Local Gweedore-based Tech Entrepreneur Brian Mac Gairbhigh is celebrating 10 years in business this year.
We spoke to Brian about his TECHIE2U company and plans for the years to come:
I run an I.T. Support company here called TECHIE2U. We have been providing Tech support to Residential and Business clients in the Gaeltacht and wider Donegal community and beyond for a decade now.
My own history is mainly in Information Technology I trained in LYIT back in 2001. I worked in LYIT on work placement and worked in Údarás na Gaeltachta as their Technical Support Administrator for the Gweedore Branch.
I found it difficult to find a full-time job in I.T. back then in Donegal so I ended up working as a consultant before eventually hitting a wall like many of the companies I support, and that was of course the 2008 recession.
There was very little happening here in Gweedore back then, most of the news was negative of company and factory closures, many of my friends emigrated at this point but I decided to make a stand here, so I decided to start my own small Tech Support business back in 2009.
Brian Mac Gairbhigh – TECHIE2U
I must admit back then many of the residential/home clients were struggling just as much as the businesses I supported. It was a bleak and challenging period for both the Business and I. However, as a fluent Irish speaker surprisingly I believe the language completely, unexpectedly helped me an awful lot as Gaeltacht based clients seemed much more comfortable communicating with me through the medium of Irish.
Since then I have grown the business to a point where I have thousands of clients in Donegal and beyond. I really enjoyed helping local companies with their I.T. Systems helping them operate safely and more efficiently and even helping some of them out when they were hit with serious ransomware viruses or in some cases had total hardware failure.
Over the years I have lost count of the number of companies I have potentially saved from catastrophe in losing their own business files and indeed client information.
During the recession even though I could have earned an awful lot more abroad I managed to actually buck the trend and start and grow my own business which of course brought its own reward and gave me a great sense of achievement and purpose as well as building a tremendous network of business clients.
Thankfully I have seen green shoots beginning to appear in Donegal in the last two years, the business scene in the ground here is experiencing growth and becoming more vibrant. So even though I am an outspoken critic of Dublin centric policy in this county, I believe that there is a bright future here in west Donegal. I moved into a state of the art €12 Million business hub here in Gweedore last year called GTEIC, it is run by Údarás na Gaeltachta and has been a great help to me as there are state of art fibre broadband and office facilities.
Údarás na Gaeltachta’s gteic @Gaoth Dobhair. Photo Clive Wasson
Part of the attraction for moving into this building is not just the facilities but also the high calibre of the companies and people that work within them here. We have multinational satellite branches here for companies such as Pramerica and Optum also for that very reason, as well as other solo entrepreneurs I can count on for advice.
As a solo entrepreneur it is great to add structure to my business and meet with fellow professionals from different industries and professions some of whom are returning after being away working abroad for over a decade. That, combined with the highly talented and educated local people, is an unbeatable combination. I believe there are the makings of many world-class-beating enterprises here that just need a little encouragement to flourish.
So I am looking at the future and hope to be able to make maximum use out of this facility and employ people as I want to change the negative view some people have of west Donegal, that it is isolated and indeed very much not at the races in real business terms.
That is not the case as I have recently started providing outsourced I.T. services to companies as far away as America and Canada I am able to do this from the Business park here in Gweedore remotely over the internet. Location is no longer a barrier, the world is increasing becoming a very small place.
Brian Mac Gairbhigh – TECHIE2U
I believe it is very important to document and write down your goals so you can document and hold yourself accountable and move towards achieving them, so with this in mind I plan to establish a centre for IT Excellence here in Gweedore. I regularly carry out cybersecurity audits with Donegal companies before I take them on as a Managed Services Contract client, many have had a tough time getting through the recession and understandably have failed to upgrade or replace their I.T. Systems and equipment. Many of them simply do not understand the risks they are taking with their own and client’s information. I plan to change that and let them focus on what they do best.
In most parts of the world companies have being using cloud services for over a decade now, many Irish companies I audit are using systems that are outdated it would be fair to say most Irish companies are about 15 years behind the United States and most parts of the world in how we operate our small businesses. I believe it is high time to change that I firmly believe in a cloud first policy this is without doubt the best and safest way to run any SMB in 2019.
Get in touch with Brian at Techie2u by visiting www.techie2u.ie or calling 086 375 6907
