Irish Rose Consulting

Congratulations to our friends at the Council of Rural Initiatives on the launch of their new web site, developed by Irish Rose Consulting. This was a short-timeframe project, so we made use of Wordpress with a pre-developed template. We’re happy to be able to support the efforts of this new organization working for rural Wisconsin.

 

Since our time living in Ireland, I’ve been using a great online service called ConnectMe Anywhere. This service allows you to purchase phone numbers in dozens of countries and forward them to your own phone. Using this, I was able to provide a U.S. phone number that rang my mobile phone in Ireland, and since we’ve moved back I’ve been able to keep an Irish phone number that rings here in the U.S. Their rates are incredibly reasonable, and their web site makes it very easy to set up a list of phone numbers to be rung.

I recently learned that one of our Irish numbers was ringing straight through to a strange voicemail system rather than our cell phones. I emailed ConnectMe Anywhere’s support department mid-day last Friday. I was pleasantly surprised to have the problem resolved in less than 24 hours, and I was delighted to get that information in the following email:

I have had an engineer look at the problem and it appears when they were doing some testing with Irish numbers on the system and your numbers where pointed to one of our developers by error.  This has now been rectified and are back pointing at your account.  My sincerest apologies and I have added 20 Euros of free credit to your account.  Just to let you know that the technician responsible will be made to wear a dunce cap for 2 weeks and get no mint cookies with his tea.  Again our apologies for the inconvenience and please let me know if you require any further help or have any questions.

That reply, by the way, was from the great, fabulous and good-looking Belinda (ahem, she told me to say that…). While I’d been perfectly happy with the service to this point, this kind of quick and humorous response from their support folks has made me a committed customer. Kudos to Belinda and the entire team at ConnectMe Anywhere!

I recently attended the Midwest Rural Assembly in Sioux Falls, SD. I wrote a short guest post on the Wisconsin Rural Partners web site describing the conference.

Our client Hartung Brothers, Inc. was recently feature on the National Ag Report. Congratulations!

Congrats to our good friend Herby Radmann of Bullfrog Fish Farm who was featured in “Questioning the Locals” column in the most recent issue of Volume One magazine!

Congratulations to our client Hartung Brothers, Inc. of Madison. They’ve signed an agreement to sell their wholesale fertilizer division to The Andersons, an agribusiness based in Maumee, Ohio. We’ve enjoyed working with the folks in the fertilizer division over the past several years, helping with custom software as they expanded their operation. We wish them all the best in their new home.

This year Irish Rose Consulting is celebrating 20 years in business. Since the exact start date has been lost to the mists of time, I decided what better day to call our birthday than St. Patrick’s Day.

In 1989 I was a student at UW-Platteville. One of my part-time jobs was working on an excellent research-and-development project for Niall Enterprises, run by Jack O’Neill, a professor at Platteville. My friend Rick Eagen was also working on the project. The project, developing a collision-avoidance system for small aircraft, was challenging and took us to all kinds of interesting places. We decided we start our own company so that we could pursue our own equally-interesting projects. And so, a nameless company was born.

Shortly after this, we landed a contract with an east-coast educational software firm. We completed a couple of small projects for them, and then were offered a Mac-based project. This presented a bit of a dilemma, as neither Rick nor I had access to, or experience programming, a Mac. We asked a friend, Steve Cooper, if he’d tackle the project for us. When he completed the project, we made him an offer. He could take full payment for the project, or join the company and split the profits. And so, in a matter of weeks, the still-unnamed company would reach its largest number of employees.

With projects coming in, the hunt was on for a name. We all agreed we didn’t want a typical “digital” or “tech” type name, as all technology company names seem to sound alike after awhile. This was in the early days of internet access for students at UW-P, and we were all spending far too much time on internet-relay chat, an early instant-messaging system. One day I was online and saw someone in the user list going by the handle Irish Rose. Immediately Irish Rose Consulting popped into my head. With all three founders being of Irish heritage, we had our name!

Over the following months we continued to pick up projects and formalized the company. We spent a lot of time working on the original collision-avoidance project. Rick and I graduated from school, got “real” jobs and I headed for Chicago, while Steve continued to enjoy the life of a student. So began a couple of years of a distributed company (pre-internet, requiring a lot of FedEx packages!), with occasional weekend meetings and lots of time on the phone. we all carried a lot of hours, working full-time at our jobs and school, then doing Irish Rose work in our off hours.

