Trading Up

What qualifies or prepares someone to create a chain of juice bars and a hospitality-focussed software business? A glance at Sam Shephard's CV wouldn't give any clues. He's a former Royal Marine with tours in Afghanistan and Iraq on his distinguished record. He is one of just a handful of living people to have been awarded the George Cross, the UK's highest honour awarded to those who have display...

Andrew Lynas runs a family-owned food business. But it's not like many others. It began with his grandfather who had a row with his greengrocer boss so he quit and set up a fishmongers. Norman, Andrew's father, was next. He took a gamble with a big order for frozen battered fish. His problem was that he didn't have any freezers or even the fish to put in them. That was remedied by some chest freez...

You can't have it all. Life involves sacrifice. But William McColgan is an example of how you can come close to having it all, as long as you correctly define what success looks like and make the right sacrifices. So when his five-year-old son was poised to undertake "shooter drills" on entering elementary school in New Hampshire, he sacrificed a consultancy career with Fortune 100 companies to re...

A nasty tackle during a football match in his final year of school left Rory King with a broken jaw, and it changed his life. If it hadn't happened, Rory wouldn't have messed up is A Levels and would probably be a PE teacher today. A decent job. But not the dream he's currently living. For in the space of a few years, Rory has taken his passion for travel and negotiating deals and developed a mult...

There's a reason why you should keep your key sales staff happy. Mathew Nesbitt is what can happen when you don't. He goes and sets up his own business which puts yours into the shade. He was in his twenties selling bodycams to pay the bills. But when Matthew's Christmas bonus didn't land the way he had expected, it was enough to send him out on his own. He had an idea, and the bones of plan, but...

He's behind the biggest residential development Belfast City Centre has ever seen and he wants to change the way we live. He began his career as a surveyor in London before moving into the development game. The £175 million Loft Lines development in Titanic Quarter comprising 778 apartments is Anthony Best's biggest project to date. He details how he makes the sums add up in a city that isn't alwa...

We catch up with two former guests to find out what's happened since we first met them on the podcast. The Newry lawyer who took an Irish pharma firm onto the Nasdaq with a $1 billion plus listing and the Mid Ulster builder who constructed the top four floors of Mayfair's Claridges Hotel in Magherafelt. Who says remarkable things can't happen in remote places? John McEvoy and Mark Gribbin update J...

Jan Cunningham believes in failure. He may have helped put Ulster Rugby on the world stage as European champions with a stunning victory in the 1999 Heineken Cup. But he contends that even that great team had more failures than successes. It's what you learn from the failures that makes all the difference. 25 years later and Jan is now Managing Partner at one of Northern Ireland's leading independ...

Things get meta on the podcast this week as Jim Fitzpatrick dives into AI with industry leaders Catriona Campbell of EY and Tom Gray of Kainos. Not only do they explore and explain the huge challenges and opportunities that AI presents to business, but Jim takes a mind-bending detour down the AI rabbit hole with an AI podcast within an AI podcast. Angela McGowan joins the discussion as they unpick...

Game of Thrones is one of the biggest TV shows ever made so you would expect a tour based around one of its key studio locations to be world class. And it is. The challenge for Sam Harding, the relatively new managing director at the Game of Thrones Studio Tour, isn’t the product or experience. It’s location – nestled in the countryside near Banbridge in the middle of Northern...

Thana Thammavongsa was working for a mapping company in Coleraine when her career took an abrupt turn off the planned route and into the unchartered territory of running her own catering business. Three years later and she was taking a lease on premises in the town to see if her healthy Thai and Vietnamese street food concept would play well with a permanent base. Now more than a decade later she'...

We don’t all get to take ourselves to the top of a mountain for inspiration. But for Matt Creighton, it worked. As a keen skier, he’d taken a job after university as a seasonaire in the Alps. The problem he faced was the paltry pay. In order to allow for a bit of beer money he began screen printing T-shirts to sell to his mates in the ski resorts. His side hustle has since...

