Their first business meeting consisted of a glass of wine on a picture-perfect late summer’s evening on a beach on the south coast of England.

The idea for Louise Doyle and Steph Scholes’s gifts company ‘Needi’, which is set to break £1million in revenue this year, came from spotting a gap in the market – and a long-established understanding of their clients.

Louise takes me back a few years to when she was 18 – and it was just a few!

A renegade of sorts, Louise, who is originally from the south coast of England but now calls Tynan in Co Armagh her home, had saved about £4,000 and took herself off galavanting around the world.

University was short lived. Louise needed to earn money and she had the wherewithal to know that “the quickest way that I'd be able to make money was in sales”.

“So I ended up as a recruitment consultant by the time I was 19,” she said.

And like a duck to water, Louise was hooked, quickly becoming one of the firm’s top billing consultant and managing about 130 temporary members of staff.

She then used that money to travel the world again – intrepid in her very nature!

“I went backpacking around the world by myself; that was a great time and I got involved with a company called Camps International, which is a global social enterprise. And that was really, I suppose, where a lot more business skills came in and it's where I met Steph, my co-founder.”

Louise worked her way up the ladder at Camps International and became the company’s first ever global sales director.

Steph was working as the UK sales manager and together they increased revenue from £5 million a year to £15 million a year on what was a shoestring budget.

Despite the turnover, there was little to no staff welfare budget for Louise to reward the hard-working employees.

“What Steph and I used to do is, we’d end up basically sending staff gifts by searching the internet; places like Etsy, Amazon.

“It was just little gifts that kind of showed them that we really care. ‘Well done, you hit your target; we can't give you lots of money but here's a small gift that says we really bloody appreciate you’.

“We would write little messages and all that kind of stuff and it just took ages trying to find gifts that would arrive on time and come with that bit of personalisation. We also wanted to support local businesses but it's really hard.”

The seeds of a business idea were well and truly sown. Louise was convinced, as too was Steph, and they were ready to hitch their wagons to this plan.

“We got to the stage when we knew that we wanted to do something together,” said Louise.

“Steph and I have done this before; we know how to grow a business, we know how to grow sales teams and we know how to release products into different global networks. Most importantly, we know how to motivate staff and clients, and that's where the idea of Needi came in.

“I think we saw what we could do within the confines of Camps [International]. We had a rough idea of the plan. I can remember speaking to Steph; I think we were having a glass of wine on Bournemouth beach and we are both just sitting there having our first proper business planning meeting. It all happened so quickly.”

That business meeting on the beach was September 2020. By December, the pair had found some well-connected advisors. 

“We managed to somehow recruit the ex Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) of our biggest competitor, Not On The High Street. He was lead marking strategy at eBay, John Lewis and a few other places.

“We had a great tech guy who was helping us do use some really clever technology that, over time, is going to be even better than the human kind of gifting that we do.”

Soon after, Louise and Steph joined the Founder Institute Tech Accelerator, almost like doing an MBA in about three months or as Louise described: “Like SAS boot camp crossed with Dragon's Den”.

“We were very driven and accountable but I knew the network was going to be important as it allowed us access to some of the top business minds across Silicon Valley, across London, across all these different places.

“I knew that I wanted to do something that was going to allow me to get into that network but also make sure that I ticked all the boxes with the business – not jump over a few hurdles along the way.

“We graduated as the top founders in June 2021,” beamed Louise. And immediately after, they created their minimum viable product. They launched Needi on a basic Shopify website, which today continues to host the website.

Louise admits that despite the range of expertise involved in a network it was “more about other people having the confidence in you” and “over time, I've got better at finding the right people and quickly learning from them”.

Louise says the company puts local independent merchants at the heart of their strategy, with businesses hand picked through a rigorous process, in an effort to stop small independent businesses being undercut like what happens on some of the larger platforms.

And while Needi was initially geared towards the individual, 80% of the business is now B2B with clients such as Spotify, Virgin, KPMG and QuickBooks all on their roster.

Said Louise: “The cost of customer acquisition has increased by about 60% over the last few years, so to pay for Direct to Consumer (DTC) customers and to onboard them is not a massively great business model, it would be very, very expensive.

“Many of the DTC customers also worked for companies and the average order value went from £30-50 to £1-2,000.”

That pivot to B2B was the game-changer!

“We were convinced it would be small to medium sized companies that wanted really personal gifts, and really cared about their staff, but then suddenly we were getting orders from KPMG. Someone from Microsoft found us on LinkedIn and put in an order for them and the next thing you know we're working with these corporates, and it turns out that many corporates actually need it more than the SMEs.

“The SMEs are at least still speaking to their staff. They are real people, whereas the corporates are trying so hard to compete with that, especially tech companies. Some great tech companies are working with us, trying so hard to be people-centric and look after their staff. That’s where we come in.”

Needi uses technology and artificial intelligence to improve the gift giving experience by matching shoppers with a high quality, local, product or service based directly on their needs and wants.

Like most start-ups the budget isn’t quite there for large-scale marketing campaigns.

A lot of what Needi do is done through organic LinkedIn outreach, email marketing, which is followed up with phone calls. Louise, Steph and their team attend a lot of networking events, often frequented by executive assistants.

We love working with these amazing Executive Assistants who are often underestimated, but hold so much power within these big corporates. It’s good old fashioned word of mouth.

But for a company expecting to hit £1million in revenue this year, there has to be funding involved, which has been a steep learning curve for the two co-funders.

“It was the Founder Institute Tech Accelerator; that was probably our first introduction to it because you don't go on an accelerator unless you want to be a multi-million pound business,” said Louise.

“We have access to that amazing network so I was constantly speaking to other founders, CEOs, investors, about how it all worked and then we just took all that advice that we were given and just absolutely went for it.

“We did our first round and closed it at £150,000. That was from a mixture of angel investors and people we've met along the way.”

That process took nearly a year and it didn’t come without its bumps.

According to Louise, less than 2% of female founded business receive VC investment but working in Northern Ireland has really opened a lot of doors for Louise as she believes “there is a genuine desire to help bring money into Northern Ireland”. 

While there is a pressure to perform and make a return on that investment, Louise is confident she has got the right investors behind her specifically Techstart Ventures and soon to join, Clarendon Fund Managers and Ada Ventures.

Louise is also realistic on her expectations. Needi, for her, is not a lifestyle business. It comes with its pressures and in the next 5-7 years she hopes to make a comfortable exit. Not to out her feet up, but to one day invest in other businesses; offer her help and expertise along the way.

For now, it’s all about striking that balance. Running a start-up with three children can be tough going. Steph is also mum to a young child.

“It is easier now [raising three children] than it was raising one,” Louise joked. Since returning to her husband’s home turf, the support network has been invaluable.

“I aim for a four day week where I spend Wednesdays with the children. It’s hard and I do work a lot of extra hours after bedtimes but I am massively working towards keeping those as gospel Wednesdays, which I just absolutely love.

“Steph has a young baby. We work hard on striking that balance; we support each other so much. If one of us spends all week networking every night we’ll persuade the other one to take Friday off. We know when the other ones getting to that biting point and when to give that space and freedom.

“We’re work wives. We worked together for eight years before we started the business. I could not do this without her. It would crush me, the weight of running a business without a co-founder who can just scrape you off the pavement when you've been rejected, annihilated, screwed up and nearly gone out of business again, all of those kinds of things.”

Needless to say, with an £5 million revenue target for 2025, they will need to harness all that support.

“Initially, I think putting the plan together, you're like, ‘what the hell am I doing?’ But just lean into the things you've got that gut feel for; the things you're really getting excited about – a project or something you think is going to be good for the business.

“If there's any way you can free yourself up from all the other stuff, just to concentrate on the gut bit, I think that's how we've done it, just really followed out gut.”

Louise added: “You've got to have enough passion and enough drive but if you've got all of that without the energy to do it, don’t do it. Running a business is like climbing a mountain with hurdles.”

Needi are always on the lookout for new independent business to team up with so reach out to Louise here if you want to know more.

Anyway, Scott and his eagle eye spotted the new graffiti lining the streets of Armagh city centre...(see above) Get involved in the rather mild-mannered debate here. We’ve dropped a little FOI on the amount of fines dished out in the last 12 months for this very offence.

It was the wild west elsewhere in the comments section but we’ll leave you to find those all on your own.

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Once again, thank you to to our newest members who signed up since our last newsletter, it’s greatly appreciated. The below story detailing another fantastic entrepreneur is open to our subscribers. We’ve got plenty more different ideas in the pipeline so do consider becoming a member today…

Enjoy – and have a great weekend!

Zara McLaughlin gets fired up about creativity, collaboration and community in business

By Kellie Gray

Zara McLaughlin has always had the itch to go into business for herself and now that she has thrown herself hands first into the world of self employment she has no doubts of her decision.

Her ceramics-centered business in Coleraine, simply named Zara McLaughlin Studio, has developed from a solitary workshop into a thriving, collaborative space for herself and other creatives, amateur and professional alike.

So, how did it grow? Like a plant would; if water and sunshine were love and humility.

Twenty-six-year-old professional potter, Zara found her love as many of us do - on the rebound. 

Said Zara: "Basically I went to university in 2017 to study jewellery but I hated it so I swapped over to pottery on a complete whim and loved it!

Three years on and graduation certificate in hand, Zara was ready and raring to go. But the world had changed and the Covid Pandemic made starting a new business all the more challenging. 

Describing the early days, Zara said: "When we went into lockdown I set up a small studio space in my grandparent's garage, and when I say studio space, it was just half the garage, a sink, a potter's wheel and a bench. I didn't even have a kiln in the beginning.

"I did everything on the cheap. My very first kiln was on Facebook Marketplace, it was older than me and I saved every penny to buy it. Uni would also have given me clay so I didn't have that expense. I didn't really need a huge loan. I did it all myself. You can do a lot with no money."

As much as she accomplished single-handedly, Zara was never coy about asking for help.

"I had help from a couple other local potters to get stuff fired in the beginning," explained Zara. 

"I went to a lot of potters in the beginning and paid around £10 to rent a shelf in their kiln. Or I worked for another woman who said if I worked for her for free she would buy all my stuff. I said "no problem!" 

"I was there every weekend, did all the jobs, cleaned her studio; anything she wanted me to do. In exchange she bought my work."

Sounds simple but the very humble Zara undersells her entrepreneurialism. The fact is - she was prepared, she had a plan in place, she had ambition and - perhaps most significantly - she was never too prideful to ask for help. Something any new entrepreneur should take comfort in.

Part of her plan involved starting an Instagram page where she documented her processes and made videos of her work. This quickly became her ecommerce platform, allowing Zara to sell her creations online.

"My degree had an element of the course where it was like how to set up a small business and preparing you for leaving uni but it was only one semester," said Zara. "I was always interested in business and even when I was at school I was always involved with the young enterprise so I always knew that I wanted a business. 

"I suppose that's what I went into uni with; that idea in my head and I wanted to make and sell and I set up my Instagram for that purpose in my first year in uni.

"I had access to all the equipment when I was at uni and I didn't have the funds to set up a business when I was there so it was a great launchpad. They had everything I needed and they were a great help.”

However, those early days in business, whilst successful, were relatively lonely. Partnering with other students and businesses in her early years became a saving grace in more ways than one. 

She enjoyed that element of 'communication' and valued their support. Zara quickly learnt that there was so much to be gained in widening her network.

Zara said: "The sculpture students would have made tools for me to use and the photography students helped photograph my work for going to galleries. 

"I have worked with cafes in Derry, Ballymena and Ballymoney and I'm constantly trying to work with different businesses. I used to work with different small businesses and I have even worked with Dromona butter and made them butter dishes."

So, just like clay on a wheel, she moulded her business to suit demand and bit by bit, it began to take shape. 

"I was in the garage for a couple of years before I moved to Causeway Enterprise in Ballymoney" continued Zara. "I was in there for two years and I started doing classes and workshops and built myself up there for a bit longer and now I've just moved into another studio and it's a wee bit bigger again."

Zara's studio is now located at the Boatyard, Coleraine in a quaint two-storey cottage. This new space has become the epicenter of her 'creative collaboration' business model.

Commenting on her new, interactive space Zara said: "I would have a lot more people down now. It's not a shop but it's a studio space for people to come in and make. 

"I would have lots of birthday parties, hen parties and different events where I work with other creatives. 

"There's always a way of trying to get people together!

"I have worked with Tughan's law firm in Belfast and they had me up on a wellbeing day. I worked a lot with nurses and doctors in hospitals and they take some time on their lunch break to do some pottery and take a break. You don't have to be good at art to just do it and enjoy it."

Of course, getting people together doesn't happen of its own accord. Vibrant Zara has achieved partnership with some of the biggest names in Northern Irish hospitality - and that - she has achieved of her own volition.

Zara explained: "I emailed the owner of Blank after I was down for dinner because everything he does is all about local produce and finding all the freshest ingredients and I loved that. 

“So I wanted to work with him to make handmade plates so that when people come in to eat in the restaurant they are eating off handmade plates, made in Northern Ireland, with food which has also been produced in Northern Ireland."

Zara's partnership with Blank wasn't a once off, she has also worked with Moira's Michelin recommended Wine & Brine and appeared on podcasts and pop-up events in London. 

The hustle and bustle of big city life has many charms. Especially when it comes to business. But for Zara, her time in London could perhaps be best described as epiphanic. 

"The pop-up was great and went really well but the community feeling was just completely different. You can go and have dreams about building a business in a larger city but there's so much to be said about a small town and how much opportunity there is here," explained Zara.

A Ballymoney girl, it goes without saying that she champions her local community above all else and - just as she received help from those around her - Zara is a strong advocate for other young entrepreneurs seeking advice.

"I love it when people come to me and tell me they want to start a business and I want to reinforce the idea of going for it. You can do it. I'm surrounded by a small business group and I've seen so many people do it. So I love seeing people just making it work. 

"There's not really a recipe - everyone will do it differently. I'm really passionate about just doing it and don't worry about going too big too quickly.

"Getting to this studio has been a big achievement and I really enjoy what I do. I love getting out of bed in the morning so I can't really complain. 

"I have huge freedom because of all the hard work I've put in but I still want to work more with other people and dip my toes in other areas."

From today, we are introducing a members-only newsletter, for those of you who wish to support our work. It will go out at least once-a-week – every Friday morning – and will include exclusive members-only content.

While we will continue with our day-to-day coverage on Armagh I, we will work to bring you longer features in our members’ newsletters, including today's interview with Deli Lites founder Jackie Reid, as well as more thought-provoking, researched deep-dives, that will be possible with the support of you, our loyal readers.

There is so much more we would love to do; so much more to cover – and uncover – which is why we are kindly asking for your support in helping us achieve this.

While we think our coverage is good (we might be a bit biased on that front) – there is always room for better.

Today, we begin with 0 supporters, but please consider joining our community as a paying member. And whether or not you decide to opt in right now, thank you so much for reading – we really do appreciate it.

Thanks, from all the team,

Micheal, Kellie, Scott and Caoilinn.

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Deli Lites founder Jackie Reid on staying curious and finding your 'secret sauce' in business

By Kellie Gray

Personable is the word to describe Jackie Reid. From the moment we sat down at Deli Lites HQ in Warrenpoint it was clear from both Jackie's demeanour and the carefully-curated team spaces within HQ that Deli Lites is a people-centered organisation.

Our ensuing discussion only served to reinforce that notion. Hard work, determination, curiosity and ingenuity play a huge part in the story of Deli Lites. And, as we spoke, it became clear that these characteristics are not only abundant in Jackie but in the company as a whole.

Jackie - who left school age 16 and went on to SRC Newry to study Media Studies - had her first taste of entrepreneurship when she began working within her sister's business; the first of the Deli Lites sandwich bars.

Jackie said: "As a young girl, I was working there part-time and studying as well and that's really how I got involved in the shop. I loved the customers and the food and I didn't know what I wanted to do but you have to try all these things out.”

This little sandwich bar not only gave Jackie a love for food and customers - it gave her the love of her life and partner in business – husband Brian.

"I met Brian at the sandwich bar,” said Jackie. “He had left school and gone to SRC for Hospitality Management and I met him in the shop making a sandwich, believe it or not. We met over a chicken tikka sandwich!"

Cut from the same crust, Jackie and Brian knew they wanted to go into business for themselves, and with queues forming down the street for Deli Lites' sandwiches, they knew there was demand. But, Jackie said: "We knew we didn't want a cafe or a sandwich bar. We wanted to do something bigger and bring sandwiches all over."

So, they embarked upon what is possibly the most exciting form of market research imaginable - and delved into a 'curiosity' that was to stick with them for life.

Jackie explained: "We borrowed my sister's Peugeot and went on a road trip around Europe to see what was happening in the food to go market.

"We were looking at offerings in petrol forecourts around Europe as they would have been more advanced than Ireland was in food to go 25 years ago. We were getting more food knowledge from Europe to bring back to Ireland.

"As well as knowing the success of my sister's bar in Newry; people wanted quality and innovation and something a wee bit different. So, we knew by putting that knowledge together and giving it to the Irish market that that was going to be a brand new thing."

Armed with inspiration, Jackie and Brian cooked up a plan. A plan that involved going into the Deli Lites kitchen at 1am, while the rest of the country lay sleeping, to begin making sandwiches before the shop opened for business. Jackie did the making and Brian took care of deliveries.

They say team work makes the dream work and, as Jackie attests: "Our first order was 30 sandwiches a day and by the end of the week it was 300."

Business boomed, and rightly so. The pair were unstoppable and in staying true to the recognised Deli Lites quality, demand continued to grow amid their new food-to-go options.

Not before long, they recognised the need for their own premises and moved into their own space in an ‘old fish shop’ in Warrenpoint armed with ‘borrowings from family members’.

"We didn't take a salary for three years. The little bit of income that we had we put back into the business,” said Jackie.

But the move allowed for the pair to bring in more team members. This allowed Jackie to get out of the kitchen and into sales - or as she says: “I moved from working in the business to working on the business”. Semantics - but it makes all the difference.

When it came to generating sales, I asked Jackie: "What was your approach to marketing and advertising in those early days?" And as it transpires, the approach then wasn't all that different to her approach today.

She said: "Our investment over the years in marketing and advertising has really been very little. Our business has grown organically which was really on referrals which is a testament to our quality, our innovation and our service levels. Those three things are the pillars of our success and they are things that every business needs to focus on.

"After our second move, that's when we really started to get big clients like Debenhams cafes, Costa and Sainsbury's. They all came from referrals. It's all organic growth. We don't have an aggressive sales strategy - we don't have to. They see our products, what we are doing, our awards, our investment in the people, a credible company and that sustainability is at the core of our business."

