WHEN Sheenco Travel founder Genevieve Sheehan launched the luxury travel company from her kitchen table in Goleen in 2012, she believed there was room in the market for a more personal, highly tailored approach to luxury travel in Ireland and the UK.

Today, 14 years later, Sheenco operates as a fully remote international business with teams across Ireland, America and Canada — while Genevieve remains firmly rooted in West Cork.

Following Sheenco’s success, Genevieve is now turning her attention to a second business venture. Earlier this year, she incorporated Craition, an AI-enabled operational systems company designed to help small and medium enterprises (SMEs) untangle the chaos that often comes with growth.

‘Most founders recognise the symptoms immediately,’ said Genevieve.

‘The same task is being done five different ways by five different people; critical know-how sits in the heads of one or two team members; new hires take too long to become productive; and businesses underestimate the cost of that delay.’

The founder of Craition said these are rarely ‘people problems.’ Instead, she said: ‘They are systems problems — and almost every growing business has them.’

The idea for Craition came directly from Sheenco’s own experience scaling-up internationally while operating remotely from West Cork.

‘As the business grew,’ Genevieve said, ‘we realised that relying on memory, instinct and key individuals simply doesn’t scale.

‘What changed everything for us was capturing how the company actually operated and building systems the team could rely on without my involvement in every decision.’

Craition works with SMEs to turn operational knowledge into practical systems, automation, and AI-enabled workflows that improve efficiency, consistency and scalability.

Genevieve said: ‘Our flagship offering, The Blueprint, combines an operational audit with the design of tailored systems built around how a company genuinely functions day-to-day.’

She believes many Irish businesses are currently under pressure to ‘do something with AI’ without knowing exactly where to begin.

‘Most SMEs don’t need hype, they need clarity,’ she said. ‘AI is only useful when the underlying business systems make sense first. Otherwise, businesses risk automating inefficiency instead of fixing it.’

At Sheenco, she said every guest journey, supplier handover, and new-hire onboarding sequence runs on systems that once lived entirely in her head.

From luxury travel to operational AI, Genevieve’s focus remains consistent: building businesses that scale without losing the human element.

‘Good businesses grow,’ she concluded, ‘and great systems let them grow without breaking.’