A drone strike on her bottling factory was just a bump on road for Mary Sadlier
Mary Sadlier, CEO of Coole Swan, comes across as someone who is full of energy, enthusiasm, and the determination to succeed.
Sadlier is the fifth guest on series 2 of the Business Plus Talks podcast, in association with Phillip Lee LLP.
She took on the cream liqueur brand in its infancy and has managed to bring it to key marketplaces like the US, UK, Germany and Canada, where it is seen as a premium option when compared to the market leader Baileys.
The role has not come without its issues, as Sadlier says, for so long she saw the business “take two steps forward and fourteen steps back,” although now she feels like they are at a stage where they are taking “two steps forward and not going backwards anymore.”
Her goal is to “take 10 steps forward.”
Sadlier, along with her husband and daughters, has put in the work over the last 14 years, but the role has kept her awake at night, something she now holds up like a badge of honour.
“I woke up at 2am this morning, and I haven’t gone back to sleep because I was worrying about something.
“Kevin Costner was interviewed last week, and he has a major ‘ick’. He said, ‘Unless you’ve lain awake at night as a person with a business worrying about something, and turned to your partner and said how the hell are we going to do this, then you’re not an entrepreneur’.
“So then I thought, great, I have a title for this madness, I am an entrepreneur.”
Sadlier has encountered numerous issues and ‘bumps’ throughout her journey with Coole Swan, and tells host Dave Burke about some of them, including how she managed to deal with a Russian drone hitting her bottling partner’s factory in Poland.
It took all of her industry skill through negotiations, white lies and remaining calm on the surface to keep everything steady because, in the end, Sadlier says “the consumer can never have known” about what goes on behind the scenes.
Sadlier follows in the footsteps of Conor McCarthy, Fidelma McGuirk, Joanna Gilfoy and Donnchadh Casey in the second series of the podcast.
Mary Sadlier, CEO of Coole Swan.
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