THE COUPLE WHO DINE TOGETHER...
Jules and Keith Mahon met in their teens, married in their 20s and set up their own business in their 30s. Now, as their food and drink digital magazine goes global, they’ve even bigger plans for their 40s – as well as some tips to get you through the fes
Jules and Keith Mahon first met as teenagers in the 1990s, back when eating out for them meant grabbing a curry chips in the local chipper in Drumcondra, Dublin. Now the couple run digital magazine The Taste – which has been voted best food and drink magazine in the world – and regularly dine in Ireland’s most feted restaurants.
They started their business ‘from the kitchen table’ in October 2014 and this year enjoyed ‘record profits’ and a turnover of €3million. ‘We’ve come a long way from curry chips,’ laughs Jules, 40, when we catch up this week to get her tips and tricks for a delicious, merry Christmas.
They first met when Jules was 14 and Keith was 17, but despite knowing each other for more than a quarter of a century, going into business together three years ago has still been an eye-opener.
‘It’s different to what I expected,’ she admits. ‘I thought it would be more smooth sailing and easier to switch off when we come home. But very often we bring work home with us and talk about it half the night. That’s been a challenge.’ They have ten employees now in their Drumcondra office – and an office pug called Alfie – so diplomacy is called for. ‘We don’t have blazing rows in front of staff – we keep it to when we get home,’ she chuckles.
‘We definitely have differences of opinion and more often than not it’s editorial. Keith’s role is more commercial and the editorial is up to myself but there’s an overlap in both roles.
‘We would sometimes differ in what we think the content should be when we are planning it out each month, what we should be writing, what chefs we should be featuring,’ she lists, by way of example. ‘We have to fight our corner. But that makes each issue stronger.
‘It’s a very open-plan office but Keith has a separate office and that’s the only way we’re not divorced,’ she laughs. ‘He needs that space.’
Those rows can’t be too bad because in February, Jules and Keith will celebrate 19 years of marriage. She was just 21 when they tied the knot, becoming a mother the following year. Their three children are Jake, 18, Sam, 15 and Sophie, 12.
“HAVING THE KIDS YOUNGER WORKED IN OUR FAVOUR THOUGH AT THE TIME IT DIDN’T FEEL LIKE THAT”
‘Having the kids younger worked in our favour though at the time it didn’t feel like that – it was hard,’ she says. ‘Now that they’re that bit older it makes working a lot easier. They’re very independent, they’re great kids. They’re not at that stage where they need a parent around as much, picking up from school and that kind of thing. I don’t think we’d have been able to do what we do now when they were 5, 6, 7. It’s too demanding.’
Especially since socialising in the evenings is an integral part of the job for the Mahons. ‘Networking is a huge part of what we’ve done, it’s been key to our success,’ says Jules. ‘If you don’t support the people who support you, you’re not going to have a long-standing relationship. So we go to lots of events and product launches.
‘In the beginning, when it was just the two of us, that was hard, we would be out at least three nights a week. We had to say to each other, “Put your life on hold for the next year, you’re not going to see friends and family other than the children”. Now we spread the events and launches around all the staff and myself and Keith would split them. Sometimes we go together, but we try to balance it out so one of us is at home with the kids to supervise homework and check out what they’re doing.’
Jules and Keith divide the cooking and housework ‘very much 50:50’. She has noticed that the mothers who are flying high in the foodproducing and drinks industries ‘all have a husband or partner in the background doing their equal share of the work at home’.
Before they launched The Taste, Jules worked in Dixons for 15 years, where she learned ‘an awful lot from a marketing and sales perspective. I really saw the business growing from being a small entity in Ireland to being massive and changing the landscape of electronics here.’
After Jules encouraged Keith to do a diploma in IT, he got a job with AIB and ‘rose up the ranks in many different financial institutions’ as a coder. Working for The Irish Times ‘he discovered his strength for selling. He has a real gift of the gab.’
Developing their digital site Ireland.com during the recession was how Keith first made contacts in the hospitality industry. Following that, he worked for digital businesses including myhome.ie. menupages.ie and thediningroom.ie, helping to boost their brands and revenue. Eventually, Keith tired of making money for other people and he and Jules began to talk about launching a digital business themselves. She bought the domain name and their plan at the outset was to entice readers with tempting deals by teaming up with hotels and restaurants.