These three pillars are something Jackie is incredibly passionate about.

Quality - it goes without saying - has been a primary concern from day one. It was the reason queues formed down the street, it was the reason people came back time and time again and it's a hugely contributing factor to the company's organic growth.

Said Jackie: "We brought in a quality assurance manager very early on within the first three to five years of business because we knew Deli Lites' success was built on quality and everybody loved our sandwiches.

“So when you're getting referrals from other businesses based on quality and sales then you need to look after that - that's your ‘secret sauce’.

“We really bottled that within the business and looked after and nurtured that. It's probably even more important today than it was on day one."

Innovation - or curiosity as Jackie jointly refers to it - is their ability to stay ahead of the curve, to analyse trends and deliver new and exciting ranges before - sometimes years before - their competitors.

"We are very innovative - we are ahead of our competitors in the sense that we launch products sometimes too soon. That's because we are curious; we are always there looking for the new thing.

“We move with the times. We have launched a new range of high protein wraps. I'm vegan and six years ago we launched the first range in Ireland of plant based sandwiches and wraps and maybe launched too soon.

“There probably wasn't enough people willing to give up meat but now you can see it growing."

And service - the third pillar of Deli Lites - comes in the form of looking after your product from conception to fruition and beyond. Deli Lites do this by managing all of their own logistics and by surrounding themselves with a team of people as passionate as both Brian and Jackie.

“Everything is made on one site in Warrenpoint and we own all of our logistics,” said Jackie. “So we know it can be safely delivered to our clients - we are in control of the whole operation from start to finish.

“People are everything. Being a responsible employer as well we do listen to our staff and understand their circumstances. We do try to be flexible and we have flexible conditions for team members. I'm a working mum and I have three kids. I know what it's like and I know the challenges so we offer that when we can.”

Today, Deli Lites continues to deliver on Jackie and Brian’s shared goal of becoming the global industry leaders in premium food on the move.

Their hot and cold food-to-go ranges have now been rolled out to great success across the UK. From this the team then developed a range of toasties, paninis and burritos that can be deep-frozen for exportation to other countries - which must be so fulfilling when harkening back to those early days of European research.

The company also achieved B-Corp status in 2022; making Deli Lites the ‘first sandwich manufacturer in the world to receive B-Corp accreditation’.

Said Jackie: “B-Corp is an accreditation that is focussed on people, planet and profit and it means you are looking after those three core values and it helps to put forward a sustainability framework around those projects.

“We have to make sure that that's our key focus in our business now. It's about our people and our planet.”

B-Corp is described as ‘using business as a force for good’ - which seems very fitting of an entrepreneur who has been focussed on character, quality and innovation from day one.

In this fast-paced world, we are all guilty of forgetting to stop and smell the flowers. Especially when we are trying to run businesses that employ approximately 300 people. So I asked Jackie to reflect on her first days in business to see if she ever envisioned Deli Lites becoming what it is today.

She replied: “I have been a very determined individual from day dot. Anything I did, I put my heart and soul into it and I sort of knew that if I found something that I was passionate about I would do well at it. Whenever I realised the love and passion I had for it I knew I could bring it to any size I wanted to and I think there is no stopping us!

“People do ask me ‘what's your plan?’ and my plan is to keep going. The world is our oyster. There's no finishing line.”

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It was once Kerri Thompson began raising her son, Harrison, that she discovered how she could turn the challenges they faced into a way to help others. 

Having just completed the Northern Ireland Explore Enterprise Support Service (NIEESS) last year, Kerri is gearing up for her visual aid business to take off. 

With her son on a waiting list for an autism diagnosis, Kerri, 31, began thinking of ways to make his life easier, which led her to the idea of a visual aid business. 

She explained: “I started designing visual aids for his use, and I saw how well they worked and realised if they work for him then there’s other families out there that would benefit from them too.”

The service was set up by Enterprise NI and the Prince’s Trust. The service aims to help people across Northern Ireland who are economically inactive to develop their entrepreneurial and employability skills. ‘The Explore Enterprise Support Service has received £1.8m from the UK Government through the UK Shared Prosperity Fund’.  

Glengormley based entrepreneur Kerri had her son Harrison, 5, in 2019, and that was when she made the decision to come out of work.

She said: “He’s on a waiting list for an autism diagnosis and was having quite a lot of struggles. Even around him being in a playgroup or nursery, trying to find a job that would fit around that was impossible.” 

With NIEESS aimed at individuals who have been out of employment and those who are currently unable to start a new position due to personal circumstances, it was the perfect decision for Kerri.

Speaking about what attracted her to the service, she said: “It was Louise at Mallusk Enterprise who told me about it. I had done other programmes in the past but I still felt like I needed help and advice, so when this was brought to my attention I decided to go for it, especially as it was focussed on what I needed the most help with.

“I feel like it was really helpful. You get such a thorough look into businesses and the structure of how they’re run. Then being able to ask questions, it’s just like being in the classroom and properly learning it.” 

Designing has always been something that Kerri loved to do. Even prior to having her son, she had studied design in University, before taking a role as a visual merchandiser after graduating. 

The idea of creating her own business is something that she had thought of for a while, but kept putting it off, until six months had passed and she realised that it was time to actually do something about it. 

Talking about her business, she said: “I finally launched the business in November, with just a few products. We’re still in the testing period, but I’m mainly focusing on getting as many new products designed as possible, so that I have a bigger variety.”

Kerri knew, however, that starting a business would be difficult, but her biggest challenge was the business side of things. 

She said, “I’ve never run a business before. I had no idea about the steps to take or the different types of sole traders or legalities, so it was good to be able to get an understanding of it and support”. 

As a part of the Explore Enterprise Support Service each individual is provided with a mentor, whose role is to offer support through one on one meetings, while contributing advice and encouraging decision making.

For Kerri, she believes she would have given up without the help of her mentor. 

She explained: “You get around 20 hours of one-on-one meetings so being able to go back to Louise if I haven’t got a clue about something, she will always be there to point me in the right direction and help me”. 

“If I didn’t have the support for the business side of things I would have given up.” 

Already looking ahead at what she can achieve in the future, she believes partnering with businesses and schools would be a good way to ensure neurodiverse children get as much independence as they can. 

“I would love to be able to get into schools and give them hand washing visuals and toilet visuals”, she said. 

“Even for other businesses based around neurodiversity, I would love to be able to help them out by giving them some because I know what that feels like to want the help.”

From her son being on the waiting list for a diagnosis, Kerri can see similarities in his routine within her own lifestyle. 

“I have done so many training courses for ADHD and autism and I’m seeing the similarities within my life. I use a lot of the visual aids myself, so if we need it, then I’m sure there are others that need it too.” 

The personal attachment to it, meant that Kerri was more passionate and determined to make it work, with the Explore Enterprise Support Service there to support her every step of the way. 

She explained: “Even on just a normal day here things will come up and I think of a visual aid that will help the situation so I go to my sketchbook and sketch it out. I could think of hundreds of things that would help, so my main goal at the moment is getting as much as possible, as quickly as possible, from my sketchbook to the physical copies.”

Without Explore Enterprise Support Service Kerri would have had no idea where to begin but now she is on the way to making sure it can be a bit easier for neurodivergent people to live their everyday life. 

For more information about the Northern Ireland Explore Enterprise Support Service (NIEESS) go to enterpriseni.com 

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Gerry Mallon has been at the helm of his window manufacturing business, Malplas, since he took the brave and bold decision to go it alone back in 2001. As he approaches his 72nd birthday, in June of this year, he feels it’s nearing that time he passes the torch over to his two sons.

However, unlike the Roy brothers in the hit TV show, Succession; sons, Ryan and Philip will not be vying for that number one spot. The pair, over the last number of years, have worked together in tandem under the expert and watchful eye of their dad – it’s a proper family-run business – to build a company that is now growing at an exponential rate.

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I caught up with all three of them to discuss the growth of their business in recent times. Their turnover has increased from £500,000 in 2017 to an impressive £3million today. For comparison, turnover in the first number of years was around £150-200,000. We also discussed their decision to go to a four-day work week and how this decision has revolutionised their business.

The firm was also awarded the 2023 Business Eye Manufacturing Company of the Year just before Christmas. It’s an accolade that meant a lot to the Mallons, especially Gerry, whose life work is now being recognised beyond the confines of the trade.

Gerry brought me back to his origins. Born and bred in Moy, where Malplas is now headquartered, the 71-year-old first trained as a carpenter after leaving school, and worked on building sites across Ireland, England, Germany and Iraq. He joined German manufacturer, Re-Hau, in the early 1980s, working in their technical department before being transferred to Slough in England.

He then joined Dessian, a Belfast-based window manufacturer, where he was a director for 16 years. By the turn of the century, Gerry’s itch to set up his own business became too great and in 2001, he took that entrepreneurial leap.

The company started out with those five employees (Gerry included) in Benburb – that number has now grown to 27 and is likely to increase in the near future.

It’s been gradual growth but “we didn’t take on too much; we took on what we could cope with and grew like that over time,” said Gerry.

His eldest son, Ryan, came on board in 2015, starting on the factory floor where he worked for nearly six years. Philip started in the office, joking that he’s “not one for manual labour”.

For both sons, it was a natural route for them to join their father’s business.

“When Philip and I were growing up we would have been running about the yard,” said Ryan. "We grew up around the business.”

Philip, not as keen to get his hands dirty, went to Dungannon Tech to complete a course in business studies which he is now putting to very good use.

“I knew I was coming here,” said Philip. “I didn’t have plans to do anything else. I was on the floor for a very limited time but like I said, I wasn’t one for manual labour.”

The boys have been central to the changes witnessed at the factory in recent years, and like most industries, the internet and technology in general has allowed for great change, something Ryan and Philip have wholeheartedly embraced.

“It’s all about changing and trying new things,” said Ryan. “With the rise of social media and the internet, it has opened up so much more possibilities. We are looking at what companies are doing on a global scale and getting ideas for our own business. Before, it was just from the magazines and companies local to us.

“It was semi-automatic back when dad started the business. Now, it’s a lot more automated. We invested in a brand new Stuga ZX5 machine which has improved our efficiency massively.

“We went from doing 200 frames a week; now this new machine has allowed us to up the output to 500 frames a week. The job itself would have been carried out by three men for 200 frames; now it’s one man for 500 frames. The staff however are a large part to play in this”.

In the last four years, workload has increased but so has efficiency – revenues have correlated to this, much to the family’s delight. The introduction of a new distribution warehouse in Ashbourne, on the outskirts of Dublin, in 2020 has been another game-changer.

Before, Malplas would have been delivering to every corner of Ireland. What can now be done in a single one-and-a-half-hour trip would have previously taken three days. Malplas deliver their frames to the warehouse and the client picks them up from there. And one man manages the warehouse!

“That has been a huge boost to the business,” says Ryan, who also bestowed the benefits of the central location of Moy.

While all that is great, it would mean little if the product wasn’t great. The German Engineered Kommerling uPVC are top of the range, high end profile.

“The quality is the biggest factor in our success,” says Gerry, unequivocally. “Coupled with the new machinery, we can get quality frames out within the week whereas others’ lead times can be 3-4 weeks. It’s quantity but our focus is on quality and that’s important.”

Another factor to the success of any business is its people. Turnover of staff is not something Malplas have had to worry about; after all, four of Gerry’s original employees are still there. Any who have left tend to come back too! It also helps when the employer listens to what its workers have to say.

And that was certainly the case 24 months ago when several employees floated the idea of a four-day work week. Gerry, Ryan and Philip sat down and considered the proposal, which led to a trial run – and that is now they way they do things on a permanent basis.

Employees work 7am-5:30pm Monday to Thursday. Gerry, Ryan and Philip are in the office on Friday for mainly administrative purposes. Mark Burns, technical manager and Lucia Abernethy, office manager are also part of that core team that helps the cogs moving in the right direction.

“Staff were delighted,” said Gerry. “We asked for the same production during the four days, and it has been, which has been brilliant for the company.”

Ryan explained: “It’s a day less of driving, especially for some who live a little further away. They can schedule their hospital, bank appointments etc. on that Friday. As for ourselves, clients know they need to get orders into us earlier and our electricity bills have been cut down too. It really has revolutionised the way we work.”

As for the future, Ryan and Philip see a world of opportunities and a chance to elevate the business their dad built from scratch. Patio doors was a new string to their bow in 2023 and orders went through the roof. Aluminium sliders and bi-fold doors is the next natural step and that’s a huge market, which Malplas have begun manufacturing this year. 

International growth may not be on the horizon as “there is enough work for the company in Ireland”, says Gerry but there is scope for a lot of growth.

Picking up the Manufacturer of the Year award in December, they did it by pipping some major multi-billion companies. It’s an award that has shone a spotlight on the modest Moy manufacturers and Ryan and Philip are keen to make their dad proud – as he enjoys his time between home and sunnier climes, when the time comes to hand over the torch.

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To be honest, when I first started out trying to compile these deeper dives into NI’s entrepreneurs, I didn’t realise how much time would be needed. It turns out, it’s a lot! So, each and every sign-up is greatly appreciated. The aim now is to make them much more frequent moving forward – and we’ve got quite a few in the pipeline. Feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn. Now, let’s dive into Joe McKevitt’s story…

Relentless dedication and an uncanny ability to burn the candle at both ends are often traits and outcomes associated with an early-stage entrepreneur.

But Newry man – and founder of tech start-up, Uptime Labs – Joe McKevitt, simply cannot – and will not – afford himself the luxury of unfettered time. He’s a dad to five young children – the oldest being 12; the youngest just one!

Nonetheless, he’s an obsessive. He is driven, but time is currency and time management is his thing, and even if he admits to not having that quite figured out yet, he’s better than a lot of entrepreneurs. He has to be!

Joe is one of three founders behind Uptime Labs, alongside London-based Hamed Silatani and Jack Moore.

But what is Uptime Labs? In layman’s terms, it’s a business for companies that care about their uptime.

While pilots and emergency services train constantly for worst case scenarios, Uptime Labs have created a simulator for major IT outages at firms which, historically, have not catered for those critical eventualities. Times are changing and IT is the heartbeat of most modern companies.

The idea for the business came about seven years ago. Joe and Hamed were senior employees at a major training firm. When things went wrong, it was usually at huge expense. An IT outage would cost millions.

Joe described these outages to me as ‘black swan events’ – unpredictable in their very nature. In terms of dealing with them effectively, Joe uses aviation for an apt analogy.

“If something goes wrong in the air, a pilot is not going to panic and throw his hands up, you wouldn’t have it. It’s the same with the fire service, it’s all muscle memory. It might still be a new situation you’ve never seen but you have a clear head to deal with it. IT is moving more and more into becoming a safety critical system and people are just not ready for it. There’s no regulation, no thorough practice in place and this is where we see an opportunity.”

Seven years ago, Joe was asked to help up-skill staff and carry out in-house drills to mimic ‘black swan events’ but with the high attrition of staff associated with big firms, this training was costing thousands every month, so Joe looked about “buying a programme off the shelf”.

“We went to the market to find this idea, to buy this product but we couldn't find it anywhere and that was the genesis; there's an opportunity here for us, but it took us five years to get the courage to do it.”

Then came Covid, it was the trigger; a black swan event on a global scale. Remote working fast became the norm.

“The idea of giving people remote tools is now really realistic,” says Joe. “Back in the day it was the boss looking over your shoulder looking it fixed as quickly as possible. It’s now all online and that worked to our advantage.

“We saw an opportunity but we didn’t know the price point that companies were willing to pay for it. 

“A lot of startups would build a product for a year before going to market. We went to customers first with a very early prototype and asked them what they wanted to see and that was very stressful. There were three or four of us working like mad from one week to the next but we managed to prove our value and bagged a few early customers.”

Uptime Labs began making money after just a couple of months but running a company as a young father to five children is no easy task, as Joe would attest.

“I was working for a big company; I’d worked with them for maybe 12 or 13 years and I needed a new challenge.”

Challenge himself, he did. 

Joe then went on to change jobs at the beginning of Covid. It was a new, smaller scale – younger company – but for Joe it was the right fit at the time.

“I did four days a week and one day for myself, and that one day was basically used to build up the idea of Uptime Labs. It went way faster than I thought it would. I was thinking it would probably take two or three years to build the company but within a year we're out full time.

“In the meantime, my wife and I managed to have a fifth surprise. The ball was rolling on the new venture at that point and next thing you know my wife says, ‘I'm pregnant, you're having a fifth’, and I said, ‘how, am I gonna have a baby and run a startup?’”

Fortunately, having Hamed alongside him as co-founder has been “massive” for Joe.

“The way my situation is, I definitely couldn't do this on my own,” Joe admits. “I need a team around me to go into battle.”

That very month Joe and Hamed went full-time, Joe’s wife had that fifth child. 

“Honest to goodness, just surviving, I don’t know how we did it.”

He laughs it off now and while it’s still a work in progress, they have coped – riding roughshod over conventional wisdom of ‘it can’t be done’!

“Life before Uptime Labs,” explained Joe, “I sort of worked in a very senior stressful job but it was for someone else. It wasn't your own business; you think you're busy until you have your own company and that’s when you realise what busy is.”

Joe was working long hours and balancing the school runs with his wife, Joanne. Without her, Joe says, none of what he is doing at the moment would be possible. Joanne has sacrificed a lot of her own career to support Joe – something he is deeply thankful for.  Together, they make having a large family and running a start-up look a little easier than it should. 

For the sake of investors, being a dad to five children and running a start-up is a walk in the park. In reality, Joe says he has to be a “very, very disciplined person”.

“I had to be,” he said. “I’d tell anyone, it’s tough, if they asked. You’ve no idea how tough it is until you do it yourself, which is why I think talking to other small business owners, co founders, you have an empathy with them.”

Joe made the decision that he wasn’t going to sacrifice everything else around him just to succeed in business – he doesn’t have to sacrifice to achieve what he wants.

“Like every book you read about startups, or anyone who talks about startups that say, ‘oh, you need 60-70 hour work weeks’ and all that, this is insane.”

Joe had previously been working in London but moved back home to Newry eight years ago; his wife and two children at the time in tandem. 

“I wasn’t going to sacrifice my family time. My colleagues, who were in same position as me were getting up at 6am and not seeing their kids until the weekend. That was the norm in 2015.

“My dad was a teacher and he was always there. I thought to myself, no way; I was going to be there for my kids no matter what. I’ll not regret being there for my kids. It’s nothing glamorous; it’s getting them up, dressed and off to school, but I’m present and that’s important.”

