Mairead Mackle's business empire covers homecare, housing, a charitable foundation, wagyu beef production and a programme for female entrepreneurs.
Entrepreneur Mairead Mackle oversees a host of different businesses - from homecare to housing and renewable energy to wagyu beef production, as well as a charitable foundation. Ian Kehoe speaks to the winner of the Entrepreneur of the Year category of this year’s IMAGE PwC Businesswoman of the Year Awards about what unites them all - a desire to have a positive social impact.
Her husband, a cattle dealer , brought her back a book, ‘The E-Myth’ by Michael Gerber, from the US.“If a business isn’t giving you more life, it’s taking your life away,” Mackle explains. “And if it doesn’t give you more freedom, it’s not a business at all, it’s only a really hard job. And I just felt I had a really hard job.”So, Mackle changed how she approached her business. She established departments, empowered others, and learned to become strategic.
In 2011, after selling some shares in her Homecare business , she launched a renewable business that has since built two biomass plants.And, this, led her to wagyu beef production — Kingsbury Wagyu now has a herd of 6,000 cattle, but Mackle said the plan was to increase this number to 20,000 “Yes, it is about innovation and looking for the next idea. Yes, it is about having the right people. But underneath all of it, it is about values.”Plus, she says she and her team were always looking at opportunities to scale, particularly in those helter-skelter early days.
In her citation at the awards, the judges noted: “Of personal importance to Mariead is not just to generate profit but also as a force for positive change. There are two not-for-profits within the organisation – the Evolve Academy which supports female start-ups and iCare, a charity to spread kindness.”
“You have 900 months in your life. You spend 300 of them sleeping. So you have 600 months to actually do something.” “I was in business with a corporate because they were listed on the American Stock Exchange. And then I realised then, or we all realised within our company, that we don’t want to be a corporate. We want to retain our family values and what happened was then we had to try and get rid of the investor,” Mackle said.
In her view, if you are not growing, you are dying, and you constantly need to develop new revenue streams. It is something she has instilled in her own enterprises and espouses to the various young entrepreneurs that she mentors and to the companies that she has backed.“You can’t be standing still in business. I think that’s important. You always have to be innovative — whatever you’re doing this year has to be at least 20 per cent of your business has to be different next year,” she said.
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