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EY CFO Outlook: Record revenues with people at the heart, with Carol Phelan, CFO of Dalata Hotel Group
In this episode of The EY CFO Outlook podcast, Carol Phelan, CFO of Dalata Hotel Group chats with Jonathan Healy about her love of business, people and company culture, and her role in helping to grow Dalata Group revenues to a record €500m last year.
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Carol Phelan has always loved numbers. Growing up on a farm, she understood how the numbers she was learning in school related to the business of the farm and how it scaled. Accountancy was one of her Leaving Cert subjects, but, for Carol, “accountancy was a set of tools that I wanted to work in Business rather than accountancy as the end in and of itself.”
Carol spent the first six years of her career as a consultant , auditing and advising client companies. However this work increasingly led her to “be the person” and become fully involved in the running of a business: “I was walking away from it at the point they were about to go and live and breathe the consequences of their decision, whether it was a new investment or whatever that might be”.
And so began Carol’s career on the frontlines of business, leading to her current role as CFO of Dalata Hotel Group, which operates Ireland’s largest hotel brands, Clayton and Maldron, and is now rapidly growing its presence across the UK and Europe.
They also discuss:
- Dalata’s successful decentralised model, where the teams in the group’s hotels are empowered to run them as if they are their own, presenting their strategy at a group level annually.
- How Dalata and its leadership and teams navigated the challenges of Covid-19 and related lockdowns.
- Dalata’s success in achieving 50/50 gender parity across its board and executive team.
- Why financial success all starts with hiring the right people, treating them fairly, and building a great company culture.
- Dalata’s rapid expansion across the UK and Europe.
George Deegan: Welcome to the EY CFO Outlook Podcast. In this series, we feature some of Ireland's finance function leaders, sharing interesting perspectives on a range of topics, from driving growth in their business to leading major finance transformation. I'm George Deegan, a partner and sponsor of our CFO Agenda programme here at EY. In this podcast, we welcome Carol Phelan of Dalata Hotel Group. Dalata operate Ireland two largest hotel brands, the Clayton Hotels and the Maldron Hotels, in addition to a rapidly growing presence in the UK and continental Europe. Johnathan, over to you.
Jonathan Healy: Carol Phelan. How are you?
Carol Phelan: Hi, Jonathan. Good to meet you.
Jonathan Healy: Tell us a little bit, first of all, about your role with Dalata. Everybody knows it's a big hotel chain. They've stayed in them. But what do you do?
Carol Phelan: I suppose I've a very varied role. We're a listed company. That means I spend a lot of times interacting with our investors on roadshows, getting out and meeting them, talking about how we're getting on. You know, they're very invested in understanding what our growth plans are and how we're doing. So I spend time doing that. I then spend quite a bit of time with our teams in the hotels as well, which is the part I enjoy about my job. The two parts, the diversity, I suppose, of what I do day to day, week to week, and you're out understanding what their challenges are, what their strategies are, how they're getting on, you know, developing their teams. You know where to next? How are their customers feeling about the hotels they're staying in. Then you're working on things as complex as tax for, you know, jurisdictional, other jurisdictional acquisitions. You're working on the financial reporting that must go for the stock exchange and all of that. So a very wide role, I suppose, which is what I enjoyed and what I started out to try and do.
Jonathan Healy: You sound like you're very hands on, and I think that that is reflected in your background because you weren't naturally drawn to hotels. And I think you, you grew up on a farm.
Carol Phelan: That's right, I did I grew up in a farm in Laois. And as hands on as I am now, I can tell you I was a lot more hands on back then. There was plenty of gaps that I stood in and running around in front of animals and trying, trying to do what I was told. But it was a great grounding, you know, it was 1980s Ireland. You worked really hard. And, you know, we all worked as a family and people forget that sometimes a farm is a business, and it's a business where all the family is in on it. So you're working in it as a child, obviously my mum, my dad were in it as well. And I was very fortunate, I had my dad in particular was from a very large family and there were so many people across so many different businesses that they'd created themselves, and it varied all the way from farms to meat industry to all these different types of businesses. So I got a really good experience, I suppose, of different things that you wouldn't naturally see living down the country.
Jonathan Healy: Did it give you a good sense of responsibility that when you were working on the farm, whether you were standing in the ditch or you were moving cattle or whatever you were doing, that you knew you had to do it and that you had to stand up?
