Peter Mangan, founder and CEO of The Freebird Club

Transcript: Peter Mangan, founder and CEO of The Freebird Club

OK. So I’m not the earliest of risers, but when I do get up and about, it’s usually about 8 o’clock. I would start actually just by browsing the newspapers and seeing what’s happening in the world, that gets me going. Then it’s really a case of addressing the e-mails. Because we have members all over the world, a lot of new e-mails come in from our members or prospective members overnight, and, of course, I’ve general business e-mails to be dealing with as well. So I usually do an hour or two of addressing e-mails in the morning. Then probably around 10:00 or 10:30, I avoid the traffic if I’m driving. I come into the office and I meet the team. We have a small team here in the DIT [Dublin Institute of Technology] campus in Dublin. People are working on marketing, business development, technology and customer service, so we all catch up in the morning and see how things are going. We would usually have a staff meeting every couple of days going through a particular agenda. And there’s always customer service to be done, and we all do a bit of that, but we’re working on particular marketing campaigns, etc. as well.

Before I make it home, I’ll usually do try to get a swim or a run in, although my discipline isn’t as good as it was in that regard. But we’ll say on a good day I go for a swim in the local swimming pool on the way home. I don’t have a television at home, so there’s usually a bit more work done. There’s a lot of grant applications that I tend to be writing, and we have a magazine as well at the moment that we’re getting out, The Freedbird Times, for members, and I’ve one or two articles I need to get writing on those. So there’s always a bit of work to be done in the evening. And if it’s a good day then I’ll switch off and read a book for half an hour or so before I go to bed. Yeah, that’s a typical day, but recently there’s been a lot of travel. We have some international, we’ve a few international connections in terms of collaborators and partners, and there’s often a Skype call or two, or indeed maybe even a conference. In the last month, I’ve been at two conferences, and there’s another one next month, so who knows, there could be a flight to be taken as well. So the days are varied at the moment, but they’re fairly full, that’s what I would say.