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04th Oct 2018

Top entrepreneur Tom Brennan names the one mistake he wishes he never made in business

Tony Cuddihy

Tom Brennan

Tom Brennan and Louise Grubb, the Co-Founders of TriviumVet – a company that manufactures pharmaceuticals for animals – are our guests this week on The Architects of Business, in partnership with EY Entrepreneur Of The Year™.

Raise more capital.

That’s the advice of Tom Brennan for anyone looking to get their enterprise off the ground, having been asked by host Tadhg Enright what he tells people looking to get their businesses going.

Tom, along with Louise Grubb, is the co-founder of the massively successful TriviumVet but he insists he’s had to learn a lot on the way.

“It’s true for many companies, you can never have enough cash. Don’t be afraid to raise as much money as possible.”

Before he and Louise joined forces, Tom set up another pharma company, EirGen, with business partner Patsy Carney. Tom was an EY Entrepreneur Of The Year™ Finalist with EirGen in 2008.

He wonders how big a success it would have been had they managed to take off the shackles and raise money earlier.

“If I look back at EirGen, we were probably under-capitalised for the first number of years and I often wonder if we had raised more capital earlier, what the end result would have been.

“You find, especially with start-up companies, they’re often afraid of the finance and they’re often afraid to pull those financial plans together. In my last company, we went raising money on version 47 of the business plan. And it was a lot of work; we put a lot of preparation into identifying what we wanted to do, how we were going to execute it and the funding we needed for it.”

Listen to the full episode here…

Louise and Tom are both veterans of the pharmaceutical world, who turned their attention to helping veterinarians treat small animals.

They have both already established several successful business ventures, including Louise’s founding of 2016 EY Entrepreneur Of The Year™ Finalists Q1 Scientific.

“With serious diseases for dogs and cats, and for your companion animals in general, there are not approved treatments available for many of the conditions they get later in life,” Tom says.

“This is the area where we’re fitting into with TriviumVet. In that, there aren’t the drugs specifically registered for dogs and cats for these types of diseases, so we’re developing those drugs,” Louise adds.

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