Practical skills for writing credible business plans
Ulmarud is a Dublin-based online education platform that runs structured workshops on business planning. The focus is narrow and deliberate: participants learn to produce plans that hold up under scrutiny — from investors, lenders, and their own teams. Since 2017, the programme has worked with participants across more than 40 countries, each bringing different industries, markets, and starting points.
The people who built and run the programme
A small, experienced group with backgrounds in finance, adult education, and operational management.
The curriculum was designed around a recurring observation: most business plan problems are not financial — they are structural. Participants frequently arrive with detailed spreadsheets but vague market assumptions, or strong narratives with no operational grounding. The workshop sequence was built to address these specific gaps in order, not to cover every possible topic.
Each module includes a written assignment reviewed by a facilitator, not an automated system. Feedback is specific to the participant's industry and context. This takes more time than peer review or AI grading, but it produces a more accurate picture of where the plan actually needs work. Questions about the learning environment or technical access can be directed to the technical support team.
Fionnuala Drennan
Programme Director
Fionnuala spent eleven years in corporate finance before moving into education. She designed the original workshop sequence and continues to refine the curriculum based on what participants consistently struggle with. Her reviews focus on the logic of financial assumptions rather than the numbers themselves.
Programme queries
Tobias Vanhoof
Lead Facilitator
Tobias leads the live review sessions and manages the assignment feedback cycle. His background is in operations management across manufacturing and logistics, which shapes how he reads the operational sections of participant plans. He tends to ask about supply chain assumptions and staffing timelines before anything else.
Adaeze Nwosu
Curriculum Architect
Adaeze holds a doctorate in adult learning and joined Ulmarud to restructure how assignments are sequenced. She introduced the current scaffolding approach, where each module builds directly on the previous one rather than treating topics as independent units. The change reduced the number of participants who stalled mid-programme.