AFTER THE BOOM:THINGS HAVE changed since Máire Kearns and her partner Deirdre Fox returned from Boston in 1995.

At the time, they were working for IT consulting firm Cambridge Technology Partners, charged with setting up a branch of the company in Ireland. A booming economy saw staff numbers in the resulting operation grow to 100, but 2001 brought a chill wind and Cambridge ended up being sold to Novell, with Kearns and Fox both taking redundancy.

In 2003, they set up their own company, Blue Sky Training Consulting, with the focus on training clients to deliver IT and other projects on time.

“We were really busy until December 2008,” says Kearns.

“In January 2009, we got two phone calls from two of our major clients, saying their training budgets had been cut.”

Thinking caps were immediately donned and, before long, Blue Sky was implementing changes.

Consultancy, traditionally the smaller part of the business, suddenly moved to the fore.

Kearns says that, while companies are not so interested in training just now, they are happy to bring people in to “hand-hold” their staff through big projects.

“Short blasts of help” is how Kearns describes the work, which was most welcome after a first quarter that was down by a double-digit percentage on the first quarter of 2008.

For the year, though, she expects the numbers to be steady, helped by the shift towards consultancy and, particularly, a move into wind energy consultancy. The firm has also taken on a project to manage a facility’s move “offshore” to Ukraine and is working on more business of this type.

Kearns and Fox have been lucky in not having to worry about staff because they only engage other people on a project basis.

Managing fixed costs is also easier for them than most because the business is run from their respective homes in Kildare and Dublin. All in all, the two are optimistic. “We hope to be up by 2010,” says Kearns of Blue Sky’s balance sheet.

Tell us your story at aftertheboom@irishtimes.com