Carol Phelan: Yeah. That's a that's a very fair point. I think, you know, I was the eldest that also plays a part. But I certainly did feel responsibility because that was your livelihood. It was your home. So you did what needed to be done. And you assumed that responsibility and it was given to you, actually. And that power. And sometimes I think maybe we don't empower. And I certainly think sometimes I don't empower my children enough. Maybe I protect them a little bit more than we would have lived through, I suppose. We would have been put in at the deep end. And it's amazing, because then you felt part of it and you felt pride as we grew and the scale of the farm grew, and you got to understand what it took to make a living and all those types of things. So I found it hugely rewarding, and it certainly did, I think, ingrain in me a sense of responsibility. And it felt like it felt like my business in a way.
Jonathan Healy: At what point did you realise, though, that you had an aptitude for numbers? You could have continued to stand in the ditch. I mean, that was an option, a career for you but...
Carol Phelan: There was a time, someone did mention that it didn't. I think as I got stuck in a bit of muck one day and I was carried by my father across it, and he said, you'll marry a farmer yet? I said, I don't think so. I'm not quite sure there's a lot of hardship involved.
Jonathan Healy: You've found numbers instead?
Carol Phelan: I found numbers instead. No. When I was in school, when I was going through secondary, I just found an ease with them. You know, they didn't intimidate me. There was clarity to them and what I found, as well as I could bring the two together. I could see the real life in front of me. And maybe that was from the farm or being around family who worked in businesses, different businesses. I could understand what they meant and what they were trying to do. I could I could make them make sense, I suppose, which I often found people were very intimidated by it. I wasn't maybe I was fortunate.
Jonathan Healy: But was that the case with, you know, your classmates; That accountancy was something that they couldn't quite get their head around, but you found, well, actually, no, I like this?
Carol Phelan: Yeah. No, absolutely. Some, some people. Yeah. Very much intimidated by it. Couldn't get their head around it and preferred different types of subjects and maybe more practical or hands on subjects, which I didn't quite enjoy as much. Um, and I suppose that's then, like most things, I was very focused on getting a good Leaving Cert. So you naturally you go to what you're very good at. So I round it out and would have done accountancy for the Leaving Cert, but I always felt accountancy was a set of tools that I wanted to work in Business rather than Accountancy was the ends in and of itself.
Jonathan Healy: You were, of course, a young graduate when you came out of college, and we'd all like to think that we were very intelligent and keyed into the world when we were 23, whereas we're not.
Carol Phelan: No, no. And a breeze.
Jonathan Healy: Yeah. You followed probably what would have been the obvious path at that stage, which was by joining one of the big four. How did that experience translate into what Carol wanted to do?
Carol Phelan: Yeah, I did, and I saw so many graduates continue to do to this day because there's a very good training there. You get to see big businesses, you get to work with people who are very skilled in that side of working with business and working with numbers. And to be honest, there wasn't a huge amount of other options when that was what you wanted to do back then. Like I look at, we have we have a grad program now, actually within Dalata, and because of the various streams of finance that we would have in, we can actually offer an experience to a grad coming in to work in the hotel, to work in internal audit, to work in investor relations, to work in development. That wasn't an option back then. The thing you did is you went to get that professional qualification and then you went out into business. I think there's much wider variety now. You know, I certainly enjoyed the people I worked with there. I really did, and I enjoyed the clients that I worked with. And I still have a lot of those relationships to this day. But standing back at the end of my contract, I didn't feel that that's what I wanted to do.
Jonathan Healy: Were you too far away from the frontline, working as a consultant? Was that something that weighed on your mind?
Carol Phelan: I think that's exactly it. You know, you were advising, and while it was great, you know, that you were living off effectively your own skills and intellect. You wanted to be the person, you know. I was walking away from it at the point they were about to go and live and breathe the consequences of their decision, whether it was a new investment or whatever that might be. And, you know, at the start, I was an audit, which tends to be historical looking, again, an amazing grounding when you're trying to build your skills. But I wanted to be forward looking. And then when I changed within the firm to work on deals and acquisitions again like that, and you're in it at the start working alongside the management teams.
Jonathan Healy: But then you have to walk away.
Carol Phelan: And then you walk away and you lose, I suppose, the sense of achievement afterwards and learning, you know, what you thought might happen and what you intended to happen and what your strategy was. Did it unfold?
Jonathan Healy: You then went and joined a small enough Irish investment firm?
Carol Phelan: Yes.
Jonathan Healy: But timing is important here. When did that happen?
