Director & Lead Coach

Messagelab

Nationality: German

Biogaphy

Irene Bejenke Walsh is an entrepreneur, former business journalist and Angel investor based in London. She founded her training and coaching consultancy, MessageLab, in 2000 and has since prepared hundreds of entrepreneurs at all stages of the funding cycle for their investor presentations.

Irene is currently actively invested in two digital media businesses, but her experience as a coach and mentor runs across a variety of sectors including cleantech, biotech, retail, financial services and engineering.

Over the last decade, Irene has been directly involved in more than 20 investment rounds, raising between £150K and £1.5 million for early stage companies.

As a coach, she specialises in investment readiness and pitch training for start-ups and early stage companies as well as training management teams of large corporations for their IPO roadshows. Irene’s clients include Angel network London Business Angels, for whom she has trained over 300 entrepreneurs and helped to increase investment rates by 33%. Other clients include early stage investors such as London Technology Fund, NESTA, GLE Growth Capital, Connect Midlands and several VCs. This year, she is delivering a series of workshops on “The Investor Pitch” at the British Library Business & IP Centre in London.

Her corporate clients include Fortune 500 companies such as British Telecom, Motorola, AIG, Oracle, Kodak, ABN AMRO, Astra Zeneca, PwC and IKEA. Her work has taken Irene across Eastern and Western Europe and the Middle East and she has worked on a number of transatlantic deals with Australian and US companies. In 2006, she coached the management team of Russia’s largest steel company, Severstal, prior to their £1.5 billion flotation on the London Stock Exchange.

As a former business journalist for The Wall Street Journal and CNBC, she brings an understanding of both the media and the financial community to the investment sector. As a speaker and moderator, Irene has gained substantial experience at landmark industry events, moderating the first two Awards Ceremonies of the British Business Angel Association (BBAA) in 2005 and 2006. She is also frequently speaking on early-stage investment and how to pitch successfully at trade events in the UK and abroad.

Irene is an accredited business coach with the International Coaching Federation (ICF) and occasionally pens freelance contributions for trade magazines, such as a recent article for Swiss HR Magazine “HR Today”. She is a native German and has lived and worked in the UK for the past 14 years.