About Lifakei

Business strategy taught seriously.

Lifakei builds seminars around the kind of strategic thinking that actually shapes decisions — not slides full of frameworks, but structured conversations where ideas get tested and challenged by peers with real stakes in the outcome.

Lifakei business strategy seminar session in progress

Where this started

Founded in 2024

Early Lifakei seminar discussion setting

Lifakei grew out of a straightforward frustration: most online business education either goes too shallow — a 40-minute video and a quiz — or too abstract, piling theory on theory without ever landing on a decision worth making. The platform was built to sit in the gap between those two failure modes.

Each seminar is structured around a specific strategic problem — market entry, resource allocation, competitive positioning — and participants work through it with peers from different industries and contexts. The friction that creates is deliberate. Disagreement produces sharper thinking than consensus.

80%

Live discussion time per session

65%

Participants from outside Ireland

50%

Sessions with cross-industry groups

The people running it

Three people build and run every programme — one who designs the strategic arc, one who shapes the learning structure, and one who facilitates the sessions themselves.

Programme Director

Orsolya Fekete

Orsolya selects the strategic topics and decides how each seminar is framed. She spent over a decade advising mid-size companies on competitive positioning before moving into programme design, and that background shapes every topic choice Lifakei makes.

Competitive strategy

Curriculum Architect

Ciarán Ó Maolalaidh

Ciarán structures how each seminar unfolds — the sequence of material, the discussion prompts, the pacing. His background is in instructional design for professional audiences, which means he thinks carefully about what participants actually retain, not just what sounds rigorous.

Learning design

Seminar Facilitator

Taavi Leppänen

Taavi runs the live sessions. He keeps discussions from collapsing into agreement too quickly, surfaces the assumptions people haven't questioned, and makes sure quieter participants get heard. That's a harder skill than it sounds.

Group facilitation

How we work

Four things that stay consistent across every programme

The format changes depending on the topic, but four principles don't shift. They're the reason participants describe Lifakei sessions as different from other online learning — and occasionally harder than expected.

1 Specific problems, not general themes. Every seminar starts with a concrete strategic scenario, not a topic area. Participants know what they're solving from the first session.
2 Small groups, deliberately. Sessions cap at 14 participants. That's enough for genuine diversity of perspective without letting anyone disappear into the background.
3 No passive attendance. Every session requires preparation and a stated position before joining. Showing up without one isn't an option the format allows.
4 Written synthesis after each session. Participants receive a structured summary of what was argued, what was unresolved, and what the group's reasoning produced — not just notes.

Strategic mapping reference used in Lifakei business seminars

Current cohort capacity

74% filled across open programmes

Places in each cohort are limited by design. Once a session reaches 14 participants, it closes — the next intake opens on a rolling basis.