, it was just after 9/11 and the technology market crash, and it was very hard to start a career over there straight out of college without any previous experience.” Over the next 10 years, he pivoted between the public and private sectors, initially working as an Economist for the Irish Government, advising on everything from transport policy to trade policy to enterprise policy, before moving into strategy and commercial roles in Banking. In 2012, he took up residence in Copenhagen when his employer at the time, Danske Bank, withdrew operations from Ireland and redeployed him to their global headquarters. There, he was Danske’s Global Head of Strategy, responsible for all the Bank’s strategy functions across the Nordics. “It was probably the most enjoyable period of my career,” he smiles via Zoom from his office in Dublin. “Exploring a new culture, building up international contacts and getting to work in cities all over Scandinavia, such as Helsinki and Stockholm. Our two kids at the time were toddlers when we moved over, and our youngest was born in Copenhagen in 2014. We came home in 2015 when it came time to get them into school, that’s when I started at Bank of Ireland.” Quinlan worked at Ireland’s largest bank for six years, where he headed up their Premier Banking, Mortgages and Financial Wellbeing departments. In 2021, he was approached to take up his current position with Ireland’s leading Estate Agent. “I had just turned 40, and I was presented with a really exciting opportunity in one of Ireland’s most successful companies,” he says. “Sherry FitzGerald is renowned for property but had a financial brokerage business for over 20 years, which was ancillary within the overall Group with a limited mandate to grow. That has changed in recent years with our business doubling both in terms of staff and revenues since 2022, to where we are now one of Ireland’s biggest mortgage brokers.” That growth is, of course, despite significant housing challenges. “We had a report released this week on the residential housing market, which showed housing stock levels in 2024 had fallen to a historic low,” he says. “People talk about the housing crisis, but it’s actually probably more appropriate at this stage to call it a housing emergency. Economic and demographic developments over the last 15 years have led to a chronic lack of housing supply across the country. Marian Finnegan,  MD of our Residential and Advisory business, often presents a really interesting graphic of housing supply over the last 50 years. If you look at the 1970s, 1980s, and early 1990s, we consistently built between 20,000 and 30,000 houses a year– that was enough to satisfy the demand at the time. Then, in the 2000s, significant economic growth increased prosperity in the country, and there was easier availability of credit, particularly international credit, as we had a lot more banks lending in Ireland – by 2006, we were building over 90,000 houses. That level of supply was never going to be sustainable in a country of 4.3 million people at the time, and we saw what happened after the global financial crisis that followed. After that, from 2010 to 2020, we had 10 years where fewer than 20,000 houses were being built each year. While this was happening, the population was exploding, from 4.5 million to an estimated 5.3 million today. So, today, we’re currently in a situation where there’s double the demand for the supply of housing that’s available. We need 60,000 homes built annually, but last year, we built 30,000, and the population will continue to grow. The new Government has committed to delivering 300,000 new homes by 2030. That is going to be a real challenge as it will require a significant increase in private and international investment compared to what we are seeing today.”

So, how does that translate to the mortgage market? “Well, the strength of the mortgage market is dictated by the housing market’s strength. Back in the heady days of 2006, when we were building 90,000 new homes, we had 12 or 13 retail banks in the country that were lending between €30 – €40 billion that year. That collapsed to as low as €2 billion in 2012 as non-domestic banks deserted the market during the recession, but has climbed steadily back to €13-14 billion in recent years. New lenders such as Avant Money, MoCo and Nua Money have entered the Irish mortgage market to challenge the domestic banks, and almost 50% of mortgage lending today originates through brokers like ourselves. Revolut is also expected to commence mortgage lending in Ireland later in the year, which will add more competition and choice for consumers. A ramp-up in much-needed housing supply over the coming years will translate to higher levels of mortgage lending in Ireland.”

Outside of mortgages, Sherry FitzGerald Financial Services also supports its clients with financial planning. This is a phrase that often gets bandied about, with many overlooking its greater significance. As the needs of the population change, so should our financial plans, Quinlan insists. “The Irish population is getting older,” he says. “We’re getting healthier as a nation, too – the days of retiring at 60 and having a nice pension to do you for the rest of your life has changed. People are living longer and working into their 70s; that wasn’t the case 20 years ago. So long-term financial planning is key to ensuring you have sufficient financial security in retirement. The other thing is that care costs may also be required in older age, which can bring with it significant expenses. And look, the way I see it, financial planning all comes down to having peace of mind. It’s all about mitigating financial stress the closer you get to retirement and, indeed, once you retire. The Government is bringing in auto-enrollment later this year for the 800,000 people in the country who currently have no private pension in place, which will require them and their employers to put provisions in place for the future. That is a necessary scheme, which will hopefully work effectively for those who need it. Because, as I say, it’s all about providing financial security for those lucky enough to live for many years after they retire.”

