Cathal Q&A2 Mar 2020 20:13
Extracts from Q&A interview with Cathal Friel dated Wed 18th Sep, 2019
Gives a sense of the determination. Some may find his answers interesting.
Q: How did your strategy develop in the context of the banking crisis and economic crisis?
A: I have experienced economic ups and downs in a personal capacity. During the 1981 recession, when interest rates shot through the roof and due to my father’s overexposure to property debts in 1980, I had to leave school as a 15-year-old after my Inter Cert and help him deal with chronic bad health and banking debts.
As such, for the rest of my life, I have hated bank debt. While running my own business in 2007, I entered the banking and economic crisis with virtually no debts except for a modest house mortgage.
Q: How do you define success and what drives you to succeed?
A: I define success as achieving your goals no matter how large or how small, being happy and acting as a person that people respect and look up to and whom parents of young children may say “become like that person”.
What drives me is the memory, hurt and anger from virtually losing everything as a 15-year old teenager in Donegal, practically giving up my schooling to help bail out my father.
That experience has made me very hungry to keep moving forward to be successful. And despite leaving school at 15, I still managed to go back to college at night to get a Master’s degree, to become probably the only lecturer in Ireland without a Leaving Cert or A level. And along the way paid off my family debt and built successful businesses.
Q: What’s the best advice you’ve been given, or would give, in business?
A: Stay hungry, work hard, be nice to people and embrace change.
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