When describing his company, Paul Mooney Founder and Group CEO reveals that Cohesion Global is a HR technology company, which integrates leadership maturity, executive resilience and staff cohesion and includes all the Cohesion Dialogue training for all staff from the CEO to the Tea Lady!
You can visit the Cohesion Global website here
How did you get the idea/ concept for Cohesion Global?
I had a twenty-year corporate career in technology and international telecoms companies. This was followed by a ten-year experience as a technology entrepreneur during which I experienced a complete nervous breakdown. During that breakdown, I met other leaders who had broken down and I decided that I could help leaders all over the world to better navigate the dark and lonely world of leadership.
Give a brief account of your education background.
I have two marketing degrees, thirteen coaching and group dynamics certifications, a masters degree in resilient engagement and I am undertaking my second PhD study in the field of Economic Metaphysics: which is creating an organisational eco system that transforms thought into margin.
Did you always know/ever think you would become an entrepreneur when you were younger?
Great Question. My mother was a cleaner in Cadbury’s and my father made marble fireplaces; So, all I ever heard at the dinner table was to join the civil service and to get a pension at the age of 18 J. Even at the age of 80, my mother still asks me will I get a real job!!!
Is entrepreneurship a common trait in your family?
No. My brother works for an international consulting house and my sister is a fulltime mother. All my cousins work in trades and in employment of various kinds.
Did you have prior knowledge of the industry before setting up your company?
I work across all industries, and I have worked in 23 countries; so, I have had first-hand experience in many industries and in many cultures.
What was your previous work experience (if any)? Do you think this gave you an advantage when setting up your business?
The most important work experience of my life to date is having a nervous breakdown from not achieving my successful exit of my technology company in 2006 and when I sold two companies for €2.5m, but I never got paid and I had to chase millionaires through the High Court for three years only to have half my settlement stolen by my own solicitor!
How did you initially fund your business? (self-funded, government funding, etc)
I have always found that clients are willing to fund a business if they understand what is in it for them and that they can be part of co-creating something specific which can later be made more general. When I need it, I crowd-fund small projects for research and technology purposes.
Looking back, would you have changed the method of funding you chose?
No. Learning to sell and to deliver value for client money is more important than learning to raise funding.
What difficulties, if any, did you encounter when securing funding?
Investors are for the most part narcissistic about their money. For some reason they value it more than their own lives, their wives lives, their children’s lives and the lives of me and my staff and my customers.
Did you encounter any financial difficulties in the first year of operation? If yes, what did you do to surpass them?
My first financial problem was hiding the money from the taxman.
What characteristics do you feel benefited you most when starting your business?
Resilience, Tenacity, Authenticity, Dialogue, Servant Leadership. Being a visionary with no answers but just a bunch of questions that people decided to believe in.
To what do you attribute your company’s success/growth to?
The dire need in the market to evolve into conscious companies and conscious leaders.
What is your opinion on the importance of a professional network for an entrepreneur?
It is vital. It is the lifeblood of an entrepreneur’s way of being and way of doing. It helps the entrepreneur be among like-minded and like-hearted crazy people who think they can change the world – and together we can!!
Do you think entrepreneurship has changed in recent years?
The core of it no – it is still about creating something that was never created before. However, technology is massively changing the way that it happens. The fourth industrial revolution is a tsunami that faces us, and unless we evolve into being fifth dimension humans, entrepreneurs will be a dying breed as the robots will have more ideas then we will have and they will be able to code it themselves.
Would you ever consider starting another company or involving yourself in new start-ups again?
Since 1999, I have set up, sold, liquidated and run several companies. I expect to go straight from the companies office into my cremation.
If you had one piece of advice for a new entrepreneur, what would it be?
Understand the price of being an entrepreneur physically, emotionally, spiritual and above all as a sense of it being part of your Divine plan and not just a copycat of Steve Jobs or Michael O’Leary. Imagine your own life differently and fix the simple problems that you face every day, whether that be that your bins are collected late or that you can’t find a coffee shop in a new town.
