ABOUT SEÁN

When Seán's school won the national Daily Telegraph rugby tournament, he scored the winning try. The preparation, the pressure, competing as a team and that moment when all the work finally paid off stayed with him.

It sparked a competitive streak and a fascination with performance, progress and what we're capable of when we really commit to something.

Seán's passion for Italy started at nine years old, when he asked his mum for an Italian textbook and simply taught himself. He kept building on it at school until a school move meant leaving that behind too, so he carried on outside the classroom with a private teacher, sitting his GCSE and A-level early.

That same pull eventually took him to the University of Padova, where he spent 2006 to 2007 studying in Italy properly. Living abroad, speaking another language and immersing himself in a different culture pushed him outside his comfort zone and developed an independence that would shape what came next.

A few years later, his Italian became part of his career too, taking him to Bloomberg and working with clients across Italy and southern Europe. It's also where he met his wife, Italy giving him more than he ever expected from a language he taught himself at nine.

Seán's interest in Buddhism started at 21, out of curiosity more than anything else. By his mid-twenties, curiosity had turned into a proper practice.

Nearly two decades on, it's still there. He meditates regularly, reads widely around it, and takes time out most years for retreats, often two weeks at a time.

It's not something he talks about often, but it's shaped how he runs the business as much as anything he learned at Bloomberg: doing the right thing, saying the right thing in the right way, and knowing that how you get somewhere matters as much as getting there.

After two years of amateur racing, progressing from Category 4 to Category 3, Seán decided to take on a different kind of challenge: London to Paris and back by bike. 360 miles, 21½ hours in the saddle and 41 hours from start to finish.

On the return from Paris, intense heat, sickness and dehydration pushed him to one of his lowest points physically. Instead of thinking about the finish, he broke the remaining distance into smaller targets and focused on getting to the next point.

Eventually his body recovered and, having spent hours simply trying to hold onto the group, Seán found himself back at the front taking turns so others could recover. The experience taught him that we're often capable of far more than our minds tell us, but also that sometimes individual performance is really team performance.

The idea had been sitting in Seán's notes since 2019: start a podcast. For years, it stayed there. He wasn't sure what it should be about, second-guessed whether he had anything worth saying or the confidence to say it, and there was always a reason it could wait.

In 2026, the time finally felt right and he pressed record.

Beyond the Business opens up the conversations Seán and Paul would normally have behind closed doors, including the decisions, mistakes, challenges and wins that come with building businesses and wealth. They're joined by founders, investors, business leaders and high performers to explore how exceptional people think about money, business, psychology, philosophy and performance.

From building companies to managing billions, the aim is simple: have the conversations worth listening to.