Nightline Group founder to speak at Athlone Start-up Night

The AIB Start-up Academy will continue its tour around Ireland with a stop in the midlands later this month.

The next Start-up Night will take place on September 16th at the Sheraton Hotel in Athlone, where attendees will be able to network with both local start-ups and some of Ireland’s leading entrepreneurs.

Among them will be John Tuohy, chief executive of Nightline Group, Ireland's largest independent delivery company. Ciara Donlon, founder of Theya Lingerie, will also speak at the event. The company designs lingerie for women who have had breast cancer surgery or are undergoing treatment. Its designs are based solely on input from their customer base.

Tuohy founded the company with chief operating officer Dave Field 23 years ago, and since then it has grown from two men and a van to 800 employees.

Nightline recently created 20 jobs at its new Parcel Motel depot in Dublin 11, which is part of its e-commerce business division.

Tuohy plans on talking to the audience about the importance of market research, marketing and cash-flow management in starting and running a business.

“A lot of people new to business don’t realise that it’s not about how good your product or service is, how good your food tastes: it’s actually the amount of money in your current account that determines whether you’ll be in business from one week to the next,” he said.

“We started the company with £10,000 of redundancy money, and we haven’t introduced any fresh capital to the business since we started it 23 years ago. And now the business is turning over €50 million a year.”

Along with the key speakers, three local entrepreneurs will pitch their start-ups on stage.

Linda Syron will talk about her company, Mollie Moo’s Pet Farm in Mullingar. Daragh O’Rourke will pitch Auctus, which develops animal nutrition solutions for farms.

One of last year’s Start-up Academy finalists, Karl McCarthy, will pitch Usher, an event- booking application platform. Usher curates and showcases quality event listings.

The event is part of the lead-up to this year's AIB Start-up Academy, a partnership between AIB and The Irish Times. There have been Start-up Nights in Dublin, Limerick, Cork, Galway and Letterkenny, and there are more to come.

The nights, which run throughout the autumn, connect entrepreneurs with like- minded people and the wider start-up community. There are forthcoming events in Wexford, Killarney, Kilkenny and Dublin.

The academy is also looking for the brightest start-ups in the country to apply for its intensive, eight-week training course that begins in early 2016.