Day in the life
MORNING
I get up at 6.30am and begin the day with a sensible breakfast and by scanning overnight news stories from various start -up, technology, marketing and charity blogs, marking interesting stories for reading later. In recent years I’ve moved fully digital when it comes to news, diary-management and note-taking. I review my priorities for the day and grab the laptop to begin my 20-minute walk to the office in town, stopping on the way to pick up a coffee.
My work generally involves meeting with the likecharity team, reviewing progress and priorities. For the past year likecharity has been working with the mobile network operators and the charity sector to build a mobile donations platform to ensure that 100% of the text donation is passed directly on to the recipient charity. The platform allows charities such as Focus Ireland, UNICEF, Concern and the Laura Lynn Foundation to accept donations from the public using a simple text message to a new five- digit short code (50300) and we hope to welcome other charities soon.
We have had fantastic support from Vodafone, O2, Three and Tesco mobile, who have all waived their usual messaging fees and charges for their customers, to ensure 100% giving. We are in the final stage of negotiations with Meteor to deliver a similar partnership for Meteor customers. Likecharity provides a simple website, www.likecharity.com, where customers can review and manage all their mobile donations.
In addition to internal meetings, I spend time meeting charities, to understand their requirements and see how best likecharity can help them achieve their fundraising goals.
AFTERNOON
More often than not my afternoon begins with a lunch meeting. As an investor in start-up and early stage companies, I often have lunch with other founders, investors or colleagues. I’m always keen to discuss challenges and exchange ideas with others to get the benefit of their experience and insight.
As chief executive of a young company my most significant role is to build a team of exceptional people that can help drive the business. It’s critical that investors, board members and executives are all aligned behind a shared vision and strategy.
Currently we’re growing our development team and recruiting high-calibre marketing/account executives who can work with charities to maximise the benefits of likecharity.
Depending on the day of the week, I may also have a conference call with our team in the UK, where we hope to launch likecharity in 2013, to update on progress and agree priorities for the week. While all our research and development is done in Ireland, we expect the majority of our clients to come from the UK.
I travel to the UK regularly for meetings with partners and to spend time with our team there.
EVENING
I head home between 6.30pm and 7pm, walking or taking the Luas, depending on my energy levels. I have a fairly hard rule about leaving work in the office so when I get home I switch off and spend some time with my family. If I’m not playing FIFA 2012 with my son I’ll be catching up on some reading I’ve tagged on the iPad during the day.
I read a wide variety of news, research and opinion in the areas of technology, creative design, marketing, business and economics.
We don’t watch much broadcast TV and instead use Apple TV to stream box sets of series.
