Una McCaffrey

Catherine Fulvio makes it all sound easy - running your own hospitality business from home, being mother to two small children and (albeit unintentionally) being a poster girl for female entrepreneurship.

"I haven't actually made it yet, but I am making it," is how she sees her position, the statement simultaneously playing up and playing down her achievements to date.

Whatever the reality, it is undeniable that as proprietor of Ballyknocken House and Cookery School in Co Wicklow since 1999, Fulvio knows first-hand about needing to put in much hard work and hard cash before business results emerge.

She also realises that businesses, particularly family operations, need to be adaptable and be able to grow on their feet if they are to survive.

And above all, she knows small businesses need to take risks if they are to prosper. So far, this seems to be paying off at Ballyknocken, a Victorian house that has been in her family for almost a century and that has operated as a family business since 1968.

To clarify, her surname comes from her Sicilian husband, Claudio, an accountant who works independently from the business and has some property interests. Helpfully, this means the family avoids the "all eggs in one basket" trap and has a steady income at all times of year.

This does not mean, of course, that the Fulvios do not take the vagaries of seasonal income seriously. In fact, Catherine's current mission is to see how she can fill the seven guest rooms in her home in the middle of winter weeks, rather than just at the weekend and in summer. As any hospitality professional will admit, this is not an easy task but it is one to which she hopes she has the answer. So far, her instincts, honed in her family's B&B in the same Ballyknocken house, have served her well.

"I'm 100 per cent comfortable with all the decisions I've made," she says. Fulvio's mother, Mary, had always wanted her daughter to get involved in the family enterprise, but Fulvio had other ideas, at least at first. She went to college to study German, PR and marketing, before taking a position in this area with Tinakilly House in nearby Rathnew.

This ended when Mary died at a young age, leaving the farmhouse without a mistress.

Rather than taking up the reins immediately, however, Fulvio first invested in an intensive cookery course at the famed Ballymaloe Cookery School in Co Cork. She then embarked on a €300,000 refurbishment of the farmhouse, safe in the knowledge that B&B status would not be good enough for her plans.

Fulvio says she started cooking as "a kind of adventure", which grew out of a hobby. When it began to take on a life of its own, she realised that the house just wasn't big enough to accommodate her needs.

With this revelation came the second big investment in the business - a €400,000 outlay to pay for the conversion of an old milking parlour into a fully-fledged cookery school.

This facility opened in 2004, the same year Ballyknocken was voted farmhouse of the year by Georgina Campbell.

Fulvio jokes that she had hoped to ease into the new venture, perhaps by teaching children to make biscuits. It was a bit of a shock, therefore, when her first bookings came from a group of Norwegian chefs, fresh from the World Association of Culinary Chefs conference and complete with "full uniform and gold medals".

These days, the school offers classes in all sorts of cookery, including courses for men only and romantic classes for couples. The real growth area, however, is in the corporate market, which Fulvio hopes will answer her mid-week occupancy problems.

This corporate activity tends to revolve around team building, a concern of growing organisations everywhere.

"Some companies want it to be a challenge," she says, describing scenarios where a shy member of staff will be nominated as head chef, or where team members will compete to guess a missing ingredient.

The costs for this type of arrangement range between €75 and €85 per head for an afternoon or morning session, including a full meal.

Other factors are also creating new challenges, such as the five new cookery schools that opened within a 70-mile radius since Ballyknocken's facility was established. This means that the company needs to differentiate itself, possibly by emphasising its true Italian link (lots of ingredients come directly from Claudio's neighbourhood in Sicily), or its long-established history at the farm.

This is a battle that Fulvio must fight on the PR and marketing front, an area in which she is by now an expert. She keeps close track of media trends and is in frequent communication with guidebook and accommodation websites and official tourism sites. She is also the resident cookery writer for Irish Garden magazine.

Just as Fulvio herself grew up in the hospitality business, so her own two children are experiencing a family guest house and cookery school at first hand - she jokes that they got a play kitchen from Santa last year. This involves some juggling on Fulvio's part as well as some very, very long hour - 8am-10pm - every day of the week, but she is lucky to have an in-house childminder.

She also recalls that Ballyknocken is "in a growth situation" at the moment and she has no intention of maintaining her current pace forever.

Already, she has seven staff, but she acknowledges that more are needed, particularly in specialist areas.

Since Fulvio took over the business in 2000, annual revenues have grown from about €90,000 to more than €400,000. She says the business is profitable, having lost money in the year before the takeover. With one five-year plan behind Ballyknocken, the family's next strategy is to restructure existing debt to pay for an expansion of the cookery school and the hiring of more expert staff to give Fulvio more time to concentrate on management.