The winner of the Women in Business Entrepreneur of the Year Award 2022, Daisy Mauhay founded The Nightingale Agency in 2016-a multi service business providing recruitment and deployment services to the health sector in Ireland. With 10 full time office staff, 2 community leaders and over 100 frontline workers, The Nightingale Agency provides nurses, carers and multi-task assistants to nursing homes in Dublin, Longford, Kildare and Wicklow. They have recently expanded into international recruitment of skilled workers and general recruitment. The Nightingale is committed to providing excellent and altruistic care to the community.
Daisy, a Registered Nurse by profession says “For me, nursing or caring for people is a vocation – it is a help for clients who are in difficulty adapting to their everyday lives or for clients trying to get back into good health and normalcy.”
Becoming Self Employed
Daisy set up The Nightingale Agency in 2016 but it wasn’t until the end of 2020 that she resigned from her career as a nurse and began working full time at the agency.
“Something inside me told me that I could help more people by working full-time in the company. The company has since progressed in terms of clients and staff employment. More importantly, I have also channelled my passion and vocation to the staff, who are dedicated to caring for clients as if they were family.” Daisy tells us.
Different to the Rest
“Any business can provide excellent patient care. What will differentiate a business from the rest in the industry is treating the clients with sincerity and to embrace them as family. As business grows in this industry, they tend to automate so they will have more time attending to business proposals and closing contracts. We automate to allow us more time to spend with our clients and we intend to keep this business philosophy even as we grow!”
Biggest Challenges and Opportunities
As a healthcare provider, Daisy cites the pandemic as both the biggest challenge and opportunity for her business.
“The biggest challenges and opportunities came during Covid. We had our hands full with Nursing Homes requesting help due to the covid outbreak. With our front line and admin staff wearing their hearts out, our front-liners readily went to do covid shifts and even enlisted the whole team as Rapid Response Team of HSE.”
Those challenges then became opportunities for The Nightingale Agency-The nursing homes and clients they provided care for during that unprecedented time are now their main clients.
A Caring Business Model
“Our business model is constantly evolving and adapting but still driven by the same business philosophy -“we are a channel for helping people”. We started with home care/community as our main support activity. Now, we deploy well-trained and compassionate staff to nursing homes and hospitals. We are also expanding our community care to our own fully operational caring facility. More recently, we are also trying to be more innovative with our care by integrating a holistic approach and working with the charity group My Lovely Horse Rescue. The concept is to have our clients care for abandoned and abused animals.” Daisy tells us.
Stand Out Moment
For Daisy and the team at The Nightingale Agency, realising how much of a difference their level of care makes has really stood out.
“The appreciation we have been shown from individual clients, communities, nursing homes and hospitals we helped during their most vulnerable times made us realized that we are making a big difference through caring and helping. We are more than committed to make a bigger difference.”
LEO Supports
The Nightingale Agency benefitted from a number of the LEO Dublin City Training Courses:
- Lean For Micro
- Start Your Own Business Course
- How to Find or Manage a Designer or Developer
- Trading Online Grant Information Session
- Win the Tender- Procurement Workshop
- Local Enterprise Week: Lean Thinking- Reducing Waste & Costs
Winning the Women in Business Entrepreneur of the Year 2022
“Winning the LEO Female Entrepreneur of 2022 validated our business philosophy of sincerity in helping others as the core of our business commitment. We’ve never even focused our sight in achieving goals but tried as much as we can to be timely every day in everything we do; resolving whatever issues we encounter at once; and making sure our clients are comfortable and happy all the time.” Daisy smiles.
The Future & Beyond
The Nightingale Agency are dedicated to continuing to provide the best quality care for their clients. They plan to provide a therapeutic living environment with animals for clients.
“We want to offer more specialized-area nurses to hospitals; and invest in delivery technology for booking and scheduling of staff as well as HR and Accounting software to allow us more time personally connecting and managing staff.”
Advice for New Entrepreneurs
“Let your passion to help precedes your goals.”
Contact
The Nightingale Placement Agency 1/F, 42 Mount Street Upper
Dublin 2, D02 X3P2
Tel: +353 1 525 3213
Email: info@tnpa.ie
Website: www.tnpa.ie