Carol Phelan: Yeah, timing was interesting, I suppose. It was back in those heady days in 2007, when Ireland was taking over the world, and we were all spending money like it, it grew on trees and there were so many deals being done in Dublin. It was such an exciting time and I felt, you know, I want to get in and be in in these and further embedded in the deal and the consequences afterwards. So I arrived in, in 2007, sort of the middle of the year. And towards the end of that year we closed a great deal in oil trading and blending business, and then about three - funded by Anglo - And then about three months later...
Jonathan Healy: That happened.
Carol Phelan: That happened I think was seared in all our memories. But what I will say is I probably got the best, you know, education and training and experience out of that. Far more than if things had continued to tip along as they had been for years. Because suddenly you're in and you're a strategy like that was built around a beautiful model was ripped up and straight into the bin. We were negotiating with banks, and you were trying to organize working capital for a business and oil business, where oil was heading towards $200 a barrel. And actually, that deal was supposed to be the starting point for adding other businesses to create something much bigger, which obviously was not going to happen in that environment. So I spent a year over and back to London.
Jonathan Healy: What was that like? Because, you know, Dublin was chaotic, London was chaotic, but on a different scale.
Carol Phelan: Yeah.
Jonathan Healy: What was it like as a relatively new just out of her first real job, now trying to find your way amongst all these kinds of bullish guys who were more panicked than they were letting on?
Carol Phelan: Yeah, it was very interesting. The oil business tends to be male dominated and tends to be very risk embracing. There were certainly some very interesting characters, the characters and the cowboy boots and the personalized nameplates on the back of the motorcycles and all these types of things.
Jonathan Healy: You wouldn't get that in Laois.
Carol Phelan: No, you certainly wouldn't get that in Laois, Jonathan. You would be absolutely kicked out the back door if you started doing having notions like that. But you like, you just had to find common ground. They had been owned by an entrepreneur who was a trader himself. Totally different structure. So there was no structures in there when we went in and we had debt, we had covenants we needed to meet. We had investors who had invested money, so we had to step in. And basically spent the year, we brought in, we extended the management team, and I had to try and bring in a clarity and reporting to give us insight, exactly the different elements of what's going on in the business with the team there. And that stood me to great stead when I arrived into Dalata, because thankfully, it wasn't at all the same situation when I joined Dalata in 2014 and it had just listed, and we had such ambition and such growth targets that we wanted to meet, and at that point we needed to do was create finance teams that were able to manage the reporting, able to take in the acquisitions, able to do the financing. Tax was getting obviously far more complex. So that learning I got from that, which, you know, was a stretch and was difficult to do at that type of time was absolutely brilliant. And then I had no fear walking in because you said, well...
Jonathan Healy: I've done it.
Carol Phelan: What could possibly go wrong again?
Jonathan Healy: I've lived the worst possible. Well, there's something could happen later, when you were with Dalata, which we'll come to in a little bit, that that definitely proved to be more challenging and inconceivable when you would have started. But in the middle of all of that, you had some chance meetings that became very important to your career as well. Tell us about those.
Carol Phelan: Yeah. So I suppose how I've always approached my career is I try to build experiences, but I also try to build relationships and working with people who I can learn a lot from. When I was in that private equity company, I met Dermot, who's now the CEO of Dalata. Our paths crossed there. You know, I really, I really thought he was a great person. He was involved. We were trying to do some things in there and the way he speaks, he had such a deep love for hotels. He'd previously been in Jurys and when he joined Dalata, an opportunity came and I was able to join as well, I suppose. And that that was, that was key to my decision actually to going into Dalata, because I believe your career is in the hands, ultimately the people you're working with to a certain extent, sorry, it's in your own hands as well, but it is very much formed by those who are around you. And I knew that his values and my values aligned. And when I went in there as well, I met Pat, who was the CEO, Pat McCann. So a big figure in the hospitality industry who was a CEO then. And I, I met him, he called me into the office to have a quick cup of coffee before I got the job, and he said, I'm not going to be talking to you about finance now. I you know, I don't I don't know too much about that. But he said, I am long enough in the teeth that I don't want to work with people who are not nice people, who aren't decent to those around me. So I wanted to see the cut of you. So I thought, oh hallelujah, this is exactly so honest and forthright and totally about working with decent people. I thought, that's exactly where I want to be.
Jonathan Healy: We'll talk about the Dalata journey in just a minute.
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Jonathan Healy: Pat is an incredible leader in Dalata, but the company was undergoing its own transformation as well. The hotels were very distressed at the time. The economic crash had taken their toll. It wasn't easy either going in there, but you say the learning that you had in London with the oil barons...
Carol Phelan: Yeah...
