Deloitte Ireland Alumni Leadership Series

Finding my voice

When I was leaving secondary school, I had no idea what I wanted to do or what I wanted to be. One thing was clear - it was either Limerick or Limerick. I was a homebird and I was and am passionate about Limerick. I had studied accountancy, economics and business in school so doing Business Studies felt like a natural progression. It was broad and gave me the opportunity to sample different modules before committing to a major or a minor, and I got to do work experience at the Auditor Generals. I spent eight months in the Department of Justice doing audit work, which gave me a sense of the auditing world and the comradery I got from the role, so I came back to college and knew I wanted to major in accounting and minor in economics.

While I was in college, Deloitte really stood out to me at career fairs as somewhere that had more of a human touch. I also knew people who worked in the Limerick office and they were really positive about their experiences. There was the added bonus that I could stay in Limerick and work from one of Deloitte’s regional offices.

At this point, I would definitely have described myself as risk-averse and slightly timid. If you’d told me then that I would eventually set up my own whiskey company in the middle of a global pandemic, I don’t think I would have believed you.

I spent five years at Deloitte, working my way through my accountancy exams and up to management level. I had started in September 2008, so as I began my career, the world changed drastically overnight. There was a lot of uncertainty for so many people, and especially as someone just starting their career. My time at Deloitte did give me a firm understanding of how businesses operate from a financial perspective. I worked with small regional companies where I would go in and get a shoe box of receipts, right up to large multinationals, so I learnt a broad set of skills and how to deal with a wide range of individuals.

Finding my own voice was one of my biggest takeaways from Deloitte. Early on, I had a disagreement with a colleague on how a project should be approached. It was hard to challenge someone who was senior to me, but I stood my ground. It might have seemed like a small experience at the time, but it helped me start to have those open conversations that we sometimes need to have in work. Later, when I started working for Google, I had to have a conversation with a colleague about conflicting working styles, and being able to have those conversations really stood to me.

This comes through with Foxes Bow too – my co-founder Alice Carroll, and I have the same destination in mind for Foxes Bow but we don’t always agree on how we’ll get there. Alice comes from a marketing background, a different world to my accounting background, so invariably there are different points of view and plenty of conversations – but knowing that we have the same ambition for the business we can have great conversations to make sure we align. So, while that early moment was crucial for me in my career, it’s a skill that always needs to be worked on.

The Deloitte network is also part of Foxes Bow’s story, both my accountant and my tax advisor are former Deloitte employees. There’s that level of trust and understanding when I meet ex-Deloitte, and they’re both also based in Limerick, which is another bonus.

I met two of my best friends in Deloitte as well. Neither of them were in my cohort when I joined, but we bonded over a shared passion for Manchester United and we’ve never looked back. I was only recently grooms man at one of their weddings and he still works at Deloitte.

A leap of faith
 

My time with Deloitte in the United States was a real tipping point. I had gotten the opportunity to go abroad with Deloitte to a client in Columbus, Ohio. In the company I was working with, I wasn’t sitting with the finance team, I was sitting with the sales team because every deal that came through had to be signed off by me. It gave me a taste of a world outside of professional services and I began to think it was time for a change.  

My then girlfriend and now wife came over for a few weeks and we got engaged. We spoke about the possibility of moving to Dublin. Everything I knew up until that point was Limerick, so it was a big change. Then I got the opportunity to go work in Google.  

It was for an 11-month contract and my mum was dead set against the move. She thought I was mad. ‘Good pensionable permanent job’ was a phrase I heard a lot of when I first told her. While I was mulling over the decision, my wife Rachel and I were visiting my uncle, who is an entrepreneur in the US, and he told me to go for the opportunity at Google. It didn’t feel like a huge moment at the time but my wife frequently says the advice changed the direction of our lives completely.  

Looking back, I recognise it was a leap and such a risk. I was leaving Limerick, family, friends and, to quote my mum, a good pensionable job. But I wanted a change. Even so, I still only saw my career being in either finance or accountancy, I never imagined being an entrepreneur.  My contract at Google ended up turning into longer than 11 months, and I spent four years in Dublin before moving to San Francisco to work in Google X, aka The Moonshot Factory. At X, the aim was to create radical new technologies to solve some of the world’s hardest problems. X was a diverse group of inventor and entrepreneurs, and I was surrounded by these individuals every day for four years! And in San Francisco, everyone has a side hustle, so I think the idea of being an entrepreneur was starting to play around in my subconscious. 

The importance of sponsorship and founding Foxes Bow 

I like to drink beer followed by whiskey, and I was doing just that one night in a bar in San Francisco in August 2019. Looking up at all the bottles in the bar, all the Irish Whiskies looked the same – black, brown, green bottles all nodding back to castles and rolling hills. It didn’t represent me as a modern consumer or as an expat Irish at all, and I began to think of creating my own whiskey, that would represent the modern Irish person I am.