Joe says his mornings with the kids are “crazy”, as many working parents will second. His working days usually start at around 9.15am and he finishes at 5.30pm, after which he literally turns around in his chair – he demonstrates as much during our chat – and his children are there with their homework.

“I try not to do any work in the evenings. I might do a half an hour at the end of the day just to get ready for the next day.”

Joe’s days are meticulously planned out, down to the half hour. Treating himself to lunch on a Friday from the shop goes in the diary too.

On Monday mornings, Joe takes the first two hours to plan out his week. He doesn’t take any meetings and sets aside any potential distractions. On a Saturday, Joe and Hamed will speak about the week just past. It’s a chance to “blow off steam”.

Come Sundays and work.. “I don’t do anything – don’t do a thing,” – Joe’s emphatic about that. “The kids need me to be checked in and I need the time to recharge.”

Every Sunday morning Joe will go for a run, for at least an hour, or do some form of exercise, if injury prevents him from running.

“It’s my favourite time of the week – it’s my time,” he tells me. “It’s such a healthy thing to have and when you don’t do it, you’re miserable.”

Joe got into running during his time in London; needless to say it became an obsession, but as kids came along and work piled up, there was a natural friction point – he couldn’t time manage everything.

“It took me a couple years to catch myself on, a sort of self-realisation that you can’t do everything. You can’t be the best runner, employee, dad, husband – you have to make trade-offs. I started realigning my goals and asking myself, what is running about for me? I didn’t give up on it but it’s important to make it all work for you.”

Joe’s quest for personal bests quelled with time, something he puts down to maturity and wisdom.

Time management and productivity is a more recent obsession. In true entrepreneurial form he told me he’d quite like to be an executive coach for time management – a personal trainer, as such, for time. There’s always a business idea floating around. At the present moment, he doesn’t quite have the time for that…

“I'm obsessed with time management. I’ve been down a rabbit hole looking into this, but to be clear, I don’t have it figured out. I always say when you go to university, they should give you a module and train you for six months on time management because it is so important.”

Joe references David Allen’s timeless book Getting Things Done and Cal Newport’s Deep Work as essential reading for anyone looking to get better with their time.

And there are principals with time management Joe applies to his own organisation, especially given Uptime Labs’ remote-first approach.

How do we work more effectively together? is a question he often asks. Since he started working remotely in 2015, commuting to London once a month for a couple of days at a time, he came to the realisation that “you’re either fully remote or you're fully on site”.

“This halfway thing, that's a disaster. It’s very hard to get right,” he says. “So our DNA in Uptime Labs is that we were a remote-first company from the get go. We will hire people in Northern Ireland but the paradigm is totally different as a remote company.

“Anyone who says to me, ‘we need to meet’, I would always challenge that. We get into this mindset that we need to meet face-to-face to do our job. Meeting face-to-face is for relationship building, trust building, 100%, but I have a colleague in Sri Lanka who is a brilliant engineer but he cannot be disadvantaged because of his location. Once you start meeting some face-to-face and not others, you diminish your remote first approach completely.”

And when you do go remote first, communication is key – and for Joe, everything has to be written down.

“If you've a conversation it doesn't exist unless you write it down. Written communication is very, very important. It doesn't matter what you agree in a meeting, if you don't write it down, it doesn’t exist. That's just a culture of transparency.”

Personally, for Joe, he lives by his written notes.

“I have a system – nothing is in my head. I will always write it down to get it out of my head,” says Joe.

He speaks about having closed loops. Open loops, where ideas and a to-do list is floating about in the back of your mind heightens stress. Always write things down.

What does the future hold for Uptime Labs?

At the moment, the company runs “very, very lean”.

“We’re not fans of growing out the company too soon,” Joe says. “We don’t think the more headcount the better, in fact, we’re the opposite, we think the leaner you can be the better. We’re software engineers so we're always thinking how we can automate things.”

There are six employees spread across Ireland, the UK and the rest of the world. They also employ a gig economy for that second layer of staff – ad-hoc work.

While Uptime Labs is, on the face of it, a remote company that can hire from any corner of the globe, Joe sees its headquarters firmly rooted in Newry.

“I’m always talking about Uptime Labs being in Newry,” he says. “We're an export company. So the customers we have are based in Canada, the Netherlands and India.

“This space is really immature so there’s definitely opportunities there but the DNA is going to be Newry for as along as I’m running this company. My co-founder, Hamed, is totally on board with this and that's largely down to two reasons; one is Brian Conlon. When you think of what he did with First Derivatives, it gives me that inspiration to think, ‘why not?’ And more recently with STATSports, you get your cluster effect?

“I’m old enough to remember how Brian started First Derivatives. He’s a massive influence for me. Why can’t we do that here in Newry?

“Secondly, Invest NI have been very supportive to us and I know how good they were for STATSports. The team in Newry have been very supportive of me; they’ve been so good and the Uptime Labs team – particularly Hamed – has seen that and can’t believe how helpful they are. London is very competitive but here in Northern Ireland – in Newry – they see an opportunity and they get behind you.

“My idea is to try and follow the Brian Conlon model where you hire bright, hungry mindsets. People here roll up their sleeves and they have good people skills.”

It might just be the recipe for another major Newry success on the world stage.

To find out more about Uptime Labs, visit the link here.

You can check out all our previous interviews here.

And if you want to get involved, or reach out to me for any reason, simply reply to this email (if you’ve read it in your inbox), comment below, or find me on LinkedIn here.

Finally, if you fancy coming on board as a sponsor, please do reach out – I’d love the support to help build this into something much bigger.

Just like his grandfather before, Peter McVeigh is a firm believer that the recipe for success lies in a few simple ingredients: a good product and excellent customer service. 

Donaghy’s Banbridge is a third generation family business, founded by Peter Donaghy and his wife, Eileen, in 1960. It began as a modest shoe shop on Newry Street and while times may have changed, the store remains the beating heart in the Co Down town’s thriving high street – now a 20,000 sq. ft. department store. 

Peter McVeigh was 26-years-old when he joined the business in 2009, before completing a management buyout of his uncle, Michael, in March 2018. 

Before that, Peter had been working in transport and haulage and didn’t necessarily envisage himself in the family business.

Peter didn’t see himself in haulage all his life either. His mother Ann, in a rather informal approach, asked her son to join the business, just as Donaghy’s were contemplating joining the Wild West that was online. It was a new side to the business that would go on to compliment the bricks and mortar store; allowing Donaghy’s to be competitive in both spaces. 

For Peter, it didn’t need much deliberation and immediately he thought to himself, “how could that be done?” 

“Whenever I was working on my last job I did a bit of research,” he told me. “This was very early on in e-commerce; there wasn't a lot of people doing it. I looked into how to set up websites and got a business plan together and started implementing that in mid to late 2009.

“There was nobody to ask about e-commerce back then. It took five months to get a payment gateway approved. Now you can set up a transactional e-commerce website in a few hours. What took us six months in 2009 could be done in two weeks now.”

Donaghys.co.uk launched on New Year's Day, 2010.

With the wisdom of hindsight, moving online was a game-changer but Peter and the family, with the luxury of foresight, were able to spot that earlier than others. At the time he noticed Amazon had acquired Zappos – a major shoe retailer in America. That marked a significant shift in the shoe retail world. Donaghy’s took notice. 

Said Peter: “We noticed a big trend towards e-commerce whereby a lot of brands – particularly start-up – e-commerce only brands – were moving towards online. A lot of people had dismissed e-commerce maybe in the early 2000s but in the late 2000s, once the dot com bubble bust had receded, we saw something that suggested maybe this is the way retail is going to go in the future.”

However, it wasn’t an overnight boom. In 2012, e-commerce accounted for about 3% of Donaghy’s revenue. In their first year trading online they did about 600 orders. Today, e-commerce accounts for approximately 30% of the business with 19,000-20,000 orders a year being shipped out of their warehouse. 

The company has 55 employees on its books with four of those working full-time on the e-commerce side. Donaghy’s do their own fulfilment, with 65% of their products heading to the UK, 30% within the island of Ireland, and the remaining 5% going internationally. 

Covid also changed those metrics – sales more than doubled with the onset of the pandemic. With the store closed indefinitely at the beginning, Peter and the rest of his management team needed to adapt and relent to a new normal pretty fast.

“Those first weeks of Covid, the retail store had closed but a few weeks in and the online sales shot through the roof. It really moved the needle in terms of that 30%, whereas before it would have been anywhere between 12-15%.”

While research and acquiring the right people go hand-in-hand for Peter, it’s that willingness to embrace change. 

“It’s all a learning curve,” he said. “We are all firm believers in learning and trying to take learnings from other people. We're open to change; it’s easier said than done but we have embraced change over the years. A lot of people don't like change but we've moved as best we can.”

Whether that’s a constant refinement of their marketing strategy, use of social media, or the latest developments in e-commerce, Peter is not one who will allow the business to rest on its past successes. 

He’s all too well aware of the history and “the big shoes to fill” but he’s a man confident in his own ability to move the business forward, and he’s doing that all while adhering to the good old fashioned values. 

“We always have, and always will, try our very best to give the customer the best possible service we can,” he said. “We're big supporters of the phrase, ‘look after your customer or else somebody else will’. 

“That good customer service, choice and competitive pricing have probably kept us where we are. If you don't look after your customer, if you don’t offer good customer service, if you don't have a good product, sooner or later your business will fail and that's as true now as it was 100 years ago.”

Moving forward, Peter says next year will see even further changes to their in-store and online offerings, with the customer experience at the heart of those changes. 

In today’s technology and AI-driven world, those changes are being spearheaded by the data. Donaghy’s, while a family business, are always leaning in on the data. Peter says, “gone are the days of hunches when it comes to purchasing products” for their customers.

Not that those days of gut feelings were all that long ago; after-all it was a hunch, or perhaps just some common sense, that allowed Peter – in a separate business enterprise – to capitalise, during the infancy of e-commerce – “when it was a bit like the Wild West”. 

He casually proclaimed: “We sold the Chinese their own shoes back.” 

You what?

“I ran an export business in China before I took over as Managing Director at Donaghy’s,” he added. 

“We took western branded shoes, which are priced at £60-70 here, but they’re £170-180 in China. So we started uploading our products on to Chinese online marketplaces. We were probably doing 20,000-25,000 orders a year. That was very successful!

“They had to be sent by Royal Mail because then that meant the Chinese knew they came from the UK and we use to put a bar of Cadbury’s chocolate in every order. In China it’s fake, fake, fake everything so this really resonated.

“The shoes were still stating ‘Made in China’ on the inside. It was crazy. I thought there’s no way we can sell the Chinese their own shoes back but we did.”

In the end Peter sold that section of the business on.

E-commerce has evolved so rapidly and Peter and his team are constantly keeping on top of those trends but at the end of the day it’s about those two simple ingredients – a good product and even better customer service. A 4.9 rating on Trustpilot tells its own story. 

And Peter’s advice for would-be entrepreneurs…. “have a good plan, put in place and take that first step. for it’s that first step which is always the hardest”.

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Welcome to the latest edition of Entrepreneur NI – a newsletter which drops into your inbox of a Sunday morning, showcasing how founders created some of the best businesses in Northern Ireland – big, small and everything in between. If you haven’t already subscribed, you can do so here… or below

Entrepreneur NI

Ordinary people doing extraordinary things in business across Northern Ireland.

By Armagh I

“I had no family here in Northern Ireland, I had about two friends and no clients..”

Owner of the eponymous Elizabeth Sands Beauty School, Elizabeth Sands, who was this week named the Ulster Tatler Businesswoman of the Year, has come a long way from the days of not being able to afford to turn on the heating in her home.

Originally from England, Elizabeth moved to Portadown with her then husband 14 years ago, but less than two years after upping sticks from London, she found herself living as a single mother with two young daughters to care for. 

Despite a split from her husband – who has gone on to be an excellent support for her daughters – Elizabeth decided she would forge her future in Northern Ireland. For the first few years living in Co Armagh, Elizabeth concentrated on raising her children, until her youngest started primary school. 

“I just made the decision that I'm going to stay, so I set a room up in the back of my house and I went and did a nail course...,” Elizabeth told me when we spoke this week. 

“Separating from my husband and being a single mum, I needed to carve a future for my children and myself and that's what fuelled me, so I put my head down, did the nail course and it went from there.”

And it all started with a good old fashioned newspaper ad in her local newspaper. 

Elizabeth explained: “It was at the time when no needle botox was all in the press, and that was back in 2014; I got my hands on the first device for facials which was no needle botox. So I went to the Portadown Times and asked, 'will you do an article please?' So they did a spread for me. I didn't have any clients so I advertised an open day and I think eight people turned up and that's where I started my business. And two of them today are now my best friends.”

While beauty had always interested Elizabeth, it was a change of pace for a woman who worked on the trading floor for Goldman Sachs as an assistant to a founding partner, Brace Young. In terms of a business grounding; it doesn’t get much better than that. But Elizabeth was always destined to work for herself. 

“The people that I interacted with, worked with, sitting in boardrooms, understanding businesses, definitely gave me the drive to progress. I always knew I wanted something, but having children, I decided I didn't want to put them into childcare; I wanted to raise them my way until I could launch my own career. 

“It was a difficult one because I moved here to Northern Ireland, I wasn't in the city anymore, it's a very different environment. I always wanted to go into beauty but when I was 16, it was never an option because, at the time, it wasn’t considered a great career choice. 

“But when my children started school I thought, ‘come on, let's go and do something I really want to do’ so by doing this it gave me the freedom to work around the children which meant I wasn't paying for expensive childcare.

“I remember those days when I couldn't afford to put the heating on during the day, and I had a little heater in my back room while I was just doing skin treatments and appointments for my first clients.

“You always remember those things and you're always grateful for what you have now. I think when you go through an awful lot in your life it makes you sink or swim; I've learnt and grown a lot through adversity.”

Covid presented another opportunity for Elizabeth to either sink or swim – fortunately she already had her proverbial life raft at the ready. The pandemic affected many businesses in a lot of different ways. Many businesses spawned from it but for Elizabeth, hers entered a whole new stratosphere. 

“Covid was one of the biggest things that happened to me. It was actually amazing because I had decided, before anybody had heard of Covid-19, that I was going to launch an online platform. I wanted this platform to be incredible, something different. I wanted proper online learning, which was blended learning and so we were writing this a year before anybody knew what Covid was.

“We were ready to launch the day we went into our first Covid lockdown and it just exploded across the UK because people were at home furloughed, and everybody's businesses were shutting.”

Elizabeth and her courses have now helped train over 14,000 people from across Ireland and the UK, thanks to a little forward thinking, not that she could have predicted a global pandemic – but she saw the potential of the internet. 

Nonetheless, it was still important that she created an online course that stood apart from many others.

“I wanted to make sure that we were the best possible online training platform students could have because I didn't want people daunted by just being given a course and told ‘off you go’. It's not in my interest to create people that aren't going to be successful.”

And many of her students have gone on to become award winners.

While the business is reaching new levels, Elizabeth is still able to keep her overheads low and her time in check. She outsources the management of her social media and IT and has someone in charge of her products. This, she says, gives her time to focus on growing the business. Time management for Elizabeth is a fine art she has mastered. And she does it all from the comfort of her own home, foregoing the expensive offices and the added extras.

Courses are all automated online and “it's only when your students ask questions or have queries, that's what you have to answer”.

“Other than that we've got an incredible IT person that does all that work on the technical side, and because the systems are in place, it takes an awful lot of work off my hands.

“We're not doing Zoom calls, which take hours; we've got a really groundbreaking online platform, which we set up, so it's self sufficient for students. Online is the way to go!” 

And because of the growth and expansion of her online courses and products, Elizabeth has given up her face-to-face work. While difficult to say goodbye to a part of the business she built her foundations from “it was the fairest thing to do” in order to help achieve the scale and growth she is now seeing. 

Building an expanding business with the right people has also been important for Elizabeth and building others up to be successful is a key driver in how she goes about her work. Creating so many future business owners in the beauty field is what she loves doing. For Elizabeth, competition is healthy as it gives people like her impetus to rise above the field. 

“There's always going to be competition in any business but the interesting thing about any business; if you look at a market that’s saturated like beauty, there's only three or four companies at the top of it. It's about getting to the top of that business, where it's not saturated, that's the key. 

“And the key to that is customer service and making sure that you are absolutely the best. Making sure that you actually care about your customers. I think, if you can get that right, and your pricing structure correct, that leads to a winning formula.”

Elizabeth has set herself apart. She started from the bottom and worked hard at being the best at what she does. But it takes time, patience, as well as “being open to criticism”. 

“You've got to be open minded because everybody that comes into your life, and even if they're negative, they're always going to be your teachers; you are going to learn something from them, you're always going to improve from the experience, but unfortunately, people don't always get that. You might hear something uncomfortable but there's a reason and I've always learned things from adversity, I've always made it my strength.”

For anyone looking to start their own business, Elizabeth suggests doing some self-reflecting, and asking the difficult questions about what they really want, for more often than not, people struggle to actually answer that question. 

“So, when someone wants to go into the beauty business, it's really important they do their research. Also, go with their gut feeling on what they're interested in and don't try and do 20 things at once. 

“When I started, I didn't have any family here and I had about two friends; I didn't have any clients. I had a diary and I wrote loads of names in it – that weren't real – and I just believed that these clients were going to come – and they did come.

“You have to have the right mindset. If you go in thinking you're going to fail, you're going to fail. You have to go into it believing that you are going to be successful.

“I know that what I've got really works because it really worked for me. You have to believe in your product and what you're doing. And if you don’t believe you’re the best, you've got to change that mindset. 

“A lot of the problems that people have is they don't have the confidence and when you lack confidence, that’s something you need to work on and overcome. When you lack that confidence, that feeling expands. Whatever you think about expands and expands so, when you start a business, it has to be done with the right mindset.”

Elizabeth, who is also a trained life coach, is continuously advocating personal growth. Her guiding principle and motto is simply “By Building People, They Build Your Business."

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Good morning, welcome to the latest edition of Entrepreneur NI – a newsletter which drops into your inbox of a Sunday morning, showcasing how founders created some of the best businesses in Northern Ireland – big, small and everything in between. If you haven’t already subscribed, you can do so here..or below

Entrepreneur NI

Ordinary people doing extraordinary things in business across Northern Ireland.

By Armagh I

For Rory Canavan – the owner of Garlic & Thyme Artisan Pizza – it’s all about balance. Not so much the bank balance but rather the perfect work-life balance, if there is such a thing in the world of self-employment. 

I wasn’t quite able to pin down Rory for a chat as early in the week as I had hoped as he was away enjoying some wild camping on the far western shores of County Donegal. Thankfully the weather made it a lot less wild than it needed to be for Rory and his soon-to-be-wife, Laura. 

