As I’m sure the whole world is by now aware, I’m coming to the end of my first week living back in London.  Everyone I’ve met this past week or asked for help has been extremely welcoming and I’ve been fortunate enough to have been invited to a few really useful networking events.  Best of all, however, from the perspective of a newly arrived Irish entrepreneur in London has been the Irish International Business Network or IIBN as it’s known.  The link is here for anyone that would like to know more or find out how to join http://www.iibn.com/london/

I’m lucky enough to have been introduced to the original Wild Irish Guy himself, Damon Oldcorn, and it seems that once you know Damon, you don’t really need to know anyone else.  I’ve always found this to be a good strategy.  Bryan Keating was the first business person I met in Northern Ireland, he’s the exact same and it’s never done me any harm.

Thursday night’s IIBN event started with drinks & chat and it was very easy to circulate and get talking to a few people as everyone’s very friendly and open.  Everyone has an Irish connection even though many, like me, don’t have an Irish accent.  Don’t let that fool you! – they all know their Leitrims from their Letterkennys and their Dungloes from their Dingles.  Our diaspora is a beautiful thing.  There were bankers, recruiters, reps from private equity houses, lawyers, entrepreneurs, investors and no doubt many more besides.  If you’re Irish, in business and in London you need to join IIBN.

As part of the evening, our speaker was the charming and self-effacing Rosaleen Blair (pictured).  Rosaleen is one of those women who have achieved a helluva lot but doesn’t go around shouting that from the rooftops.  She just gets on with things.  Most of all, I liked the way she described the values her company operates by and I liked her statement of the 3 things she demands from people in her team and recruits against.  I’ve used these a few times already in conversation with others I’ve met this week but having chatted with Rosaleen on the evening, I don’t think she’ll mind.  They are as follows:

·         Trust – the members of a team have to really trust one another; of course this takes a bit of time

·         Collaboration – people need to be able & willing to work on projects with each other and to work hard to make that collaboration work

·         Sharing – Rosaleen hates it when people hold back knowledge & refuse to share it with other members of the team

I also loved what she said about encouraging a culture of “intrapreneurship” within your own organisation as a way of motivating and retaining the people in your team.  If anyone’s unsure what that means, it’s about encouraging positive aspects of entrepreneurial behaviour but within a large organisation.  It’s something we’ve always tried to do at Learning Pool.

Rosaleen told us her story about how she arrived in London from Dublin in the 1990s, not knowing a soul but with a background in recruitment and having run a few small businesses in Ireland, believing herself to be fairly unemployable.  She went to work at Alexander Mann and over the course of time, persuaded her employer to allow her to try something new to fill a gap in the market and co-create adjacent services with clients (the first one being ICL/Fujitsu).  As it happened, she, working along with James Caan, became one of the early pioneers of what these days is known as RPO (Recruitment Process Outsourcing) and the rest is history.  In 2007, Rosaleen led her team through a £100m management buyout with the backing of private equity house Graphite Capital.  These days her company Alexander Mann Solutions employs 2,000 people working in 70 geographies and 42 languages.

Rosaleen also gave us some priceless bits of advice which I hope she won’t mind me passing on here to others:

·         When looking at which private equity house to go with, do some research and talk to some of the companies your main players have divested themselves of

·         As CEO, always keep your bank manager close & don’t give them any surprises; don’t pass that bank relationship off to someone else in your team

·         If your company is going to be working in some way with a private equity house, get yourself a CFO that has previously worked with a PE house, a CFO coming from a big corporate background won’t have the right sort of experience

·         Trust your own instincts and that of your team every day of the week over the advice given to you by external “experts”

Thanks Rosaleen, thanks IIBN and hello London!

...even though he will deny it!  Dr Bryan Keating (pictured above at Learning Pool’s office earlier this month) is one of the reasons I moved from London to Northern Ireland, 10 years ago at the end of this month.  I left my safe job as FD of CIPFA’s commercial subsidiary IPF.  I’d worked at CIPFA for what felt like 100 years or more.  It was cosy & familiar and I’d recruited and collected a high performing team around me over the years.  As an organisation, we hit all our targets & were able to predict with a high degree of certainty what we’d be doing for the next 3 – 5 years.  Life was easy.

What could be stranger than leaving that environment to become a dotcommer – working for one of Belfast’s high tech VC funded start-ups?  Drenched in uncertainty, constantly seeking funding, moving the goalposts every day, handling our tricky VCs, managing our quota of prima donnas (every tech start-up has them!)...Bryan was the person that calmly showed me how to deal with all of that & more.  Take my hand & walk into the abyss – sometimes that’s what you have to do.

He coached & mentored me when I needed it with sensible advice and his practical and so friendly way.  Bryan shared with me his wisdom and told me his stories – the kinds of stories every fledgling entrepreneur needs to listen to and hear.  We had a few adventures & met some great people (and some not so great people) along the way, burned the midnight oil when we needed to and we had a lot of laughs.

Bryan gave me confidence and encouraged me to go on & become an entrepreneur myself and for that I will be forever grateful to him.  It hasn’t always been an easy journey but it has been challenging and fulfilling.  If I hadn’t met him when I did, that would definitely not have happened for me.  He is a great man and over the years I have learned so much from him.  Even now, when I have an important decision to make, I calmly ask myself what Bryan would suggest – and I’m able to think it through in my head.  I usually carry a few of his crazy diagrams in my handbag, scribbled quickly on a napkin or the nearest scrap of paper as he explains something, and I look at them from time to time & reflect on the advice he’s given to me.  I carry some of his words in my head and repeat them to myself from time to time like a mantra.  I find myself saying some of those same things now to my own young team.

Bryan – thank you for everything that you’ve done for me and for everything you’ve done for the hundreds of other start-ups and entrepreneurs that you’ve helped and encouraged along the way – we appreciate you and I don’t know where we’d be without you!