Ireland – Year 6 – Day 2 – May 22, 2017

We spent the day at Trinity College in a lecture hall interacting with 5 strong entrepreneurial leaders:

1. Ciaran Flanagan, Owner, IDEA
2. Andrew Parish, Entrepreneur, Mentor, ConnectIreland
3. Joanna Murphy, Chief Executive at ConnectIreland
4. Val Cummins, Senior Lecturer, School of Biological, Earth and Environmental Sciences, University College Cork, Ireland
5. Enda Madden, Founder of ACE Health

Ciaran spoke of the need for experts to have a formal process. For his clients, he focuses on the following:

1. Exploration
2. Diagnosis
3. Operational
4. Post-sales

Andrew had four key questions entrepreneurs need to be able to answer:

1. so what?
2. who cares?
3. how much?
4. how soon?

Joanna spoke to the unique challenges women leaders face, and urged the students to embrace adversity, stay positive, and that the “magic dust” of success only comes from within!

Val spoke of her admiration and respect for the Warrior Ethos:

• Always place the mission first
• Never accept defeat and never quit
• Never leave a fallen comrade

It’s interesting that in all the cases, the discussion revolved around two key points:

1. It’s all about the people (so why don’t we invest the time to develop our people-skills?).
2. Know the market, because it’s all about creating products, services, and offering to solve problems.

Peter Drucker famously said consultants only need two questions in their tool belt: What business are you in; and who is your customer? And as any good VC knows, sell the problem, not the solution!