What a guy!
We knew it would take someone special to feature as our first male spotlight. Conall O Móráin has been a prominent voice of Irish business for decades so we were delighted to join him recently on his podcast ‘That Great Business Show’. Whilst talking about our #Awakenhub life Conall agreed to take up that mantle, enjoy!
Conall you have a stellar career in the media and are known to many but not all (yet!). So would you like to tell us a little bit about you and your background.
My first real foray into media was in UCD where I co-founded ‘Gobshout’ magazine. It was easily the biggest selling magazine in any Irish university, based on a mix of gossip, tittle tattle and just a soft smattering of truth. It was a great commercial success and paid for a very nice college lifestyle. From there I ended up in RTE, presenting news TV programmes, and then being appointed the station’s first business correspondent.
I was headhunted by a stockbroker where I worked for eight years, becoming a director of the firm. During this time I applied for the national and local Dublin radio licenses with former colleagues from RTE. We failed unfortunately, no thanks to a certain government minister who was subsequently found to have taken a bung or two (but not from us!).
One of Europe’s largest banks bought our stockbroking firm and I eventually happily headed back to media, via one of country’s larger PR firms where I was head of corporate PR for some years.
In 2001 Goldman Sachs approached me and a friend to run the PR campaign for Tony O’Reilly’s Valentia Consortium, to buy eircom. And so The Media Group was born. We were involved in PR, local newspapers, TV documentaries and we were about to launch a senior’s magazine when the financial crisis happened. During this time I presented The Sunday Business Show on Today FM, until it was taken off air in 2018, which was an unusual decision given we had the highest ratings on Sundays on Today FM.
A chance meeting with Ireland rugby legend Jamie Heaslip set in train the launch of That Great Business Show. Payments company Stripe came looking for Jamie and we weren’t able to match the Collison’s pockets, so Jamie left us, all very amicably. The TGBS continues and is now in its second year, ‘doing business very differently’. I am currently working on a number of very different podcasts, a TV series and…(I’d love to tell you more but the walls have ears…).
The PR side of The Media Group continues to thrive. I also continue to broadcast on RTE, RnaG, TG4, BBC NI and others on business / economics issues. At one stage I even had a showbiz column ‘as Gaeilge’ in the Irish Daily Star (is fearr an Star!) and I have also written columns for the Irish Times, Sunday Tribune and Business Post.
You could say I like media.
The last year or so you have been focussing on #ThatGreatBusinessShow and showcase some fantastic entrepreneurs every week. What drives you to do that?
Some people like music. Some people like sport. I love business. I’m a nosey bugger and I love knowing what’s behind businesses, where the margins are, how some pretty ordinary businesses become very successful, whereas other really clever businesses founder and close. I have been in business myself, since selling my first bag of popcorn outside the family home when I was probably ten and I share the pain, heartache and elation with every one of the 250,000 SMEs in business in this country. I’m also chair of the Irish International Business Network that links Irish businesses with the diaspora around the world. More recently I am a co-founder of the Ireland Connecticut Business Council, again connecting Irish businesses wishing to establish a base in the US, with those in Connecticut [above NY, below Boston] who want Irish companies to use Connecticut as a beachhead into the North American market.
I like helping businesses.
We also know you are a man of your word when it comes to gender balance and promoting women founders. Is it true that you have actually exceeded more than 50% of female guests on your show? And where does that commitment come from?
Both Jamie Heaslip and I agreed from the outset that we wanted to do business differently and one of the targets we set for ourselves was to have an equal number of women and men on the show. Guest One on Show One was Susan Spence, co-founder of Softco. From that time, with the help of some amazing people like Paula FitzSimons (the doyenne of promoting women in business) we have not just kept to our target, but we have exceeded it. We have had some Big Beasts from business on the show, like Tony Smurfit and John Teeling. I was anxious to get some Big Female Names from business on, to balance things out (these Big Beasts get an hour plus to chat to us). Recently we’ve had two great successes when we were joined by Breege O’Donoghue, the Queen of Primark as I like to call her, who was a director of Penneys / Primark for a very, very long time and knows more about retailing than probably anyone else, as well as Fidelma McGuirk, founder of international software company Payslip. Two amazing women…and there’s another Big Name woman in the pipeline. And of course we had four-in-one when we had the AwakenHub team on Episode 54, an hour plus all to themselves!
I was brought up in a very liberal Dublin household where equality and equity was just a given. My mother had attended Miss Meredith’s school where she had learnt ‘boy’s’ activities like woodworking etc, so at home I was taught to knit, sew, cook, darn…and I learnt an awful lot about fashion. As I say, I’m generally curious. I have three adult children, one boy, two girls, and I hope I have passed my love of cooking on to them (I don’t think anyone darns anything anymore!).
We are all made equal.
We know this is a tough one but if you were to pick your top 5 favourite #TGBS episodes or guests so far which/who would they be and why?