For more information on Sherry FitzGerald and their research on the housing market, check out Shane’s LinkedIn here.

The post An interview with: Shane Quinlan appeared first on Fitzgerald Power.

In Fitzgerald Power’s interview series, we’re speaking to people with different perspectives who feel they can offer more to the workplace, from the water cooler all the way up to C-Suite.

Everything changed for Tammy Darcywhen she turned 14. “The first 13 years were great, but the next weren’t so much,” she says via Zoom from her Waterford home. As she entered her second year of secondary school, a series of events took place that changed the course of her life forever. “It was one of those perfect storms of family life being really hectic and stressful, and school life being really hectic and stressful, and just kind of living in survival mode at all times.” Darcy’s family had already dealt with their fair share of trauma – one of her sisters passed away when their family was young, deeming the question of “how many siblings do you have?” more difficult to answer – but it was when her parents decided to separate that Darcy felt the world crumble under her feet. “That was really, really stressful,” she says. “At that age, you notice the way the adults around you are acting, and yet are still doubting yourself because they’re the ones that are supposed to have all the answers.”

During that same year, Darcy’s older sister Shona, 15 to her 14, began showing signs of serious illness. “Our parents didn’t really make us aware of it,” she says. “But she was struggling with school, her balance, her ability to retain information. She was getting confused, like she’d tell you a story, and then tell you the same thing a few minutes later. And then this one day, she had been out on her bike, and all of a sudden somebody pulled up to the house in a car with her in the front and her bike in the boot. She’d literally just fallen off the bike in front of them, and they brought her home. Another time, we were on a walk and her legs stopped working. Things escalated very quickly from there.” Shona was eventually diagnosed with Arteriovenous Malformations, a type of acquired brain injury which saw her health deteriorate and doctors diagnose an end-of-life date within the year. Mercifully, she fought expectations, living for another 30 years, but the stress of that time caused profound effects on her younger sister, Tammy. “I was a straight-A student, captain of every team, the most popular kid in the class, until that year,” she says. “And then, because of those challenges that I faced, I wasn’t even going to school by the end of the year. I was quite seriously bullied and completely isolated from my friends. I didn’t trust anybody. I had a really bad attitude. I had a lot of anger, and ended up doing all the textbook rebellious things: black nails, goth phases, all the rest. I didn’t have any self-worth and got into relationships and friendships with people who didn’t treat me very well. It took me a long time to come back from that, and I’m really lucky that I did because a lot of girls and women don’t.”

At 18, Tammy became pregnant. “I didn’t go to college directly after school, because I couldn’t,” she says now. “It’s a tricky thing to remember that time – and I do think your memories can deceive you – because it was incredibly hard. Nothing feels difficult after that. I was a single parent, too, which made things all the more difficult. But it was also the best thing that ever happened to me.” She returned to education at 25, graduating with an honours degree in Human Resources Management, followed by an MA in Business Management in Social Enterprise a few years later. However, despite enjoying her work and landing a great career, Darcy felt a calling from deep within her. She felt that had she had the right support, information, and guidance when she really needed it, she may have been better equipped to overcome the challenges she faced as a teen. “It was something I always thought about,” she says. “I probably had been thinking about it for five years before I said anything to anyone.” Then, one day, in the middle of her Masters of Education course, she was asked to do a micro-teaching session. “We had to come up with a workshop and deliver it to the class. Of course, I already had nearly word for word decided what I would do. Afterwards, everyone in my class said I should be doing that for a living. So, I called my husband and asked him to meet me to discuss it. Now, my husband would be quite risk-averse, so I expected him to bring up worries or talk about the insecurity of it all. So, when he said I needed to be doing this, I thought… Oh crap, this is really happening.”

Darcy began brainstorming, thinking during every spare minute she had, and making plans. “I began reaching out to schools and working with teachers, and in 2017, I went part-time at work. I thought about marketing, accounts, funding… I applied for a fund in 2018, which allowed me to leave work and pay my salary for a year, which was a huge opportunity. So I took a year off work and set up The Shona Project for two years on my own. Then I got one employee, then two, then three… And as of this month, we have 11 employees. And, as well as that, in the last year we reached 180,000 girls. So it has been that fast in terms of growth. That said, it’s not all about numbers. I set The Shona Project up because I really felt that was what I needed in my time of need was somebody to simply check up on me. That’s all it took, I didn’t need to be saved or whatever – I just needed guidance, direction and a listening ear.”

