My Story
From corporate finance to Ireland’s most distinctive business partnership.
I grew up in London, moved to Cork, and spent over 16 years building a career in finance — from small family businesses to multinationals. I self-funded my education while working full-time and bartending in the evenings, completing my Accounting Technicians qualification before earning a degree in Accounting at CIT.
My last corporate role before starting McNamara & Co. was Global Team Lead of the Corporate Card and Expenses team at Gilead Sciences — one of the world’s leading biopharmaceutical companies. I helped build and launch their corporate card programme globally: 13,000 employees, 4,000 cardholders, across every country Gilead operates in. That’s the kind of financial and operational complexity I was managing before I went out on my own — and it’s exactly why I can sit at the intersection of CFO, COO and CEO for the founders I work with now.
“I launched McNamara & Co. without any financial backing and no access to funding — because I knew exactly what founders were up against. I’d seen it from the inside.”
In 2022, my first daughter Grace arrived, and I was faced with a choice that too many women in Ireland still face: career or family. There was no part-time option. No nearby family support. Having lost my own mother at a young age, I was not prepared to miss the moments that matter most.
In July 2023, I stepped away from corporate life and built McNamara & Co. from scratch. A few weeks in, I discovered I was expecting my second daughter, Lilly. No funding. No backing. Just a very clear sense of what I was building and why.
More recently, I was diagnosed with ADHD — which explained a lot about the way I think, the way I work, and how I’ve always moved between detail and big-picture strategy with unusual ease. I’m currently training as an Advanced ADHD Coach with the Neurodiversity Training Academy, a specialism I’ll be bringing into my work from later in 2026.
