Frank Prendergast

There's great freedom in working on your own, with no boss... but there's also no-one to bounce ideas off, no-one to challenge you to grow, and no-one to fill in the gaps in your skillset. When myself and Marci realised we worked together really well, the brand strategist and the brand storyteller, it was like putting the last piece of a jigsaw puzzle in place - everything clicked into place, and the picture was complete. We help personal brands rise above the blah - how? We help them define their brand, align their online presence, and shine through their content. Shoot me a message if you'd like to know more...

I've been really lucky to have mostly worked in companies with very close friends and family, creating the type of environments we all wanted to work in. But there's a freedom that comes with being a sole trader that I love. So after working my way up from web designer to management, to then founding a company, I went out completely on my own and worked as a freelance web designer and digital marketer... Before meeting Marci, getting married, and then forming a husband and wife team helping people rise above the blah by developing unforgettable personal brands. Check out frankandmarci.com to see exactly how we do that...

My memory of founding Aonach is that myself, my brother John, and our friend Joe Smyth had all just completed a stint of working for other people. And we all felt it was time to be our own bosses again. We knew we worked well together coz John & Joe had worked at an online hotel booking company together and I'd been brought in to work on a couple of projects that they were working on in there. I ended up leaving Aonach shortly after we founded it because I wanted more freedom to be able to take on acting roles - but I remained Aonach's design partner for years, and John and Joe went on to grow Aonach into an impressive online strategy business, and then pivoted into Magento specialisation. So I ended up getting loads of experience in designing larger websites in the travel and eCommerce space - invaluable when it comes to helping people craft landing pages as part of what myself and Marci offer now. Check out what we do at frankandmarci.com - as just one part of our offering you can get your perfect landing page wireframed by myself and written by Marci.

If you read more than one of the descriptions I've written under my experience, you're bound to notice a pattern of me working with my brother a lot. And this is no exception. We joined the company together, and spent a couple of years working with Jim Breen in Tralee. I joined the company as technical director and John as operations director. Jim had assembled a great creative team, which we continued to build, and we came up with some pretty cool eLearning products. My PulseLearning experience has come in very handy again lately as myself and Marci explore putting together our first courses and group programmes. Hey does anyone actually read these descriptions? Send me a message if you do... say "yeah, since you asked, I read the descriptions under the experience section"

"Shots fired!" We'd be working away on a project, coders tapping away, me probably designing something in Photoshop, John managing clients, and Tom solving some server issue or other... when someone would quietly reach under their desk, pull out a Nerf gun and shoot someone on the other side of the desk with a yellow foam bullet. A massive battle would ensure. This probably isn't what you came here to read about, but just one of the many things I loved about working for Zenith was the Nerf gun battles. Zenith Solutions was a company set up by Tom Raftery and my brother John, and after studying design in Dun Laoighaire College of Art and Design I came back to Cork to work for them. I started out designing websites - and for the nerds, this was back when Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer were battling it out, and everything was laid out in HTML tables. I then joined the management team and managed the delivery of web application projects, leading a small team of developers. Couldn't even begin to tell you the experience I racked up working for Zenith, I look back now and think how amazing it was to be creating websites just a handful of years after Ireland even got the internet, and before social media was even a thing!