Brendan Kavanagh: The tech boss who former employees say ‘blurred’ lines in the workplace

In September, businessman Brendan Kavanagh resigned from the board of Grinds 360 after a power struggle and row over governance with Ronan Murdock, his co-founder at the online grinds company.

The dispute ended with Kavanagh agreeing to sell his shares and a joint statement where both sides wished each other well.

Kavanagh remains involved in education. His Olive for Education business is the second-biggest supplier of one-to-one IT equipment in Irish secondary schools. Some schools have complained they are still waiting for hundreds of laptops and cases, months after the school year started.

The Irish Times has previously revealed how both sports pundit and psychotherapist Richie Sadlier and Derrick Evans, the British TV fitness instructor better known as Mr Motivator, were both so unhappy with business partnerships they had with Kavanagh’s Olive Media company that they terminated their deals early. Both men felt the customer service and technology delivered by Kavanagh’s company let down customers.

Kavanagh (61) is a Wicklow-based businessman who lists directorships in 20 Irish companies and six UK companies.

Numerous company sources describe him as a persuasive and charming businessman who is constantly on the look-out for new ideas and new investors. He regularly tells entertaining stories and drops the names of sports star investors.

Biographies on Kavanagh’s company websites describe how he originally worked in the “oil and gas sector”. He was hired into his father’s forecourt services company, where he led a management buyout at the age of 24. He set up his own company, Retail Petroleum Solutions.

In his 30s, Kavanagh met a friend who asked him whether he was “still bullsh***ing about climbing Everest someday?”

Angered by the jibe, Kavanagh booked a flight to Kathmandu the following day.

He has said he did not reach the 8,884m-high summit of Everest, but claimed he climbed to 6,000m. The trip to Nepal was an eye-opener for him on a number of fronts. He discovered “Eastern teachings” on spirituality and also found a highly educated workforce in Kathmandu, where he set up an office with production staff for his new Olive company.

Although Kavanagh has said “university is for slow learners”, Olive specialises in educational technology products, often in the form of training videos where production work is carried out in Nepal.

A number of staff at Olive, who worked under him for the past 20 years, speaking publicly on the issue for the first time, have told The Irish Times about their experiences of the working environment he created.

For a number of workers, Kavanagh came into their lives offering help – not just for their careers, but for their personal lives. Kavanagh offered the dream of financial success coupled with mental wellbeing to his recruits, many of whom he met after they had attended Alcoholics Anonymous (AA).

Kavanagh has spoken publicly about his record of offering meditation and mindfulness courses to people with addictions on two podcasts.

On the Finding Me podcast with Sanidhya Arora, Kavanagh was introduced as someone who “works with a lot of people in the addiction space”. Kavanagh spoke about the benefits of AA and the serenity prayer recited at each meeting.

On the Sober Mess podcast, host Colm Doolan introduced Kavanagh as having a “black-belt in mental health awareness”. Kavanagh spoke about helping to introduce people to the practice of meditation and mindfulness over the course of eight weeks.

“I wanted to become the Dalai Lama, that was part of my desperation to be loved,” Kavanagh said, referring to the spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhism and talking about his personal journey as a mentor.

While he has cultivated a public profile as a mindfulness and entrepreneurial guru, a number of former staff say their experience of working under Kavanagh has had a lasting negative impact on them.

Six men whose experience with Kavanagh spans the 20 years that Olive has been in business have described to this newspaper the blurred boundaries that arose from Kavanagh being, at various times, their boss, mentor, business-partner, sponsor, mindfulness-adviser and meditation guru.

In a statement in response to our queries, Kavanagh’s solicitors rejected “in the strongest possible terms” any implication or assertion that Kavanagh’s professional conduct or actions were inappropriate or improper.

The video producer and the Iraqi hurler documentary

Most of the former staff declined to speak on the record out of fear that Kavanagh would sue them personally.

However, Will Rock (33), who founded a media production business with Kavanagh in 2022 after meeting Kavanagh in AA, was willing to speak publicly about the damaging effect his relationship with Kavanagh had on him.

“When I met Brendan, I was newly sober and attending AA,” said Rock.

“I was looking for stability and direction, but the line between the personal and professional often felt blurred. I noticed others around him also looking to him for guidance and approval. I recognised some of the same uncertainty in those dynamics that I was experiencing myself.”

The company founded jointly by Rock and Kavanagh was SevenYellow Media-Tech. It aimed to make commercial videos and documentaries.

When it launched, Kavanagh said: “SevenYellow are an energetic team that are offering world-leading solutions for clients in achieving their communications goals, and I have no doubt this will be a very successful venture.”

One of its major projects was producing a documentary called Home, about Zak Moradi, an Iraqi-born hurler who played for Leitrim.

A number of former staff, including those who were never in AA, have described how they were invited for one-to-one meditation sessions with Kavanagh at work or in his home in Wicklow. Rock, who was not sponsored by Kavanagh in AA, said his meditation sessions with Kavanagh made him feel uncomfortable.

