From the poster boys of Ireland’s erupting tech scene to the heavyweights excelling in global and domestic markets, EY Entrepreneur Of The Year™ brings you The Entrepreneurs – an all-new documentary series that follows a number Ireland’s most successful entrepreneurs as they overcome fear, failure and adversity in pursuit of their ambitious visions.
Kicking off on Monday 29 September at 8.30pm, the four-part RTE ONe series will air every Monday until 20 October. The series continues online each week with web exclusive content available on RTE Player and social media featuring personal business advice from this year’s EY Entrepreneur Of The Year™ finalists. Viewers can join the online conversation using the hashtag #EOY2014 or by visiting eoy.ie.
EPISODE 1
EY Entrepreneur Of The Year presents The Entrepreneurs – a new documentary series that goes deep into the personal stories behind many of Ireland’s top entrepreneurs. Marian O’Gorman revisits the family cottage where Kilkenny Group was born as the Group enter the online retail space. Cork man Pat Phelan takes the plunge and moves to Manhattan to expand the business before bringing us back to his days as an apprentice butcher, his struggle with alcoholism and discussing the exciting journey ahead for Trustev. We also join George Mullan as he lays the new pitch in Glasgow’s Celtic Park and shares the challenges of juggling family with running a global business. The featured entrepreneurs are all shortlisted for this year’s EY Entrepreneur Of The Year Award.
Marian & Greg O’Gorman, Kilkenny Group
The Kilkenny Group is Ireland’s largest emporium of Irish designed products, supporting Irish craft & design for over 5 decades. The Kilkenny Group currently employs 230 people across the country. Turnover for year ending January 2014 reached a record high for the Group, totalling at €25.5m, an increase of 86% on the year previous, while website sales for the last financial year showed
an increase of 51% year on year.
Marian O’Gorman is CEO of the Kilkenny Group, and has worked in retail since the age of 16. Marian is incredibly hands-on in her role, working closely with the buying team and company restaurants as well as mentoring managers and key members of staff. In 2013, Marian was named one of WXM’s Top 25 Most Influential Women.
Gregory is the eldest of Marian’s four children. This year, Gregory has taken over as Group Marketing Director, overseeing not only his traditional forte areas of Marketing and PR across the Group but also the Visual Merchandising and Group logistics
George Mullan, SIS Group
Support In Sport are a world leader in synthetic and natural sports surfacing. They design, manufacture and construct sports surfaces
for a wide range of sport venues ranging from international stadiums to community projects. Founded in Amsterdam in 1999,
George Mullan purchased the company in 2001 whilst based in Holland. The company turnover was €200,000 and had a staff of
three.
Today SIS Group employs over 200 people and has a projected turnover for 2014 of €34.3m. They have constructed new pitches at
Santiago Bernabeu, home of Real Madrid and at Camp Nou, home of Barcelona FC. SIS has built pitches for the World Cup Finals, African Nations Cup, European and Asian Football championships. SIS has just completed at Spartak Moscow the first World Cup pitch for 2018.
George Mullan is the founder and owner of SIS Group, a manufacturing and sports construction company with offices in Europe, Asia and Africa. George is a graduate from Trinity College Dublin and has MBA from the University of Bradford in the UK.
George’s background is as a turnaround specialist and he has completed turnarounds in South & North America and Europe for a
major US multinational.
Pat Phelan, Trustev
Pat Phelan is recognised across the globe as one of the most connected men in the technology industry. Over the past 15 years
he has built a number of successful global businesses in the internet, mobile and telecoms sectors. Trustev offers a totally modern approach to e-commerce fraud prevention through real-time online identity verification. It focuses on validating the individual making the transaction, not just the payment method they’re using.
The platform delivers individual, real time decisions for every one of your customers using multiple
dynamic data sources (behavioural, transactional and social) instead of restrictive rules based decisioning and profiling. Launched to the market in May 2013, Trustev was awarded the coveted title as Europe’s Top Technology Start-up by the EU Commission and in December 2013 Trustev was named one of the Top 10 Hottest Global Start-ups by Forbes magazine.
In April 2014, Trustev took top prize at SXSW, the world’s largest technology festival. In a very short period of time Trustev is already significantly reducing fraud and increasing revenues for some of the biggest e-commerce companies in the market.
Pat is a well-known advocate for technology start-ups and a frequent judge and mentor for many national and international start up
programmes.