Pete Boyle began with a student loan and an illegal pitch on Belfast’s Royal Avenue. He built a retail business that’s made him many millions and that enabled him to buy a reservoir near Belfast (because he loves kayaking) and turn it into a tourist and leisure destination. Meanwhile he’s been growing a property development business with a focus on transforming old buildings. Pete B...

The journey begins in 1977 with a Ford Cortina in Crossgar and makes important stops in Dublin and London with foreign destinations now on the horizon. James Nicholson, founder of JN Wines, shares his incredible entrepreneurial journey from selling wine out of the back of his car to building a multi-million pound business. The episode explores the ups and downs of running a business, the chal...

John Kelly of McConnell’s Irish Whisky: It looks like a typo, but it’s central to the brand - McConnell’s Irish Whisky. Spot the issue? This week on Trading Up, Jim goes in search of an explanation for the missing “e” as he meets the man who has helped breathe new life into a brand that was once one of the biggest names in whisky/whiskey from Belfast to Boston but had gone out of busines...

When he’s not wearing wellies on the family farm at the weekend or trainers as he pounds the pavements prepping for his latest marathon, Rob Heron wears the title of Managing Partner at EY in Northern Ireland. A diverse skillset and decent fitness level is useful for the boss of a firm in rapid growth mode. EY in Northern Ireland has ambitious plans to more than double its 950-strong workforc...

Maeve Monaghan loves making money.  It’s what she does with it that makes her business different. She heads Now Group which is a social enterprise, so her profits get reinvested in her cause - helping young people with learning difficulties and autism to find meaningful employment. She never begs, she delivers. She delivers for the many businesses who buy her products and servi...

The serious business of fun - So, picture the scene. You’re in town doing a bit of shopping but you’ve got your young toddler with you and they're getting restless. They begin tugging your arm towards the little rides out in the mall. How much are you willing to feed that machine and how does the business behind it capture your pound, or two? That’s a question for John McAreavey whose fa...

Have you ever tired of hauling a suitcase after you on holidays and the queues for bag drop at airports; or wondered how to get a student packed off to university with all their gear; or even had to move the contents of your home to another country? The chances are you may have come across the business founded by the guest on Trading Up this week, Paul Stewart of mybaggage.com How has he turn...

This business turned its net zero ambitions into a bottom line bonus, and at the same time found itself snarled up in an unwanted investigation from the all-powerful Competition and Markets Authority (CMA). Connor McCandless runs EnergyStore, a successful small company that makes and sells insulation products. He didn’t expect the CMA to come calling and, when they did, he wasn’t sure if...

Securing £100m with a slide deck What sort of start-up business secures £100m in funding with nothing more than a slide-deck presentation to show for itself? And what sort of person is willing to take that money and several hundred millions more to build a business that won’t make a profit for years? This week on Trading Up we meet Dominic Kearns, the founder and CEO of telecoms challeng...

There's a Maghera company of joiners involved in some of the most prestigious commercial, leisure and residential developments in London. If you’ve ever needed anything more complicated than a bit of shelving installed at the house and want some decent woodwork done, you’ll know that It’s always hard to find a good joiner. On Trading Up this week Jim discovers that’s possibly because most of...

Peter Ringland is one half of the family firm, The Ringland Group, the other half is his brother Ben. Between them they’ve developed from an Airbnb business began in 2008 to a multi-million pound Belfast hospitality group. Their latest venture - Amelia Hall - is their most ambitious to date. A £12 million development beginning with an Italian food and drink concept opening in Septem...

Brainwaves and brain-boxes in Belfast where a tech startup's mission is to zap brains across the world with electricity Dr Jason McKeown is the founder of Belfast tech start-up Neurovalens. His medical devices, which he has been developing for the last six years, have recently won two approvals from the powerful Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in the US.  These devices pulse electricity in...

Kneecap, the movie Trevor Birney is much more than a tenacious investigative journalist. He is a documentarian who has found himself producing a feature film that’s become a viral sensation even before it lands in cinemas across Ireland, the UK and US this month. In some ways it couldn’t be more niche: Kneecap is an Irish language film telling the story of a west Belfast rap group. But e...