Picture-perfect year for Stockbyte's Kennelly
But that's exactly what happened in April of this year when Getty Images snapped up the company for ?110m.
Mr Kennelly was not the only winner in this sale. Staff at Stockbyte also got a slice of the windfall, each receiving around ?175,000.
Married to Johanna with two boys aged 11 and 15, the 45-year-old Mr Kennelly started his career in the media working for 'Kerry's Eye', a newspaper founded in 1974 by his parents Padraig and Joan.
By the age of ten, he was assisting his father on news assignments and had developed a keen interest in photography.
At 21, Mr Kennelly set up Newsfax, a photo agency which also supplied newspaper articles to the Irish and UK markets.
With the advent of digital technology he realised that the business was changing rapidly, and so in 1997 he set up Stockbyte to provide photos to publications.
Newspapers, magazines and the internet have a huge demand for stock photographs to illustrate articles and features.
Rather than selling photographs individually, he decided to use new digital technology to sell them in huge batches on CD discs and on the internet.
By the time his company had been sold to Getty Images, it had a collection of 85,000 pictures that were used in 70 countries.
From its modest headquarters in Tralee where the company started off as "rank outsiders", Stockbyte had become the biggest seller of stock photographs in the world.
The acquisition by Getty Images had been on the cards since October 2004.
Mr Kennelly has been low profile since the sale, although he is a backer of a new radio station in the South West of Ireland.
- Samantha McCaughren
