Growing up in the west of Ireland I always knew that when I grew up I wanted to make woolly jumpers. Though this may sound strange for a bloke to say, this wasn’t to be in a sitting by the fire with a pair of knitting needles and a cat playing with a ball of wool kind of way. This was to be in a mass manufactured and high fashion business with customers like Ralph Lauren, Saks Fifth Avenue, Donna Karan or Paul Smith.
Growing up and eventually summer working up in a family business environment, and hearing about the exciting trips (to me) that my father would make to London, New York, San Francisco and most particularly Tokyo, I just wanted to be involved.
This desire brought me to Limerick to complete the Bachelor of Technology in Production Management degree. This would allow me to become the manufacturing manager in the family business, while at the same time my sister was completing a marketing degree. I would make the woolly jumpers and she would sell them.
My degree course combined a mix of industrial engineering topics with some business management subjects such as economics and accounting – all taught in a strong project focused environment. It was during this project work that I began to notice my style of working and acceptance of responsibility that was instilled through the family business background – if the staff didn’t complete the work, but the work still had to be done, there was only the family that would complete it at the end of the day.
Through my work placement from the University, the beginnings of my fathers frequently repeated prediction that I would find different ways of working that would eventually turn my head started to come true. While my work experience was primarily focused on the development of an environmental management system for the company, much of my work was computer based. This was my first major interaction with computers (if you don’t count programming on a 32k ZX Spectrum when I was a kid). Apart from the daily documentation and spreadsheet creation requirements of my role, my growing computer skills led to the development of a highly praised Fantasy Football League spreadsheet used by the whole company. My head started to be turned.
My mind started to wander beyond the creation of woolly jumpers in Mayo to the possibilities that working with computers, in a technology role could provide. This became even further reinforced when I began to investigate the possibilities of joining a management consultancy type organisation during the university milk-rounds. Even more interestingly, I started to notice that the people recruiting management consultants had almost universally worked abroad with financial institutions before returning to Ireland.
The possibility of being able to visit many of the places I’d heard about when I was younger while working at a job I could see myself enjoying enormously led me to enroll in the Graduate Diploma course in Computer Engineering, and concentrating my job hunt on London based American investment banks, leading eventually to my acceptance of an offer from Morgan Stanley.
My journey had thus far taken me from a manufacturing background aiming to work in a production management role in a small west of Ireland business to becoming an IT graduate trainee in London for one of the biggest investment banks in the world.
And my first foreign trip brought me to New York for a 4 month training programme. Over the years I worked with Morgan Stanley I discovered that my work ethic and desire for responsibility which came from my family business background stood to me enormously, but that I also had to learn the intricacies and delicacies of working in such a large and sometimes political organisation.
My time in London, followed by periods of time working in Hong Kong, Tokyo, Frankfurt and back in New York, provided me with the excitement of experiencing these places for myself, but also the fantastic opportunity to live like a local and gain a deeper appreciation than a mere business traveler could achieve.
Through my style of working, and the knowledge gained from working across multiple business areas in application support as well as on various project teams, I began to gain a reputation within Morgan Stanley which I have tried to cultivate wherever I have worked since. That is one of being the “go to” person – the person everyone knows they can go to in order to get something addressed, and to be confident that it would be sorted efficiently and accurately.
September 11th, and the subsequent troubles for American investment banks, plus a growing desire to return to Ireland meant that in early 2003 I decided to come back to Ireland. By that time, my parents had retired and sold the business so I would not be knitting woolly jumpers on my return. After an initial foray into the jobs market, I began to wonder if banking and finance would be my thing in Dublin after all.
Returning to the theme of entrepreneurship and family businesses, I began to investigate the business possibilities that were presenting themselves around that time through the widespread coverage of “Rip Off Ireland”. Having lived abroad, I was struck by the lack of information available to Irish consumers at the time, and devised an initiative to address this. While early ideas were well received, and my business plan led to the initiative to be accepted on the Sligo/Letterkenny CEIM enterprise development programme, it became obvious eventually that while there was the need for consumer information, it was not a money making opportunity – as many others have found out since.
So, while the consumer website continued to provide the much needed information, a concentrated period of reflection allowed me to confirm within myself that the business and support analysis work that I had experienced in London was of greater priority to me than working in the financial industry again. And this brought me to Vodafone where I changed industries again, but also type of business also. The movement to the FMCG type of product provided by Vodafone and the previously unknown phenomenon of customer relationship management brought new challenges and experiences for me.
Though Vodafone brought such new experiences, I found the work environment difficult because of their business processes which meant I had little or no work to do for over a third of my time. A phone call from Merrill Lynch following up on long passed interviews led me back to the financial services industry, but also to a more difficult scenario sometimes experienced at work. When my hiring manager was promoted, his replacement decided that my position, and by extension that I, was no longer required. This proved a difficult and stressful time, but in itself provided me with a new learning experience. Parting on good terms, I arrived at Davy.
Davy, to a certain extent, is now providing me with a composite of all the experiences I’ve had in the past. It’s a financial organisation but it is Irish owned and based with what could be described as a medium sized staff. It is not a manufacturing or FMCG type company, but it’s also not a large multinational corporation. My work is focused on the Portfolio Managers and their new customer relationship management application which will improve productivity and efficiency. And while this new application will provide trading functionality, it certainly won’t knit them any woolly jumpers.
TBC.
