Conor’s career journey began with a marketing degree, followed by various roles in the field. In 1997, he transitioned into internet marketing at a technology firm, recognising the early potential of the online space. Over the next 25 years, Conor worked with notable brands like Vodafone and RaboDirect, contributing to award-winning campaigns. His entrepreneurial ventures started in the 2000s with projects like BOSS Metrics, a social media analytics product. Later, Conor founded Connector, a digital marketing and events company that achieved significant success, including major clients and industry awards. After selling Connector in 2020, Conor launched Career Lab, focusing on career planning for modern, non-linear career paths.
Career Labs latest event will be held in Baseline in Dublin in Dublin 8 on Wednesday October 9th. Tickets Are available here.
Can you tell me more about your background prior to opening your first business?
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I’m originally from Oldcastle and Co. Meath, and followed traditional career path into University, where I studied marketing, and then proceeded into various marketing roles.
And then around 1997 I got my first job in with the Internet marketing in a technology firm. I had zero experience but blagged it and moved to Cavan to secure this new career path.
This was because I spotted the early potential of the internet, and then combining that with my marketing experience and qualifications, I decided to stick into marketing online, and I’ve been there ever since, which is over 25 years.
So along the way, then I worked for various agencies and various brands, including like the Vodafone and RaboDirect, where I was online marketing manager at the launch. And we won a lot of awards for the first online-only bank in Ireland.
Before the success of Connector you created a number of other businesses. How successful were these early businesses?
So in the noughties, I started dabbling with some personal projects, which included some selling T shirts and and blogging, etc. Around 2013, I also set up BOSS Metrics, which was a SaaS product for social media analytics, and this was in 2013 so we got some funding from NDRC and from Enterprise Ireland, and we made as much progress as we could before the money ran out. We had a good, pretty good product, but we weren’t able to sell insufficient numbers to make that a viable business.
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Can you tell me more about Connector, why did you open it, how successful was it?
So Connector was a personal brand that I created as a play on my first name. I started running meetups in 2008 to ‘connect’ people and a social blog about people I was meeting, etc.
Connector became a digital marketing and events company because of my background in digital marketing.
We had a lot of success with likes of Huawei and Sony and Volkswagen, Benecol, etc, winning awards in Ireland, in the US and in Europe.
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Why did you decide to sell the company and what did you do after selling it?
So connector came from that, from that background, and then it became an agency, started hiring some people. At its height, we were doing a million a year in revenue. So this was a milestone, obviously it’s hard to get to that level and then hard to sustain it.
After about 10 years, I decided I had enough of running a company in the increasingly competitive market for marketing services, and decided to sell it. And this ended up being sold to Granite Digital in February 2020.
After that, there was, we were, Ireland was in lockdown, so I took a little bit of a break, got into gardening, and then also started looking into careers and career career career planning, people who started making their own careers, which led to Career Lab.
I also work as a freelancer on innovation, marketing, and education projects.
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What led you to create your newest venture Career Lab? Why did you think there was a need for it?
And Career Lab was an early foray into investigating modern career planning for non-linear, non-traditional careers, where a person may be employed, self-employed or both juggling multiple income streams or projects.
So careers are becoming much more complicated with much more opportunities for multiple income streams and OECD said that ‘50% of all professionals will have multiple income sources by 2030.’
Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn recently said ‘Within ten years, 50% of people will become freelancers.’
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Can you tell me more about it, what is its mission and what plans you have for the future?
During my research, I noticed that career career education wasn’t keeping abreast with market developments. I set to work on a one-page career planning tool.
The Career Lab project is a career design experiment for Conor. As well as monthly workshops, his forthcoming workbook on ‘Career Business Plans’ is due out in 2024. Other career planning tools like a calculator for ‘Career Lifetime Earnings’ are ready for testing using popular platforms like Notion. Webinars, courses and programs are all in advanced stage of readiness.
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What types of events does Career Lab organise currently, and how often are they held?
So currently, Career Lab organises monthly meetups, which will a monthly workshops where we’ll look at a topic, like career collaboration, career AI tools, personal branding. And there will be more events like Side Hustle Saturday, etc. Events are run currently monthly, between a mix of online and offline.
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What type of marketing or partnerships do you have and hope to develop for Career Lab? What other ways do you attract new users?
Well, currently talking to organisations about partnerships, and they are generally in the career space. There’s career coaches, there’s youth organisations, recruitment firms, and training companies.
Career Lab is currently promoted on social media with online ads to follow soon.
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What impact do you think the pandemic had on career development? How is this playing out in the workplace for new hires?
I feel the lockdowns demonstrated to many people that they were unhappy at work, like quite a few people were unhappy at work, and they were quite happy to just once they were given the break from getting in and out of the office every day, taking two, three hours round trip.
So they were missing out in family time, etc. So when that was laid bare to them, a lot of people didn’t want to go back to that, to that life, that commuter lifestyle. And so people were reappraising their work life balance.
But research has shown from Gallup that even now that in 2023 there was like 85% of people are disengaged at work. So that is, I got an insanely scary number of people that just don’t really like or don’t just not that buzzed by what they’re doing, and quite a lot choose to do nothing about it.
‘85% of global employees are disengaged at work, costing $8.8T in 2023’ Gallup
But in that within that number, there are people who will do something about it, and those are people I would try and help. So they’re motivated to try and do something new, whether it’s explore personal projects or side hustles or, you know, maybe doing something on their own in the future.
So, yeah, I think for new hires, yeah, I think still the events are coming back to normal, but there was a big drop off in events and networking. And just think, people got a little bit lazy and anti social. And that is that is correcting itself now as more and more companies are trying to get everyone back to the office in a full time environment.
Online education got a boost with so many people working from home and getting used to video calls.
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Can you tell me if there are any other people, companies or programmes that you are a big fan of in DEI in Ireland?
When it comes to dei in Ireland, my main recommendation is everyone to visit ‘Focus on Diversity’ and follow Barry and all social channels and support him as much as you can, because he’s doing amazing work
He’s a real leader in this space. And I’m excited to see he’s doing a new course, and I hope this would be a great success and will be shared with different organisations from its launch program in Rathmines College.