Tina McKenzie: on a mission to make ‘a real difference’ in Northern Ireland

When Tina McKenzie, probably Northern Ireland’s most prominent businesswoman, describes herself, one word keeps coming up: “driven”. Even her idea of relaxation is to sit on her lawnmower, running it up and down her garden.

She loves it because “you can smell the outside — I’m never outside”.

Between her day job as chief executive of Staffline Recruitment Ireland, the agency whose operations on the island she set up from a standing start in 2013, and her many roles promoting the region’s business potential at home and abroad, she is more often inside a meeting room or on a plane. She steered Staffline Ireland to a turnover of £150mn within six years, although the Covid pandemic trimmed that to the current £130mn.

Mowing the lawn also reminds her how far she has travelled, professionally, from the council house where she grew up with six siblings in Belfast during the region’s Troubles conflict and how her success cemented a desire to make things better there.

“I want to make sure of two things — that I can always provide for my family and for myself without having to rely on anybody and . . . to really make a difference,” says McKenzie, 51.

That meant championing the local economy during the aftermath of Brexit when she was Northern Ireland chair of the policy unit at the UK’s Federation of Small Businesses — work she continues as a UK government trade adviser.

To “make a difference” also involves developing staff and helping a still deeply divided society to prosper. At Staffline, which McKenzie started after two decades in recruitment in the UK and EU, more than half her 180 staff have been promoted at least three times: “I really grow the talent from within.” Lively and expressive, she is speaking in her cosy office in Belfast, overlooking the River Lagan.

Her return to Belfast from England came at the end of 2012, after senior roles at Dutch recruitment firm Randstad, where she transformed the Northern Ireland and Scotland division from 30 temporary staff to the most profitable in the UK. It also coincided with the “flag protests” over how often Belfast City Hall could fly the Union flag.

The desire to “do the right thing” and to try to heal divisions in society prompted a foray into politics a decade ago that she remains proud of, despite it having proved a “total humiliation”.

Whatever the family business was, we were all working in it . . . I was managing taxi men in their fifties and sixties when I was 14

McKenzie, from a nationalist background, joined the new pro-UK party NI21, and became its chair. It swiftly imploded, prompting McKenzie to withdraw as a European parliament candidate on polling day in 2014.

Going into business was, however, always on the cards. McKenzie cut her teeth in family-owned snooker halls, cafés and taxi firms from age 12.

“Whatever the family business was, we were all working in it — working a lot, even through exams — business came first,” she recalls. “I was managing taxi men in their fifties and sixties when I was 14 . . . So you learn pretty quickly this is how you manage people, this is how you work — and, by the way, work comes first.”

Aged 11, she failed the UK grammar school selection test and did “just average” in state exams at 16. “They put me in a typing class, but I was a shit typist,” she laughs. Encouraged by an inspiring teacher, she dumped the typing, did well in her leaving exams, and studied philosophy at Ulster University.

“I’ve always had a certain amount of confidence,” she says. “It doesn’t mean I wasn’t shy and self-conscious about things — of course I was. But I always knew I was going to be all right because I’ll do whatever it takes.”

Her first job, aged 22, was on a project to find employment for former prisoners in Northern Ireland. The skills she picked up then provided a head start when she moved to London, aged 25. “I could do what you’re doing,” she told a sceptical recruitment consultant in a job interview. “You try selling ex-prisoners into jobs in Northern Ireland.”

Within a week, she had a recruitment job there and she was a manager within four months. “It was easy, easy, easy because I was prepared to do more hours,” she says. “Just when everyone has given up, I’m always prepared to give it more — because why not?”

Somebody can be smarter than you, somebody can be more suave than you, but no one is everything more than you

With what she calls her “big Belfast voice”, McKenzie claims to have more confidence than talent. A skilful lobbyist, she has been recognised as one of the region’s most influential business figures and was awarded an MBE last year for services to the Northern Ireland economy. She never gets imposter syndrome: “Somebody can be smarter than you, somebody can be more suave than you, but no one is everything more than you.”

McKenzie believes the Troubles made people from Northern Ireland particularly resilient and she celebrates the workplace as a space where people whose housing and schooling were often segregated came together.

She has spoken eloquently in a TED talk about the need to move beyond the labels that burden many Northern Irish people. Entering politics appealed because “we’ve all got a responsibility — especially people that are from here — to use our skills and talents in a way that helps this place”.

But could she try politics again? “I don’t know. I don’t know . . . ”

Her success has not come without sacrifice: it was her husband who stayed at home with their three children. And McKenzie is pragmatic, if sometimes wistful: “Sometimes, people say you can have it all — what a load of crap.”

Pushing harder, taking risks, doing more — as she describes her style — has left no room for hobbies, although she indulges her passion for Patsy Cline, Dolly Parton, and “all sad love songs” while on the lawnmower.

If someone offered me something and put a bit of a challenge around it, I was easy to manipulate

A visiting professor at Ulster University’s business school, honorary consul for Finland, and global board member of non-profit organisation The Ireland Funds, she is now more choosy about which projects to join. Early in her career, it was different: “If someone offered me something and put a bit of a challenge around it, I was easy to manipulate,” she says.

She plans to have another few years in the corporate world as she considers her next chapter. “You’re crocheting a blanket of your career and you won’t really know what it looks like until actually you finish it,” she says. “Sometimes, you put ribbons and bells on and you don’t know why, but it all comes back for a reason.

“And I firmly believe that, if you try to do the right things, try to help people and work hard, good things happen.”