After a couple of years of this, Rick, climbing the ladder at his day job, opted to leave the company to focus on that. Steve finally graduated from school and moved to Chicago to work for the same engineering firm I did. Irish Rose continued to land larger and larger projects, and we put in way too many sleepless nights keeping up with the work. We bought our first laptop, an early IBM Thinkpad model. Steve and I both moved on to new day jobs and continued with Irish Rose in our off hours.

The start of 1996 brought a large enough contract for Irish Rose to support a full-time employee, so I made the leap, followed a few months later by Steve. We would both work full-time for the company until 2004, when the company went through one more transformation. I had moved to western Wisconsin while Steve still lived in Chicago. We had each developed essentially stand-alone businesses while being co-owners of a corporation operating in two states. The overhead didn’t make any sense, so we split in 2004, with me keeping the Irish Rose Consulting name.

And so Irish Rose Consulting continues to this day. I remain the only full-time employee, choosing not to grow the company. I do often refer to Irish Rose Consulting as “we” because I’ve been fortunate to develop a large network of friends and colleagues who can be called on for projects as needed, as well as relying on the constant support and patience of my wife Kathleen. We’re still based in Menomonie, Wisconsin, recently returned from a two-year stint based in Ireland, a fortuitous event for a company named Irish Rose Consulting. We’ve been fortunate to develop many long-term relationships with clients over the years, a fact which has allowed us to survive and thrive in a constantly changing business.

I’d like to take this chance to say thanks to Rick and Steve for the early days of Irish Rose. The pace and hours involved in a start-up are absolutely crazy, and the only way to survive it and have a little fun along the way is with friends. Our lives took each of us in different directions than we expected when we started Irish Rose, but I’m glad we could at least start this together.

I also owe a huge thanks to our many clients over the years. As we built a new business our clients were generous with their time and loyal in hiring us for repeat projects. We’ve always tried to do good work and have fun, and we’ve been lucky to work with clients who feel the same. Over the years we’ve come to call most of our clients friends, and that alone makes the business a success in our eyes.

And finally, a great thank you to my wife Kathleen. We were living in Chicago barely making ends meet when I came home from work one day and suggested it might be time to try working for Irish Rose full-time. Instead of throwing me out of the house, she told me she had faith in me and that I should take the chance. Being an entrepreneur is not easy. Being the spouse of an entrepreneur is even harder. Kathleen has believed in me from the beginning, and her support has helped create the Irish Rose Consulting that exists today.

Thanks for the first 20 years. Stay tuned to this space to see what happens next!

David Jones recently lost his job. He quickly sat down and wrote a book about his experiences. A friend of ours, the ever-sunny Maryrose Lyons of Brightspark Consulting in Dublin, heard David talking about his book on the radio. She decided to tap her network to create a web site and marketing push for David and his book – in a week! A web designer, web developer, artist, photographer and several marketing folks all came together to pull off this project. We came in at the tail end and helped out by putting the designer’s work onto David’s new Wordpress blog. You can check out David’s new web site here, and read his new blog here.

Congrats to everyone who pitched in on this project, and thanks to Maryrose for pulling it all together. The economy may be dark today, but good things are still happening.

Our good friend Connie Loden recently published an article titled “Localism – What’s the Attraction?” on the NewGeography web site.

“So, what is the “local” appeal? It is the character and quality of life that provides a sense of place – a reminiscence feeling of authenticity and knowing the source of where things come from, who made it and how it was grown. There is a desire to make the personal connection and create an experience in the purchase of a product. That experience often equates to wanting to have that sense of place association. The sense of place character is one that has a unique quality, a distinction and flavor that brings out the emotional response which translates to being an experience of culture and belonging.”

The whole thing is well worth a read, check it out.

Congratulations are also due Connie for being awarded the Ron Shaffer Award by the National Rural Development Partnership. Connie is the first Wisconsinite to win the award. Well done Connie, it’s well deserved!

We ventured out into the frozen evening last night to shoot some pictures at Menomonie’s WinterDaze 2008 parade and fireworks. The parade was organized by our good friends at Main Street Menomonie. Congratulations to the whole crew of volunteers who made this event a great outing.