WELCOME
A welcome message from Fionuala Pender, IIBN Global Chair Welcome to the first issue of Global Connections for 2021, the IIBN eMagazine for our 9,000 members globally. We are delighted to bring you a terrific line up of Guest Contributors this month, including Fiona McEntee of McEntee Law in Chicago, Janice Flynn of Janice Flynn & Associates in London, Ross Finnegan of Lonsdale Capital Partners in London, Chris Burge of Spark Crowdfunding in Dublin and Deirdre McKettrick of UFurnish in London. In addition to this, we feature the Profiles of a broad group of IIBN Members from across all of our
IIBN
Global Connections
Global Connections magazine is published by: Irish International Business Network Registered address: 2nd Floor, 15 Greycoat Pl, Westminster, London SW1P 1SB, United Kingdom Editor: IIBN Executive Team e: info@iibn.com Advertising Sales: Ailbhe Mullen t: +44 (0) 7470 339799 t: +353 892363821 e: ailbhe@iibn.com Design: Dean Coulter Design on Tap www.designontap.co.uk www.iibn.com
© Irish International Business Network Global Connections is published 6 times a year. No reproduction of any part of the magazine is permitted, nor storage in a retrieval system without prior consent of the publisher. No commercial exploitation is permitted. No warranty is implied in respect of any product or trader mentioned herewith.
Chapters and across all business sectors. Future editions of this Magazine will further extend these profiles and we will be in contact with you in the coming weeks and months for inclusion in these. For those of you who have been attending IIBN events going back many years we have included a series of photos from previous events. As a not-for-profit organisation, we are very grateful to our sponsors for their continued support of IIBN, many of whom you will see in the ads throughout this eMagazine. If you would like to promote your own business in future issues of Global Connections, we would love to hear from you. Finally, many of our Members may now be looking for new job opportunites and we are keen to stress that IIBN is well placed to help you deepen connections and / or advertise any job openings you may have in the coming months that can be shared with the IIBN community globally. We hope you enjoy reading (and
sharing!) this, our latest issue of Global Connections, as much as we have enjoying preparing it. Who could have imagined, as we gathered for events in London, New York and Dublin in February 2020, that it would be this long before we could meet? With the vaccination rollout well underway across all major cities, we are hopefully getting much closer to the time when we can start running face-to-face events again and we greatly look forward to meeting you all in person in the very near future. Fionuala Pender IIBN Global Chair
CONTENTS 03 Welcome and contents
12 Members Profiles
06 Entrepreneurs - Plan Your Exit by Ross Finegan
26 What does an Investor look for in a Start-up? By Chris Burge
08 New Visa Opportunities and Hope for the Undocumented Irish in the USA by Fiona McEntee
28 Growing a business in Covid by Deirdre McGettrick 34 IIBN Programmes
10 Good News for IIBN Members who want to Live and do Business in the USA By Janice Flynn
36 Throw Back from Event in 2019
The Best Place to Meet the Best Senior Irish Professionals, Globally
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