Top dragon has eyes firmly on the den

SARAH Newman is one busy lady – Ireland’s only female dragon, dot-com millionaire, having sold needahotel.com, a newly launched private equity investor and chalet operator.

Looking around Dublin in 1994, she realised there was a niche, as most travel agents did not carry a huge range of hotels and most were tied up in package deals. In contrast, she had access to 25,000 hotels worldwide and, crucially, at net prices, offering savings of between 40 and 50%.
Despite the good offer, it took a lot of hard work and long, long hours, with Sarah slogging around the country visiting every travel agent while simultaneously starting a family.
Within a relatively short space of time, she managed to persuade Ryanair to give her a desk in their call centre to offer hotels. She sat at there six days a week from 8am to 8pm while also managing an office to deal with travel agents.
Her business grew steadily. Then, as Ryanair launched its website, she landed a bigger three-year deal to move online with them and thereby needahotel.com was launched.
She then recruited a dedicated team of employees, who she says she is deeply grateful to for the effort they put into her business. Within a couple of years, Newman was paying Ryanair multi-millions in commissions, providing one of the first examples for the airline about the benefits of ancillary revenues. In fact, in the 12 years from 1994 to 2006, the business grew from nothing to €100m.
After 12 months of negotiation, she sold out for a figure mooted to be circa €50m, according to speculation, although she does not confirm the figure.
Since then, she has “travelled and done fun things”. She has also spent more time with her own children and with her partner, hurling legend DJ Carey and his two boys. She also took up golf and is the incoming ladies’ vice-captain at the K Club.
But business is never far away. She has finished renovating an Alpine chalet, www.chaletgrace.com, overlooking the Matterhorn in Zermatt. The chalet is available for rent in the winter for the ski season but Newman is also planning a mind, body and soul experience in the summer.
Sarah was on a flying visit to Ennis to address the inaugural FBD Ennis Chamber Clare Business Excellence Awards and gave the thumbs up to Doonbeg Golf Club and the west coast of Clare for relaxing breaks away from her busy career. “I love golfing and play a lot. The Doonbeg course is magnificent and I can strongly recommend it to anyone. The views are breathtaking and the facilities are second-to-none. For me, it’s the very best and it sums up all that is good about tourism in this region. It was my first proper break in Clare. DJ and I decided we didn’t want to get on a plane but needed a short holiday. We had been in Doonbeg for a round of golf before but decided we’d come for a bit longer and we loved it. After that, we headed down to our friend, Bill’s [Cullen] hotel in Killarney. So we had a staycation and we’d strongly recommend it,” Sarah adds.
In the past year, she has also lined up with Michael O’Doherty on the Bioenergy project and they’re in the middle of producing a DVD.
“Given the environment that we’re in now economically, there is an awful lot of stress in the workplace. Across the board, the more responsibility someone has in their job, the more stress and burden they are carrying. I met with Michael at a conference about this time last year and his speech about bioenergy really resonated with me. It was a treatment I wanted to try and when I did, it made a huge difference. It is quite extraordinary,” she explains.
Sarah is now bringing bioenergy to business people.
“The idea is that many large organisations now offer their employees reduced gym membership or other well-being products. So the plan is to offer bionenergy on a corporate level. Companies can give their employees a card which will entitle them to eight bioenergy treatments, for example. In order to make sure it wasn’t just me going through a phase, I brought in dozens of executives, friends, and every single person who had a bioenergy treatment said that it changed their lives and made them less stressed, more relaxed and generally feeling better. We are endorsing bioenergy as something that can be used to help achieve a better work/life balance. It is part of a lifestyle change,” Sarah adds.
“The other idea we’re working in is having people trained to give bioenergy treatments. Many people now for various reasons are looking for career changes and this could offer them what they are looking for. So I am now in business with Michael and I’m very excited by this project.”
While she knows that both men and women face work/life balance issues, she believes it is often more of an issue for women.
“Women in general have a talent to multi-task and to be honest, we need to be able to do that because there is an expectation that we can manage a lot of things, that we can juggle a lot and still do them all well, be it rearing our family, looking after our homes, performing in work, business networking and other things too.
“I know that I can be in the middle of something really important and it suddenly comes into my head, what have I got in for this evening’s dinner, or have I forgotten little Johnny’s medical appointment, or has my child got headlice. The reality is that mainly women, when they’re a mother, organise almost everything.”
She noted that people under pressure need to ask for help to manage everything.
“If you don’t ask you don’t get help, it’s as simple as that. We are our own worst enemies because women don’t tend to ask for help. So it is harder for women to get the balance right,” she comments.
Sarah has just been signed up for the third series of Dragons’ Den, which she is really looking forward to.