How could you even ask this question?? Every member of TeamGBS is like one of my own children and no parent can say who their favourite is, can they?? However…I still love Episode 15, Conor McEnroy and the wildest business stories you’ll ever hear, including blagging his way in Thatcher’s Britain, being kidnapped in South America and buying a bank in Paraguay, as you do! I waited a long time to get former Penneys / Primark director Breege O’Donoghue(Episode 46) to join us (she was too busy doing her two yoga classes a day!), and then the Retail Queen started giving out to me, on air, about the (non-Penneys) clothes I was wearing. She never stops selling. On Episode 43 Limerick’s Davy O’Hora gave us a masterclass on how to use Facebook for business, which I think should be essential listening for anyone starting out with teeny marketing budgets. Episode 40 saw us bring back (2nd interview, due to demand) Dr. Jo Burke, our positive psychologist, and she gave us an hour of everything we all should do to maintain excellent mental health. Finally, Episode 54, the AwakenHub Episode (I know what side my bread is buttered on!). Pure Class.
Who doesn’t love a good story?
You're a man of the world. You have seen, do see and know a lot about what is going on in the world of business and the entrepreneurial eco-system. What do you think are the top 3 areas founders should be looking towards?
In stockbroking we borrowed the title of a Rod Stewart song and we used to say that the ‘first cut is the cheapest’…that’s when things are going wrong, sometimes it’s wisest to quit.
Be realistic. I sometimes get offered guests and their businesses and even at a cursory glance I know there’s no demand for the service or product – it’s a business going nowhere. Have a hard conversation with yourself. I like to follow up with businesses we’ve had on, and to date they’re all still in business.
Business never stops. You will work incredibly hard, harder than those not in business can understand, but you’ll be working on your business, and that’s a kind of love affair – and as we know love can be cruel, but it can also be so rewarding.
What do you know for sure Conall? In life and in business.
For sure I know we die. My lovely sister, Iseult, sat down to watch TV one evening and never woke up again. Live every moment.
If you’re after money, rob a bank. It’s quicker and even if you spend 20 years ‘inside’, it might be easier than running a business. Also, do know that money is absolutely not the answer. We still can only sleep in one bed, eat one meal and wear one set of clothes at any given time.
Nothing on earth trumps time spent with your children or partner.
Dropping your shoulders when walking in the rain, makes the rain ‘less wet’ (try it and see if it’s not true).
Conall as a total media pro and an extremely likeable person - what top 3 tips would you give to our AwakenHub community to help them on their founder journey?
Well you’ve started well, using charm, ‘an extremely likeable person’! However, like everyone else I’m a sucker for flattery so I’ll tell you that any community has to be relevant, active and probably challenging. If AwakenHub is not doing things for members, there’s no point in being a member. If AwakenHub is active and pushing boundaries, then every woman who fancies being in business, at whatever level, should be an active member. Not all women do it, but all women need to back all women in business, until nobody can see any imbalance any more.
The first bit of advice I’d give those thinking about going into business is to ‘dive in’. It’s an absolute revelation to finally work for yourself. Everything you do, don’t do, win at, fail at, etc, will be down to you. That is so empowering. You may not earn as much as when working for someone else (you may also earn a lot more, as it’s going into your pocket!), but the satisfaction of being your own boss cannot be measured.
It’s a joy.
What are you plans for #TGBS in the coming months and next year? And is there anything we can do for you via our AwakenHub community to help you with that?
Ah, my plans, my plans (see answer 1 above). I have so many plans but so little time. I will be bringing TeamGBS international, starting very soon in Connecticut, where we’ll be recording regular slots. I also have two really, really interesting but completely different podcast series, aimed at worldwide audiences, that are currently bubbling under, waiting for the right sponsor. I also can’t wait to get back to MC live events (probably my first love), particularly business based events.
Then, there’s a WIP – work in progress – but unfortunately they have been WIP for quite some time now. There’s a TV series about one of my big passions outside of business. Plus a documentary about ‘Ireland’s richest man’ [and no, I don’t think you’ve ever heard of him], and I may have composed a song for Leinster Rugby, and then there’s that book, or is it two…?
All I ask AwakenHub is to tell the world, and I mean the world, that there’s a very different type of business podcast, www.ThatGreatBusinessShow.com available for free and for nothing because of the generosity of the world’s best shaving oil manufacturer, www.DeFactoShave.com – and founder Tom Murphy is keen to tell the world it’s aimed at women and men – that’s he say it’s the best ANYONE can get. I also want to hear from any great business that AwakenHub members think should be given the oxygen of publicity and that TeamGBS should know about (hint, it’s better if it’s a scaleable business, rather than a one person lifestyle business, a business that listeners may say, ‘I could do that’ or ‘I’d like to do something like that’.
Follow Conall on his social pages here
And catch up with his podcast here www.thatgreatbusinessshow.com/