I started working on it a bit every day, and then a lot every day. I got in touch with someone I grew up with across the road from in Limerick, who I knew was in the drinks industry, and she loved the idea – that was Alice Carroll, my co-founder. Then March 2020 happened and the whole of San Francisco shut down. I had been commuting two and a half hours a day, and I started using that time to build out Foxes Bow. My wife and I decided to return to Limerick and for the first six months of being back in Ireland, I worked on Foxes Bow from 9am to 5pm and then logged onto work with my San Francisco based team from 5pm to 1am.

It wasn’t sustainable and I found myself having to grab a thirty minute nap at lunchtime because I was barely getting any sleep. It was at one of these lunchtimes when my wife and I began discussing me running Foxes Bow full-time. We decided it was the right time to take that risk and we both knew I could always go back to being an accountant. It was a big decision, but it felt like a natural one.

I always say Foxes Bow wouldn’t have existed without the pandemic but it also wouldn’t exist without my wife Rachel. The level of support she shows on a daily basis is amazing. Unlike me, she is a risk taker, she went from being a teacher to doing a career pivot to work in finance for multinationals. She encourages and inspires me to take risks. I always look at her with a lot of admiration.

Surprisingly, my mum’s reaction to me leaving Google to become an entrepreneur was supportive. She’d seen the journey I’d been on from leaving Deloitte, moving to San Francisco, and how much I was investing in Foxes Bow. I had learnt to embrace risk more, and I think my mum had too.

Mentorship is really important to me and knowledge sharing is crucial. Individuals can only do so much, we all need a network and support. One example of that right now is around how Foxes Bow has raised cash. Crowdfunding has been a success for us and over the last two years I’ve probably taken over 200 calls on this to help people understand it and caveat that it is not the silver bullet that it may seem when you have announced you have completed a successful campaign. Democratising whiskey was a catalyst behind Foxes Bow, so knowing people can invest a tenner in our company represents a core part of our values as a business.

Resilience means I can keep going, without it being detrimental to me or those around me

I’m a consumer junky so I really appreciate branding but I don’t have a background in marketing or the drinks industry. My co-founder Alice and I are ying and yang in that sense. Her background is in marketing in the drinks industry while I have that financial acumen. Alice always says though that there has been a huge benefit from me coming to the business without any industry knowledge as I can bring a fresh perspective. 

Beyond this learning curve, if I had to say what was a challenging moment as an entrepreneur, I’d say everything. You ride a rollercoaster all the time as a business founder and owner, and for most of the early days, I was flying by the seat of my pants, a little bit less so nowadays! When I look back now, I realise how naive I was. There were so many things I was doing for the first time, like pitching to a distributor or retailer, building out our supply chain, or pitching to a potential investor! And it is a grind – no matter how long you think something is going to take, the reality is that everything takes longer, particularly when you are starting out. But I try to focus on the successes because they’ll fuel you. Going into supermarkets and seeing Foxes Bow is always an incredible moment, especially if I’m in one of the major liquor stores in the US and I see Foxes Bow on the shelf. It’s a pinch me moment and I should take more stock of that.

Over the past year I’ve learnt a lot about resilience. To me, it means I have the capacity to keep going but in a way that isn’t detrimental to me. By February this year, I realised I was burnt out. I had gone from working 18 hours a day at Google and building Foxes Bow to being an entrepreneur full-time without taking a break. I wasn’t taking care of myself physically or mentally. When I realised this, I went to my GP and took a look at what needed to change in my life so I could have better habits.

It took me a while to get to this point. I know if I hadn’t taken the time to pause and think about how I could take better care of myself, I would have kept on going, but it would eventually have impacted either me, my relationships or Foxes Bow. I don’t always have the opportunity to take a 2-week holiday but finding those pockets throughout the day when I can take a breather and reset myself is so important now.

Being an entrepreneur isn’t easy but I’m a big believer in the importance of failure. We’ve had lots of success with Foxes Bow and lots of learning moments too. A time that comes to mind is during our initial launch. We wanted to export in other markets and we spent a lot of time with one particular distributor, but we always had an instinct that they couldn’t do what they said they could do. We kept going with it though, invested in elements of the export process, and then the time came to get going, our initial instincts turned out to be true. We had wasted 12 months on the deal! If we’d trusted our instincts, we would have saved so much time and energy and seen other opportunities. I learnt a lot from it.

I describe myself as a recovering accountant and I like to think I buck the stereotype of accountants being boring! In saying all that, my solace is still jumping into a spreadsheet and figuring things out. Looking back on my career, I’m amazed at all the pivots. I never envisioned owning my own business, let alone a whiskey company! Leaving Deloitte with an amazing network and friends behind me was a critical launching pad as I learnt to take more risks and embrace opportunity.

Four pieces of advice/ Things I wish I’d known 
 

1. Keep your study and career broad at first, get experience. Figure out what you like and then you can figure out what you want to do. I’ve always been a generalist and it’s definitely stood to me.
2. Run at the hardest problem first, don’t work around the problem. It doesn’t have to be figured out perfectly, but if you can get it to 80% then you can iterate over time. 
3. Fail Fast  - every entrepreneur says this but it’s true, there’s nothing wrong with failing, you learn more from it than success.  
4. Look after yourself, I didn’t appreciate that until this year but it is so important.