About
About The Academy
The Academy teaches owners and office staff of small Irish businesses how to handle everyday work, like enquiries, follow-ups and reports, with free tools and AI that a person checks. The learning is free. Help building it into your business is optional and paid.
Who runs it
The Academy is operated by Raven Design, and the tutorials and classes are written and taught by Brian. Brian builds and runs a portfolio of around 50 Irish websites, together with the systems behind them: handling enquiries from many sites in one place, weekly reporting across them, and monitoring sources for useful changes.
Those are our own systems, built for our own sites. When a tutorial uses one as an example, it's an example of something we built and use ourselves, not a client case study. We don't claim time saved or results for other businesses that we haven't measured.
Contact: hello@theacademy.ie
Why it exists
Most small businesses already use AI tools for the odd email. Fewer have a reliable way of using them for the jobs that repeat every week, with a check so mistakes don't reach customers. That gap is mostly about method, not software, and method can be taught for free. Some businesses will want help putting it into practice; that's how the free side is paid for.
What this site used to be
Until October 2026, The Academy was a programme for people out of work or short on experience: first a planned cohort (which never started), then volunteering on our early-stage projects. We closed that on 2 October 2026. Nobody had applied or volunteered, so there are no past participants, graduates or references. The old career guides are kept in an archive while we decide what to do with them.
Contact
hello@theacademy.ie. We're not connected with other organisations called "The Academy", such as venues, stage schools or training centres.