Eveleen Coyle, founder of Fabulous Food Trails.
THE FIRST half-hour of the day is spent catching up on e-mails that have come in overnight.
Then, if we've a trail on that day, I'll ring around and make sure everyone is coming. Sometimes people book months in advance and then forget all about it. After that we check we have all the bits and pieces we need for the day, such as maps, booklets and aprons.
I set up the business with my niece, Pamela Coyle. We are both food writers, and we said we'd give it three years and see how it went. That was three years ago, and it's going great.
We work from a purpose-built office at the side of my house, and in recent weeks we have spent much of our time setting up a new Food of Dublin walk, taking people slightly off the beaten track - there's no point bringing tourists to Grafton Street, as they'd be going there anyway. We walk a bit, then we stop and taste a bit.
Most walks like that last about two and a half hours, and at the end of them you sure don't need lunch.
If it's an office-based day we're actually pretty good about taking lunch - we're both foodies, after all. It's also nice to take a break and chat about things other than work. That said, some of our best ideas have come to us on our lunch breaks.
After lunch we try to do an hour of accounting and bill payments. You have to be very disciplined to keep on top of a small business, and I hate doing it, but you feel great after it's all done.
At the moment we are working on revamping our website, and it's taking up too much time - rewriting material, taking pages down and putting them up.
We are constantly revising our offerings, depending on what's working best. Our ethnic days, for example, have proven really popular, and our new chocolate day has been a success.
We also set aside a portion of each day to source new ideas for food trails, talking to chefs and meeting people, as well as doing up feasibility studies.
We have to do about three dry runs for each new trail, bringing groups of people out and asking them for feedback on what they liked and didn't like. It's hard work for them, because we give out three-page questionnaires to fill in.
Early on I realised not to use friends or family for practice runs, because they don't like to say anything negative, and that's no use to us.
If we are having an ethnic day we'll head out of the office early to meet with a group of between six and eight people who want to learn as much as they can about Thai or Japanese cooking, say.
They come from all around the country, and, perhaps surprisingly, there are usually as many men as women. We go into a restaurant in town, and the chef goes through everything from the implements used in a typical Japanese kitchen to ingredients, food preparation and cooking.
Afterwards I'll head back to the office to clear the desk of any unanswered e-mails and set priorities for the next day.
We usually finish up by about 6pm, and I go back into the house. Even if I've been on a food trail I'll still eat dinner, but luckily on those days my husband will cook it for me.
In conversation with Sandra O'Connell