Jonathan Healy: Paid dividends when it came to talking about hotel rooms in Ireland.
Carol Phelan: Absolutely. Well, I wasn't phased by, I suppose, the role that I had at that point, which was really trying to build out some of the structures around finance and financial reporting and as that team grew. And to be honest, when you heard Pat and Dermot speak about the opportunity that they saw, you'd have followed them into the fire. You'd have gone anywhere. You knew they were going to do it one way or the other. So, to be honest, it didn't feel like a big sort of a punt or a risk or anything like that. And I've never shied away from a challenge. I like when you're sort of out of your comfort zone. That's where you learn. That's where the magic happens. It's a bit of fun. There's different things going on and you know that that point. Like when I look back, when I joined Dalata did 80 million of revenue that first year. We did over half a billion in revenue last year. Like, it's been transformative over the last few years. And when you're around that, the amount you learn, the experience you build is fantastic.
Jonathan Healy: But how much has changed in that intervening period, particularly when you go down the chain. You know, do you treat hotel managers, do you treat hotel staff differently the bigger you got? Did you lose some of that personality?
Carol Phelan: No. And that's you know, that's always something you have the forefront of your mind because to be honest, what makes Dalata is it's culture. Like and if I look, you know, our people are absolutely the key part of our business. Like we are hospitality. If we make our peoples experience at work great, they will make our customers experience great. That will make our business grow and deliver profits for our shareholders. So it's absolutely critical. And there's one thing that's quite different about us compared to some hotel companies. And that's we very much believe in a decentralised model. And what that means is we empower those teams in the hotels to run those businesses as if they are their own. They have their own full management teams, they present their strategy every year. They lay out how they're going to go about their business. And then what we provide at Central Office and it is Central Office. It is not head office.
Jonathan Healy: No dictation from the top?
Carol Phelan: No dictation. But we provide that support and we do provide oversight. We obviously are a publicly listed entity. We have to make sure we're making returns for our shareholders. But that is absolutely key to the business. When I go around, we, you know, we go around twice a year for budgets and sort of what we call our May reviews, interim reviews. Like we listen to the teams talking to us across the table about what they’re doing. You know, the first thing they talk about is the people they have in the business. What are their priorities with their teams? How are they feeling? Who's on development programs, how is that going? And we work our way steadily through all the other key priorities that Dalata as a group has; be it sustainability, be it looking at our customer scores, how are we doing? Where are we not doing so well? Do we need to put investment in this? Do we need to put something different? And our last slide is the EBITDA slide and the earnings slide. And I think that is that really underpins what we believe. That will come. That's the result.
Jonathan Healy: When you say you go around Carol, do they not all come to you and head office in Dublin and sit down with sweaty palms downstairs waiting to be called in?
Carol Phelan: Absolutely not. No way. We go around like it is. It is so energizing to be out at the front of the business with the teams like it really is. There's such passion across - because they genuinely hold that business as part of their own. A little bit like when I was, you know, back in the farm that was your business, you know, you were part of it and you mucked in and you did whatever was needed. And I think even about during Covid, what some of the teams did when our hotels were shut or locked down for people repainting their hotel, you know, the management teams were in there. We tried to hold on to everyone. Everyone just did what needed to be done to protect the business and not just for shareholders, but for the people who worked alongside them, who had jobs and careers tied up in all of this. It was all about keeping that going to come out the other side in strength.
Jonathan Healy: I want to talk about Covid because that's what I was referring to earlier, the crisis that simply could not have been foreseen and eclipsed, particularly in hospitality everything that had gone before. What was going on in your mind when it became obvious that you were going to have to close your hotels?
Carol Phelan: Um, I suppose one of the things we do, and we're very agile, we react well. So I think we sort of sat down and went, we've no real idea where this is going, what’s going to happen, but it's not looking good. They were the early days. We were looking at what was happening in Italy. First thing we did, we went into our banks. We said, you know, we just need to carve out the time and space, you know, put waivers in place so we're not concerned about covenants, and we need to get on with protecting the business. And that's where we took it. It was always looking at the long term. It was reacting, but reacting in a way to protect the long term future of the business. So when the hotel shut and we didn't have business coming in the door or very, very limited business, obviously when it was essential services only, our first priority was to say, how do we keep as many people as we possibly can in this business because it will reopen again. Science will get there. And that was in the days when nobody was sure whether...
Jonathan Healy: You put a lot of faith in that.