“During a one-to-one meditation with Brendan, when it finished, I noticed that he had tears running down his face,” said Rock.

“He looked me directly in the eye and said: ‘These aren’t my tears.’ That’s the phrase I remember him using. I understood that to mean that the tears were somehow mine rather than his, as though he were expressing an emotion on my behalf.”

Kavanagh and Rock both had 48 per cent of shares in the company. The remaining 4 per cent of shares were split evenly between Ryan O’Loughlin, a Wicklow-based solicitor, and Tom Cullen, an executive in Olive.

Although Rock was chief executive of the company, its finances were managed by Cullen.

While Rock was receiving meditation sessions and mentoring advice from Kavanagh, he was becoming increasingly worried about the finances of their joint venture.

He sent a series of messages to Kavanagh and Cullen seeking to have bills paid from money given by a philanthropic organisation which was financing the documentary.

In late 2023, work on the Moradi documentary ceased because the production crew had not been paid. The Irish Times has seen internal communications that shows Rock complained in November 2023 that he had been sent proof-of-payment documents by Olive for money transfers to the crew, but the money had not materialised. The philanthropic foundation financing the documentary emailed Olive and Kavanagh to question why its funding was not paid out. It complained this should have been done “a long time ago”.

Kavanagh reacted furiously. He sent a WhatsApp message to Rock on November 27th of that year complaining about what he called his “veiled threats” which he said were the “FINAL insult”. The message said Rock was to return his Olive car and never to contact Kavanagh again.

From being Rock’s business and meditation guru, Kavanagh would then only communicate with him through lawyers.

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Solicitors for Kavanagh wrote to Rock in January 2024 to complain about matters of “great concern” to him. He complained that his personal details, including his phone number, were shared with people, and that allegations about improper conduct had been made about him. The letter also complained that Rock had by then set up a rival media production business to SevenYellow.

A&L Goodbody Solicitors responded on Rock’s behalf to deny that he gave Kavanagh’s details to anybody. The letter said Rock understood that Kavanagh would deal with outstanding creditors that were owed €60,000 by SevenYellow.

The letter questioned a series of transactions from the company’s bank account alleged to have been made without Rock’s knowledge or authorisation. This included a €100,000 payment that SevenYellow received from MyClub on March 31st, 2023, and a payment of €100,000 made to a solicitor’s firm on the same day. (MyClub is a sports club app founded by Kavanagh which now trades as Social Ties. Rock was never involved in that company.)

Other payments queried included credit card transactions in shops and petrol stations and transfers out amounting to €105,000 that were paid to Upskill Online, the Olive Media company. Also flagged was a €17,833 payment to an individual in the UK who is an investor in HiUp, another Olive company.

Kavanagh’s solicitor responded and said it was “surprising” that Rock had only raised queries about transactions after he had left the company. The letter said Kavanagh was a minority shareholder and it “makes no sense for creditors of a company to be chasing a minority shareholder for debts incurred by the company”.

The letter accused Rock of breaching company law in the way he had set up a new company by allegedly transferring assets from the joint venture. SevenYellow has never filed accounts due to the fallout between Rock and Kavanagh.

Rock said his experience with Kavanagh undermined his self-belief.

“I found myself wondering whether my own instincts were wrong all the time,” said Rock.

“Over time, I felt increasingly confused and anxious around Brendan. I felt that I had lost a lot of confidence in my own ability to make decisions for myself.

“The experience had a major effect on my life and it took me a long time afterwards to rebuild confidence in myself and my own judgment.”

Not the only one

Not all staff contacted by The Irish Times reported negative experiences with Kavanagh. One man who still works with Kavanagh said he only had positive things to say about him.

“I’ve seen him give people chances, support people and be an incredible boss and friend, even when it would have been easier not to,” the man said.

“Brendan has been a huge mentor to me professionally, but it goes far beyond business. He has also helped me personally through some very difficult times in my life, and I’ll never forget that. I genuinely consider him one of the best people I have ever met.”

Others, however, have spoken about how they felt uncomfortable being asked to do meditation or mindfulness sessions with Kavanagh.

That was not the only unusual interaction with the company’s founder and chief executive.

Two staff recounted separate occasions when Kavanagh appeared topless in work video calls, which they said was inappropriate and added to the feeling that Olive was run differently to other companies.

In an Instagram post in May marking Olive’s 20th year in business, Kavanagh posted a video that included two selfies of himself bare-chested.

“It was all very strange,” a former senior manager said about the work culture in the company, where several staff were having one-to-one sessions with Kavanagh.

“I would ask if they were okay and they’d say: ‘He helped me.’”

One former Olive worker who had been in AA and who worked with the company more than 10 years ago, said Kavanagh had an overbearing impact on his life.