The Shona Project is an award-winning organisation which provides support and mentorship to young women and girls in Ireland. Covering topics like mental health, bullying, body issues, self-esteem, relationships, medical concerns and school and exams, it tackles young woman-centric issues head-on by way of school workshops, community visits, festivals and ambassador and mentorship programmes, something they’ve just launched in recent months. “Our mission is to educate, empower and inspire today’s Irish girls to become tomorrow’s strong, confident and curious young women,” she says. “When you think about how girls are influenced, it’s in school and online. So, we’ve created a voice which allows them to feel empowered – and one that ensures someone else’s standards do not define them. It’s very much a movement driven by the girls, but we’re growing in lots of different ways. Some of our programs are more about raising awareness and challenging perceptions, while others are about deep, impactful, life-changing interventions. Ultimately, we hope that the girls we work with through those interventions will, in turn, go out and be the same level of influence in their communities and create the same change that we’ve managed to facilitate for them, too.”

Over the years, Darcy’s work has been recognised nationally and internationally for its huge importance. In 2021, she took home the Irish Red Cross Humanitarian of the Year and, in 2024 she was announced as a European Leader with The Obama Foundation. She regularly appears on TV, radio, podcasts and newspapers and has been invited to speak to royalty about her work. She is also a published author and released her first book, You’ve Got This, a resource for young women in 2021. “I’m always doing a course of some description,” she laughs, as I ask her how she does it all. “I graduated as a celebrant last year, I’ve done courses in Technology Transfer and Patenting, and loads of other accelerator courses on Social Change and Social Impact. And I’m on another program at the moment. So yeah, every year I’m doing something, because I feel like at the rate at which The Shona Project is growing, I need to grow at that rate to be able to keep up with it and to do it justice.”

The Shona Project recently undertook an enormously extensive survey to find out just what exactly it’s like to be a young girl today – and what exactly might be needed to help. “The findings might be quite stark for some people, but they’re not surprising to us,” Darcy says. “Obviously, confidence, pressure, mental health, and specifically anxiety, are huge challenges. But so are rivalry, judgment and exclusion. We see a lot of girls just basically in survival mode, like I was back in the day. It was bad before the pandemic, but it’s been hugely exacerbated ever since. You know, if you think about a girl’s experience daily, she can feel horrified, helpless, worried, insecure, scared and untrusting before she even gets out of bed in the morning. She’s looking for opportunities, but doesn’t see them, and she knows that she will have to fight harder and be louder, better, and quicker off the mark than her male counterparts. And then, on social media, she sees anywhere between 6000-10,000 adverts that are going to tell her that she’s not good enough. These things can look small, but when you put them all together, it’s like a perfect storm of bombardment and brainwashing that you’re just never going to be good enough.” To counteract this, Darcy says a complete overhaul of how we look at, talk to and consider young women and girls has to happen first. “What we have to do is be louder than that, and be that voice that’s constantly there, reminding them to challenge those messages, even just to be aware of them. Many of them are subliminal, and we meet so many parents who just really are not equipped to deal with this.”

So, what’s a parent, teacher or member of society who wants to help to do? “Number one, talk to them,” Darcy says. “Not in a judgy way. And also, actually, as parents, I think we tend to panic and minimise – I’ve done it myself because I go to the worst-case scenario. So, I think listen, don’t judge and be genuinely curious about their experiences. Secondly, educate yourself. It’s hard, because things change so fast with social media, with news cycles and everything… But just make sure you’re educated. And then the other thing I would say is to inflate their confidence as much as you possibly can. We kind of come from a culture in Ireland where we don’t want to give anyone an ego, so people can find that hard, but inflating their confidence is so important – because the second they go out the door, that confidence will be chipped away at bit by bit. So don’t think that you can overdo it, and really just focus on highlighting as much as you can. Highlight what you think is great or interesting about them, and focus on their strengths. Because that trickles down into everything they do, and impacts everybody. So if we want to see more female leaders in the world, this is how we do it.”

A group of female Fitzgerald Power employees have signed up to The Shona Project’s mentorship programme, a national initiative for senior cycle secondary school girls who are seeking positive role models and career inspiration. Running over 9 months, those involved will meet with their mentee monthly online to give focused support and build trusting relationships with inspirational working women. For more information, check out the details of the programme here.

For more information on Tammy, check out her LinkedIn here, or find out more about The Shona Project on their website here

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