Businesses that pivoted through the pandemic

Mary Fennin-Byrne

Managing Director of Clanard Court Hotel

We have certainly dug deep to re-invent and reimagine our business during these Covid times! Our first action, was to adapt ourselves to a new Dine @ Home Take Away offering, that then needed to go online, so we opted for a ready-made platform. Later we launched our own custom made Clanard Court Online Store to include this take away service and Christmas Gift Shop including Festive Food & Drink Hampers, partially filled with our homemade Bailey’s Pantry range and Revive Spa Shop items to promote the retail side of our new Revive Spa (opened August 2020).

The Online Store has since evolved with a Valentine’s and Mother’s Day shop selling gifts and meal offers, plus a Home Spa shop. Our Afternoon Tea Boxes have been a huge success and we recently added a new Grazing Antipasti & Cheese Box. We set up Nationwide Courier Delivery for the gift items and offer a local Click + Collect plus a Level 5 Delivery Service for food too.

A big thank-you to Jacqui McNabb and team at Kildare LEO for all their help with the online trading voucher and to Niall Reck and his superlative team in Graphedia for our online shop.

Michael Morrissey

Managing Director of Magnet Marketing

Martin Cullinan

Managing Director of MyWebinar.ie

Prior to March 2020, Magnet Marketing’s core business was sourcing promotional merchandise for the corporate sector including contract management warehousing, logistics and promotion management. One year on and the medical arm of the company, Magnet Medical, whose origins came about due to the pandemic, now accounts for well over 90% of sales. With over 25 years in the business Michael Morrissey and his team were adept at meeting rush orders and providing a very fast turnaround for their client base including customers like the ESB and Irish Distillers. That expertise stood to them when they seamlessly pivoted their business into the world of PPE and www.magnetmedical.ie was born.

They built up a reliable, local supply of CE approved products complying with all safety and testing regulations. This agility earned them a large new client base of Hospitals, Nursing Homes and other essential service providers. Never standing still, they also offer Corporate Antigen Testing services, which they can quickly scale. With an eye on the future, they are ramping up their ECO range of promotional merchandise for when large scale events are back. They are also working on other revenue streams where synergies exist within the business namely in Digital and Media.

How did we survive as an Event Production Company when there were no events? The option we looked at was beginning to mature.... And our timing was perfect. We set up a subsidiary to All Event Productions Ltd. called MyWebinar.ie

We pivoted 100% into Online Event Facilitation with great effect. In 2019 we had purchased a 6m x 3m LED Videowall, a €60k investment, and we already owned other broadcast-quality streaming equipment, cameras, etc. At the same time people were struggling with platforms like Zoom, in the professional sense. We had been in the livestreaming space anyway since 2017 so we had a great jump on our competitors and could very quickly start to help customers deliver their online events without the stresses and worries they were enduring. It helps too that James and I are qualified electronics engineers. We also created a ‘Pop-Up’ Studio allowing us to live-stream directly from a client’s premises. Although restrictions have limited the use of our Live-stream Studio, to date we have facilitated nearly 100 virtual conferences, AGMs and Awards Ceremonies from our two remote control-rooms.

Hybrid is the future and we are perfectly positioned to service these events when the floodgates open again.