But it’s that balance of time away from the business that Rory works hard to achieve. The 32-year-old gave up his role as a transport planner at Manfrieght at the onset of the pandemic. 

The world of self-employment was where he was always destined. In fact, his time at Manfrieght was the only role he have had as an employee – he’s a man with an entrepreneurial spirit. 

Previously, Rory had his own cleaning company which operated in the Newry area. He specialised in carpet and office cleaning. Rory loved working for himself; he just didn’t love cleaning. 

“I thought if I could combine working for myself with something that I actually enjoyed, I think I can go quite far,” said Rory. “Food has always been in the background and with working for myself always at the forefront of my mind, I just thought I’d combine the two and go for it.”

But cleaning, transport planning and pizza making all seem a bit scattered in terms of his approach to his career, but Rory has always had a passion for food, thanks to his parents. 

“My mum and dad were very good amateur cooks so I always grew up with really good food,” he explained. “I always had an interest in it and always knew I was going to go into food at some stage, but I'd never had any formal qualifications. 

“When COVID struck, I told Chris Slowey – the owner of Manfreight – about my plan and he said he would keep the job open for me if it didn’t work out. So it was a no brainer for me and it was the perfect opportunity because everyone was buying takeaway food; all the restaurants were closed. I thought I could really land on my feet if I go for it right now and that’s what I did and we've been busy from day one.”

Rory has been at the helm from day one. His partner Laura was still working full-time but was helping with deliveries. Laura would come on board full-time eventually.

Staring out there was an initial £20,000 outlay and that was a significant one for Rory. He had £10,000 saved up but required a loan for the rest. 

“We were actually meant to go to Australia, Laura and I, but that was knocked on the head with COVID so we had that money set aside, so I used it for the setup business.”

Was it a difficult choice for Rory, giving up on a trip of a lifetime? Not at all!

“I just knew it would work,” he enthused. “I just had it my head and I knew if I really went for it, it would work. I mean, who doesn't like pizza and there was no one in Portadown doing it the way I wanted it. 

“So if I can keep quality high and advertise myself I just knew it would work. I mean I had parachutes there. I could go back to my job if I needed to; I could sell the wagon if needed, so it wasn't a massive risk.”

On day one, Rory rocked up at a vacant lot beside the Orchard Wine Lodge on the Loughgall Road, having contacted the owner who was happy to oblige. 

Rory enlisted the help of his mum to begin with, after all, she helped inspire his dream from a young age. 

Said Rory: “She said she would help me for a few months until I got on my feet and from that first day we had a queue line up for our pizzas.”

The recipe for success is not a complicated one, according to Rory. 

“I think anything new in the area, people are just curious. So that helped with the first couple of months. People always want to try something new, especially when it’s food related.”

And when your product is of quality, the best form of advertising is word of mouth. 

Today, Rory and Laura’s time is split between selling to the public, outside Portadown Football Club, and events, however, it’s the latter Rory wants to do 100% of the time. 

“Since day one I've always wanted to be event only; so weddings, parties, corporates, that sort of stuff and I would say we're maybe 60 or 70% of the way there. Hopefully by next year we will be event only, I hope. That's the way we're going and that's the way I want to be.”

Rory believes events offers the best way to make a business like his work, a lot because it's all prepaid and much of the guesswork is eliminated. 

“You know exactly what you're making,” he explained. “The host will order so many pizzas and it's all prepaid upfront. There's no questions about turnout or anything like that because it doesn't matter.”

Garlic & Thyme’s first event was that of a neighbour of Rory’s who happened to notice the wagon. 

He explained: “They were just about to get married and she asked if we could come and do pizzas for their wedding event; it was during COVID and because the way food was at that time, they couldn't do a sit down meal. So it was a trial for me really, the first one, at a hotel in Belfast.”

And the idea caught on. Since then, the business has grown to a point where Rory got himself a small unit in CIDO (Craigavon Industrial Development Organisation) last year. There’s only so much you can do in a spare bedroom. 

Said Rory: “Everything we were doing, we were doing it from the house at the start; the house was becoming a business and I wasn't getting away from it, so we got a small unit in CIDO, which is a prep kitchen for us now.” 

Before that, Rory and Laura had transformed the small box room of their three bed semi-detached into a makeshift prep room. It contained three fridges a dough machine. Admittedly, “you could hardly move in it”. 

“We were getting bigger and bigger and I had to prep more and more dough balls. It was just impossible to get bigger without getting a unit because I just couldn't fit the stuff in it at the end.”

Unfortunately, Rory was unable to supply any photos from those early days….

With Laura on board, having quit her full-time job, the double act became the ultimate dream team and they decided to make it official with a marriage proposal earlier this year too.

Before that, Rory had employed one person but they went back to school, which is why Laura was able to fit seamlessly in. 

For Rory and Laura, the team is as big as it needs to be. They aren’t chasing riches of a monetary kind but rather the riches of time, something which is often much more valuable. 

“Since COVID, people are reevaluating their businesses, their money and their time; it's definitely something I have revisited and I believe that time is so important. That's another reason why we're trying to do events because it gives us more money and takes less time. And I want the happy balance between money and time because it's really important to me to have that time. Laura and I couldn't be happier to be honest. We work three or four days a week and we spend the other two or three days together just seeing the sights of Ireland.

“We could grow and we could get a premises. I even did a business plan for some premises but I figured out Laura and I would be working six plus days; a minimum of six days to make it worth it. 

“I just thought, yes, I'll have probably a healthier bank balance, but it wasn't that much to make it worth going through four or five years of stress. This way is less stress and more time. We're not poor. Whenever we are out we do earn good money but we're not going for that millionaire status.”

That’s not to say Rory and Laura are not always learning and making the most of that time away from the business, physically, to learn more.

“We're always trying to keep up to date with what what's sort of new and current in the pizza world, and in the food world in general. I would often try and do wee crossover pizzas. My big passion is curries so I like doing the odd curry pizza from time to time and obviously visiting other restaurants as well, especially Belfast, and keeping up to date what's going on Belfast.”

For now, Rory and Laura are working hard but enjoying their downtime – it’s the balance that self-employment has allowed them. It’s certainly a balance many people would love in their lives, whether it’s employment or self-employment. 

It’s clear what side of the fence Rory is on when it comes to employment or self-employment. 

“I always say if you can try and do something for yourself, do it. I believe, if you can get it to a point where you can work a little bit less, then why not? I mean, if you're putting in 37 hours plus – most people are working 45 hours a week – if you can put that into your own business, I believe you'll be successful, I really do.

“If you have that notion in your head, just take the jump, for the risk is definitely worth the reward.”

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Good morning, welcome to the latest edition of Entrepreneur NI – a newsletter which drops into your inbox of a Sunday morning, showcasing how founders created some of the best businesses in Northern Ireland – big, small and everything in between. If you haven’t already subscribed, you can do so here..

Mind your own business and learn to say no! Deborah Loughran is neither abrupt or discourteous; she is the owner of one of the most successful communications companies in Northern Ireland but it’s the very fact she is great at both minding her own business and saying no (mostly) that has given her a strong foothold in the entrepreneurial world. However, there’s always room for improvement – there has to be! That’s another little slither of advice I can offer up from my conversation with Deborah this week. 

Entrepreneur NI

Ordinary people doing extraordinary things in business across Northern Ireland.

By Armagh I

King Communication began at the beginning of Covid, not in spite of the virus, but rather as a result of it. Deborah was Group Head of Communications at MJM Marine – the cruise specialists. Covid and cruise were the antipathy of each other and the job leading up the communications strategy in a company working in the cruise industry at that time was going to be a very different one indeed. 

If there was ever a time for change, it was then. Deborah reluctantly left behind a role – and colleagues – she enjoyed; fortunately her now former employers remain good friends. 

What Deborah, awash with doubt, wasn’t fully aware of at the time was the fact that what she had been doing over the previous 10 and more years was building up a network, which ultimately lay the foundations for what has come since. 

“By being involved in the Chamber of Commerce in Newry, by getting involved in charity things, by being stuck in different clubs and activities; at the time I didn't realise but I was building a network that would come back to support me further down the line,” said Deborah.

“Before I made a final decision to leave my job and start my own business I was able to lift the phone to probably 10 of the best business people in this area and ask them if this was a good idea or not? And I got such support and encouragement from it – probably two of my first clients out of it as well.”

“Your network is your net worth,” a quote Deborah threw out that I had never heard of…

The encouragement was so much that if it hadn’t have worked out, Deborah had bagged herself the chance to walk straight into another job at a top business. She was told to put that one in her back pocket but, fortunately for her, it was a Get Out of Jail Free card that never needed to be cashed in.

Deborah spends her time helping other businesses grow and one of the ways she does that is by looking at strategy – steering them in the right direction – because that is the problem, she says, most growing companies face.

“So many of these fantastic businesses have been grown by people who have spotted a gap in the market, or who are good at something, and a business has developed around that, and they want to try and take it to the next level but are not sure how.”

That’s where Deborah comes in. She describes the role she plays as “the outsourced company director”. 

Before self-employment, Deborah spent 10 years working in agencies in Belfast and she says it was “one of the best things ever happened to me because, if I only had in-house experience, I wouldn't have known how to charge for my time”. 

She adds: “I wouldn't have known how important it was because there is this idea of understanding that your time is your product. A lot of small businesses fail because people don't know, or understand, the importance of being able to charge for their time.”

This is where learning to say no comes into play but it only works when you have a clear vision and strategy already in place. For Deborah, that strategy is not an eight-page document filed away, never to be read again, but a simple one page document that sits on your desk. 

By referring back to this document, which contains a very clear vision and sets of objectives – time and time again – it becomes easier to say no! Learning to say no is never easy, it takes time. 

“Anything outside of that strategy, it’s noise, don’t touch it. You learn to say no to things because you know clearly what you’re doing when you have a strategy,” said Deborah. 

“As a business owner what would make you sit back at the end of the financial year and go, ‘Do you know what, I have delivered here on what I set out to do’, or ‘Do you know what, I've more to do’. It's so simple, but it actually really focuses the mind. I know personally how many hours I have to charge every day, and at what cost, to earn the salary I want for myself. Every single day!

“I physically know then what that looks like in a week, so I know whether I've gone under or over my target. If I look at my diary over the course of the week, or the fortnight, or the month, or the quarter – I know. It's simple because I set the number; I said this is what I want to turn over in the business in a year.”

Deborah says the same principal applies for allocating budget and time. When it falls outside that strategy, or your core objectives, learn to say no! 

King Communication’s typical client base is more established businesses, those who maybe need the marketing or communications director but don't have a full time capacity for it. Deborah has pitched the company – her services – like an extension of the senior management team – that outsourced company director.

And one of the stipulations for Deborah – and it’s a big stipulation – is that “for me, I have to be comfortable making myself a cup of tea in the company location”. 

“I have to be comfortable enough for anybody who I'm working with long term, comfortable enough that I go to the cupboard, or go to the kitchen and stick the kettle on for myself, because that shows that you're not a consultant, you're part of the team.”

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Being one of the team is key, which is why Deborah has no major aspiration of scaling her operation – she does not want to run an agency. She has built a network of people around her who are specialists in their respective fields and who support her across various projects; there’s no desire to have people work directly for her, for now.

“Yes, it means I am limited to an extent because you only have a certain number of hours in the day, but it just gives you that ability to be part of the senior management team, and work with a small number of clients who see the value of what you’re doing.

“Without being disrespectful to the agencies, sometimes they don't get under the bonnet of a company and, with in-house, you’re too involved and get pulled into different things you shouldn’t. 

“So, what I wanted to do was really be involved in the business, to be an extension of the senior management team, where you're only getting paid to deliver the core things that you've agreed you're going to deliver. You're not getting dragged into other things in the business that aren't relevant to you.”

Aside from helping other businesses, Deborah has to work on her own company too. It’s about fine-tuning her skills and there is a constant need to do so, whether she likes it or not, but it’s not about worrying what others are doing – mind your own business. For Deborah, it’s about being comfortable in her own offering; an offering she is always working to improve.

Said Deborah: “I ask myself, what are the three, four or five things that I could do, say in the next 12 months, to elevate my business? Even a tiny little step at a time that I can turn around and say, ‘Okay, yes, I am doing that’.

“One of mine is that I do some level of further learning each year because I need to keep learning. Two years ago I did a mini MBA. This year, I did a course through the Clinton Institute in Digital Disruption. I’m not off doing 10 random things; I focus on one decent course per year that will keep me fresh in the game. 

“I also want to give back so I’ll mentor or support at least one student a year. You’ll know and understand your capacity with clear objectives, so you know what you can and cannot fit in. While it’ll be hard at the start, you’ll get better with it over time.”

While Deborah sounds like she has it all sorted out, there are of course challenges for her; work-life balance and being able to keep her work away from home is difficult to get right at times, like most business owners. 

With two young daughters, aged seven and nine, life can be pretty hectic. That’s where being strategic, organised and keeping a robust diary come in very handy. 

On top of that, Deborah is a keen runner, it’s how she unwinds. In 2022 she completed four marathons but that, she admits, was too much. This year she hasn’t clocked up any marathons for that simple reason, but she has her eyes set on the London Marathon later this year. Before that it’s the Belfast Half Marathon. It’s a case of healthy body and healthy mind. 

The world of self-employment, as full-on as it can be, suits Deborah and her family’s lifestyle. 

“My husband and I are full time taxi drivers for our two daughters. The football, swimming, dancing all gets marked in my diary and fortunately working for myself allows me to switch routines. That flexibility allows me to be there for the children which is important at their age. 

“I don’t buy the excuse ‘I don’t have time’. My husband and I have to make it work. We co-ordinate with each other but of course, we couldn't do what we do without the help of our parents because we rely on them so much. So I do understand that there are constraints on people's lives, but it’s so important to make a bit of time for yourself. Running is how I do it and I make sure I don’t run with music, podcasts or anything – it’s my free headspace time.”

And time to switch off is vital because “self-employment is certainly not the easy option, certainly not”. 

“You have so much to think about. You do need to be on your A-game at all times and I do struggle a bit with that at times. I find that it can be a lot of pressure but the minute it stops becoming enjoyable you just move on and do something else.

“But for now I am really enjoying it and three years into it, it suits my lifestyle, it suits the family. Having a supportive and loving family just makes such a difference when you’re running a business because, at the end of the day, they are your biggest asset and your biggest allies.”

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Good morning, welcome to the latest edition of Entrepreneur NI – a newsletter which drops into your inbox of a Sunday morning, showcasing how founders created some of the best businesses in Northern Ireland – big, small and everything in between. If you haven’t already subscribed, you can do so here..

This week, I spoke to Aaron Bushby, one half of a dynamic duo, who alongside good friend Harry Singer, set up Roast & Roll – a tabletop games café – in Banbridge almost one year ago. This is their story of how they continue to make it a viable, thriving business. Enjoy..

Halfway through a Masters degree in astrophysics and working in a supermarket, Aaron Bushby decided he was going to put it all on hold and open up a tabletop games cafe in Banbridge! 

He enlisted the help of good friend, Harry Singer, and together the duo opened up Roast & Roll – a café specialising in games such as Dungeons and Dragons and Warhammer – which has really welcomed a loyal community of followers over the last 11 months. 

Aaron’s initial intention of returning to his studies has dissipated somewhat as he continues building upon his dream of entertaining people.

“One of the best things about the café is seeing people laughing, having a good time; knowing we have provided a place for that to happen and seeing friendships grow between different people,” Aaron enthused. 

And it was their own friendship – and unique qualities – that really made this idea the perfect fit for the dynamic duo.

Aaron explained: “Harry and I have been friends from Sixth Form. I knew he was into the same things I was into but he also had hobbies I wasn't too familiar with. I reached out to him; it was a bit of a long shot but he seemed very interested.”

It helps that Harry is an excellent baker too! That became a major part of the business as Aaron explained. 

“I myself have a nut allergy and you go to cafés, you can rarely find anything that's nut free, but being able to have it all baked in house was great – and reassuring,” he said. 

“All of our tray bakes are being made in here by Harry, fresh from scratch, so having that is just a massive extra side of the business. That wasn't an initial consideration…the café was secondary to just having a place for people to hang out, with entertainment as the main goal of it.

“Eventually the café side of the enterprise started to become a lot more prevalent in the discussion. I enjoy my coffee, so does Harry, and with Harry's baking and everything, it was a no brainer – it's been a huge boost to the business. We do actually get people coming in just for a coffee, or for a tray bake and that's wonderful because it’s not what we were expecting at the start.”

Aaron and Harry don’t look upon the café as a way to make their fortune – they are delighted to have turned it into a viable business that sustains the two of them in jobs they are proud to have created for themselves. 

Initial discussions were all about how they would keep the café alive, and with a lack of business expertise (Harry has a background in Computer Science), or huge amounts of capital to begin with, the pair needed some help to get their idea off the ground and that’s when they launched a Crowdfunder campaign with a target of £10,000.

It was a nail biting finish but they made their target. Without hitting their goal, they would not have received any of the money, as is the rules of a Crowdfunder campaign. For them, £10,000 was a game changer – literally – for two reasons; it validated their belief that there was a demand locally for what they wanted to achieve and now the fact there was a pot of money to actually make that dream a reality. 

Said Aaron: “With that money we knew that we could actually fill the shelves with games and get the things that were actually going to make the place fun from the beginning. If the Crowdfunder hadn't have gone through, it would have been very bare bones. I don't know if it would have worked because people coming in and seeing a games café with barely any games, and barely any café, would have been a totally different experience.”

Raising money is all well and good but Aaron and Harry had to make the business sustainable – they had to make money. They manage to do that in various guises. 

“The original idea (a table time charge of £2 per hour) is very much alive and reflected in our income,” Aaron explained. 

“The second is coffee and tray bake sales. So, the café really does boost us a lot. You're basically paying for an amount of time of entertainment. If you go anywhere it'll be a lot more than £2 per hour. You can get three hours of entertainment for £6 and add, say a coffee or a couple of rounds of coffee; that's actually one of the bits we were quite surprised at, was actually the rounds of coffee people bought throughout their sessions. The longer someone's playing the game, the more likely they are to get their next drink.”

While the economics seem straightforward, Aaron and Harry go hard on the community aspect; they know the community and they work hard on developing it because making that a success will, in turn, make their business a success. 

“We have plenty of what you would consider regulars but we look at it more like members of a community. Many of these people would come in and participate in multiple different types of events; they'll even suggest events and lead events themselves. They’re just such a friendly group of people.”

