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After 15 years working in medical sales in the pharmaceutical industry, Brenda Ward found herself craving change. Increasingly disillusioned with Western medicine, she became more and more interested in the holistic approach and after qualifying as an acupuncturist and some time working in a hospital in China, she returned to Ireland to set up her own clinic in Maynooth.
It’s through that first business that the idea for her second was born. Shocked by how often women’s health woes—fertility concerns, in particular—were brushed off, Brenda wanted to use her expertise to help. She went back to study under Dr Trevor Wing, a UK Gynaecologist, and shortly after, she set up The Fertility Hub, an online platform with a dedicated team of healthcare specialists working to help individuals optimise their natural reproductive potential.
From the importance of trusting your intuition to how she achieves balance in her life, here she tells her Start-Up Story.
The Natural Fertility Hub is very much a passion project for me. Obviously, a lot of entrepreneurs are passionate, but this is part of a female health movement. Unfortunately in my fertility acupuncture clinic I’ve heard of the gaslighting experienced by women all too often, and of the many ways they just hadn’t been listened to. Women are experts on their own bodies, but people just don’t listen to them. They have been thrown around, they have been told to get blood at the wrong time during their cycle, they’ve been told it’s their eggs, it’s their age… that just takes the power away from women. I was in shock at what I was hearing from clients. It’s a very acceptable expectation that you go to your GP and they will know what to do with fertility but they’re over all different aspects of health and female health is really a speciality of its own. We need education as well, we can’t expect the GP to be able to help you in your fertility journey. So The National Fertility Hub is about empowering female health and helping women to literally road map their journey.
It’s very confusing and noisy in the fertility world. I want to help quieten things down, and really give people that time to get an individualised assessment. We want to get clients to where they need to be at the quickest time possible because if there’s one thing that people don’t have on their fertility journey, it’s time. The aim and mission of the Natural Fertility Hub is to optimise fertility naturally. We offer fertility acupuncture, we have nutritionists and counsellors if needed – and that will expand. I run the hub alongside diagnostic experts. There are tests that can be done with no referral through the hub, and then, obviously, we have access to medics where required too. You need more than one expert and I absolutely can’t do everything. I will do my job to the best I can but it’s great to have a team.
A lot of the time, GPs are tied into protocols – if you’re under 35, you’re told to wait for 12 months, if you’re over 35, you’re told to wait for six months before panicking. You’re told to go home and stop stressing; things that can be quite condescending to women who know that something’s wrong. As I said before, time is precious. So yes, I agree you should absolutely wait those few months but there are things you can be doing in the meantime to optimise your health. You don’t run a marathon without training! These are things we should be doing anyway.
This is all self-funded. I have a business consultant helping me out. I’m also still running my acupuncture clinic so you know, I’m in one business and working on another. My Local Enterprise Office has helped with the website side of things, and we’re talking to them about further grants too. I did the Start Your Own Business course. ACORNS has also been brilliant for me. They basically help businesses being set up in rural Ireland, businesses outside of Dublin, Galway, and Cork. They’re female-led. You get a mentor, and we meet once monthly for six months. That really spurred me on. Women helping women – the advice and support of a team behind you is just so lovely to have. It also holds you accountable which is important for me and my personality.
I think self-doubt is inevitable on the journey but whenever that kicks in, it’s like the universe sends something really positive or somebody turns around and goes, ‘Oh my god, this is what I’ve been looking for’, or, ‘Oh my god, I went through rounds of IVF and if I had known something like this was available, it would’ve meant the world to me.’ That encourages me to just keep ploughing on. It’s the patients, the women, who spur me on. They’ve picked me up a few times and kept me going.
This is the second business I’ve started. Sometimes you’re in so deep that you just have to keep swimming and you get used to that uncertainty. You acknowledge it, and then you work with it. I trust my intuition and give myself time to think, ‘Is this the right path to take?’. Getting the hub together was probably one of the hardest things I’ve done but I suppose, because this is the second time around, I know and I’m ready for the amount of times you have to tweak things. If you’re looking for perfection, you’ll never get going and you certainly won’t keep going. Sometimes I go, will this work? Will it not? But you can’t be too hard on yourself because mistakes will be made and they’re probably the steepest learning path. Starting off, it is such a tough road, but it really just makes you stronger. It also makes you a promoter of other small businesses. You try and support them whenever you can because you know what they’ve gone through behind the scenes.
