Lisa has combined a love of IT and teaching 

Career paths aren’t always linear, but more often than not, when a person is drawn to a particular area, they end up working in that field in some shape.

That’s true for Lisa Finn, owner of Enhance Consulting. Lisa wanted to be a teacher but circumstances dictated that she couldn’t pursue that at third level, so she ended up studying Computer Science instead. Lisa worked for CMS Distribution in Kiltimagh for 17 years but has set up on her own in the past two years, bringing her love of IT and teaching together.

We sat down to chat about what brought her to where she is now.

Angelina: Lisa, thanks for talking to me. Tell me a little bit about yourself.

Lisa: I was born in the UK to an Irish mother and an Italian father. We moved back to the west of Ireland as a family 30 years ago. My mum is originally from Ballyhaunis, and that is how I ended up here in the first place. 

I went to school in Claremorris and then went to college in Limerick in LIT and studied Computer Science there for four years and achieved my degree. After college, I spent a lot of time working and travelling. My big passion is travelling. I spent time in the States, Australia and Asia. I finally decided to relocate back to the west of Ireland, back to Ballyhaunis.

Angelina: Why do you think you pursued computer science?

Lisa: I always wanted to be a teacher. When I moved to Ireland, I discovered I couldn't be a teacher because I didn't have Irish. I was 13 when I moved to Ireland, so I could get the exemption. 

Some people have a flair for languages. I was one of those people that didn't have a flair for them. From that point of view, the effort of being a teenager and having to pick up Irish when I could get away without doing it, I chose the easy option. So of course, when I applied for colleges to be a national school teacher, I just couldn't do it because of not having Irish. 

At that time there was a lot of buzz around computers and programming, and I did enjoy that. So I decided to go ahead and do it. I started college in '98 and when it was coming to graduation, it was around the time of the crash in terms of the IT industry (the Dot Com bubble). The year I finished, a lot of companies that would have offered graduate programmes actually didn't have them on offer. What's funny is I spent a lot of years then not actually practising, which I'm sure is what a lot of people do - you do your degree in one thing and you end up moving into another avenue over the years. 

I guess because of my travelling, one of the easiest roles to get into was sales. I did sales in America and sales also in Australia when I was living and working in both of those places because it was easy to get a sales job. When I relocated back to Ireland, because I really wanted to get into an IT company in Galway, I pursued that and they had offered me a role, which was bringing me back into the IT world. 

But then I got offered another job with CMS Distribution in Kiltimagh, which was just down the road, and I made the decision to join them, and I didn't leave them then for 17 years. It was the best learning path of my career I could have imagined. Then I decided to go out on my own.

Angelina: How did your company evolve then, Lisa?

Lisa: When I started on my own, I was very much focused on the training piece because I enjoy that. I enjoy helping people develop. I guess it comes back to me always wanting to be a teacher when I was younger. It's that coaching, it's that mentoring, it's being able to make a difference in somebody's career or potential life choices. That gives me a bit of a buzz. 

And because, as I said, I never lost that computer programming, I never lost that thought process or the ability to actually code. Then when I was doing some work in the background for a client, I discovered the potential in the Microsoft platform and I went back to loving the fact that I could get something that was broken to suddenly work.

Angelina: You are two and a half years on your own now - how has that been?

Lisa: At the moment, there's an opening where businesses need to digitise, and they are looking at that digital journey of what they need to go on to improve their processes. Some companies have invested heavily in digital transformations and it hasn't had the impact that they wanted in the organisation because technology on its own is not going to make a difference. We need to look at the people. We need to look at how engaged they are. We need to look at the culture in the organisation in terms of how they're working, the current processes, and the technology is the icing on the cake at the end. 

Where for me, Enhance Consulting is able to really add value to businesses is that my abilities allow me to do a combination of all three. It's really engaging the people from the start and bringing them on that journey with you. When I get involved in an organisation, I literally cement myself within that organisation. I treat it as if it was my own business in terms of the dedication and the passion that I put into it.

Angelina: So you've just added another string to the bow with a selection of online courses.

Lisa: What I was offering to organisations was very much the consulting, the support, and the mentoring. And then because of my programming knowledge, I discovered this whole realm of applications as part of people's Microsoft licences that were available to them. 

So the company then went down the route of developing Microsoft specific digital solutions. And the great thing about them is everybody's using Microsoft already. So most of these organisations didn't have to incur additional licence costs. They were just exploring the potential of what they already have. 

So as part of that, what you sometimes find is that you go into organisations and there's these knowledge gaps for people where they may feel that they know an application but I did find that perhaps the potential of those applications or programmes wasn't being realised fully. 

Covid threw us all into remote working. So people got thrown in to using things like Microsoft Teams and SharePoint. And we were just all working in that organised chaos of suddenly being remote. And then, of course, we all came up for air and we said, 'Wow, these platforms are great. We're going to keep using them.' But because we were potentially thrown into using it in the first place, we were missing some of the knowledge them. What I was doing was I was offering training to organisations to make sure that they had the right foundation for using these platforms. 

But of course, we know how challenging it is. I mean, right now we're killed with being busy. Day to day life is hard enough without somebody saying, go up and do a course for eight hours in Dublin or Galway or wherever it might be. On the back of that then, I developed an eLearning platform that was very much built around my own experiences because being in technology every day is a school day for myself. I need to learn all the time but I don’t necessarily have the time to do long courses. 

So that is why I developed Enhance Learning, which is an online learning platform. The topics are very much based on my own experiences from consulting. Every one of the modules range between 20 to 30 minutes. People can very easily do 20 minutes tonight, 20 minutes tomorrow and just finish the modules in that concept of learning. Because it's an eLearning platform, you can learn anywhere and learn at any time. This is allowing people to take charge of their own learning. It's allowing them to take accountability to feel they're in the right mindset at that point in time to pick up the learning.

Angelina: What keeps you driven Lisa?

Lisa: We're all trying to work smarter, not harder. That is the end goal for all of us. But unfortunately, sometimes what's seen is the working harder versus the working smarter. So it is trying to change that mentality around working smarter, not harder. I have three children. It's very busy. So it can be very difficult to keep that motivation and that drive going. 

The only thing I would say is I have always had that ethos myself that it should be about working smarter not harder. Like that, I have to look at my own company and I have to go, how can I keep developing the company to work smarter? How can I effectively scale without trying to pull myself in 20 different places. And that's where I guess the concept came about of the online courses because it allows me to record that content, record that knowledge, and get it out to a number of people much quicker than me having to go to each individual site.

Angelina: What advice would you give to someone who is thinking about dipping their toes into the self-employment pool?

Lisa: It is scary to step out. It's okay to make mistakes. It is about the journey and it is exciting. You do feel a great sense of achievement. It is absolutely hard work. I'm juggling being a mother, being a wife and trying to run my own business, and it's not easy. The only person who probably gets left behind a little bit is me. So it's about trying to make time for myself, trying to focus on going for that walk or making that hair appointment or whatever it is because I do find that when I'm not working, then the rest of my time belongs to my children then. I think it's just important to try and make that time if you can for yourself as well.