Sunday Business Post, June 07 2009

By Martha Kearns

Carol Flynn doesn’t have to look far to find her entrepreneurial roots. The managing director of Nanny Solutions is the third generation of female entrepreneurs – and her offices are in the same Georgian building where her great grandmother and grandmother ran their auction business.

The 34-year-old, from Terenure in Dublin, qualified as a Montessori teacher in the early 1990sandworked as a Montessori teacher for seven years before gaining experience as a recruitment consultant. In 2002, she struck out on her own and set up Nanny Solutions.

‘‘Setting up businesses has always been in my family and there was always a part of me that wanted to do that,” said Flynn.

The company provides a number of services, including placing professional career nannies in homes, providing night nurses and sleep training. Sleep training, which involves a maternity nurse coming to the home for up to three nights to help parents deal with problems such as sleep disruption or behavioural issues, is becoming extremely popular.

All of the nannies on the company’s books have childcare qualifications and at least two years’ full-time experience.

All have been vetted by the Garda and had their references checked. The nannies are employed directly by the families, who also pay a fee to Nanny Solutions.

‘‘A lot of people are unsure as to what nannies do,” said Flynn. ‘‘It’s very important to us that people know they are career nannies. They are not babysitters or housekeepers.

‘‘They get the children ready for school and ensure they do educational activities with the smaller ones, such as arts and crafts. They help the older ones with their homework and feed them a healthy meal before the parents come home. This means the parents have stress free time in the evenings with the children before they go to bed.”
Flynn’s great-grandmother, Teresa Balfe, bought a property on Ormond Quay in 1926 to set up an auction business for antiques. Balfe Auction Rooms was taken over by Carol’s grandmother Rosemary and then by her father William Flynn in the 1970s. The business moved from Ormond Quay in 1999 but the family still own the building and lease its offices. Five years ago, an office came up for lease and Carol moved into the building.

‘‘There’s a huge amount of family history here and I remember playing here when I was a child – my great-grandmother used to live over the auction rooms and my grandmother had her wedding breakfast here,” said Flynn, who also employs two other people in the business.