Ruairi Kelleher is the CEO of Immedis, responsible for corporate direction, strategy, and M&A. Watch the full video — free, no account needed.
Ruairi Kelleher is the CEO of Immedis, responsible for corporate direction, strategy, and M&A. He focuses on enabling the senior leadership team to drive innovation in international payroll and tax services.
you know our vision is very clear like we want to be the first real-time global payroll platform in the world and nobody's got anywhere near us now we've gone from basically zero to 35 million in that period of time and contract recurring revenue all organic [Music] hello everyone and welcome to the deal maker show so today we have a very exciting guest i think that the the story that he's going to be sharing with us is quite remarkable you know everything started starting from like really spinning off a very exciting business out of the company that he was working previously but again i mean the growth that they have experienced is remarkable uh so i guess without further ado let's welcome our guests today rory kelleher welcome to the show yeah pleasure to be here thanks man for having me so originally born and raised there in dublin so how was life growing up there yeah very yeah i
like a lot of times i i really like ireland and you know i had an american mother so i did get to spend quite a bit of time on the west coast of the us over in san francisco visiting my grandparents at the time and but yeah outside of the weather and dublin is a great place to to grow up i still live here today so i think that tells a lot that uh you know glad to be here and you know it's actually sunny today and so that's you know rare rarity here so when the sun does shine in ireland it's it's one of the best places in the world so if we could just get that all the time it would be great but and from a living perspective i think there's very few places in the world that are scottish ireland i hear you i hear you and and obviously you know i'm wondering if having your mother being from from the us perhaps you know that that mindset the american dream the ambition and all of those things
you know like maybe you got inspired by it and maybe one day you know you you told yourself perhaps growing up that one day you would have your own business or make a big difference as a as a business person i mean would that be the case yeah i never thought about it exactly like that but like when i do look at it like some like my my mother's father he was actually irish so ironically full circle uh he did he went to america and during world war ii and i became very successful and construct construction company out in san francisco so you know i did grow up around that that you know you could achieve anything and you know the us is a great place to do that for you know an irish irish young irish guy going over there in his kind of early twenties and to end up really with a really successful big construction company in san francisco shows like you know the opportunity that is america you
know and that ideology of the american dream is something that's very true and so you know i i think you know i travel a lot to the u.s or you used to travel a lot to the u.s before the last year and look forward to going back again but you know what does strike me in the us every time i'm there is the entrepreneurship the the ability to to to grow businesses to to live out your dream and you know it can be a little bit corny but it actually it really is true over in the us do you think that and it's this place i admire greatly for that and do you think that maybe like now as you've been able to compare and and all of that you know would you say that maybe in dublin things and there in ireland like things are starting to opening up a bit more where you don't have to be a lawyer or a banker or a consultant and it's still going to be well viewed if you decide to become an entrepreneur yes
it's definitely coming more and more so um like you know when you've got a lot of the big tech organizations here you know salesforce google facebook a lot of the stripe a lot of the big ones have big head counts here like you know from uh from overseas you can you can come across that they're here for tax purposes but they're not they're here for you know they've huge head counts here like you know they've put down routes in the uh in ireland as their european headquarters so you know from when i finished college back in the early 2000s to now it's it's wildly different in terms of the opportunities even when you look at the graduate rounds and you know the the old milk grounds have gone into the consulting firms the big four accounting firms and the law firms and a lot of the top talent is looking elsewhere now to get into these different types of organizations and there's there's not
yet a clear path which i think is is interesting you know we actually have a sister company called grad guide that was kind of set up just to support that in terms of trying to help graduates into those kind of find a path into those organizations but um yeah i think definitely in ireland you know i think we are still slower than the us and i think we're still a bit more cautious than the us so i think that if that impacts our kind of venture ecosystem it's not as as a risk as risky as the us or risk doesn't have the risk appetite of the us so you know i still think we have a bit to go on that but i certainly think we're going in the right direction very cool so in your case you know like the direction that you took was to go to university and basically studying a combination of business and law but very early on you knew that being a lawyer was not your thing so so how did you come
across or how did you end that thinking that way yeah yeah i think i wanted to be a lawyer because for your kind of reasons that you said earlier was kind of it was very stable and you know somewhat sexy kind of thing to do was to become a lawyer or a banker or an accountant um after one of the first one of the first in in law in in first year in law in ireland two your first courses are constitutional law and both of them put me to sleep very very quickly so i realized very very early that i didn't have the i didn't have the discipline to to or the yeah to do that much reading around subjects that are just not that interesting so uh very quickly i didn't really have the appetite for it and uh focused more on the on the business side and i've i've always loved maths maths and problem solving so like you know even to this day we're talking about payroll it's around you know mathematical
numbers you know analytics and solutioning problems is really what what it is and what global payroll is and if that's always something i really really enjoyed was you know solutioning and and the law that takes a long long time absolutely so so then as a result of that you graduated then you got into retail then management consultancy uh and i guess you know this landed you eventually you know working at tax back and and that's essentially where you really you know got exposed to to the problem that you're currently solving uh with the business you know that you've started but you know i'd like to hear you know like how that experience was for you what you were seeing especially when you went more on the international side uh and how was that journey for you you know which was a pivotal you know kind of like initiation into perhaps you becoming an entrepreneur yeah like so when i joined
tax bank you know we were or the business at the time was was really launching its first b2b product on the on the tax side um and tax back for all the from its founder terry cloon who founded tax back back in the mid 90s coming out of um out of university again it's always an entrepreneur and still is to this day an incredibly entrepreneurial environment to work in and you know it's about seizing opportunities that are global big and global is generally you know when i speak to terry what do what the ambition and the drive is all about and so when i came in in 2012 um and in typical black fashion which shows when he found out what they were trying to do was tackle a big market that was dominated by um very slow-moving large organizations at the time it was the big four accountancy firm so what we were going into was you know assignment management which is still a very complex piece of
tax work that any organization that sends someone overseas has to manage because you're managing tax and payroll and multiple just jurisdictions at the same time and understanding how that ends and the cost and the service customer service element of that with an accounting firm was you know less than ideal because you're dealing with two almost separate organizations even though they may be the same name and like the big four they're generally kind of independent organization so you're dealing with two different people on two on two different sides of the assignment and and number one it's it's a bad customer experience and number two it's very costly for the organization so you know the the group had noticed that through doing a lot of individual tax returns for for people abroad seeing the amount of corporates who just couldn't deal with that so they ended up paying for it themselves
so we…