Aaron and Harry also offer up a membership programme that gives patrons discounts on gaming sessions. 

“The way it works is that people can pay an annual membership which means, that for every gaming session they come in for they get the session for a percentage off – depending on what membership is – for everybody at their table.”

Aaron says they will be looking at developing their membership offering down the line.

Events is another way the pair generate revenue but sometimes they operate events at a loss…in revenue at least, for their value in loyalty often outweighs the tangible monetary value. 

“Some events we've run actually at a loss just for the sake of having something fun to do for the community,” Aaron admitted. 

“For example, we have a a Warhammer tournament that runs once every other month and it's an all day tournament. It basically takes up almost every table in the café, which means on those days, there's not as much room for regular members of the public coming in. So, setting that aside and including the buy in cost and whatever refreshments people get through the day, it's generally a little bit less than what we would normally make on that day but, because it's the event, and we love running those, and we love seeing people coming in, it's definitely worth it.”

It has been an incredible first year for Aaron and Harry. In the early weeks and months the pair were putting in 65-hour work weeks but as time has gone on, they’ve managed to strike a balance with their down time, even if they can’t be off at the same time. It helps that it doesn’t feel like work for either of them. 

They get Tuesday and Wednesdays off but the daily routine has been mastered; most of the less exciting parts of the day happen early on – deliveries, inventory etc – before it all comes to life in the evening. 

“You almost always end the day on a high because everybody there and it really is a great atmosphere, it’s fun and you're talking to everyone, it’s just great to be around.”

Often, the idea of starting a business sounds great in your head but a daunting prospect in reality and it certainly doesn’t help when you have the naysayers – Aaron and Harry had plenty of those but thankfully they spoke to the right people who saw the potential.

Aaron continued: “At the start loads of people told me that they don't see it working but then as soon as I switched to speaking to people who knew the industry, they were a lot more positive about it, telling me that it works in a lot of places, so why not here? 

“It's perhaps always a little too scary to maybe take that first step of looking into it and pushing the boat out but when we did take those first steps and speak to the business adviser, as well as look into other businesses like this, it became a lot easier to picture how it would all actually work.”

Research was key. Aaron saw how it worked in England, when he was there studying. He built a model of how he wanted the business to operate and then he spoke to a business adviser who shaped the dream into more of a reality. 

“At that point we started to see what we would have to do to bring it to fruition. “It's slow, methodical, do your research, and then go for it.”

Being ahead of the curve and opening something that hasn’t been done before in Northern Ireland really helped too. This side of the Irish Sea, there weren’t too many all encompassing hobby cafés and with Banbridge, they had the perfect catchment area.

“I think this idea is finally starting to come over here a little bit more, but we are lucky to be one of the first ones to put it into brick and mortar,” said Aaron.

It’s embracing a culture, a community and Aaron says they have dove headfirst into that geek culture. 

And probably the most obvious test of a business’s viability for its owner would be – would you use the business? For Aaron, the answer was unequivocal. 

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“If this opened in Banbridge when I was in secondary school, I would have been here once or twice a week…at least!” 

As for the future, it’s slow and steady progress but there’s hope of expanding into a function room upstairs in the property and continue to grow the retail side of the business.

Hello and welcome to Entrepreneur NI – a weekly newsletter brought to you every Sunday morning, showcasing how founders created some of the best businesses in Northern Ireland – big, small and everything in between. If you haven’t already subscribed, you can do so here..

The Covid-19 pandemic, and subsequent lockdowns, issued in an era of uncertainty for many businesses. For one Co Tyrone couple, the time was used for self analysis; to take stock of what they wanted from their future – and that too of their daughter’s.

Trevor and Barbara Boyd own a farm in Pomeroy but had been renting it out pre-pandemic. Their daughter, Bethany, was studying Food and Business at CAFRE’s Loughry Campus in Cookstown. Albeit at a different stage in her career to that of her parents, Bethany’s future was also very much at the forefront of her mind. 

Renting the farm wasn’t really working out for Trevor and Barbara and they needed to think of something new. 

“We come up with this plan to make something out of the farm ourselves,” explained Trevor. “So we ended up putting sheep on the farm and we converted some of the old buildings into a production unit for making ice cream with the view to building a business for Bethany.”

The farm was brought back to life and Bethany had the opportunity to build a business of her own. Betty’s Ice Cream was born. The name comes from Bethany’s nickname – Betty. 

Mum, dad and daughter all work on the business, adding their own special ingredients to the mix – a mix Trevor describes as one of “enthusiasm and experience”.

Barbara has a background in retail and procurement, Trevor worked in animal health and Bethany’s studies focused on the business of food.

“We're still in the early days of excitement and potential,” said Trevor. “It does give you a good kick whenever people taste the product and think ‘wow, that's lovely ice cream’; that's what makes you feel that you're onto something. 

“Even though there are umpteen types and flavours and varieties of ice-creams out there, you're able to offer a locally produced product that gets people to stand back and take notice. It gives you a degree of satisfaction that, for at least for a percentage of the population, you're hitting the spot for them.”

Once the Boyds decided what they wanted to use the farm for (there were a number of other ideas put on the proverbial table) they set about making their business a reality. 

They went to Mid Ulster Council who advised them about the Go For It programme, which offered mentorship and preparation work. Trevor also reached out to his own contacts from previous employment, who were kind enough to advise him on how to approach a market. 

They soon became members of Food NI, which helped provide training around unique selling points for their product, where to go to sell it, and what the consumer trends are – what customers are looking for. 

The reality of a running a business – while not to be unexpected – soon became apparent.

Said Trevor: “Despite all the thinking through, the challenge and the surprise of it all is the amount of hours that are involved. Barbara and I worked for other businesses and people were assigned particular roles within those businesses.

“Whereas in a startup business, you find that everybody's doing everything. If we were to put an advert online in the morning, we would find it difficult to put together a spec for that job, because at our point in development, whoever's working on the company has such a broad remit. It's not just marketing, it could be sales-marketing, and you'll go to this event and that event, so the challenge is the taking on of a lot of roles, you're juggling a lot of balls at one time in order to try and move the business forward.”

The logical step for Trevor and the business was to look about bringing in students in need of placements. As much as it was experience for the students, it was necessary experience for the young business. 

While entering the labour market is becoming harder and harder across all industries for employers, Trevor is not one to speak about problems unless, as he says, you have a solution and the regional colleges and the InnovateUS programme have been good in bridging that gap – offering a solution to a problem.

“It's a challenge for us setting up a business because you're driven by the project, the aspiration and the vision. The hours are longer than an employee is obliged to work and the range of responsibilities is broader that you can often define, so it's depends on whether or not you can find a person who wants to embrace your vision. 

“That has been the challenge of entrepreneurs who have gone before us. Often one-person bands have been particularly hard to work for because people have not embraced the same vision for the business as they have.”

It’s not the only difficulty for start-ups. Trevor is proud to be one of the very few ice-cream producers west of the River Bann, with most of the situated in the east but while it’s great to be an outlier in one sense, Trevor uses the point to illustrate just how difficult it is for start-ups in Northern Ireland. 

“I suppose the reality is as we're trying to grow the business, everybody else is getting paid, we have part time income because whatever is made in the business basically is going back in to drive that business forward and to make ultimately more efficient.

“A startup business, in practice, is not as efficient as it should be; it's probably as efficient as it can be, with the restraints on it, but if we had different types of equipment, our volume could be higher and our method could be more streamlined and cost effective, but we have to work to get there.

“In terms of funding, what we discovered is that for new startups, there is actually no money available. There is plenty of advice, there's plenty of mentorship, and there's plenty of training but there's nobody saying, ‘oh, that's a brilliant idea, let's throw £5,000 at that and see where you can go’. So in that sense the growth curve is that little bit more drawn out.

“And most lenders now are looking for two years of financial figures. Obviously, they're looking for a positive out of those two years, so it's a challenge for a startup business to show much of the degree of profit within two years.”

This is also a point, Brendan Digney of Machine Eye, made in a previous newsletter.

While funding is not a realistic prospect, Betty’s Ice Cream will have look at other ways to grow capital and that comes through innovation, something Trevor believes the business is already doing.

Currently, the business is looking under the banner of healthier ice cream, and while “ice cream will never be deemed to be healthy product by nature of its composition” there are ways to innovate, says Trevor.

They’ve done that with the introduction of a range that's made with no added sugar.

“That then becomes more attractive to parents with children. It's better for teeth, it's better for preventing obesity; that's a factor in play. We're also then looking at nutritionally enhanced ice cream which would be of benefit to the healthcare sector.”

Malnourishment is still an issue in the healthcare system, which is why Betty’s Ice Cream is conducting research in the use of the lesser used sheep’s milk, alongside the University of Ulster where “there's a big opportunity if we get this right”. 

There is a huge potential in the ice cream business and while Betty’s remains a direct to customer brand, predominantly through events, their products are stocked in various farm shops and restaurants. The next step is the bigger retailers. 

“Wherever we can get the opportunity to get in front of people, it gives us a chance to tell our story, build brand awareness and sell some ice cream to help pay our bills.

“The day of the corner shops are gone, so to get into shops, you have to be able to deal with a Mace or a Spar and that requires volume and a higher level of environmental health. We’re currently going through the training and developing our business qualifications to meet their criteria. That’s all in the offing.” 

And it’s a pretty hectic schedule for three people who work on the business on a ‘part-time’ basis. Trevor admits, that while rewarding, it can be a lot of hard work and strain. 

“We're just basically coming off a very busy period and people are tired. You're excited that your business is growing but then we are exhausted. We say to each other, ‘well, how are we going to stick this, or what are we going to do to make this easier? How long does this go on?’

“You also have to walk out of a work environment into a family environment. How do you draw a line between the two. When does the conversation about ice cream stop and become about the family. We were away last week for a holiday and it's important to make the time to get away.

“It's not simple as a startup just to leave everything behind. We are constantly thinking about what we going to do differently, all being well, next year, to avoid some of the pressures we've put ourselves under this year.

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“I would say there's tensions that have to be managed; they naturally come with the vision and aspiration to get a new business off the ground.

“For me, it's better to try that not to try at all. And let's acknowledge what entrepreneurs are taking on. One piece of advice I would offer if for aspiring entrepreneurs is to think hard about the implications for you as an individual, the finances, and the family, where there is a family.” 

It’s hard work, but when it pays off, it’s usually worth it.

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When it comes to family businesses, Jackson Roze – a new Tandragee based artisan drinks producer – is the epitome of that moniker. 

Andrew and Nicky Jackson head up the company, which was only founded in the latter half of 2022. It’s one of our youngest companies to feature on this newsletter but it has its own very unique story. 

While the husband and wife duo oversee the operation, their four daughters; Rebekah (15), Zara (12), Olivia (10) and Eliana (6) play a huge part too. Not only is the non-alcoholic traditional ginger wine produced and bottled in the home kitchen but its name derives from the girls’ initials – ROZE.

The business is centred around the one product. One product has allowed the Jacksons to focus, and with time, comes mastery – that’s the aim! The recipe, after all, is a century old.

It’s been less than a year since Jackson Roze became an official product though. The journey started around October/November 2022, as they were approaching the Christmas period. 

“To be perfectly honest, we have been making ginger wine as a family for as long as I remember,” Nicky explained. 

“My mum and dad – and then my grandparents before that – I remember them all producing the wine. The recipe was passed on to me from my mum and dad about seven or eight years ago.”

Ginger Wine is a traditional Christmas drink; the Jacksons would have produced it every Christmas and Nicky would have given it to friends and family. 

“One of my friends said to me, ‘do you realise there's nothing like your product out there; it's spectacular in its flavour’. They had tried ginger beer, ginger ale and all sorts of ginger drinks but there was nothing that was really set apart. They looked forward to me making it every year.” 

The idea was planted but the reality of producing this drink to be sold was still a long way off.

“That thought then transformed into ‘maybe we should do a couple of Christmas fairs and see how we get on’,” said Nicky. “We thought it might bring in the money for Christmas for our four children.”

The Christmas fairs were the perfect market research but they had to source bottles to begin with.

Luckily, Nicky has family who bottle apple juice “so we approached them and asked them if we could have 30 bottles”. 

“We started with 30 bottles. We didn’t have a lot of confidence and were stepping well and truly out of our comfort zone but that 30 turned to well over a thousand in that six week period. It kind of just exploded in the lead up to Christmas.”

The first Christmas fair they managed to shift 19 of those initial 30 bottles. 

“We thought we were the bees knees,” laughed Nicky. “The Council then asked us to do a couple of their light shows and Banbridge cleaned us out of everything we had that night. 120 bottles gone!"

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“At that stage we realised that what we're actually offering something unique that nobody else was doing. At that point we knew we needed to think about turning this into an actual business, rather than just a fly by night thing.”

Those six weeks of trading got them through Christmas and just like any normal family, they had bills to pay – the business was a real game-changer for the family in the sense they could incorporate it into their everyday lives.

Nicky currently homeschools three of her youngest daughters, and building a business incorporates so much learning. 

“We decided as a family if we’re going to do this, we’re going to do it together,” said Nicky. “The girls are learning how to run a business, how to start something from scratch from the home environment. 

“Zara sees this as a business that she's going to take on herself some time,” added Nicky. “Now she wants to be the sales rep, a marketing consultant, everything. She’s being exposed to all of that because we are all learning together as we grow.”

Nicky has a background in finance, Andrew works in electrical home sales but the business of food and drink is all new to them.

“We speak to the children about all sorts, like environmental health; they’re very involved in every aspect of the business. Socially, they’re out with us; the other traders know them and they’re out talking to people, telling people about the business.”

The challenge for the business is making their non-alcoholic ginger wine more than just a Christmas tradition. Nicky wanted to develop it to be sold throughout the year.

Most ginger drinks are made with ginger essence – flavouring – but in January, just after the Christmas rush, Nicky spent the entire month perfecting her own ginger essence using natural ginger roots – a throwback to a bygone era of producing tonic wine using pure ingredients, which in turn has its own health benefits. 

“The taste remains the exact same and I’ve had people at the table literally in tears, saying it reminds them of their mum or their dad, someone that used to make it at Christmas time. The nostalgia side of it is there, which is lovely and I love that. People have told me to go down a different path and forget about that but I don't want to forget about that, it’s too important to people.”

A traditional family recipe – and with it family secret – but when it comes to selling a product publicly, it’s no secret anymore.

“I used to ask dad all the time how to make it and he would have talked about the secret ingredient and everything else – I never knew what the secret ingredient was until about seven or eight years ago. 

“Unfortunately, I don’t get away with that anymore. I was able to, before Christmas, play the secret ingredient card, but as soon as we registered in January, you have to put that on the bottle.”

To get started, Nicky and Andrew contacted the Go For It programme, and reached out to the Council’s Economic Development team who got them involved in the Food Heartland programme. 

Nicky is currently doing a food innovation programme through the Southern Regional College. Through these different programmes, conversations started to happen and the business started to blossom. 

Now, the Jacksons are producing anywhere between 1,500 and 2,000 bottles a month from their home kitchen. The production, bottling, labelling is still all done by hand and all the profit the family is making is going back into the business in some shape or form. 

Non-alcoholic ginger wine has the difficulty of not only trying to shake its Christmas tag but it’s a rather niche product that, as Nicky admits, “people will walk past it very easily”.

“People need to taste it to believe it,” she said. “We have to stop people in their tracks. As soon as people try it you get this surprised look in their face.”

While still in its infancy, the business is bubbling and Nicky knows the small domestic kitchen is not going to withstand the demand for much longer.  

“The next step would be to get more equipment; we would love to be able to streamline a little bit more and increase the litre volume per month. 

“The big vision is that we are looking a shed with a custom built factory which will also have space for community.” 

For now, it’s one bottle at a time – quite literally in this case! The product is getting recognition from buyers but also those handing our some pretty glitzy gongs. 

Not only did Nicky win £3,000 from a Women in Business pitching competition but Jackson Roze is up for Family Business of the Year at the prestigious Great British Entrepreneurial Awards later this year.

“It feels overwhelming at times, I’m not going to lie,” admitted Nicky. “It’s a whirlwind but we’re trying to roll with it and walk through the doors that open to us.”

A lot has happened in less than 12 months and that presents its own challenges; for Nicky, fitting everything in has been tough. 

“The amount of hats I’m having to wear. I’m going from creator to producer, to marketing, sales, to social media guru, homeschooling, to mum, to wife and in the midst of all of that my own mum had moved in with us for a period after my father passed away last year. 

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“Going from paperwork to production, it’s hard work, but we knew it would be. We are currently challenging ourselves, putting ourselves in situations we're uncomfortable with, all the while knowing we've got a great product.”

Jackson Roze now stocks in 25 outlets – two months after the first stockist came on board – with more in the pipeline. Fortunately, after a few samples placed with buyers at the beginning, the stockists are seeking the Jacksons out. 

And they are extremely grateful for all the help they have received. It’s a business that has really helped a small family come together and create something special. 

“There’s not a bottle sold we’re not grateful for.”

Jackson Roze - handcrafted with love and care. And it tells!

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Nestled on the shoreline of Lough Neagh, at the picturesque Kinnego Marina, Evolution Motor Works is a unique business owned by husband and wife duo Manus and Emma Lappin. The company specialises in custom bespoke motorcycles for customers home and abroad. 

For 49-year-old Manus, it feels like he has come full circle in life. He’s the man responsible for some outlandish ideas but admits he’s “extremely fortunate to have a wise and sane woman” by his side. Emma has been by his side in business since 2003 – even longer personally. 

Evolution Motor Works began in 2014. The couple, who have two daughters – Rose and Clara – had just sold a popular and hugely profitable Irish rugby magazine (more on that in a bit) when they opened up the store. Life, with two children, changed for them. Hospital visits became the norm in the early days after Clara – their youngest was born with Down’s Syndrome in 2012. The sale of their magazine came at the right time in their lives; they had been approached about a buyout six months earlier. It was, to a degree, all about timing. 

For Manus, he took the long route around to opening up a motorcycle shop. It wasn’t conventional by any stretch. 

“Whenever I was very young, I was into motorbikes and it's quite bizarre because neither my mum, or my dad, were into them, they didn't even like them,” Manus recalled. 

“When I was really young, dad wouldn't allow me to have one, so I built one. Whenever I did eventually pluck up the courage to bring one home – instead of keeping them at a friend's house – he had to resign himself to the fact that you can only fight it for so long, that it was inevitable I was always going to be involved with motorbikes. 

“But the one thing my dad always said to me was ‘get yourself an education, because it's a lot easier carried than a toolbox’. And, you know what, he was right.”

