From his Co Galway mansion, Declan Ganley manages his burgeoning business empire which stretches to the four corners of Europe and beyond.
A self-made multi-millionaire, Ganley's passions for fancy cars and travel have come together in his latest venture - a pan-European chauffeur driven executive car service for business users. After two years researching the market, the service, called Capital Route, started in London in early January.
The son of Irish emigrants to England, Ganley and his family returned home to Galway when he was 12.At school, he spent lunchtimes checking with his bank manager on the prices of the shares he held.
He went on to get involved in many different ventures. He made much of his initial money by selling metals and timber from Russia and the Baltic States. He also owned 2.5 million hectares of land in Russia, but sold out before the economy collapsed in the early 1990s.
Since then, Ganley has had and continues to have all sorts of high-tech investments across Europe, including broadband, cable TV in Bulgaria and investments in Albania. One of his projects, Adornis, was designed to sell jewellery online as Amazon does with books, but it didn't quite work out that way.
Ganley says his group spent the past two years researching the executive car services market. It found that the sector was very fragmented across Europe, bedevilled by different grades of service and lack of consistency in cars used. During his travels, he says, he has often found that executive car services available on the ground just didn't match up to the sort of consistency and level of service travellers get from airlines. The average fleet size was just two cars, with lots of different models being used and varying standards of driving.
So he claims to have spotted the gap in the market - consistent quality - and started his own service.
So far, Capital Route has about 15 Mercedes on the road, all leased, and he expects to have 200 cars on the road in London within the next 12 months. A full-time sales person has been appointed in the US.
So far, about €2 million has been invested in the project. The plan is to roll out an identical level of service for business users in 26 capitals and other cities across Europe, with a new location being opened every three or four months.
Next on the list is Geneva. Dublin is likely to be some way down the list, although he does say that we need it.