Future Proof: Gary Mullan co-founder of Prosperity

Returning to Ireland following an acting career in Los Angeles, Gary Mullan ventured into recruitment. After a year's experience working for a company, he left to set up his own with friend Jim Murray.

“I decided I want to be my own boss and a very good lifelong friend of mine Jim Murray joined me. We both started Prosperity over 15 years ago.”

Dealing with recruitment for web related areas, Prosperity has grown to recruiting in international markets like the Caribbean and Dubai and it is now opening their first international office in mainland Europe.

“We built it very slowly, one placement at a time, learning the market and started recruiting in that area. We also got involved in another area called Jobsearch, which is a job portal.”

Jobsearch.ie was launched by Mullan in Poland. It was a recruitment service which allowed Irish companies to advertise jobs before people made the move to Ireland. It offered application forms and advice on moving to the country.

“We still have the website, it’s a side business. We let people advertise on it now and do whatever they want and we provide that service for free within Ireland.”

With the growth in the digital industry, Mullan now appears to have had incredible foresight back then but, without the experience of the international Jobsearch website, the projection of Prosperity might have been slower.

“It was really what we learned about digital media and digital marketing and what the impact Google had on that website. I think that really shaped how we brought Prosperity forward. The website was a sideline business but it really shaped what we saw of the future in media and web development. We saw that this was going to be a really big area at that point in time”, he says.

“We decided we were going to have to rebrand our website and get much more into web technology recruitment – everything to do with the web. We became quite successful at servicing the international companies that started to come in and our brand won a lot of awards for advertising.”

New branding

Prosperity’s new branding included the “smiley face” text at the end of their name which is now so common in text messages.

Having grown the business to a staff of 15 and enjoying the challenge of recruiting for all the new internationals setting up in Ireland, Prosperity was going through a purple patch until the events of 2008 struck with serious implications on recruitment and Mullan’s business.

“To be perfectly honest with you, I wasn’t aware of the impact it was going to have on our business but I literally went back to the office and the phone just did not ring. So it was a moment where it looked like the end was near.”

As with so many companies, Prosperity had to make staff cuts, letting go of seven employees. But Mullan's partner, Murray, took a novel approach to saving the business. He took six months unpaid leave during which he wrote the book Brother, which became a success on Amazon.

The drastic measures kept the company ticking over through the initial crisis until things started to turn around, Mullan says,

“As you can imagine it was a real tricky time but I suppose one of the great things that happened to us in the middle of the crisis was that big multinational companies, that the IDA attracted, started to call us and say that they have requirements. I think the fact that they were even calling us and giving us jobs and getting us in to do large-scale recruitment that really gave us a sense of hope that things were getting better, it gave us the momentum we felt to get us through and it actually did.”

Paris expansion

The next rung on the Prosperity ladder is the opening of their first international office in Paris. With the sourcing of talent within Europe to work in Ireland and vice versa, opening the new office is the biggest step Prosperity has taken.

"We have a lot of international staff here and we've worked in those markets already. We know the niche that we're in. We know this web sector very well and we're good at it. We've said to ourselves that we've done it before in other markets why don't we do it with people who are actually in that market," he says.

“We’ve experience working with some French companies and our people here have worked with French companies at a senior level. We feel like we’ve got the right offering for them in that marketplace.”

Despite their move into recruiting for further afield, Mullan has found much encouragement that business is going well at home in Ireland too.

“I think the future is bright and what’s really encouraging for us now is that local indigenous businesses are leading the way for us. That’s our busiest sector.

“To have architects and interior designers calling you saying we are looking to hire a digital person or a developer or designer is really encouraging because obviously business is good enough for them to take on a digital team.”