Founder
I've spent more than twenty years building and growing businesses. Conigrum is where I put all of it to work for yours.
In 2006 I started Acorn in a basement office. Seven years later we were a hundred people and Ireland's largest agency, named Agency of the Year in 2011 and again in 2012, with more than a hundred awards along the way. Then we sold it.
The story
I learned the trade at Dell. From 1999 to 2006 I held senior product and marketing roles across Europe, the Middle East and Africa, with a marketing budget of $500 million a quarter. I was part of the team that took Dell from tenth to first in the United Kingdom. It taught me discipline: every dollar has to earn its place, and the numbers always have something to tell you.
Then I went to Perlico as Head of Marketing and Sales, taking on the incumbent as a challenger telecoms company. We built a way of winning customers that measured everything, and went from fifty new customers a week to a thousand. Perlico was later acquired by Vodafone.
In 2006 I started my own business. Acorn grew from that basement office into the country's largest agency, working with brands including Google, Dell, Bank of Ireland, LinkedIn, Molson Coors, Hello.ie and many more. Along the way we helped businesses such as Panda and 123.ie scale dramatically. In 2013 Acorn was acquired by Epsilon.
Building and selling a business teaches you things no job title can. Growth rarely comes from doing more of the same. It comes from finding the one idea, opportunity or change that makes everything else work harder. Different sectors, same job: find where the money and the meaning meet, and push hard there.
Creative people chase the idea. Commercial people chase the number. I've spent twenty years joining the two, because the businesses that pull ahead do both at once. What I do best is see the commercial opportunity others miss, and join the dots between the customer, the proposition, the brand, how you win customers and how you grow.
Why Conigrum
Since Acorn I have backed, advised and mentored growing businesses, and today I lead Conigrum.
Conigrum exists for one reason: to help founders, chief executives and leadership teams find the idea, opportunity or change that can make their business considerably more commercially powerful.
I work directly with every client, and I bring the same question I would ask of my own business: what would we do next if this were ours? Then we answer it together and turn the answer into a plan. AI makes the work faster. Experience makes it right.