Claire Tolan, Managing Director – Ireland, Irish Distillers Pernod Ricard reflects on how learnings from her early career inform a customer-focused approach to strategic planning and how she mentors now

There’s always a risk with mentoring someone ambitious within your own company—build up their fire too much and they may leave to pursue those ambitions elsewhere. It’s not something that overly concerns Claire Tolan, Managing Director – Ireland, Irish Distillers Pernod Ricard. Although she’s been lucky to grow her career within the company, she’s happy to see people go elsewhere to build up their experience if there isn’t a suitable position open for them—with her no-nonsense attitude tempered by a palpable sense of fun, it’s no surprise that people are keen to return to the fold to work with her again, and she’s more than willing to hold the door open for them.

As a child the Malahide woman had notions of being Dublin’s answer to Nancy Drew, keeping a keen eye on all the activity in her neighbourhood, but after a degree in marketing and languages in DCU, she forgot her detective dreams, and instead joined a graduate scheme organised by Ibec, and was selected by Irish Distillers to go to San Francisco as a brand ambassador for Bushmills.

Diving In

After she got over her initial disappointment at not going to Spain she took to the city and her new job like a duck to water: “As soon as I got to San Francisco I realised it was amazing! I landed over in the middle of the dotcom boom and literally every night there were rooftop parties. It was a really exciting place to be.”

Of course, in the drinks trade, the rooftop parties are work—sponsorship and promotional opportunities. “At the time, Jameson was big on the East Coast and Bushmills was really big on the West Coast,” she recalls. “It was a brilliant experience; I was really thrown into it and had to build relationships with sales, distributors and influencers—it’s a three-tier system over there. It was very entrepreneurial; you had to get out and do it yourself.”

She laughs reminiscing over operating in the early internet days, with a fax machine in her bedroom, and a big aerial on her mobile phone. “I have this memory still of driving my car up and down the hills in San Francisco thinking ‘This is amazing’. It’s such a vibrant place. It was so easy to meet people; people really liked the brand, they were open to doing stuff with me, the team on the ground were really supportive. I loved it.”

As the Bushmills brand moved into the Pernod Ricard portfolio in the US, she took on a role as Field Marketing Manager with them and worked across the entire portfolio of brands and across the entire Western Division—“from Alaska down to Louisiana”. As a 23-year-old female in a team of around 40 men, she says, far from coming up against sexism, “It was like having 40 dads! I never had to get a taxi from the airport, someone always picked me up.” As it was a newly created role, the team were thrilled to have support and help around marketing activations to help their sales.

Building Relationships

Throughout Tolan’s career reminiscences, the phrase that keeps coming up again and again is

“building relationships”, and she says she learned the most from observing two of the market managers who “had a really natural way of dealing with people”. She recalls, “They’d have a bit of craic with them, but ultimately got so much done by building these really strong customer relationships.”

When I put it to her that turning up with a bottle of whiskey makes for a fairly smooth start to relationship building, she counters that the follow-up is what matters. “What you need to do is prove yourself—see how you can support them and if you see an opportunity, actually follow through on it.

“When it comes to on-the-ground sales roles, following up and doing what you said you were going to do is so important; people see a lot of reps come and go, but you can make a difference by understanding their business.”

Her on-the-ground experience and lessons learned from those early days in the US still inform a customer-focused approach in her current role as Managing Director, responsible for the sales and marketing of the full Pernod Ricard portfolio of premium wines and spirits on the island of Ireland. “When we’re doing plans for our strategic accounts, I always look at it through the lens of the customer. They don’t care about marketing activations; they want to know if it’s driving footfall, if it’s going to give sales at a different time of day, or bring new consumers in.”

Get Into Action

Tolan benefitted from a company mentoring scheme at a time when her career took a massive leap—taking on the €12.7m redevelopment of the Jameson Distillery Bow Street project and jumping from managing a team of 20 to managing a team of 150. Now she mentors others, having recently worked with a colleague based in France.

Her key piece of advice: “The biggest thing for me is ‘get into action’. Try things out.” She has found her style to be that of a coach, encouraging her mentees to make connections with senior people, ask questions and even to start water-cooler conversations with senior colleagues they want to connect with: “Ultimately, it’s about asking the questions and probing, because they have the answers. They know themselves.”

What she has found is, “A lot of the time people are just trying to work out what their next role is. It’s all simple stuff but it helps having a different perspective.”

There are, she says, “so many opportunities in this industry”, pointing out the number of new whiskey brands in the market. “Irish whiskey is the fastest growing spirit, and Jameson is the number one Irish whiskey, so even within our company it’s a really exciting, dynamic place to work. Because we do our marketing here, we’ve got really good budgets and work with really good agencies. There’s so much innovation, but also, I feel the heritage passed down. When it’s your turn with the brand you do the best that you can with it, and hand it on in a better place.”

