WE STARTED OUR business eight years ago – but it feels like a lifetime.
Myself and Jen, my business partner in the Pregnancy & Baby Fair, were both working in St Vincent’s hospital beforehand. I was a communications manager for the healthcare group, and Jen was HR manager.
I originally went into nursing when I was really young, and it was hands-down one of the best decisions I ever made. It has shaped my character – it’s a very hard job but also incredibly rewarding.
But as I said, I was very young starting out – just turned 17 and I don’t think I was prepared. Like every nurse, you have very good days and sometimes bad and very traumatic ones.
Nothing can prepare you for the huge responsibility you carry and the devastating situations you can witness.
At 20, I had one of those ‘what am I doing with my life moments’ after a very challenging week of night duty, where no matter how hard I tried, my best wasn’t good enough.
So I decided something had to change, and that was me. I wanted to do something removed from my situation – so I thought, ‘what is the opposite of healthcare?’ I applied for a masters course in PR there and then and I got it.
It was just one bad day – and I worked happily part-time in Vincent’s private for a few more years – but it did made me think about other careers.
It goes without saying that the two worlds, nursing and communications, are completely different.
I think coming from a nursing background has helped me not to panic about anything. Nothing was life or death in PR, whereas I had worked in those situations before.
Sometimes I think, is communications as satisfying as nursing? When it comes to nursing, you can make a real difference in somebody’s life, however I didn’t always get that feeling from PR.
But I still loved the work. It was exciting and fast-moving. There are deadlines and stress, and I was able to handle it all. Without the background in both of those, I don’t think I would have been good at running my own company.
A different path
I started out with the agency Unique Media – they gave me my first break – and went from there to doing communications for Vincent’s hospital.
For nearly half of my time at Vincent’s, myself and Jen were running the Pregnancy & Baby Fair business on the side.
It was just the two of us in the office with our boss, and she was incredible. She was a classic female boss who always drove us on, encouraged us to figure out what we want next and said we could strive for more.
We started to develop the idea of the Pregnancy & Baby Fair during the hours we would carpool together to work.
We both lived on the north side and worked in a south side hospital, so I would collect Jen and we would drive in together.
The two of us were always thinking about different ideas, but it was 100% Jen’s idea to do the pregnancy event.
She had just gotten married and had gone to all the wedding fairs in preparation. At the time, herself and her husband Anthony were starting to plan for having a baby.
She went online one night thinking she would go to a baby fair and couldn’t see anything and thought, “this can’t be right”.
So she went looking around the UK and the US and saw these baby exhibitions were all over the world, but Ireland seemed to have nothing comparable.
I will always remember it, I was out walking around Donnybrook with my friend Joan and Jen called me and to say she had then idea of running the baby fair with me. That’s where it started.
Juggling roles
When we started to plan the event, we were still both working in Vincent’s full-time, juggling the two jobs together.
We would get in the car for the commute, and we could be in it for an hour and a half. But we couldn’t afford to waste that time, so Jen would be on the laptop and on the phone while I was driving, doing all the calls and work.
We would brainstorm ideas all the way in and all the way home as well, not wasting a minute.
But doing it part-time was tough. Jen was the first of us to go out full-time and focus on the business solely, and I’ve followed her since.
It was a huge investment when we started the show. If you’re starting in the RDS, that’s €250,000 minimum that you need.
So myself and Jen couldn’t afford to pay ourselves wages or anything like that. We both had huge mortgages, but we needed to reinvest all of what we made into the business.
We had only literally registered the company, and we applied to go on Dragons’ Den on RTÉ. We cringe when we look back now, but we got the five investors on board which was huge publicity for us. Just because we had the money, it wasn’t plain sailing.
I remember driving home with Jen one day in Vincent’s after a long week and we just bawled all the way to her house. Neither one of us could console each other.
We were just so exhausted and overwhelmed with what we were going to have to do in the next month.
I was single and never went out at all. Instead, I sat in a box room night after night every weekend working. Jen was in the first year of her marriage and never got to see her lovely husband Anthony – I’d say he was so sick of seeing me in the kitchen.
That was the reality of our first year. We were working non-stop all of the time, but we had huge support.
My aunt and uncle did our accounts and our families all worked at the shows. They hands down carried us when we felt we had nothing left to give.
Learning your lessons
So we’ve had the fun photocalls and the thrill of organising the event, but the downside would have been thinking, “Oh my god, can we do this? We’re two young girls and we haven’t done something like this before.”
Business can be cut-throat. We both came from a background of working in a hospital, which is very different to business.
I had a small idea of what business was like from working in PR, but even then I was sheltered in a small agency.
In a hospital, it’s different. You’re all working as a team the whole time. It’s not that you’re nobody’s friend in business, but people work with you based on results and nobody will do you favours.
We’ve had great mentors around us and they told us to build it slow and steady, to reinvest our money, don’t be greedy or go too big too quick.
We’ve learned to play to our strengths as well. About five years ago we wanted to expand the company a bit, and we launched a baby furniture brand, Huggy Bloom, that sold cots.
These were the most beautifully crafted cots and we debuted them at our own show. We got them into loads of retailers in Ireland and were really well-received. But the product launch itself was a failure.
Money-wise it didn’t work out for us because we had such tiny margins. Myself and Jen quickly realised that we like having control in our business and when you work with products, we didn’t have that control.
We weren’t producing them ourselves and we had to rely on a factory to do that. So if somebody wanted to return a cot, we couldn’t just give them a replacement.
That’s different to the events, where we have complete control over them and we can deliver an excellent exhibition for you. We would like to say we’re now an authority in the baby industry.
We never say never, but I think we’ve learned our lesson. Products aren’t for us.
Claire Finnan is the co-founder of the Pregnancy & Baby Fair which takes place 7 and 8 October in the RDS, Dublin. This article was written in conversation with Killian Woods as part of a series on unlikely entrepreneurs.
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Written by Claire Finnan and posted on Fora.ie
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