Having it all hardly encompasses what Ms Eileen Gleeson has achieved in her 40 years. Daughter of publican Mr Frank Gleeson of the eponymous pub in Booterstown, Dublin, she has achieved an awful lot, abiding by his early advice to her: "If it's only apples you're selling, try and sell them yourself."
Last week she sold FCC, the Dublin public relations company in which she has a 74 per cent stake and her partner Ms Mary McCarthy a 26 per cent share, to Shandwick, the third largest PR company in the world for a figure industry sources put in excess of £3 million (€3.8 million). Shandwick was acquired recently by the Interpublic Group, the multinational media organisation, with a worldwide staff of 28,000.
Part of the money was paid up-front, she confirms, but declines to give figures. The final figure will be determined by the growth of the company over a 3 1/2-year period. Ms Gleeson will stay on as managing director for the earn-out period, after which time she and Ms McCarthy can elect to remain with the company or leave. FCC is medium-sized in the PR business. Its client list includes the ICS Building Society, Ireland On-Line, the Irish Hotels' Federation, McInerney Holdings, Nissan Ireland, Tedcastle Oil Products and the Vintners Federation of Ireland - to name a few.
In addition to FCC, which she established 11 years ago, Ms Gleeson is special adviser to the President, Mrs McAleese, and has worked for several leading Fianna Fail ministers. She is married to Lt Col Gerry Hegarty and has a four-year-old son, Gavin. They have homes in Sandymount, Dublin, and in Wexford. She employs a full-time nanny because she is frequently abroad with the President and her husband travels a lot also - he is attached to the Army's overseas office. "We have great fun trying to co-ordinate the diaries"
Her interest in PR started the summer after her Leaving Certificate when she was working in the family pub, well-known as a media haunt at lunchtime. Looking at a group of people still there at four o'clock one afternoon, she inquired who they were. "They are in PR," the head waiter replied. "That's for me," she decided.
There followed a PR course in what was then the College of Commerce in Rathmines in 1978. They were the first intake, "guinea pigs to a large extent . . . we did a bit of journalism, a bit of business studies . . . we learned a lot from the journalists who lectured there".
She joined Public Relations of Ireland and stayed for 10 years, becoming a director. Working on the Irish Distillers take-over led to her decision to specialise in financial PR. "I loved the buzz of that big corporate work."
FCC started out small. "We borrowed an office, we borrowed a desk and borrowed a photocopier. There was no capital outlay. I'm not an easy risk-taker."
She says neither she nor Ms McCarthy wanted to be the biggest and best straight-off, but wanted to grow the business their way. This philosophy will continue to dictate development in the new business.
Initially, they were not over-enthusiastic about Interpublic's approach, which was to buy an established business, but, after talking it through, they realised this was the way things were going in PR as much as other areas of the media. The present staff of 15 remains with FCC.
Her work for the President is quite separate from the company. She has an office in Aras an Uachtarain, where she goes for several hours every day. Her weekdays start at 8 a.m. in FCC. She tries to spend an hour and a half with Gavin in the evenings and then it is back to her computer until around 11 p.m. PR has changed since those long lunches in Gleeson's pub. With the proliferation of business sections in newspapers and business programmes on radio, it has become a round-the-clock operation for PR consultants. "Everything has to be news-based. In order to produce the news, you have to work harder behind the scenes with the (client) companies to source the news.
"There is a lot more investigative media. What their readers want is analysis, what's behind the news. The media has to work harder and we have to work harder."
