Our Story
Breaking through growth barriers. Executing scale with confidence. Making growth happen.
With over two decades of experience, our only purpose is to partner with founders and leadership teams to dramatically increase scaling success. Our partnership will navigate complexity, overcome barriers, and build lasting success. At Select Strategies, our approach is grounded in strategic thinking and deep expertise. We work to ensure alignment of your team on key choices and decisions that fuel growth. We have a genuine passion and commitment to create a roadmap and support the execution that will determine your success.
Our Team
We are founders, scaling leaders, influential board members, leading executive coaches, internationally cited researchers and publishers on scaling and growth.
Our team has successfully scaled ventures, guided multiple leadership teams to growth, shaped impactful programmes, and advanced cutting-edge research into scaling best practice. We have walked in your shoes, we have the war stories and we have analysed the process. We take tacit knowledge of scaling stories and codify them to understand how scaling is executed. As integral members of the growth and scaling ecosystem, our practical experiences influence the stories we share and foresight which determines the actions we help you take.
- Paul O'Dea
Managing DirectorAn engineer by profession, Paul has co-founded and scaled several technology-based businesses. He has the scars and the war stories of rapid growth first-hand.
Paul is now passionate about figuring out how to scale businesses cost-effectively (helping them avoid some of the mistakes he made)!
He is Founder and Managing Director of Select Strategies Limited, which for over two decades have been trusted advisers to CEOs striving to scale their businesses.
Paul currently serves on the Boards of several investor-backed businesses and has also had a number of successful exits. He has been a guest speaker at Stanford University and the University of Cambridge.
The Growth Roadmap® is Paul’s third book. His previous books The Business Battlecard (2009) and Select Selling (2006) have been widely used by entrepreneurs seeking to scale.
Paul has served on the Board of Technology Ireland and been an adviser to Enterprise Ireland, Advantage Austria and multiple other organisations on how to scale companies in a repeatable way.
- Emer O'Donnell
DirectorEmer has over two decades experience working with, and as part of, senior leadership teams solving the challenges that come with scaling a business.
A Director of Select Strategies, she is specialist in team dynamics and leadership coaching and has led multiple international growth transformation client engagements.
A European Mentoring and Coaching Council (EMCC) accredited business coach, Emer is passionate about helping companies unlock and leverage team dynamics to accelerate the delivery of international growth.
She has been invited by clients to develop senior team dynamics in their international teams, based in Europe and Asia.
Emer is currently programme lead on Enterprise Ireland’s start-up initiative Founders Forum (@hpsufoundersforum) and has extensive experience in the delivery of executive education programmes.
She is also the author of several industry research reports and publications.
- Clare Gallagher
Finance DirectorPrior to joining Select Strategies, Clare spent over ten years working in the financial services industry where she engaged in developing and managing strategic investment portfolios for both corporate and individual clients. Clare has assisted multiple SMEs with customer acquisition and retention using both traditional and digital marketing strategies.
Clare has an MBA from UCD Michael Smurfit Graduate Business School, a Higher Diploma in Psychology (UCD) and a BA in Science of Materials (Trinity College Dublin).
Clare currently serves as Chair of Orbis Ireland and Board Secretary of Epilepsy Ireland.
- Eimear de Haan
Senior Management ConsultantEimear joins Select Strategies from FinTech Unicorn Fenergo, where she spent the last 10 years of her career leading and scaling teams through intensive periods of growth. Her expertise includes Product Management, Strategic Planning, and Execution, with a focus on helping high growth companies develop and execute their growth plans to achieve their ambitions.
Eimear holds a finance postgraduate degree from UCD Michael Smurfit Graduate Business School and she began her career at a leading global Investment Bank in London and New York.
- Sarah Bohan
Programme ManagerSarah holds a Ph.D from the University of Galway, studying the management of scaling ventures. She conducted a research inquiry of ‘serial scalers,’ functional managers and entrepreneurs with subsequent experiences of scaling ventures internationally. Sarah’s research has discovered novel insights on the processes and mechanisms associated with successful scaling, and has been peer reviewed in top entrepreneurship journals such as the Journal of Business Venturing.
Sarah manages the Readiness to Scale Programmes, including the HPSU Founders Forum Programme, an Enterprise Ireland initiative in collaboration with Select Strategies. Sarah oversees the delivery of communications for Select Strategies and contributes to the consultancy practice. Her commitment to the mission of Select Strategies is underpinned by her academic research, of scaling best practices and practical insights.
Sarah also holds a Masters in International Management from the University of Galway.
Our Books
The Growth Roadmap®
NOW AVAILABLE: The Growth Roadmap® - How ambitious companies scale successfully
The Growth Roadmap® is designed to help your team close the growth gap and scale successfully. It makes scaling a continuous growth process, owned not just by the leadership team but by your whole company.