Manus headed in a different direction than one maybe he thought he was destined for. He went off to university and studied computers, graduating to become a programmer. He spent about 10 years in the IT industry, all the while building motorbikes in his spare time.

“I remember sitting in board meetings and covering my black fingernails. People would just turn and say, ‘well Manus, what were you working on this weekend?’ It was always one of those inevitable things that was consistent right through through my life.”

Manus enjoyed working in IT; it forged an understanding of business in him that he would use to his advantage. 

“I was in IT at a time when it was a tremendously collaborative environment – it probably still is. There were lots of people bouncing ideas off each other and people genuinely were interdependent. You relied on your work colleagues to stimulate your thoughts and vice-versa, it was really a very creative environment and a great space to work in and I was very fortunate to work with a lot of really good people, really smart, intelligent, intuitive business people. 

“From a relatively early stage in my career, I got to work alongside lots of different companies and from that I got some great exposure.” 

In the latter half of his IT career Manus worked as a consultant, collaborating with all sorts of companies to redesign their processes and making their businesses more efficient by using appropriate IT solutions. 

“I got to go work alongside farmers, Formula One teams, central government, banking and insurance companies, so I had a huge exposure to all those different sorts of processes and how those different businesses worked.

“That was wonderful but I always had this hankering to do something for myself.”

It wasn’t motorbikes at this stage…that was still to come. 

Emma, who had a background in publishing, had just started a high-level marketing role with BT. Manus, who has a passion for rugby (he played with Portadown RFC for 15 years), had been travelling a lot with work. The year was 2003. 

Manus explained: “I was doing a lot of travelling in airports and I couldn't find a really good Irish rugby magazine. I remember coming home from an overseas trip and saying to Emma, ‘what about doing a rugby magazine?’ She thought I was mad.

“I started planning it all out. I did the figures, projections, the costings and everything else, and brought it all down and put in front of Emma.” 

Emma didn’t say no – Manus had his buy in! 

Shortly after, Emma left her job and the pair started a publishing company called Extreme Publications – apt, given the nature of their decision. For the next 12 years, the couple – with the help of a team – produced a monthly Irish rugby magazine and website called Emerald Rugby. An infamous row with Ireland Rugby coach, Joe Schmidt, couldn’t even put a damper on it. Manus was on the right end of that argument and Joe admitted it in the end. Those 12 years would fill a book.

The couple sold the company for an undisclosed sum in 2014 before going on to open Evolution Motor Works.

“When we sold the business I had some more free time,” Manus explained. “People started coming asking me to build them a custom motorbike, which was great, but then it became a little bit all consuming.”

So what did Manus do? True to form…

“I remember going down and saying to Emma, ‘what about opening up a motorbike shop to build custom bikes?’ She kind of rolled her eyes and said, ‘not again!’

“I did my costings and really tricked my brain into thinking that these were accurate – they weren't accurate at all.”

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The pair looked around for premises and found the perfect location down at Kinnego Marina. The unit had been empty for the best part of two years. The couple put their money down and in 2014 Manus opened up his dream business.

It has been the change of pace that has really helped Manus and Emma.

Emma has been so supportive and her role in each of the businesses they have ran together since 2003 cannot be understated. Manus doesn’t understate it either; he speaks effusively of his wife – they are the dream team. 

“I think it's important because most entrepreneurs think of it as being a lonely path, and for some it is, but for me, it certainly wouldn't have been possible to do the things that I have done without somebody there with you.

“People think motorbikes and think the man, and it's a traditional view, but Emma is 50% of the business, if not 60-70% and has been with all the businesses.

“I know people think I am the one cutting and welding and putting bikes together but without Emma there to promote the business, and to do the marketing side of things, to pick the correct stock for the shop and all those things, there wouldn't be a business and that's the cold truth of it.”

It’s what Manus describes as a stage of interdependence – “where you rely heavily on the people around you, whether that be friends, family, a spouse, your work colleagues…”

Manus relies on Emma’s acumen and has also garnered skills and knowledge from others over the years because he was open to learning from those around him. 

“This is what the IT industry taught me, that nobody will know everything, but there's lots of people who know plenty and if you're open and receptive to that knowledge and that information, you'll make yourself a better person, and you'll make better decisions. 

“I suppose that's really what business is about, is making consistently good decisions. Now, you don't always make good decisions; you have to make bad ones to appreciate the good ones. Everybody who runs a business will tell you they have made their fair share of bad decisions, but hopefully, in the round, it's a majority of good decisions you make.”

A good decision which, at times looked like a bad one for Manus, was his choice to get rid of the repair work they carried out at the store. For a number of years people could bring their motorcycles in to be fixed but it tended to be more hassle than they needed. 

“A number of years ago, we put focus back on building custom bikes, which is what we set out to be from the outset, and that's really what we're focused on over the last, maybe five or six years. It has been good but don't get me wrong, when you're turning down maybe £8,000-9,000 of repair work a week and you're saying, ‘no sorry, we don't do repair work anymore’, you're thinking 'have we made the right decision?'

“But what you find is, when you clear that space, you get the proper work in that you want to do. When you're busy doing all that other stuff that you don't really want to do then there is no capacity to take anything else in and other opportunities pass you by.”

That said, Manus has made his mistakes, but he’s followed one piece of advice published by a professor at the Harvard Business School.

“Focus on the revenue rather than the costs,” Manus recited. “So, if you concentrate on bringing in money and generating money, the costs will look after themselves, and that may sound a wee bit naive. Yes, you need to have a benchmark of what you need to bring in to cover your costs but at the same time, if you just focus on building the business and building the revenue for the business, it will help with the costs. If you focus on the costs, you'll only be dealing with the costs and that'll not get you anywhere.”

It’s advice Manus swears by, and while it helps moving the business forward, the father-of-two is at a point where huge expansion and exponential growth is not at the forefront of his thinking – but never say never.

“Emma and I did the rat race,” he said. “We both worked in the big cities and we both did a lot of travel but we made a conscious decision that whenever we had kids, we would want to be there to drop them off at school and to pick them up and to be able to do things with them. 

“And again, I’m well aware that not everybody has that luxury but there has been a lot of sacrifices along the way to do that.

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“For us, money isn't the be all and end all. It might sound funny for some because it's normally the driver for people to start their own business, but it was never really a thing for me. It's surprising how little you can survive on when you have to. You want to have time to share with other people as well. You want to do something you enjoy and that was more of the point for me.”

Manus has found his groove, found his niche, but is still always one to challenge himself – by his very nature he’s someone who needs to be brought outside his comfort zone.

“I feel that I act best when I'm under a little bit of pressure – I'm fortunate enough to have a wise and sane woman by my side who can keep me in check all the time.

But that’s easier said than done. 

“There are always opportunities out there. There's always things that can blindside you on a Friday afternoon, to think, ‘my goodness, I never thought of that’.”

That’s exactly what happened about a month ago. An opportunity to stock a range of low capacity motorcycles from English manufacturer ‘Herald’ – which Manus can customise off the shelf – and become the official distributor across the island of Ireland. 

“It's an opportunity for us to expand into a side of the business that we hadn't really explored. Obviously our unique position, being in Northern Ireland and able to trade with Ireland and the UK, there's probably an opportunity there, which a lot of businesses are either taking, or will be taking very soon. We would be foolish not to be looking at it.”

And when opportunity knocks, you cannot ignore it. What’s next for Manus – dare we even ask! 

He may no longer be that young teenager but he’s certainly living that dream. It really has been an evolution

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Ryan McCracken is living his dream, having turned his hobby into a full-time business that now employs four people. 

This is the story of how one home brew kit spawned an entire brewery on the outskirts of Portadown in Co Armagh. 

It was about 10 years ago when Ryan took a tour of Hilden Brewery in Lisburn. For him, that tour “was the hook”. He was already interested in craft brewing but the idea for McCracken’s Brewery – as we know it today – began as a dream from that day onwards.

Ryan first stumbled upon craft beer when he became tired of the “usual flavourless beer”. For him, craft beer was exciting and something he wanted to delve into.

“I was literally trying all sorts of different beers and then, one Christmas time, my wife, Nicola, asked me ‘what would you like for Christmas?’ And I said, ‘get me a home brew kit’. It was literally a bucket, a packet of extract and that was it. You put water in and a few weeks later you’ve essentially got beer. The first time wasn't that nice; it didn't turn out well at all, but I sort of caught the bug for it then.”

Ryan really embraced the idea of trialling new flavours, comparing ingredients and being able to put them together to produce something really nice and on par with the beers which were professionally brewed. Although small scale, Ryan believed he was onto something. 

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“I just had a dream then to start my own craft brewery,” he said. “And it was around that time – 2018 – we were looking for a new house and this house (where he lives now with his wife and two children) came up with some bit of land around it, as well as a few outbuildings, so I was able to convert some of those into a brewery essentially.”

Ryan started off small, brewing approximately 300-350 litres each month. That soon became 1,200 litres a month – even that wasn’t enough as demand for the award-winning drinks grew. 

“We got to the point relatively quickly where we needed to up production. We were looking at upgrading the brewery but then 2020 hit and we lost 85% of business overnight. It was a tricky time but we recovered after three months and started maxing out again.”

That was all thanks, Ryan says, to an uplift in sales to local off-licenses as well as online sales – helped immeasurably by an Amazon listing. 

Related: Ryan turns passion for craft beer into growing success as brewery continues to expand

Brexit brought its own challenges too, but McCracken’s Brewery seized upon an opportunity with one Italian distributor which had lost its English supply. Ryan was able to leverage the single-market and supply them with McCracken’s beers. It was a positive that came at the perfect time – “the upgrade was back on”.

McCracken’s were producing 6,000 litres a month but space-wise, things got pretty cramped. 

He needed to further extend and only recently – in the last few months – the brewery has undergone an extension and now has the capacity to produce 15,000 litres a month. It’s now a little more future proofed against further surges in demand. 

But bringing it all back to starting a company – Ryan was an enthusiast with no business background. His skills lay in technology and that gave him a little head start when it came to getting his head around the equipment, but he admits “it was daunting”. 

“I was pretty confident I'd be able to sell the beer but obviously until you get up and running you don't know for sure. I suppose on a smaller scale, it was actually more difficult because you need to have that capacity there to actually start making any sort of profit.”

He began with a system that mimicked a professional setup as closely as possible. Technology aside, the testing of flavours is the very epitome of trial and error too and it takes time… and a lot of patience. 

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“It was all a bit of a learning curve to be honest, not only from the production side of things but to everything that comes with running a business. You will be doing everything at the start. I made the beer, sold the beer, a general dogsbody. There was the marketing, the finance and bookkeeping, you name it.

“It's a massive undertaking and I’m still learning and will continue to do so but I found quite early on that everything is daunting but you just have to take a step back. 

“I suppose that’s what I did quite early on, was take a step back, break things into smaller chunks and go through one thing at a time, one process at time; and if that means researching how to do something, or figuring something out, or going on a course, do it. Take your time.”

Ryan, like many in his shoes, reached out to the Go For It programme which taught him how to deal with a curveball. 

“You can never plan for every eventuality but it’s about being able to take that scenario and dealing with it as effectively as possible.”

The programme covered all the soft skills, from marketing, social media, compiling a business plan for banks should any finance be required. 

“It was good to use the programme as a sounding board to make sure I was on the right track because I had never started a business before.”

Ryan went on to complete a drinks producers course through Invest NI which opened doors to experts and other startups which have taken off over the last few years.

“It was good to hear things from different perspectives and, again, we've developed connections and built up that network with other local drinks producers. Everybody starting out makes some mistakes and it’s good to hear what not to do and it’s good for us to advise others too. 

“Even though other breweries are our competitors it is still a close-knit community in Northern Ireland if we need help. You just pick up the phone and ask; people ask us all the time and where you can help, you help.”

McCracken’s Brewery has been mostly all self-funded – as the business has grown, so have the facilities but those go hand in hand. DAERA supplied a small bit of funding for a number of fermenters but what comes out of the business tends to go back in. It’s a patience game for Ryan who is well aware of the pitfalls of massive growth. Thankfully, over time, the processes have become easier.

“We've got people in to help us brew and package; we've got distributors that take the stuff on and sell. We're not doing so much running around which has freed up time to focus on the actual running of the business and building the business up in that regard.”

Ambitions of growing further are never too far in the back of Ryan’s mind. While canning has been outsourced, that’s something Ryan envisages may be brought back in-house now the extension has been completed. 

“I don’t necessarily look at what's happening right now but rather what's happening, or will be happening, in the next six to 12 months. I need to start planning for that now. I need to have the resource in to meet the demand. 

“In that sense I’m always looking for more space. In order to keep moving forward you need to take a risk, and that is increasing production when you don’t necessarily have the actual outlets at this moment in time, but you need to have in place to actually get more business. 

“We're working with a couple of people at the minute, whereby, if we got those deals, we're going have to increase things quite considerably, so we're always keeping an eye ahead to see what we may need in the future.”

From just Ryan at the beginning to a proper operational, manned brewery, McCracken’s Brewery has come a long way from that home brew kit bought one Christmas. Now an award-winning brewery on an upward trajectory.

For Ryan “it has been a bit of a rollercoaster” but rollercoasters tend to be fun, don’t they?!

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After moving to Northern Ireland to complete his PhD, Kerem Osman Çubuk later became involved with Armagh Observatory and Planetarium and has now taken up the post of Education Officer.

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“It depends what day of the week you ask me; there are days of the week I'd say this is the best idea ever and there are days of the week, I'll say, ‘what am I doing?’”

It’s perhaps a common response for any person who decides to throw themselves into building their own business, and it’s no different for Co Down entrepreneur Brendan Digney, who launched Machine Eye in 2018. 

The 27-year-old, who hails from Saval – a rural area of Newry where decent internet tends to be a luxury – is a Queen’s University electrical engineering graduate.

That’s the simplified introduction to a young man who is passionate about what he does and how it could help save lives across the world. He’s captivating when he speaks about the potential of young people and businesses on our own doorstep; absorbed in the idea of making Northern Ireland a better place for start-ups like his. 

Before we jump into that, we have to ask the obvious question: What is Machine Eye?

Brendan, who has probably answered the question on more than one occasion when pitching for investment, explains it as the provision of tools to support the creation of safer environments in the primary industries. In layman’s terms – “Tesla for Tractors”. 

It’s a form of artificial intelligence that uses computer vision to make manned heavy plant machines safer to operate and work around.

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“Taking the example of a loading shovel,” Brendan explains. “It has very large blind spots, it moves quite fast and it's operated by somebody who will be on it for an extended period of time. They're often performing fairly repetitive tasks in terms of loading material, often within confined areas, so there's a significant risk posed by that loading shovel to pedestrians. One risk comes from visibility. One risk comes from psychology… computers don’t fatigue.”

Machine Eye’s technology assists the driver and alerts them to potential risks. It’s a similar safety technology used by Tesla – it’s a camera-led driver assistance technology aimed at ultimately saving lives. Similar to lane assist on most new cars.

Brendan admits his company are “only scratching the surface” as the world of technology moves at a speed never witnessed before. In terms of research into the field, “you could throw money at it” and for Brendan, running a business, “that's always the biggest challenge, trying to restrict spend and work within our budget for you could just go down a very deep hole”.

He adds: “The technology is exciting and it's the future. Give it 10 years, this sort of stuff won't be an optional extra, this sort of stuff will be standard on every digger, on every tractor, on every forklift in every country in the world because that is the direction of travel, it creates a safer workplace and makes more efficient machines.”

Brendan has always had an interest in machinery – like many children growing up in the countryside. His interest turned more to curiosity, which soon turned into him being able to strip things apart and build them up again, admittedly, with varying degrees of success over the years.

Brendan launched the company in 2018 while he was still at university. He had two years left and this business, which now employs seven people, was “just something in the background”. He graduated in late 2019 and went full time in January 2020, when it was vital to get in front of people with his idea… 

“So Covid then arrived three months later and that really helped with that,” Brendan quipped.

“I was very lucky in that being a graduate I didn't have the same sort of overheads and responsibilities you would have had as a larger business. So it was possible to put my head down and work away and just come out the other side.”

For Brendan, there was no masterplan; there was no route to success already mapped out. 

“There's a lot to be said for going with a flow, taking an opportunity as it comes,” he said. “Some of the best experiences I've had, or some of the best opportunities I've had, haven't been planned, they've come from a conversation, or a phone call, asking ‘what are you doing tomorrow?’ So I think you have to be somewhat fluid in your outlook, and just go with things as they present themselves to you.”

Machine Eye was always more about solving a problem than making money and that ethos remains five years on, even if the reality of commercial success underpins the future of the company. 

Said Brendan: “There was never a case of, 'oh, somebody isn't doing this, there's a huge business opportunity there', it was always motivated by 'somebody isn't doing this, this technology is coming along and it can have an impact’. The driving factor for us is impact. 

“If you have technology here which can do good for people, you have an obligation to run with it, you have an obligation to get that technology into people's hands. 

“Of course, we're not a charity, we're a business and we have to make money. We have to have that commercial drive, but in terms of a motivating factor, it’s knowing what we do can help other people.”

While the business – any business – is underpinned by its commercial success, Machine Eye could not simply start without a cash injection. A bootstrapping graduate was not going to cut it. That injection came in through Invest NI’s Ignite programme, which has now been axed, much to Brendan’s bemusement.

“You could directly map to Northern Ireland's GDP, what was coming out of Ignite. Even though they only picked up a small number of businesses, the inward investment that came to Ignite businesses, because of the training and because of the innovation, and because of the businesses that they were, was phenomenal.”

The programme, with a guaranteed stipend, enabled Brendan to jump start his business.

“It wasn't a big stipend but it was enough that you could focus for six months on a business (it was a six-month programme). You got given your co-working office space paid for; you got given tailored mentoring, access to people with experience, access to people who had come back from London, from Dublin etcetera.

“You had four or five meetings a week set up with investors from overseas, people who got it, people who wanted to invest in new business… you had that hand holding, teaching you how to run a business and how to get off the ground. I was coming out of university as an engineer, I wasn't coming out as a business person, so I needed that education and that was great.”

Getting in front of the right people with a lot of influence, and who understand technology, has been a big part of Machine Eye’s success to date – it’s a huge piece of the puzzle to solve in business, but for Brendan, there’s not enough angel investors in Northern Ireland – it’s something he’s passionate about shining more of a spotlight upon.

“We need far more people angel investing; we have people who have been very successful business people in Northern Ireland. We have people who are here, who are local, who are indigenous, who need to be investing in the next generation of companies; they need to be getting that knowledge, getting that awareness, stepping forward because until you get your angel investors, you won't get any of the higher tiers of investment.

