From teaching English in Japan to founding a corporate financial services business
Brian McDonald chats about how he discovered that the career he thought he would love was not for him
To please his father who believed he should get a career which guaranteed a steady income, Brian McDonald qualified as a Chartered Accountant.
However, he believed that teaching was the career for him, so following his graduation he traveled to Japan to teach English in a rural area of the country.
After two years he realised that teaching wasn’t for him.
His business career then progressed in earnest working in Ireland, France and the UK with a variety of organisations. First it was with a small chartered accountancy firm in Dublin, Duignan Carthy O’Neill, That was followed by a number of senior management roles which included : a manager in PWC, senior Manager in AIB Bank, executive director at GE Corporate Finance Bank, executive roles with Paragon Group UK Limited, a director at Beatha Technology and in 2018 establishing Bay Advisory.
Bay Advisory is a provider of corporate finance services, offering guidance on mergers and acquisitions, financial restructuring and capital raising.
In this chat with Jim and Ellen Brian recounts the many lessons learned during his varied career: his thoughts on leadership; entrepreneurship; remote working against office based; adjusting to different cultures and his admiration for people who work in and volunteer with charities.
His advice for those seeking to move up in your career: listen twice as much as you should speak; if you make a mistake, admit it, learn from it and move on
If you are in a management role Brian says that it is important to encourage people to challenge or disagree with you and focus on people management as much as process management
As someone with a very keen interest in sport Brian equates a team in sport with a business team in that no matter how good an individual team member is the team must perform.
The conversation inevitably turned to AI with Brian explaining why he is positive about it with a human in the link.
It’s another must listen-to episode
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