An Entrepreneurial Life

All of my ancestors going back as far as we know were entrepreneurs in rural Ireland, primarily in hospitality and farming. My parents met in Boston and soon thereafter opened a real estate and insurance company in the city. When I was 9 years old, my mother ventured into the hospitality business (a throwback to her Tipperary childhood in her mother's guesthouse) when they bought a lovely family resort motel nestled beside a beautiful lake on Cape Cod. Over the next decade, I engaged in every aspect of the business from cleaning rooms, painting pools, flipping burgers, running the switchboard, cashing out the till and, of course, greeting guests at the front desk. The highs and lows of hectic summer operations and financial frugality in the winter was not lost on me or my five brothers. Family run businesses make for a wonderful, crazy, stressful, rewarding environment. The story is the same for small businesses in seasonal tourism areas worldwide.

Many years later, after decades of business and academic experience, here I am in Clifden, Connemara (my Dad's hometown) where I have been working with sole trader and family run businesses on all aspects of their businesses since 1997. Any sole trader or partner in a very small business is incredibly aware that multi-tasking is life, but there's still only 24 hours in a day. Not all the business action pieces can get equal attention. In my twenty years in Connemara, I have found the following situations to be most common:

• Day-to-day OPERATIONS overshadow the other business activities.
• PLANNING and MARKETING are areas that are perpetually on the 'when I get time' list or never get attention at all.
• FINANCIAL gets more attention because of tax compliance but often in-house sales and cost analyses are insufficient for future planning and forecasting.
• RESOURCE EFFICIENCY is the new area that can save money but businesses don't know where to start or cannot afford to do so.

My objective is to help small businesses to fit all the Business Action Wheel puzzle pieces together with affordable strategic planning and creative ICT solutions. It is a delight to share my voracious appetite for management knowledge and tools, as well as my total technology geekness, with Connemara businesses! Give me a shout if you would like more information on 095-22888.

Ellen McDonough

Left Brain vs Right

Do you ever take those online tests to see which side of your brain is dominant? I get the same answer every time - they are equal. This means that I need to feed the logical left and the creative right in balanced amounts to be happy. Moving from developing business plans and financial forecasts to creating marketing executions, cool websites and custom software applications is my normal day.

Bio

• MSc in Management for Sustainable Development (1st), Dublin City University (2012)
• MBA, Pepperdine University (1982)
• BSc Marketing, BSc Communication, Syracuse University (1979)
• 30+ Years Professional & Third Level Lecturing experience in the USA and Ireland
• Working with Connemara businesses since 1997
• Publisher of the Connemara View Newspaper 2004-2010
• Developing websites since 1998