“You need an angel coming in first, at an early stage putting that initial cash boost into a company to get it into the institutional levels, the VC levels, upwards. That will then create more of an ecosystem here – we currently don't have enough of that.”

For Brendan, it’s vital that it’s an ecosystem that works right across Northern Ireland, beyond Belfast’s Westlink and west of the Bann.

Brendan’s hometown is Newry, and while he knows what he is working on is not a product for Newry, that shouldn’t stop him operating out of the city – but he can’t! Machine Eye is headquartered in the Catalyst Innovation Centre in Belfast. In his opinion, Newry simply isn’t set up to allow start-ups to properly compete.

But Newry isn’t short of its success stories – Brendan just wants to see more of them. He cites the example of STATSports, based at Drumalane Mill.

“There's a company built in Newry that has literally created the world of sports analytics effectively,” he said. “They defined a product, a category, a market, and they're doing it better than anybody else.

“The late Brian Conlon of First Derivatives once said ‘California had Silicon Valley, and Newry has Silicon Canal’. We have the talent but why do we not have more businesses?

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Brendan believes the talent, when they decide to move on from major companies like STATSports and First Derivatives, should be coming out and creating the next round of start-ups in Newry, that “those big organisations become incubators for talent”.

“Why can we not create that here? Why can we not say to people, there is an ecosystem, there are supports, you can take a risk, you can come out, you can start something and bring all that talent out and get the whole thing cycling, circling and with time that will build the right ecosystem to help new business thrive.

“I'm a huge proponent for doing things here. I'm a huge proponent of getting out of Belfast, and west of the Bann, to Newry, to Armagh, Enniskillen and Omagh but yet I'm sitting here in Belfast because we don't have an ecosystem outside of the city to support new tech startups.”

Brendan has an ambassadorial role with of the Institute of Directors (IoD) in Northern Ireland and part of his cornerstone objective is to spark this sort of conversation, raise awareness of the need for new business support in these areas.

Co-working space is vital to harnessing that eco-system. “It's not just about here's a room go sit in it, it's the people and the culture and the environment that goes around it.”

Machine Eye is not a big organisation but it has big ambitions, therefore, it has to compete against larger businesses for talent.

Being at Catalyst in Belfast, where there are other businesses, on-site facilities, community and social events within the hub, it creates a wraparound package that, as Brendan explains, “somebody can come and work for a startup, but still have the same experience, culture, and parts that go with being in a big business”.

“And that helps make us competitive in the labour market, which we could not do if we were in a room in Newry; if we could even afford a room in Newry. Whereas what I would like to see is this sort of ecosystem, this sort of experience in Newry, in Armagh, Enniskillen and Omagh, in places that are bustling with entrepreneurs, bustling with ideas, where there isn't that support system in place.”

While he’s fighting the good fight for the smaller hubs of Northern Ireland, Brendan has his own job at hand. Being an engineer is one thing, a business owner, another thing altogether. He describes himself as “the solver of the problems and finder of money”.

“I'm an engineer who's had to become a marketer, who's had to become an accountant, who's had to have a crash course in tech investment. You know, people don't give you parts for free. Staff don't work for free, the money has to come from somewhere and we're in the world of startup. So we're in the world of startup investment; that's a completely different world than any other one I've been in before and that's one that has to be navigated.”

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Brendan has been fortunate enough to be among one of the first ever graduates from Northern Ireland to be given a fellowship at the Royal Academy of Engineering in London. That was a game-changer in terms of the doors it opened and the investment it presented. Not only that but the training the Academy provided.

He said: “Their training was specific to, ‘Okay, we know you're an engineer, we know you can do XYZ and we also know you probably don't know your way around a PnL (profit and loss) statement, let’s fix that.”

And it certainly has fixed it for Brendan but there’s still a long way to go yet; he’s still a man who wears many hats.

“The phrase ‘that's not my job’ shouldn't be in your vocabulary. If something needs done, you go and do it. If it moves the business forward and brings money in the door, whatever the case may be – within reason – go on do it.”

A man of many hats inside his own company and a man of many talents outside it too. How does Brendan Digney spend his downtime? Well, it’s more like uptime! He flies his own microlight aircraft.

“I fly as often as I can although the weather in Northern Ireland kind of dictates how often. It's something I've always had an interest in, it's something I've always enjoyed. 

“If you go flying, your mind is entirely focused on the task at hand, you're not thinking about a meeting earlier, you're not thinking about what you're doing tomorrow, you're solely focused on the flight, so it's a very, very good destresser.”

Maintaining aircraft is vital and something Brendan is meticulous about. Of course, he has stripped, redesigned and rebuilt his own microlight.

Oh and when he’s not flying he can be found behind a camera snapping events – he’s a photographer for hire too!

“If I'm getting paid for something that I can do well elsewhere – and it takes the pressure off this business – then brilliant.”

His paid work outside Machine Eye meant Brendan didn’t have to draw a salary from his company – he didn’t have to rely on the business from Day One.

“I could have that wee bit of breathing space that, when there was a salary in it, it didn't have to go to me, it could go towards getting a second engineer to do more work, in order to move the whole thing forward.”

Photography and Machine Eye are inextricably linked. It’s the science of cameras which Brendan ultimately specialises in – it all stems from photography.

“And at the end of the day we have all the equipment to run our own marketing team. We are very, very efficient in how we run the business.”

Efficiencies are something Brendan is still trying to improve though and that includes creating “periods where I'm turning the phone off and I'm turning the emails off to get a chance to actually work – as opposed to talking about work”.

His days were becoming more fragmented with, perhaps, less important work and distractions so he decided to ring-fence his days which has allowed him to claw back time and complete tasks much quicker.

And as the leader, Brendan is always looking at ways to make things better while fostering the right sort of culture – a culture very much focussed on people with all sorts of different qualities.

“We have people here who have joined out of university and we've effectively nurtured and grown them into the type of people we believe they can be, but also the type of people that we need.

“Then we have people who are very experienced and who are coming in from other companies with different approaches, different cultures, different experiences, and we want to, as a new business, be taking best practice from from their experience. Everybody is encouraged to challenge assumptions, approaches, decisions, and to speak up.

“It's not for me to put words in their mouths or answers in their mouths. They're not here, just to perform a task, they're here because they've got very good experience, very valued knowledge – they're very good people.

“We have a company that's built around helping others doing good for people, creating positive outcomes for people, so it wouldn't make sense for us to do anything but embody that in our staff, and in our team. It’s people centric culture.”

You can find Brendan on LinkedIn here. If you’re an entrepreneur and want to get involved you can reach me on LinkedIn here.

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For over 20 years, Joanna Neeson plied her trade as a chef. Originally from Dublin, the mother of five boys has been living in Cookstown, Co Tyrone, for longer than she ever did in Ireland’s capital.

Joanna and cooking are synonymous, it’s something she did from the age of 10, but with a young family and a devastating health prognosis, her time as a working chef was sadly cut short.

“I remember going to the hospital and was told I had osteoarthritis in both knees,” she explained. “The doctor said I had to give up my job and I was gutted – I've been cooking since I was 10.”

Joanna was the eldest girl growing up and did a lot of the cooking at home.

“Whenever you came to our house I was in the kitchen baking, so it was very hard to give that up. I think when you're working in any professional kitchen it’s like your family.”

Joanna, who had worked at a local hotel for eight years after moving to Co Tyrone, lost that family, because of the stress it placed on her knees. She attempted to return on a part-time basis but the pain was just too much to handle.

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Caring for her five boys may have always been Joanna’s main priority – but there was always a sense of wanting to do more with the skills she had cultivated over the years as a chef. She knew she had so much more to give to the industry, which is why, when her youngest boy turned one, she returned to university in a classic case of it’s never too late to try new things.

It wasn’t a quick-fire three year course either, for Joanna studied in the little spare time she had, and completed her degree in food technology – part-time – over the next seven years.

Food technology deals with the methods and techniques involved in food production, processing and preservation, something which Joanna admits “really opened my eyes”. The course was the planting of the seed that would later become her business.

“When I was working as a chef I liked teaching people how to cook,” Joanna continued. “When the juniors came in I like taking people under my wing and showing them how to do things, so I kind of had that in me – I just love to see people flourish. I still wanted to continue to do something with food but not on the physical level I was operating at before.”

In 2016, Joanna got her legs straightened and plates inserted in preparation for the eventuality of having her knees replaced, but instead of allowing her arthritis to hold her back, Joanna used the time to study and work on putting together a business plan, even if becoming a business owner wasn’t necessarily her plan.

Following completion of her degree, Joanna underwent a post-grad in Business Communications. She then took part in the free Step Up to Sustainable Employment (SUSE) programme with the Northern Regional College in Magherafelt. She had it in her head that she would use her degree to get a job somewhere in the food industry. Where, she wasn’t sure.

“I only went to get my CV and I ended up staying for about three months,” she laughed. “I did loads of different courses while I was there. I did a cookery programme in my local area as part of one of the modules. I could see that people didn’t really know much about cooking – I kind of saw a gap in that market.

“People are just buying processed food and they don't know really how to cook so that's where my idea kind of came from. When I went to do the SUSE programme, to get a job, they also had an option for the Go For It programme – I then signed up to do that.”

The idea for her business – WYSE BITES – was formulated during her time on the SUSE programme. It soon became apparent that working for someone else was not going to cut it for Joanna – she was bubbling with ideas.

“On the course we were talking about getting jobs and applying for interviews, and I wasn't really interested in that end of it. I was more interested – I kept asking the girl to give me more information – on the Go For It programme. I was just more interested in working for myself.”

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The name and logo for WYSE (What You Should Eat) BITES was the brainchild of Joanna’s youngest sister – a graphic designer by trade. The rest of the business – all Joanna!

Before launching in 2019, Joanna also completed a free six-week Inspire to Innovate programme at the Dungannon Entreprise Centre. After that she started to organise her own workshops, hiring halls in the local area and helping out with various sports teams. Her marketing was, and continues to be, done through social media and word of mouth.

And word of mouth led to an opportunity to get into local schools, which arose through the National Lottery funded Soft Project, based in the Mid Ulster area. The project focused on the needs of children in schools, including food sensory, particularly for children with additional needs.

Joanna knew she was perfectly placed to deliver, and as a result, developed her own Food Sensory programmes around the needs of individual schools.

“I wrote a four week or six week programme dependent on the school. If there is a child in the class with a particular need, they would have taken me in to work with the whole class rather than just go with the one child, or two children, that had the issues.”

However, the pandemic ended the work within schools but Joanna was able to offer her sessions online and did a lot of one-to-one with parents and their children.

Joanna admits a return to schools still looks a long way off given the nature of wholesale budget cuts across the board, and while she understands the focus on children’s mental health, she is a firm believer that “eating right is important for wellbeing too”.

She adds: “This is a lot to do with mental health because it is affecting children's health and with that, their mental health; it's trying to convince people that food is important.”

Four years in and there have been plenty of obstacles thrown Joanna’s way. The biggest learning curve has been discovering that you have to pretty much spread yourself very thinly in a start-up business.

“For me, realising there's nobody coming to rescue you, that you're on your own and you're responsible for everything that goes on in your business, that's one of the big learning curves. When you're working for someone else, it's not so much your problem.”

It’s a pressure some entrepreneurs love – others loathe it. Joanna is somewhere in between.

“Sometimes it's hard when you're always worrying about where the next meal is coming from and how you're gonna pay your bills but I'm very, very optimistic. I know there's a need for what I do, I can see there's a need for it and that it will get better. The business will grow.”

Joanna says she would love someone – or a team – to come on board with her to help build the business because of that need.

While the hope is to employ others, Joanna, to date, has sought other support from the Mums at Work network – set up by mother-of-seven, Sinead Norton. That particular network has been invaluable for Joanna, who says she saw the group on Facebook one day and decided to reach out.

“I have to say, the amount of support I have got from this group is unbelievable. I wouldn't have got where I am today without the group, that's being honest. Anytime you need any help, you just put it into the group and somebody has an answer for you, or helps you, we're all in the same boat.

“I think there are a lot of women out there that are working in a job they don’t want to be in; there’s so much opportunity out there for them too.”

The main thing for Joanna is the love for what she is doing – the joy she gets every time – and she urges others to find that passion and to challenge themselves.

“For me, the best part is when something clicks with somebody, when they're cooking, they're like, ‘this is so easy, how come I never did this before’. And when I see a child that has never eaten pineapple, or tomatoes, and the parents are all clapping – that's the best part to be honest.”

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While Joanna works with a range of different groups, she also takes great pride in being able to help re-train those who have lost the ability to cook. At the end of last year she conducted workshops with the Brain Injury Foundation in Co Armagh, helping people, who have lost movement in certain limbs, to cook using innovative and creative techniques.

Her work with these groups of people hasn’t gone unnoticed either. Earlier this year WYSE BITES took the top prize for diversity and inclusion at the Federation of Small Business Awards NI, before going on to represent the region at the UK finals.

The achievement was all the more special given the fact Joanna is less than five years into her business and battling with her own health issues.

But battle she will continue to do. It may be a business but there’s an ethos – a cause – attached to what she does and there’s an evident need for it too. More than one in 20 school children in Northern Ireland have been diagnosed with autism – trebling in a decade – and one in four adults in Northern Ireland (27%) are now living with obesity.

“Really, what I'm trying to teach parents is that you don't have to go to the supermarket and buy a ready meal, you can make it yourself and it's more important to get your children involved in what you're doing in the kitchen. It’s not about judging people either but rather trying to let people know how easy it is – meal times are stressful so it’s important to put a little more fun into it.”

And while the business may have only come about in recent years, Joanna has spent a lifetime with siblings and her own kids – the youngest of whom is now 14 – trying to get mealtimes as stress-free as possible. It’s that experience as a parent which has proven to be the foundation blocks of her business.

One thing’s for sure, whatever business throws at Joanna in the future, she’ll remain as cool as a cucumber!

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Hello and welcome to Entrepreneur NI – a weekly newsletter brought to you every Sunday morning, showcasing how founders created some of the best businesses in Northern Ireland – big, small and everything in between. If you haven’t already subscribed, you can do so here..

Construction has been a way of life for Louise Crothers, having grown up with a dad who ran his own repair and hire business for the best part of 40 years. 

Louise has spent her entire professional career in the industry in some form and was an office manager in a construction firm in Belfast before she decided to approach her dad, Ronnie, with a proposition about his company, RL Services back in 2018. 

“My dad worked by himself for 40 years fixing forklifts and then he turned 65,” Louise explained. “My brother was kind of working in the business with him a few years ago but again, they were just working along. 

“I knew Daddy didn't really want to retire and he wanted the business to carry on, so I was working in a construction company, as an office manager, in Belfast and I said to my dad, ‘why don't I come in and I'll run the business’. He kind of thought, ‘oh, I couldn't afford you,’ were his exact words. And I thought, ‘no dad, it doesn’t work like that; I tell you what, give me three months, and if you don't see any difference, and if you can't afford me, then I'll leave, I'll sack myself’. 

“So, it was me and him at the start, my brother had left at this point. So it's just me and him tiddling about. And the first thing I did – my dad was 65 – was to employ a mechanic.”

“That was seven years ago. Now the company employs seven people. So seven years later, today, we have now seven employees. 

“Obviously, after the first month, my daddy could see a big change and then he just thought, ‘right, well you're going nowhere’. But we had to generate more income and we have done; it’s easily trebled in that time.”

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The company had to branch out and offer a few more services. They now hire out a range of plant machinery. While RL Services is on a smaller scale than some of the bigger players, Louise has her own ambitions – and it started by at least trying to act like a big player. 

“I asked my daddy one day, ‘what do we not do here that all these other companies do? How can we be like them?’ I'm certainly not saying we are like them, but we're working towards it.”

While her dad reluctantly suggested offering up training – he wasn’t a fan of doing it himself - Louise was certainly more on board with the idea. 

“I says, ‘well, why don't I start it and he looked at me and he goes, ‘you want to be a forklift instructor?’ If it's going to generate money, I'll do whatever it takes.”

Louise, who is a part-qualified accountant, went and retrained – for two full weeks – as a forklift instructor. She helped reconstruct the yard into a training centre, which took the best part of a year. 

“We started off with the forklift training, then built it up to like reach trucks, telehandlers, the scissor lift, the booms, so everything that we hire out, we can train you how to drive them.”

The business grew as a result and that saw the return of her brother, who took over the training and gave Louise a chance to return to the office to focus on pushing the business further. 

Growth has been steady since. They now fix and sell parts – there’s an employee on board for that too. 

Louise was clear from day one – “I absolutely saw the potential in this business”. 

She said: “I love setting myself a challenge and I could see there was a challenge here to be done. Daddy was 65 then and he's now 72. I know my daddy wouldn't have been fit enough for it and I knew I had challenges to try and organise staff but I've always set myself a challenge. 

“I would have a goal that once I hit a certain turnover, then I can employ somebody, and then we'll set out a strategic plan for what I want them to do then, when we hit the next turnover, I can employ somebody else, and that's how I have been basing it as we grow. There's no way, it wouldn't be sensible to employ seven people at one time, still on the turnover that you were at the start, it just didn't make sense.”

“Once we had a surplus of money, I would see that was an opportunity to buy another machine without hurting the business.”

The business has self invested in improving the yard space and increasing the number of buildings. There has been tangible growth and Louise is delighted, especially following in her dad’s footsteps. 

“All I wanted to do was make my dad proud,” she beamed. “That was another goal, I wanted my daddy to enjoy his retirement and for me now to provide for him. He's done that all his years, providing for me. I just see that now he's retired, this is an opportunity for me to provide for him, it just seems only fair."

“But to be honest, at the very start, whenever it was just me and him and maybe one or two employees, I didn't want him to retire as such. What I wanted to do was be like a sponge and listen to everything he said. Obviously, being a woman in the construction industry is interesting; it's amazing the amount of people look at you and like, what do you know about a forklifts?

“At the time daddy kind of thought how's this gonna work? Again, he probably thought what does she know? Not knowing that I'm a strong, determined person that, if I set my sights on something, I will not let it go until I prove you wrong, plus wanting to make them proud at the same time. I think I’ve done that.”

While Louise can take a step back and look at the successes, she understands it doesn’t come without hard work and sacrifices. She may have the freedom to do what she wants a little more but it’s still not a 9-5. 

“Before I came here, my objective in life was to provide for my family, my children, that was the reason why I got out of bed in the mornings. Whereas now, my kids, they're both adults, now they're 18 and 21.

“So now, what gets me out of bed in the morning, and what keeps me going is, now I have seven mouths to feed, seven people to provide for, that's always my get up and go.”

