WILD GEESE/Ronan Donoghue serial entrepeneur based in Italy:THE LAST time I met Ronan Donoghue, he was driving me deep into the heart of Lazio, south of Rome, on our way to an excellent vineyard. In those days, he was into the olive oil and wine export business.
A business and economics graduate from Trinity College, Ronan had long been attracted to the idea of moving to Italy and eventually did so in 1994.
After a less than wonderful start working for the Inlingua Language School in Milan, he was on the point of returning to Ireland when he decided to give things one last go, opting to move south and teach at Inlingua’s Rome school.
Within a year, he had moved from teaching English to working in the finance department of the Rome-based UN body, the World Food Programme (WFP). By the summer of 2001, his star was shining so brightly that he had successfully applied for a job in New York with another UN agency, namely Unicef.
But then, at 30, he abandoned the UN career path, swapping the security of the permanent and pensionable post for the insecurity of life as a one-man, Rome-based export business.
His first idea came from Giusi, his Sicilian wife. She comes from Licata, a small village close to Agrigento, where her father Francesco worked hard all his life producing very good olive oil and wine.
The realisation that every autumn Francesco would be stuck with more than 150 litres of unsold olive oil prompted the export idea. Donoghue set up Giusioil (named after his wife), an Italo-Irish import business specialising in wine and olive oil.
In the summer of 2001, he shipped his first consignment of 200 bottles of Francesco’s oil.
Nine years later, Giusioil is no more. For a start, the major source of his olive oil dried up with the death of Francesco in December 2005.
He also realised, during a trip back to Ireland to drum up business, that clients considered olive oil a luxury, to be used sparingly. Put simply, return orders came only slowly and he began to have doubts about the size of his “turnover”.
So, where to from there? His Giusioil operation had relied heavily on its website which, like all things technological, needed regular updating, modification and general tweaking, if he was going to run the thing properly.
Rather than continue to pay for professional website advice (at €50 an hour), Ronan set out to teach himself website design and maintenance.
Along the way, he met Scotsman Will Gardner and between them they formed “Mediaclan” (www.mediaclan.it) in 2007, a mulitilingual web design company that not only creates user-friendly sites, designed to attract online shoppers, but also works on search engine optimisation (ie getting your company or product to “pop” up near the top of the list when someone does a web search).
It started slowly but business has begun to build. Being able to provide both technological and linguistic expertise to Italy-based clients is a plus, although by no means all the Mediaclan clients are Italy-based.
Long before Mediaclan was up and running, though, Ronan had another project on the go, again involving his wife, who is an accountant, and, to a large extent, again making the cross-cultural divide work for him.
In 2004, he set up www. accountantrome.com and then established SIT (Studio Internazionale Tornambé), a company offering resident and non- resident foreigners in Italy advice about how to do business here.
Not only does SIT offer services related to all aspects of business in Italy – setting up a company, filing your tax returns, pension registration, Italian VAT, property tax (ICI) etc – but it also offers invaluable advice on the often bemusing bureaucracy of living in Italy, be it acquiring a permesso di soggiorno, opening a bank account or renting or buying property.
Ronan and Giusi got a break when CAF came calling. The San Sebastian-based Basque country transport company won an important contract providing and maintaining trams for Rome’s municipal transport authority.
It needed on-the-ground professionals who could not only look after their interests but also handle practical issues such as overseeing a 35-strong pay roll.
In late 2005, SIT won the contract. Since then, its clientele has grown and now includes more than 50 regular clients ranging from the embassies of Ghana and Tanzania to a French specialist bookshop, an Israeli electronics wholesaler and a Danish jeweller.
Along the way, Ronan and Giusi freely admit, times have been hard but they have toughed it out, but their success in doing so means that, in these recessionary times, they find themselves very busy.
Furthermore, to a large extent, they are in control of their own work timetables which means having time for their two children, whether it be ferrying them to school or out to a sailing course in Ostia.
As lifestyle choices go, they clearly feel that this beats the Big Apple-based UN career path.