‘The readers’ offers are the whole hook of the business. The idea is that you will log on for ten minutes over coffee in the morning and hopefully the reward is you’ll buy one of our exclusive offers and get an amazing price,’ she explains, of the meals-for-two and hotel-stay specials.
‘We started The Taste off at the kitchen table. We built, designed and marketed it ourselves. It was a real collaboration. It worked because of the generous people who believed in our vision and who loved food as much as us. People gave their time and their work for free – that really helped us get started. We grew our own little community of likeminded people who love food and wine.’ Having given up their day jobs – something they could not have done when the kids were smaller and the mortgage bigger – Jules and Keith worked hard to get The Taste off the ground. Now they claim to be the only publication in Ireland writing about food and drink every day.
‘We had to knock on a lot of doors,’ says Jules. ‘Our success is down to certain people who took a leap of faith in us. Sallyanne Clarke of L’Ecrivain has been a massive advocate for The Taste. When you have people of Derry and Sallyanne’s calibre endorsing you, it makes life so much easier. Dylan McGrath is another great supporter who took a chance on us from day one. One of our biggestselling deals on the site are for Dylan McGrath’s restaurants Fade Street Social and Rustic.
‘Having key people like that on board from day one made people think, they must be doing something right. Now we’ve got over 150 members that we would class as partners, people we work with regularly in top bars and hotels all around Ireland.’
They have also branched into travel by offering food and wine guides to various cities. ‘You’re always chasing the next sale, the next opportunity. For us we’re still growing and we want to grow further. We focus heavily now on our travel section, working with Emirates, one of our partners,’ she says, of the Dubai-based airline.
Given all the boxes she has ticked, it is surprising to learn that Jules found it tough turning 40 earlier this year. ‘It wasn’t like turning 30. It was a difficult period, it seemed to come so fast. It was a life-changing age for me. It made me really think, “What do I want to do in life?” One of my goals was The Taste and we’ve achieved that so I wanted to launch another business. This time it’s a lifestyle site called Indulgeme.ie. There will be a lot of highend fashion, beauty, make-up and skincare deals.’
Jules is pleased that there are more female role models in business for her daughter Sophie than there were when she was growing up. ‘Last year I got to take part in the Going for Growth female entrepreneur network set up by Enterprise Ireland. For six months my mentor was Mary McKenna of Tour America and she was really inspirational. She had great advice about how to grow the business and take it to next level. There is great support and camaraderie between women in business in Ireland.’
Jules and Keith are ‘both very ambitious and driven’. They are also extremely engaging on Facebook and Twitter – with over 350,000 followers – and last month won Best Social Media at the eir Spider Awards. But another award won last year catapulted The Taste on to the global stage.
‘Early last year when we won the Gourmand World Cookbook Award for Best Food Publication in the World, that was a massive turning point for us,’ says Jules, pinpointing it as the moment they felt as though they had arrived. ‘It’s outside of Ireland and Ireland can be the land of the begrudgers sometimes – you feel you can never win anything here,’ she complains. ‘It opened doors for high-end partners we might not have been able to get beforehand. It helped us to grow our audience to 9.6million readers worldwide. We have a huge readership in the US and Britain – ex-pats like to know what’s going on at home.’
What is going on in the Mahon home for Christmas? Well, it sounds like another collaborative affair. ‘We will be having a big family dinner with my parents and Keith’s mum in our house. We share the workload as we both love cooking and do most of our prep on Christmas Eve over a glass or two of mulled wine using Patricia Kavanagh of the ICA’s recipe and some Simply Better mince pies made by our Galway pals, the Foods of Athenry. Prepping ahead means we get to enjoy a rare day with all of the family and not be stuck in the kitchen.’
Any rows over content – of the dinner plates, this time – will probably be off-set by laughter.
‘The key to working together is to be able to have fun,’ reckons Jules. ‘My biggest inspiration in business is Keith. He has a great sense of humour, he’s one of the funniest guys you could meet. And when you work together, the one thing you really need is a sense of humour...’
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