And with that, is the need to keep the business going in the right direction – it’s not all plain sailing. Recruitment, she admits, has been a tough nut to crack. 

“Getting staff in certain areas to build the business is frustrating, especially when you want to grow. We ended up bringing on an apprentice to train him up in the role because there was nobody out there for the position.”

Another important aspect of any business is cashflow and managing it. 

“People’s bad management of their business affects our business,” admitted Louise, who thankfully lives and dies, figuratively speaking, by her love of spreadsheets. Everything is accounted for.

“I'm a bit of a geek when it comes to spreadsheets; I have all my direct debits on a spreadsheet so I know how much money I need for that month; I know then what turnover I need to do.

“There are a lot of people out there who don't know and understand the whole finance, but you don't need to, it comes down to a bit of common sense at the end of the day.”

Louise is a also a member of Women in Business network which has proven to be a great stimulus in building the business – and, if nothing else, providing some much-needed respite from her male-dominated world. 

“I have a husband and two sons, so when I go home, it's male, male, male. When I come into the office, I'm the only woman here, everybody else is male so I’m just constantly in that male dominated environment. 

“Whenever I went to the Women in Business, it was just like a breath of fresh air. You kind of just think it's just you until you listen to everybody else's problems and you're thinking, they're the same as me, I'm not different to anybody else, I am normal.”

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Being part of that group has opened up many more doors for Louise and allowed her to complete several other programmes. It was on one of these programmes that she was introduced to a mentor, which has been a game-changer. 

“One thing I would definitely recommend is getting a mentor. Within the Women in Business programme, there was all different mentors that came in with different expertise, like finance, strategies, marketing, things like that. 

“So, I actually clicked with one person, and I got her in privately as well. It's great because they can come in, look at your business from the outside; they're outside looking in through the window, where we're inside looking out. 

“They can see what you're doing and what you're trying to do and they can throw out suggestions and strategies that maybe you haven't seen that you completely think, ‘oh, here I didn't think of that’. That was absolutely priceless for me.”

Louise is not one to buy into the working more to achieve more mentality – she did that when she didn’t work for herself. Early mornings trekking off to Belfast resulted in late evenings, trying to cram in dinner and homework before bedtime. 

Now, Louise works with a little more freedom. 

“When the boys need me, I am there and whenever I know that they're okay and they don't need anything, I can go into work, should it be 10 o'clock at night, I can go and do that.

“I was very fortunate that whenever my boys were younger, I had great grandparents that always looked after them and took them to school for me. I just dropped them off at 7am because I worked in Belfast, which was hard pill to swallow, and we weren't getting home until six o'clock at night. You're then sitting down trying to make dinner, do homework. That was difficult.”

But would she have been able to do what she does now back then? Probably not. 

“My dad always would say I wish I had you here 20 years ago but I think things happen for a reason. If I was here 20 years ago, it probably would still be the same because I think you need to be in other places to learn and then to come back. 

“I didn't know 20 years ago what I know today so I wouldn't have been able probably to push it along. You really need to be away working and sort of soaking up the ideas from other companies and what they're doing, and then bring it back and apply it to what you have.”

For everything else, there are podcasts. Louise listens to podcasts regularly for her own inspiration – “they’re a great motivator”. 

And her own words of wisdom on starting out in business: “It's not impossible, you just have to get the right idea, and as long as you're prepared to put the work in, definitely do it.”

Job Profile

By his own admission 46 year old Ronan McGuirk ‘fell into’ his role in Accountancy. He became familiar with ASEE over a 25 year period whilst working for the company’s accountancy firm and so, when offered the chance to join the team – he jumped at it.

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Hello and welcome to Entrepreneur NI – a weekly newsletter brought to you every Sunday morning, showcasing how founders created some of the best businesses in Northern Ireland – big, small and everything in between. This week we talk to Co Armagh man and up-and-coming entrepreneur, Jarlath Warner. If you haven’t already subscribed, you can do so here..

Sometimes it’s hard to get your head around some of the technology we see in front of us everyday. Concepts and ideas may seem alien to us but everyday there is an entrepreneur out there somewhere creating amazing products. 

One of those amazing entrepreneurs is 24-year-old Jarlath Warner from Madden, Co Armagh. He has always had an interest in technology, and he always knew he wanted to help people, so he combined the two and created his company, Axonnr. 

Computer science and, in particular, artificial intelligence (AI) may invoke a sense of dread (Terminator style dread) but the end product, in reality, has the potential to change the lives of so many people for the better.

In a nutshell, Axonnr uses AI technology to help develop real solutions for people living with mobility issues – in particular, amputees – generating ground-breaking ideas for the future of prosthetic developments.

Jarlath is a little different to the entrepreneurs we have interviewed to date, for his company is in its infancy but the potential is almost infinite. He was recently included in the Belfast Telegraph’s 30 under 30 of young entrepreneurs to look out for – and there’s a good reason for that. 

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Jarlath grew up attentive to the technological advancements around him – he was fascinated by them – and while it may be a little unfair to say serendipity played a part in Jarlath’s story, as he may have always found his way along this path, we’ll pinpoint a moment in his youth that certainly gave him a little nudge towards his destination. 

At 16, he sent his CV into Computer World, a small computer shop based in Armagh City, not thinking he would get the gig but like many employers, when they see the right CV, they know. And Computer World clearly knew. 

“I remember as soon as I sent in the CV to Computer World, the following week, I got the phone call to come in for an interview,” he said. “It was very fortunate because, even if I didn't get the job, I still would have had a love for computers, but getting that job was great, it's always good to be in the sort of environment you actually want to work in. 

“Computer World was my first part time job. In there I learnt how to fix computers; then once I was able to do that, I thought, ‘now let’s build one’. After that, it’s a complete rabbit hole you go down where you’re always looking to find a new component to try and make the computer a little bit faster. As more components get released you’re always trying to upgrade.”

A few years later and university beckoned, where Jarlath met so many other like-minded people. Helping his peers build their own computers became part of the norm; it, Jarlath admits, was a completely new rabbit hole of exploration in itself. 

Jarlath is currently studying a PhD in Computer Science at Queen’s University; naturally enough, he’s using a computer he built for himself. However, it was during his research into prosthetics as an undergraduate – during lockdown – that the idea for his company began to manifest itself. 

“Before I actually started university, I was always looking to do medicine,” he explained. “My main sort of ambition, when I was younger, was to try and specialise in technology from a medicinal point of view. But when I did all those shadowing events – where we went down to Belfast to shadow a doctor – I got to see what that kind of career would be like and I realised I didn't want to go that way. 

“In the end I sort of flipped it around and focused on computer science but with the intention of always trying to specialise in medicine somehow, which led me down this road to investigate and do research in this area.”

Jarlath’s aim is to use artificial intelligence to read an amputee’s signals from their stump and then translate these to movements on to their devices. That’s the aim of Axonnr, the company Jarlath has set up to help realise his ambitions and turn his theories into a reality. 

Said Jarlath: “We're trying to tackle this issue from a technology perspective as opposed to a prosthetic company perspective. We're trying to use artificial intelligence to create new innovative medical devices, to create a technology that can understand the signals produced by our muscles, and our bio signals, just from electrical activity within our bodies.”

For Jarlath, it’s equally important that his technology is as accessible to as many people as possible. 

“There are so many different problems that can be solved using technology and I really do believe the lives of people can be improved if this technology is applied in the right way.

“It shouldn’t just be the ultra rich who can access this technology but your everyday patient. I do believe it should be readily accessible and that's another big driving factor for the company and our ethos.”

It’s still early doors for Axonnr but Jarlath’s journey has already opened doors to amazing opportunities and fascinating start-ups who have helped contribute in various different ways to his goal. 

Setting up business has been “an eye opener to say the least” and Jarlath credits Queen’s Student Union Enterprise which has helped guide students like him with their ideas to get them up and going – almost like a parent letting go of a child riding without stabilisers. Jarlath has gotten rid of the training wheels. 

“I then progressed from the SU Enterprise department onto Invest NI, and then from the likes Invest NI to Innovate UK, so it’s these slow progressional steps, and it’s through those programmes where you start to fill the gaps with the business knowledge you need. Business was certainly not my forte but within the last year my business mindset has definitely grown.” 

Jarlath’s network of cohorts, both within Queen’s and beyond, has also grown.

“You get familiar with people and the issues they have encountered and likewise, them with some issues I've encountered. You also start to focus in on the startups within your sort of area. 

“But also to have non-startup, non-company networks, like my own friendship groups, who keep me in the loop with what's happening in the software industry. It’s really good to keep involved with all sorts of little networks.”

While learning the intricacies of business is an important aspect of growing, it’s down on the list of priorities for Jarlath whose research is front and centre of moving his company forward.

While it wasn’t an epiphany, the 24-year-old realised there was real merit in what he was researching and part of his research included looking into the technology currently available on the market and their capabilities. 

Jarlath was unequivocal: “They're just not as advanced as what they could be.” 

“With my own research I was like, ‘right there's something here’ because what I was capable of doing in my own room, on my own computer, in my opinion, it was out-performing the current devices. So it was at that point I knew there was definitely something here.

“And then one piece of research actually got published at an international conference for engineering, medicine and biology. Once I got published it reinforced my belief that there was merit to what I've done here and it was at that point I thought, ‘right, let's go for it’.”

The reaction from professionals who work with amputees and people suffering with Parkinson’s was “brilliant and it's definitely helped shape my mindset and where I want to take the technology”.

Jarlath admits that Axonnr will be a company where he will lead from the front. He wants to do things “the way I think they need to be done – I need to be in control myself”. 

“There are some brilliant companies, and even just in Northern Ireland, doing some brilliant work but just far from my own sort of a vision, I knew setting up my own company was probably the best way to make it happen.”

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It’s early days yet for the fledgling start-up but already it’s making waves having been shortlisted for the Digital DNA Start-up of the Year awards and now a finalist in the Invent 2023 Awards. 

Jarlath has lofty ambitions for the company. In terms of global scale, the world is his oyster, especially with the potential around AI and how quickly that is developing. 

He said: “Our technology, in its current form, is for prosthetic devices and, in particular, upper limb prosthetic devices but that's not all we're going to be doing. Down the line, we're hoping to expand into other forms of prosthetic devices like lower limb, as well as other sorts of mobility devices for people who have spinal cord injuries etc. 

“Because our technology evolves around this ability to be able to read the signals in your body, the applications are endless... there's one sort of application, which hasn't been done before, and if we can pull it off, it will be mind blowing. 

“Technology is constantly evolving; so what was probably thought of as impossible five years ago is now possible. So in five years time, something that's impossible now, is going to be possible. Just as long as we sort of adapt and evolve with it, I have high hopes for the company.”

The ideas behind some of the devices and applications currently being researched and trialled behind the scenes are out of this world. Jarlath and Axonnr, if his vision is to be realised, are on the precipice of a whole new world; one which will be better for so many people. 

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Just seven months into her new role with ASEE, Rostrevor’s Ceallach McSwiggan, has found a new lease of life in the company’s procurement department.

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Jacqueline Rooney is a business owner firmly on the passion end of the entrepreneurial spectrum. She is driven by an unfettered love of art and you can tell that in her work. She’s an entrepreneur without any formal business background and certainly someone who didn’t care for the numbers. She knew what she wanted to do and went for it, eventually. 

For years, Jacqueline toyed with the idea of opening up her own business. The foundations and courage to do so were laid nearly 20 years ago, just before she took up a full-time teaching gig – which she thoroughly enjoyed – in St Joseph’s High School in Crossmaglen. However, like some foundations, they lay waiting primed to be built upon; it took 12 years – and family heartache – to finally open that door of opportunity.

But before that, we have to go back to 2006 to discover what lit the touch paper. 

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“I took a year out to go to Australia by myself,” Jacqueline explained. “I was in a bad relationship. I had my house, my car, my permanent job, everything set in stone, but I knew I wasn't happy, so I decided I would take a year out by myself. That was the turning point for me, in terms of taking risks. 

“I had £250 with me. When I got to Australia I had to make money. It was a real eye-opener in the sense that you can make things happen if you really want to. And they did happen. I knew at that point that taking risks can really pay off.” 

That experience stuck with Jacqueline but life often gets in the way and it wasn’t until 2018 that Jacqueline took the biggest decision of her career. 

It wasn’t that she was miserable in her job; the fact she enjoyed it so much clouded that ambition to go it alone at times. 

It’s often said that you should just trust your instinct and not let anything get in your way. Two unexpected family deaths and welcoming two children into the world don’t tend to be the catalysts for such bravery – but they were for Jacqueline and her husband, Scott. Scott had lost both his parents to cancer all the while adjusting to life as a Father of two young sons in the space of 18 months. 

“We sat down one night and asked ourselves, ‘what are we doing?’ Life was too short and we both handed in our notice. That was the turning point for us. It took something really, really tough to kind of make us stop and really assess everything.

“Scott opened up a coffee business in the heart of Rostrevor and I went on to do my art full-time. We kept each other going.”

Covid came and went. People rushed to get coffee and some social interaction while others were keen to spruce up their homes and Zoom backdrops with art.

“Suddenly all these things started, it was nearly like the doors started to open. It might sound airy fairy but it was like signs from the universe that we were doing the right thing, finally.”

There were moments of doubt, as there are with most entrepreneurs. Money is often the biggest stumbling block. 

“I remember saying when I went on my first business course, ‘if I can make what I'm making as a teacher every month, that would be my aim’. I have surpassed that now, but it wasn't about money, it wasn't about any of those things, it was just about being happy. 

“My eldest son, he's just turned seven, he's autistic. All he wants to do is be an artist and I think what better sort of influence are we on our children when we are doing what we absolutely love. What sort of misery would we bestow on our children and what would they see growing up if we didn’t do that?”

Handing in her notice was difficult – starting and running a business was another step altogether. Where do you start? Well, for Jacqueline, she simply researched what sort of business help there was available because she knew her own limitations.

She contacted Newry, Mourne and Down District Council, who offer up a “fantastic” mentoring programme through Go For It. She had a meeting, put together a business plan, which made her really think about the rudimental elements of running a business like: What do you need a month to cover you? Your income, your bills, how to make in financially viable?

From there, there was the Grow Your Business programme and then the digital business programme, which helped Jacqueline really up her game on social media. If you follow Jacqueline at all, you’ll know she currently updates four platforms every single day, religiously. And it was all free help and guidance. 

Jacqueline is now also part of several networks, including the Newry Chamber of Commerce and Women in Business. The latter, she says, really helped bring her out of her shell and helped her become more confident in what she was doing. 

“I've been at networking events where you'll get a very patronising sort of bravado sometimes and I think it's because of my profession, maybe if it's a different job they'd take me more seriously but I remember being at an awards and this man beside me asked me what I did and I said, ‘I'm an artist’, and he replied, ‘good luck with your wee paintings’. I would be like to myself, I'm gonna go to the next awards, and when I win it was two fingers up to your man who was putting me down.

“I got that a lot at the start and I wasn’t very confident. I found Women in Business was a more comfortable fit for me. It wasn’t about what I earned; there are some fabulous networks out there, you just need to find the right ones for you.”

Through networking, Jacqueline now has friends in all areas of business, which comes in handy from time to time. 

“As your business grows, you will find there's more opportunities that are open to you. I think if you're not networking, you're not going to hear about all these things that you can avail of, very often for free. It is also important that it gets you out of your comfort zone. We've got to go into a room of strangers and start talking to them.”

The Federation of Small Businesses (FSB) has been another great support, in particular with HR advice. 

“Until you come up against a problem you don't really know how to solve it unless you ask for help. So, it's knowing that there is support out there, that there are experts in the areas that you're not comfortable with. I know what I do well and what I don’t.”

Jacqueline says her business was really thrown into the limelight thanks to an opportunistic collaboration with TV personality and furniture restorer, Jay Blades. It eventually led to the opening of her new store in the heart of Rostrevor, which was a real test of her business credentials. 

Jacqueline explained: “Jay found me on Instagram and rang me up out of the blue and said ‘we need to collaborate, your art is making the hairs in the back of my neck stand up’. We collaborated and it turned my business around because he put my art on furniture and showcased it to his 100,000+ followers on social media. The orders started flooding in from England.

“I was then on UTV Live with Pamela Ballantine. That programme went out and the owner of this beautiful building in Rostrevor saw it and came to our house and knocked the door and asked if I’d like to use it to open up a store. Before that, I had my name down on a waiting list for storage facilities in the area, because my business had grown in a really good way but I'd taken over our house and my husband was ready to divorce me at this stage if another canvas or box, or frame arrived. 

“I always dreamt of opening a place but didn't really know how or where to start.”

Previously, a restaurant occupied the building, which is a four-storey period property. Jacqueline was handed the keys and in less than two months was opened and trading.

The landlord was very supportive with low rent in the first year, coupled with Covid rates relief. 

“I was selling more but my overheads were higher than ever. I had to really understand the figures, analyse them and become more accountable, which is something I wasn’t before.

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“There are times where the footfall is quiet and you really have to push the online and overseas sales and things that aren't just local based; that's where the business courses have really helped me, looking at the likes of export and constantly educating and keeping one step ahead.”

Jacqueline says 70% of her sales come locally with 30% through online, but she’s working on making that split more even.

“My goal is to grow the brand beyond local for sure but to keep the gallery going too. It’s an absolutely gorgeous enclave here in Rostrevor. In the tourist season it’s booming; Christmas is great but in between it’s quiet, you've got to be thinking all the time.

“I opened the gallery thinking that the beauty of art is, if you're going to buy an investment, in the shape of an expensive piece of art, you want to see it in person. So I think it was really paramount that I did open the gallery. I do also sell my art in other galleries all over Ireland, so that's been lovely.”

For Jacqueline, her art is the “finishing touch of an entire room”. She has a passion for interior design; her art is “only one piece of a big puzzle and I love putting it all together… interior design would be like a natural progression for my business”.

Jacqueline says her only regret is not jumping into self employment sooner. Her granny – who she adored – knew. She was Jacqueline’s keenest supporter!

“My granny was my biggest fan and she had kept saying to me to ‘give up that aul teaching and do your art’. She always told me I’d get by and not to worry about money.”

Ultimately, Jacqueline heeded her granny’s advice.

“Now, I would tell anyone thinking about it to just absolutely trust your heart, trust your gut and go for it and get all of the help and advice you can for free. It's knowing how to access it but once you start you'll begin to see more opportunities out there that will help your business grow. 

“Do what lights you up - do what you love. If you can bring into business the things that make you happy in your life, it’ll make you more resilient. And it’s never too late!”

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Previous Issues

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