The discipline of debating and crafting a growth strategy forces your team to select what's important. The Growth Roadmap® clarifies and aligns your team around a growth strategy. It combines high level strategic principles with a results based approach. It brings growth strategy into the mainstream, rather than leaving it to annual planning sessions, which are often rooted in incremental improvements.
The Business Battlecard
The Business Battlecard was published in 2009 (Oak Tree Press) and is based entirely on growing companies.
Through working with over 250 growing companies in the US and Europe, we have identified the factors which accelerate and inhibit growth. Our insights are based on the workshops we have conducted, one-to-one consulting engagements, and on validation from world-class CEOs and members of the venture community.
Our aim is to keep strategy creation simple and strong. Of course it also needs to be comprehensive. Because strategy can be daunting, we break it down, just as large-scale wars are broken down into battles and skirmishes.
So what are the 'battles' in business strategy? We centre our approach on five key questions - the 'battlegrounds' on which companies wage war:
- What do you want to be famous for?
- Who are your selected customers?
- Where is your measurable value?
- Why should customers choose you rather than the competition?
- How will you get your product to market?
Using these five simple, but crucial steps, The Business Battlecard helps you craft a winning strategy to grow your company.
Thought Leadership
How a COO can help your company scale
Leadership
CEOs often ask whether they should recruit a Chief Operating Officer (COO) to help accelerate growth and scale their business? Typically …
Diagnosis in a Time of Uncertainty
Market
Building your External Diagnosis Map A client of ours, we’ll call him Peter, who is CEO of a medical software scaling company, recently …
Our Clients
Our clients span diverse industries, sectors, and maturity levels, and are often founder-led. Our sole focus is to partner with you on a shared ambition to grow to the next stage.
At Select Strategies, we know each scaling journey is unique but we see continuous patterns. We excel in pinpointing the critical stages for your growth, leveraging insights gained from our extensive experience with diverse clients through a ‘Scalability Framework’. We understand the obstacles to growth and how to overcome them. We create your roadmap and execution system to ensure real outcomes are delivered. Our team is dedicated to supporting you at every step, ensuring your execution system scales confidently. With over 100 client success stories, we take pride in being your trusted partner for growth.
Select Strategies have been an invaluable partner in helping us align, focus, and execute on our growth plans.
Great experience and frameworks. Helped align our teams around scaling growth.
The Select Strategies team provided great insight and supported us with their growth planning and execution expertise.
Working with Paul and the team at Select Strategies was a turning point for Financefair. Through their structured Growth Roadmap process, they helped us align our leadership team across the core pillars of sales & marketing, funding, tech & product, operations, and risk. The result was real clarity around our go-forward strategy—what we need to prioritise, where to focus, and how to scale with intention. Their insight, objectivity, and practical approach made a real impact on how we think about execution.
The Select Strategies process was very useful for our senior leadership team. After doubling the business over three years, we needed help with the next phase of growth. Select Strategies showed us a clear path we were not seeing. This enabled us to make better choices and become more aligned, putting us on a course to continue scaling the business.
Select Strategies give 360-degree feedback which is helpful... They tell it how it the way it is, whether you like it or not. They're great coaches and they're there when you need them, always answering any questions we might have. They think outside the box and let you know their honest feedback - this means a lot.
Select Strategies took the time to analyse our business and get to know us. They had simple solutions. That's the genius of Select Strategies: that feeling that we should have thought of what they proposed before they came up with it! But you can't do it. You need that expertise.
The Select Strategies team provided great insight , advice and expertise on every occasion we engaged with them.
The journey we went on from diagnosis through to strategy and execution was significant. The process helped our team identify the growth gaps we needed to address and led to important decisions. Now we have an ambitious roadmap to scale that our international team is focused on delivering.
At a time when Neueda where beginning our growth journey we worked closely with the Select Strategies team. Their expertise and professionalism enabled us to form a concise & robust strategy, one that we are still following today.
The big thing is that they have been there, done that. The Select Strategies team have worked with plenty of software companies and have the war stories. Theory is fine, but you need to live and work through it to really understand what's needed when push comes to shove.
Know-how - that's the main difference. Select Strategies have helped many companies; they've traveled this ground. We're first time entrepreneurs, and we have to remember that we can't invent everything. It's important to take guidance from people who've done it before and done it well.
Our Partners
We remain at the forefront of industry trends and innovations, bringing the latest insights and strategies to help leaders achieve success.
Our tailored approach draws on deep engagement across the broader ecosystem—including the venture and investment community, industry bodies, research institutions, and commercial partners. This connected approach allows us to bring fresh thinking and practical strategies that drive real impact for the leaders and businesses we support. We bring experience and learning from over 100 client scaling journeys to deliver actionable insight.
Contact Us
Let’s schedule a 30-minute Scaling Conversation.
Let’s turn your ambition into reality. Let’s make growth happen.