TileGO Team

Cathal Leonard, CEO

Cathal Leonard CEO

Cathal studied Mechanical Engineering at Bolton Street College of Technology and has recently graduated from DIT’s Hothouse program with post grad diploma in new business development.

In 1984 he set up a business in London designing, manufacturing and selling a range of up market children’s furniture and supplied customers such as Brown Thomas, Harrods, Harvey Nichols and Hamleys, Prince Charles, Princess Diana and Andrew Lloyd Webber.

Cathal then trained as a marble mason/ tiler in London and worked at that in the U.K. and then later in California.

He was offered a position with Dataway Design (S.F.) heading up a large team installing data and communications networks throughout San Francisco and Silicon Valley and trained in Cisco as a network engineer and SeaCore as a fibre optic technician.

He returned to Dublin to be a co-founder of an E-Learning, software development company PII infotech (Ireland) launched by the then Tánaiste Mary Harney.

He has been a recent guest speaker at the international T.R.A.F.F.I.C convention in Dublin as well as being featured several times on national newspapers, T.V. and Radio.

Ernie Rice, Operations Manager

Ernie is a very experienced qualified industrial engineer whose first employment was with James Mackie and Sons in Belfast, a very large company that had an unsurpassed reputation in the industrial engineering field, especially in the area of textile machinery manufacturing. Mackie’s designed complete factory layouts and designed/built and installed the complete production machinery. During his time with Mackie’s Ernie spent a number of years working in India advising on and setting up complete textile factories.

Ernie left Mackie’s in 1970 to join the engineering staff at Waterford Crystal Ltd. where he was promoted to Chief Engineer after a few years. He was responsible for the introduction of large scale automation and design, layout and project management of new factories, as the company grew rapidly in the 1980s and early 1990s. At one stage in 1986 Waterford Crystal was the largest manufacturing company in Ireland with 3,700 workers.

In 2004 Ernie retired from Waterford Crystal, and since has been working as an independent consultant to S.M.E.s. Over this time has worked with over 60 companies specialising in management development, factory re-engineering, productivity improvements, and quality systems.

Billy Power, Finance Manager

Billy is a qualified accountant and spent over 34 years in Waterford Crystal firstly in various accounting roles including Chief Management Accountant. With responsibility for all aspects of budgeting and control, costing and pricing and reporting. During his last eight years there he was promoted to General Manager and Operations Director for five years and then to Managing Director for three years with responsibility for all aspects of Crystal Manufacturing. He retired in 1990.

Since 1990 Billy worked for two years as a full time lecturer in the Waterford Institute of Technology, lecturing in Accountancy and Business Management. He then set up his own independent consultancy business and over the past seventeen years he has worked with over 250 companies a number of them over a long time and was a director of six of these. Billy specialises in financial planning, costing and pricing, profit improvement organisation development, business strategy and financial controls. He has considerable experience of raising finance including through B.E.S. and state agency grants, bringing products to market etc.

Billy was also a member of the Enterprise Ireland mentor panel from 1992- 2005 and during that period completed over 50 assignments.

Alex Fuentes, Director in charge of US Marketing and sales

Alex Fuentes has held several sales, business development and operations positions throughout his career. At director level he was instrumental in the creation of bidz.com where he was responsible for the implementation of internet strategy and Business development. During his time there the company went from an idea to a publicly traded company. Alex worked on many of the strategic alliances.

Alex has worked at sales and business development positions for Lexis Nexis, UMI and Profound in Silicon Valley for over fifteen years and has worked with most of the large blue chip companies in the area including Apple Intel and Hewlett Packard.