“There was an emotional attachment to Brendan, because he was the person who’d gotten me out of this hole. I felt indebted to him. He would say quite often: ‘You don’t owe me anything’; ‘The most important thing is your spiritual wellbeing.’ Except, there actually was massive pressure to deliver. He had this character – it was all or nothing.”

This former employee said he started receiving counselling a year after he left Olive to deal with the stress and anxiety he felt from working in the company and being so dependent on Kavanagh for personal and business guidance.

The former employee said his relationship with Kavanagh was dominated by “blurred lines”. He felt he could not leave, even when the company was late paying his wages.

“He’s your confidant, your best friend in a sense, your spiritual adviser,” he said.

“And yet you know he pays your wages and quite often doesn’t pay your wages. You’re in a very precarious power dynamic. It’s very hard to leave. There’s a lot of these elements holding you in place and keeping you silent.”

On September 2nd last, this newspaper asked Kavanagh a series of questions about his companies and about the one-to-one sessions offered to staff, including whether he had qualifications to provide meditation and mindfulness advice.

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Just over a week after the queries were sent, Rock received a legal letter to his home from Fitzwilliam Legal, one of two law firms that represent Kavanagh and Olive.

While Rock’s name was on the letter, it was addressed to another former Olive worker. Rock spoke to him and discovered he had also received the same threatening legal letter. It was identical to his.

The letter, marked “NOT FOR PUBLICATION”, claimed its recipient had made “false, defamatory and otherwise damaging statements regarding Olive, Mr Kavanagh and Mr Kavanagh’s business interests to a number of individuals and the media”.

It claimed the recipient had revealed “confidential and commercially sensitive information” as well as “private information, much of which is untrue, regarding Mr Kavanagh and his family”.

The letter alleged that these “statements/publications” were “designed to lead people to believe that Olive commits breaches of law, including employment law, is financially unstable or insolvent, and does not adhere to its contractual obligations”.

It claimed statements about Kavanagh were “clearly designed to embarrass” him. It also claimed the recipient was in “flagrant breach” of “contractual and legal obligations”.

The letter demanded the recipient “publish an apology”, although it did not specify where. It demanded that a list be provided of all people allegedly provided with false statements, or commercially sensitive or private information about Kavanagh. It asked that each party be sent a “written retraction” and an apology to Olive and Kavanagh.

The letter sought proposals for compensation for the alleged injury to Olive’s and Kavanagh’s reputation and privacy, and an indemnity for their costs.

It set a two-day deadline to “accept liability” for the alleged statements “and other wrongs” and “agree to compensate” Olive and Kavanagh.

After more questions were asked by The Irish Times on October 29th, Philip Lee solicitors issued a statement on behalf of Kavanagh and Olive.

The statement denied that Kavanagh had ever threatened staff with legal action for speaking about their time at Olive.

“The assertions and/or implications contained in this question are very serious and bear directly on our clients [sic] personal and professional reputation,” it said.

“Our clients refute the characterisation provided and reject in the strongest possible terms the assertion that Mr Kavanagh has or would threaten an employee or member of staff in the terms described or at all.”

The statement complained of the nature of the questions asked. It said any implication or assertion that Kavanagh’s professional conduct or actions were “inappropriate or improper” was rejected “in the strongest possible terms”.

Asked about former staff who said they felt damaged as a result of the blurred boundaries of Kavanagh being their boss, mentor, sponsor and meditation guru, the statement said “Mr Kavanagh denies the characterisation of him and/or his actions and statements contained in this question.”

The statement said there were “clear structures” for Olive employees to report inappropriate behaviour.

“No confirmed, determined or decided inappropriate occurrences have been raised through those channels in respect of Mr Kavanagh’s behaviour and he rejects in the strongest possible terms the idea that he has, or would wish to, place his employees in a position where they felt his conduct infringed professional boundaries,” it said.

The statement said the characterisation of Kavanagh in the question was “unfair, inaccurate, misleading, and defamatory”.

Asked about the former employee who spoke about the stress of his delayed salary while receiving mindfulness sessions with Kavanagh, the statement said it was difficult to answer anonymous allegations.

It said: “Inevitably in the course of conducting business over a period of in excess of 20 years, instances may arise where payments are delayed unintentionally or due to unforeseen circumstances.”

While “such instances are regrettable”, they believed no formal dispute was lodged.

Asked about the dispute over SevenYellow and whether Olive controlled that company’s bank accounts, the statement said the questions related to “discrete incidents” that were “not fairly, fully or accurately represented”.

“SevenYellow Media-Tech Ltd is a separate legal entity with its own corporate structure, directors, officers, shareholders and governance structure,” it said.

“Mr Kavanagh was not a director. Mr Kavanagh was a minority shareholder. Any reporting of transactions undertaken by SevenYellow Media-Tech Limited should accurately distinguish between the company, its directors and officers, Olive and Mr Kavanagh personally.”