Danny Buckley is co-founder and director of ADHD Now, Ireland’s largest private ADHD assessment and treatment provider, offering clinically led diagnosis and ongoing care for children and adults across the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland.
Founded to tackle the chronic shortage of timely neurodevelopmental assessment, the company has reached approximately 60 per cent of the Irish private ADHD market.
The service spans both assessment and intervention, including therapy across psychiatry, speech and language, and occupational therapy.
What vision/lightbulb moment prompted you to start up in business?
My late wife Simone told me she believed I had ADHD. I was in denial. Her last words to me were a plea to please get help for my ADHD. After losing her, I sought my diagnosis and experiencing first-hand the struggle to get access made me determined that the people who came after me could get answers in weeks rather than years. That is where ADHD Now began.
Describe your business model and what makes your business unique.
We provide private, clinically-led neurodevelopmental ADHD and autism assessment and treatment across Ireland and Northern Ireland, combining telehealth with in-person care. What makes us unique is scale paired with governance: we’ve reached roughly 60 per cent market share without compromising clinical standards, working with quality-assurance partners to keep diagnosis rigorous and patient-centred, supported by a team of over 100 clinicians across both services.
What is your greatest business achievement to date?
My proudest moment in business is deeply personal. From a place of pain, I was able to get assessed myself and experience first-hand the positive change that understanding yourself brings: a diagnosis, clarity and a plan on how best to support yourself moving forward. To then be able to build that experience into a service here in Ireland, offering quick access and a positive, supportive journey to thousands of others, and to see it work so well that it is now strengthening the public system alongside us, that is my biggest achievement in business. The commercial success matters, but it is the human impact that defines it.
What was your backs-to-the-wall moment and how did you overcome it?
In our early growth phase, demand for assessments far outpaced our clinical capacity. We had patients coming to us in their thousands, finally able to access help and we had a responsibility not to let them down. We had to move fast: going out to recruit further expert clinicians, building the supervision structures to support them properly, and putting the administrative backbone in place to allow them to focus on patients rather than paperwork. It was a defining period. We came through it because we refused to compromise on clinical standards, even under intense pressure, and it made us a far stronger organisation.
Describe your growth funding path.
Self-funded and bootstrapped from day one. Profitable and reinvesting into growth.
How will your market look in three years and where would you like your business to be?
Demand for ADHD and autism assessment will keep rising as awareness grows and stigma falls. In three years, we expect a more regulated, more competitive private market. We intend to remain the clear market leader across the island, the trusted name patients and GPs turn to first and to have made meaningful inroads in new geographies
What is the single most important piece of advice you would offer to a less experienced entrepreneur?
Get the fundamentals right early: governance, compliance, contracts, quality. They feel like friction when you’re moving fast, but they are exactly what lets you scale credibly later. And beyond the commercial, know your “why”. Mine is Simone. When things get hard, and they do, knowing why you started is what keeps you going.