Simplifying the complex is what Noesis is all about. The global IT services company provides clients with a one stop shop when it comes to IT solutions, whether that’s cloud, cybersecurity, AI and data analytics, automation or low-code platforms. Launched with the support of IDA Ireland, the company opened its new Centre of Excellence in Dundalk in 2024, creating 30 jobs across various areas and highlighting its commitment to innovation and excellence. The Dundalk facility joins other centres across the globe, in Portugal and Brazil, and the intention is to research new ways of looking at client challenges and investigate trends before they’re presented to clients. The new facility, which complements the Noesis Dublin office, is also a step forward in its broader strategy around enhancing its global reach and impact. “With Ireland at the forefront of IT around the world, it made sense for us to establish a presence here. There is amazing talent in Ireland and we want to harness that talent so we can provide our clients with top level solutions. Exporting our services to other regions is a priority, as is maintaining a high level of service to our Irish and UK clients. The Dundalk facility will allow us to do that,” said Ricardo Batista, Managing Director – UK & Ireland, Noesis.

The services available to clients at the Dundalk Centre of Excellence will help them on their journey towards digital transformation. They’ll enable businesses to be more competitive, speed up delivery and raise the quality of their customer offering. “Research shows that 70% of all software development will include these services by 2025. We’ve recognised that there is tremendous opportunity for growth when it comes to these services in Ireland and we are determined to lead this movement in Ireland. That’s why our new IT Centre of Excellence is a crucial part of our growth strategy.”

For over three decades, Noesis has been providing clients with solutions that help make their business more efficient. The company’s values – efficiency, security, reliability and quality – are the cornerstone of the Noesis operation and the reason why it celebrated 30 years in business in 2024. A strategic mindset has kept the company a step ahead all these years and it’s that type of forward thinking that’s at the heart of the new facility in Dundalk. “Thinking strategically is what we do and it’s what we encourage our clients to do. If you look at what happened to businesses when Covid struck and the strategies they very quickly developed to deal with a rapidly changing business environment, I think that forward momentum has stalled a little. We need to harness that progress again and that’s what we help our clients achieve. We help businesses to be as competitive as possible by implementing smart, efficient solutions that work for them.”

Those solutions, which are all vigorously tested before roll-out, include Cloud & Security – a set of tools that help clients adopt and leverage cloud capabilities and focus on the security of their IT ecosystem. They also include Enterprise Application Integration, which allows clients to connect any application, IoT device, service or datasets in the cloud or on-premises with ease. When it comes to increasing efficiency and agility, simplification of processes is key, says Ricardo. Similarly, enterprise solutions from Noesis add value and the potential to

scale. “Our enterprise solutions help our clients better manage their relationships with customers. Those solutions range from digital signature and CRM to chatbots and they really help improve a company’s operational efficiency.”

Real-time data analytics can help a business thrive. In 2023, research from McKinsey showed that data-driven organisations are 23 times more likely to acquire customers. Noesis provides advanced analytics, data preparation, data discovery, data visualization, big data architecture and machine learning models to help clients streamline processes and maximise profitability. However, gathering the information is one thing; utilising it to your advantage is another. “It’s not just about getting real data. We help clients to transform the data they’ve gathered into actionable insights and really capture that hidden value. That will then help guide the client to make the right decisions, improve operational efficiency and provide a more dynamic customer experience.”

Improving operational efficiency is high up on the priority list for thousands of small and medium sized businesses across Ireland and the key motivator for AI adoption. In late 2024, research found that a significant number of companies were planning to implement AI while more than a third had already done so. The research from Eir Evo found that almost a third of businesses surveyed said AI could cut up to four hours a week from administrative tasks. A further 23% said administrative work could be reduced by more than six hours a week, redirecting spending of up to €5.1 billion. AI solutions from Noesis can deliver process optimisation through consumption forecast, market demand forecast, production forecast, stock optimisation, detection of production failures and predictive maintenance. AI can, says Ricardo, help boost a company’s growth but it must be utilised in the right way. “I think it’s important that businesses look at ethical AI and the data and privacy issues that go hand in hand with it. In 2024, we all lived through an experimental phase of AI. In 2025, I think we’ll progress to a more business-focused version of AI which will be all about cooperation and improving decision-making. We advise our clients to focus on being more responsible around AI and more sustainable. AI is a powerful tool that can prove useful to clients, but it must be leveraged responsibly.”

Low-code, a relatively new approach to software development that allows for faster delivery of applications through minimal hand-coding, is on the up says Ricardo. “I think we’ll see more businesses implementing low-code platforms this year. We’ve been a partner of OutSystems – a pioneer in low-code – for over 15 years. The OutSystems platform allows us to offer our clients a solution that helps them achieve scalability, reduce risk and complexity. Essentially, it helps them innovate that bit easier.”

Technology is constantly evolving but there are some things that don’t change. Regardless of the latest tech trend, Noesis will continue to focus on efficiency, security, reliability and quality. “And that’s also what our clients want. They also want to implement both legacy and the newest technologies to help them grow and thrive, but a focus on quality and service will always remain. I think there’s sometimes a tendency to focus on the future rather than the present. It’s so important to concentrate on the here and now, knowing that in 10 years people will be asking for the same thing. Technology will always evolve – that’s why we have our centres of excellence – but the need for excellent service remains a constant. We’re an IT solutions provider that knows how to help clients make the most of their business and that’s not going to change.”