BORN in Carrick-on-Suir, Co Tipperary, the daughter of a cattle exporter, Angela Kennedy was brought up in a family of four girls and no boys, which gave her the chance to observe the farming business at close quarters. She also learnt the simple truth about making a profit.

“I was fascinated by the fact that you could buy one euro worth of drystock from the mart, fatten it up for a few months, get it ready for slaughter and then make a huge profit on selling it.”

At the time, it was rare to see women in the drystock industry, so Kennedy started studying science technology and got a job in the experimental medicine and pathology departments in University College, Galway. “I always wanted to get into the workforce. I wanted to be earning my own living,” she says.

Kennedy is now managing director of Megazyme, an enzyme manufacturing company that she set up with her husband, research scientist Barry McCleary, in 1987.

Several of the company’s tests are used as industry world standards.

Kennedy met McCleary at 29, having worked her way from the lab, through a pharmaceutical sales job, to become marketing manager at an Irish enzyme manufacturer, now a division of ICI.

McCleary was an Australian academic working in the area of enzyme research at the company. Enzymes, proteins which make DNA replicate faster, are used by companies making food, detergents and other organic products, to speed up and enhance processes.

The enzyme market, essential to these industries, is worth more than €1bn, but is dominated by multinationals. Kennedy reasoned that for a small company there was potential to develop more specialist products.

In 1987, she moved to Australia and was followed a year later by McCleary. The two married and set up Megazyme.

While Kennedy worked to support both of them, McCleary worked on developing potential enzyme products, out of a laboratory attached to their house in northern Sydney.

Within nine years, turnover had reached €750,000. In 1996, Kennedy and McCleary took the decision to move back to Ireland, and set up the company in Bray business park in Wicklow.

That same year one of the products McCleary had developed, a test to measure starch in cereal that delivered results in two hours, compared to a previous three-day wait, became an industry standard.

Kennedy and McCleary believed in their ideas. “You have to have enough confidence in your own ideas and the ability to take a risk. It’s better to have taken a risk than not ventured at all.”

The company now employs 13 people and has started work on a 15,500sq ft molecular biology research and development facility where it will clone its own enzymes in-house and produce a new range of test kits for the wine and beverage industry.

Forty per cent of its sales are online to markets including North America, Europe and the Far East.

In 2002, Kennedy completed an MBA at the Smurfit graduate school of business, gaining first place in the faculty. Last year she took over as chairperson of the Small Firms Association, an industry lobby group representing Irish firms employing less than 50 staff.