I am a professional in both the mobility equipment and IT industry.

In 2004, my now estranged father started up a mobility company called DPMS. This company provided repair services to the health board in Ireland, which involved servicing thousands of mobility products. Alongside repairing mobility equipment, the other side of DPMS focused on the retrofitting and adaptations of vehicles. The vehicle adaptations varied from boot / trunk hoists, swivel seats, automatic clutch systems, and much more.

At the time the company had started I was 14 and in the middle of a rough patch in school, so between the jigs and the reels, I went my own way for a number of years and got involved with fixing computers.

Fast forward a few years later, my father had passed away and I took over the day to day running of the company. This time, I was coming back into the mobility industry loaded with an extensive amount of IT experience which I used to help drive the company online.

The day to day running of the company really began in January 2012, mere weeks after my father had passed. At the time I thought everyone was my friend and learned the hard way about a lot of things in business. So just over a year later everything came to a head, the company could not be saved. When I initially took over DPMS, I thought I knew it all, but how wrong was I.

Fast forward to around July 2013 and the company was on it’s knees, the debts were high, the customers were pissed off – things began to fall apart. Whilst I knew a lot about mobility products, websites, marketing – I knew NOTHING about how to run a business!

So, in August 2013, I got a job from a good friend of mine, and continued working in the mobility industry as an employee. Me and my partner Niamh packed our entire home and our cat into a car, and moved an hour away to Kildare.

After about 6 months in this mobility company I worked at, I constantly went from working an IT role, to sales role, to deliveries role, back to the role of IT. I wasn’t happy, simple as that and it was nothing to do with my colleagues or the company, I knew this was me and I needed to make a change.

So, I quit my job, days after finding out we were having a baby, yes this was stupid at the time…

The very next day we had our baby scan, and suddenly the nurses face changed and we were ushered upstairs to a different department. It turns out the much clearer ultrasound machines and additionally more senior doctors are on the second floor, so diagnosing a fatal fetal abnormality was more straightforward.

Not long afterwards, our 12 week old baby was gone, the same day, my partner was fired from the same company I had worked at. Hours after losing our baby, the last form of income we had was gone! I thought about a lot of things when this happened, but we decided to pick ourselves up, and now rebuild everything we had lost.

Literally the next working day I contacted someone else I knew in the mobility industry, within hours I was in their boardroom and chatting about the idea of creating this brand new online mobility company, called Go Mobility. My new business partners knew the situation I was in and were gracious enough to both pay my entire month salary upfront, so I can make the rent, and also gave me everything I needed to get the job done.

My partner came on board a few weeks later, at basically €100 a week, and it was better than nothing at the time. We both know with the right amount of effort we could build this company up, and that we did.

Few years pass and the company is doing well, but again I want something else, and yet to figure out what it is. So around August 2016, two years after starting the company we brought in a replacement for me to own and run the company.

The replacement managing director was the same person who gave me the job when my fathers company failed, he was willing to take over my company and any investment debts, in return for my shares and control in the company. I was told I could literally walk out the door and not worry about a single bill that company owed to the other shareholders, again the good business people they were.

So it’s worth mentioning, a lot of people helped me during my journey through these companies and this has helped progress both my mobility and IT career over the years. I owe it to these individuals that got me so far here, and thank them for what they’ve done for me.

Fast forward to 2017 our son Aidan was born, and I was around a month out of Go Mobility and just starting to get things rolling with my new company. My next venture Webaria, was a company that provided web development and marketing services to companies around Ireland, and I really felt at the time it was what I wanted as a career.

This time I was totally out of the mobility industry with the exception of providing ongoing marketing and web services to my old company, Go Mobility. So working in Webaria was completely different to the other mobility jobs I had worked before, there wasn’t the same level of a “feel good factor” with this web development job.

Then I started getting other mobility clients on board, mainly 3 different stairlift companies. I had worked on stairlifts in DPMS and did quite well with them, so it was interesting to see the potential in the market when I spoke to these companies.

What stood out to me most was how popular reconditioned stairlifts were and that more customers wanted second hand stairlifts over new. Once again seeing more and more of the mobility industry got me going, and I wanted to get back into it.

So this time I setup and promised myself that I would stick to this brand new company, I would drop Webaria and focus on my new company called Modern Mobility. This new company would specialise in mobility repairs and stairlift sales, which is now still in operation after 7 years.

During Covid, when things were quite in Modern Mobility, I decided to setup a YouTube channel called The Mobility Guy. This channel was inspired originally by the daily vlogs I seen on tradesmen channels, and thought I would love to do something like that.

When I began doing videos, I thought I’d spice things up with a few tutorials and product reviews, and these types of videos started to really take off. From there, the channel has been steadily growing with over 12,000 views a month and over 4000 subscribers!

My main issue in the mobility industry, and really gets to me is the anti customer attitude out there. For example, it’s frowned upon by manufacturers that you would ever sell someone a second hand stairlift. Additionally, I’ve seen many cases where stairlift companies simply write off stairlifts they either aren’t able to fix, or because spares are so expensive, it’s not worth fixing!

So between my company and my own personal YouTube channel, I wanted to try and change the stairlift industry for the better. I feel people should be able to carry out basic repairs on their products, alongside they should know what quality products exist out there.

So as it stood at the time, my ran my company by day and edited the odd YouTube video by night, and tried to build up both entities.

Over the Christmas I did a lot of thinking, frankly Modern Mobility wasn’t doing too well as we had overheads beyond what we were taking in. So it was obvious whilst I was good at mobility repairs, good at stairlifts and excellent at web / marketing – I was a totally crap businessman! So in 2025 I decided to pass over control of Modern Mobility to my partner Niamh, she would run it daily and I’ll directly do the normal work related things, like stairlift installations and repairs. Niamh now runs the day to day operations whilst we also both balance the life with two young kids!

Due to the distraction is was for our company, we stopped providing mobility repair services officially and now do these jobs on a case by case basis myself. Our company was too focused on the stairlift division, that we felt offering mobility repairs wouldn’t be in the interest of the company and distract from our stairlift division greatly. Due to the fact I was so busy with stairlifts, and we were heavily advertising, people weren’t getting their mobility equipment fixed fast enough.

Simply put, Modern Mobility needs to stick to it’s core of being a stairlift repair and installation company, with any additional services launched being solely stairlift related. So, since the company is no longer offering these repairs, I operate the previously company website called Mobility Repair, and take on jobs that are both worth the time as I now do these repairs on weekends, but can also benefit the YouTube channel and audience out there.

I’ve also decided to offer my previous IT services including web development and marketing out to a small circle of companies I know, so I basically get to work in Modern Mobility for stairlifts full time, then my mobility repair business gives me additional income on the side, along with it – more YouTube content. Additional to what I mentioned above, I also have started a dedicated company providing high end consulting and development services for companies. The business called www.ricki.ai, speciliases in AI Business Services, Bespoke Web Development and Online Marketing.

Now I have multiple smaller jobs and get to still work at various roles I enjoy on a daily basis. One day I could be recording a YouTube video, the next day installing a stairlift – after that coding a new website! I genuinely love how it’s all setup now and I am focused on the future.

Anyway if you made it down this far, I appreciate the read as I really wanted to convey my story to the fans who watch my content.