Me & Mine

About Me: Cormac M Kelly

I am curently managing director of CMKC Design Ltd. – I’m an Irish guy living in Dublin, I’m very interested in innovation, great new ideas, fearless thinking, moving goalposts, disruptive technologies, creating firsts, making mistakes and staying with it. Through my company CMKC Design I work with individuals and companies who have great new ideas , products , systems and service offerings. My main interest is always to see these solid innovative ideas and products evolve, develop and get to market in the most efficient , profitable and protected way posible.

I started my journey working with some of the worlds most innovative companies back in 1989 in Boston Ma, when I joined Healthcaresource, now regarded as the Internet’s largest healthcare job board. I joined as the companies Sales Manager and then Director of Corporate Accounts setting all sales records which I believe has yet to be broken within the company these many years later. Position Manager one of the companies innovative products is the leading Applicant Tracking System for hospitals in the US. It automates many of the time consuming tasks that hospital human resource departments perform manually.

This company was founded and led by two highly motivated, hard working entrepreneurs Russ Smith and Steve Ludwig, and a lot of what I know of integrity and the hard work that goes into building up a multimillion dollar technology business is in no small thanks to them. Great Bosses; Great Innovators and Great Friends. I worked with many of the top hospital administrators and HR managers all over the US. I then moved to a company called TraveCorps – since merged with Cross Country Health Care, to create “Cross Country TravCorps” the largest Nursing and Allied HealthCare travel jobs agency company in the world. At TravCorps I was part of a special team put together to develop their allied health business to a multimillion dollar division in readiness for the forthcoming merger.

In the mid 1990’s I moved into IT and became a self taught network engineer and while working as a contractor at Partners HealthCare in Boston I developed a company with two other techies, called The Djs (The digital jukebox service) www.thedjs.com one of the first MP3 development and delivery companies riding on the waves of a very new technology. The company never launched as a result of threatened lawsuits by the RIAA along with other record studio executives to close down operations. The uncertainty as to the future of the MP3 and the digital music delivery industry as a whole among the major players and dwindling capital forced us to close down the company and go on our merry ways.  Serious lessons learned for the future. My merry way at the beginning of 1999 was to return to Ireland and over the next 10 years help set up web application, security software, media packaging &  consumer product design companies. Today I assist many young companies in getting clarity on what they have and where they want to go with it.

I have just stepped away form a very dynamic company, Aqua-Nu Filtration Systems Ltd. which I helped develop from very early stage to product launch and market entry planning. As the companies interim commercial director I structured the company, the board and all the shareholders, assisted is raising much needed capital in the region of a million euros from private investors. I developed all their marketing collateral, partner acquisition, sales and marketing strategies and PR campaigns.

The two years of active involvement via my companies business development division, CMKC Group Ventures, was an excellent and rewarding experience; to see the product idea being born, developed, tested and now ready to come to market as the most powerful, most portable and most cost effective water filtration device on the planet. This company and its new product line will now completely change the rules and the direction of the water filtration and the bottled water market. Exciting times to come.

I have also helped such Irish Start-Up’s as OWJO Technologies Ltd. with business plans, goto market strategies and important introductions to key personel. I stood in last year as interim commercial director for Intelligent Design Technologies Ltd helping raise considerable funds and developing the companies distribution channel into Europe and the US.  I have also assisted Beyond Encryption Ltd with key strategies and brand development where the company is now winning awards for its innovative device and system security software and garnering significant interest worldwide.  All of these companies have new innovative ideas and distruptive technologies that will make huge statements, massive impacts and actually change how we percieve whats normal in their cutrrent fields of endevour.

So we day-dream – then we are inspired to day-think – then plan and move to action – but unless we are doing it all, purely as a hobby , we will want to make money from it and that means commercialising the ideas, the products, the systems or the services. The ones that just could change how we live in the world. Thats the hard part – where is the money at and how do we get it? where are the markets at and how do we engage?, how can we sell, licence or leverage off this amazing thing we have created or what large company can we exit to? :

These are all questions that pop in and out of the investors, the innovators and the entrapeuners minds. It can be a hard ride getting to the wealth and the riches from your ideas. Some of them might be duds but you might just have the one that, with a bit of strategic planning, professional polish, spin, hard graft, marketing and introductions to the right people at the right time,

will make it.