Blowing Fire: Sarah Newman

The Dragoness!

WORDS: LIV MORGAN

The soon-to-be Dragon, on the Irish version of the Dragon’s Den, puts her taste for success down to the great films she gazed dreamily at as a child. “Seeing movie stars and fast cars and big houses and swimming pools, I’d say ‘God I’d really like that’. So having access to worldwide TV made me see things that other people had and made me go ‘Wow! That would be fantastic.’”

When Sarah was growing up, this Essex girl was drawn to the open skies. “When I was a child I wanted to be a British Airways Stewardess on a long-haul flight. I pursued it but I failed the aptitude test when I was 17. Life Over!” she remarks in a dead pan tone. How things could have been different.

Sarah’s calm nature has surely seen her through many a hard-ball business deal but she seems unaware of this if it was the case. Sarah speaks practically, “I think I’m a woman who always knew what I wanted but having two young children and being a single mum made me even more determined to be financially independent. I didn’t ever want to depend on another individual.” Now that she’s 39 and with a successful business history behind her, Sarah says she’s in a place where she can pick and choose but she’s still as ambitious as she was when starting out.

It’s apparent that this lady launches herself into everything she believes in with gusto. Having left school early, she was married by her mid-twenties, moved to Ireland with her then husband and set up the business she is most well-known for, Needahotel.com. After years of success with the wholesale accommodation business, Sarah sold it for a reported ¤60 million to the multinational, Cendant. “It was absolutely the right time to exit. If we had left it any later it mightn’t have been the success story that it was. You need to know when to let go. It was a real rollercoaster. When there’s a group of people involved from accountants to lawyers from either side of the pond, you’re dealing with a lot of egos and everybody wants to end up looking the best and get the biggest fees.”

After the sale of Needahotel.com in 2006, Sarah took some downtime which means she was “involved in a few different things but they weren’t that exciting”. Thanks to RTÉ securing the Dragon’s Den rights, Sarah will be back on our media radar setting entrepreneur’s sirens off. She’s ready to find some really good investments and won’t be limiting herself on what she can invest. “I was very flattered to be asked to be a dragon, I hadn’t given it any thought as I didn’t even know it was coming to Ireland but apparently they had earmarked me for the past 18 months!”

Read more about Sarah Newman in the December | January 2009 issue of WMB, on newsstands now!