From Pizza To A Painter, This Mom Has The Number
Some of the best inspirations can come out of nowhere. It’s smart thinking on the part of Nicola to realize where their was a niche in her own country and filling it. It’s obvious how intelligent she is by how well she has done in the world of business. As a mom of three, her experiences can easily inspire other parents to reach out and grab onto their own dreams.
Nicola Byrne, the mother of three who runs Ireland’s only native directory enquiry company, now has plans for European domination.
Yet growing up in Portmarnock in north county Dublin, Nicola didn’t have a clue what she wanted to do. After repeating her leaving certificate, she got a job in freight forwarding at Dublin airport.
Even at this early stage, her impatience to move ahead and indeed, her formidable energy, was apparent. Before long she had moved Gateaux while doing a FAS course, then onto Jacobs before landing a job as a brand manager at Evian. She then moved to Bank of Ireland and eventually on to AC Nielson.
“I was having a baby and I was so sick that I had to quit work,” she explains. Typically, she used the lay-up as an opportunity to set up her own business selling advertising on tickets. Irish Ferries and Stena Line were among her first customers. The company, Stenix Media, then won the business for the Eircom telephone book as well as An Post but Byrne was restless again.
“The business was running for about four or five years but I was tired of always having to win contracts,” she says.
On a visit to the UK she spotted an opportunity.
“In the UK, it seemed like there were 100 directory enquiry companies but in Ireland there were only two.”
She came home and within months she had launched a new directory enquiry company, now 11890. The company started out business-to-business and quickly signed up a range of top clients including KPMG, An Post and AIB. The idea was simple. Any employee trying to call directory enquiries would have it automatically routed to 11890, no matter which 118 number was dialled.
“It took three years to get the database spotless,” she says. At one stage, she had 50 people working on the database and she still employs two people full-time to keep it up to date.
Image from Stock.xchng.
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