I'm from Clonakilty in West Cork, and for most of my young life sport was how I understood myself. I played hurling and football and raced triathlons.
Then the injuries came. I had back surgery, two hip surgeries and shoulder surgery. Later, I finally realised that sport wasn't the arena for me.
Business was.
I qualified as a secondary school teacher and set up several companies. None of them were massive successes, but they did teach me some valuable lessons.
I've always been heavily involved in education, and in English language education in particular, which led me to co-found an English academy in Madrid. When the partnership stopped working, I bought my partner out, and the buyout left the business with no cash. I spent the next five months living in the academy's storage room, cooking on an air fryer and keeping the doors open.
That period taught me the lesson I've built everything around since. Hard work alone doesn't save a business. Good systems do. We put proper processes in place for finding students and looking after them, and the academy grew into what it is today.
The problems I kept seeing in my own business came down to one challenge: getting from the lead to the actual booked appointment. That's where Danu Local was founded.
All the skills I use, I learned at my own craft, in my own business. I'm now packaging them for other local business owners.
I love business, and I love working with people. I've had payroll to meet and sleepless nights over it, so when I sit down with a business owner I know what their week looks like.
That same instinct is behind my charity work. When I saw what the earthquakes had done in Venezuela, I wanted to do something practical about it, and people at home made that possible.