Carol Phelan: Well, you know, what was the alternative? That that's often what happens when people have to you find your way. But we did that. So I remember sitting, you know, it was 2:00 in the morning. I was on with the Chief People Officer, we were working through and our shared service centre in Cork. We had a fantastic payroll team. We were so fortunate with centralised payroll down to Cork and the ability then for us to utilise the subsidies that were put in place, in particular by the Irish government, but also within the UK, with furlough. Like our ability to work through the mechanics of that, because it was hugely complex. It was about version 17 at one stage when a lot of people just had to give up, they didn't have the teams or people in place who could work through it and keep paying people. We were able to do that. We held on to as many people as we could. Our Dalata Academy, which is the backbone of our learning development programs in the company - We had all of them online. What we didn't have online, we got online so that the people who couldn't come in, who were working at home, supported by the government, were able to do courses to stay connected with the business. We're able to fill their time. We're able to do things that they might not have the chance to do in normal times, when they had jobs and families and running around to different things with their children. And that was hugely important to stay connected, even when we all couldn't be together within the hotels or visiting hotels.
Jonathan Healy: In the middle of all of that, you were still trying to keep the business alive. You strike me as a resilient character. You know, you had the 2007 experience, you had this experience, you had the grown up on the farm experience. Did you feel resilient at that time?
Carol Phelan: Yeah, I think I did. And I think, you know, that's one of the reasons I always wanted to, to work with really good people. You know, when you're in those types of situations, how you come together as a team, you know, really helps, you know, get you through. You lift each other because everyone will have the darker days, you know, and everyone had their own challenges in home and family life trying to juggle be it, you know, schooling and all those types of things. We lifted at each other. And there was always somebody who would have found the piece of news that said they were getting there and the vaccines, or there was this or that emerging and going on, or it was starting to fall away, and we just kept going. Looked to the long term, we're going to come out of this strong. We were fortunate. We did a big sale and leaseback on one of our hotels in Dublin when the hotel was actually shut, and that was the strength of our partnership with that fixed income investor that brought in cash. We then went to we waited, you know, there was still a little bit of uncertainty, obviously, was how it was all going to go. So we decided to raise equity from our shareholders, which was very well subscribed. And we just kept taking the steps calmly. When we could open, We opened, but we did it safely. And if you're always looking through to the long term, that helps. And if you have good people around you that you know you can rely on, that helps too. So yeah, I think, I think resilience and probably never shied away from a challenge. So, you know, you kept going. It was good.
Jonathan Healy: You now have 53 hotels, over 11,000 rooms, 1300 rooms coming. How big is this going to get?
Carol Phelan: Oh, we're not finished yet Jonathan. We we've just, so if you think about it. As a hospitality company coming out last year, we added seven new hotels to our portfolio and our first in continental Europe in Dusseldorf. This year, we've acquired two hotels in London, which is traditionally extremely difficult to get into for a hotel company because you're going up against so many competing funds. We've added a site in Edinburgh, which is a beautiful building we're going to convert over the coming years, and we've just added our first hotel in Amsterdam as well. So and the thing is, we came out probably stronger financially even than we went in. So we've been primed sitting there because we feel that's where the opportunities are going to come. When you go through a level of distress like that in the market and now you have rising interest rates, which will start to weigh heavily on people who may not have the same balance sheet we do or have approached our financing the way we did. Opportunities will shake loose and we were sitting ready, waiting for those, I suppose, and we're delighted. And having the teams there that we kept through Covid means we're able to. Because a building is only a building, you need a person and a team in place to make it come alive.
Jonathan Healy: You talked about that Dalata Academy and the importance that that played during Covid and continues to play as you're growing and expanding your business. People as a people are a problem insofar as they're hard to find.
Carol Phelan: Yeah.
Jonathan Healy: How were you managing that? How were you making sure that your addressing diversity in the sector properly? I mean, you're one of a handful of female CFOs in the country. You know, how are you making sure that you're doing the right thing when it comes to leadership and bringing people through?
Carol Phelan: Yeah. Well, I suppose first of all, if I speak about it more widely across the business. You have to really prioritise treating your employees well. And a lot of people speak to that, but then don't do it. So as a leadership team, when we go around the hotels, one of the first things we do is we look at the back of house areas. Is the staff canteen in good shape? Is it the type of place that you want to be? Are the staff meals good? Are they of good quality? Is there a variety there? Are there changing rooms? Are they all good? Because if you treat people well and pay them well, they’re going to want to stay with you. And then we offer them the opportunities through our academy and the, the, the training and development we put behind them and the opportunities as we grow for them to grow their careers. Like we give people every reason to stay with us. And that's really important. And you're absolutely right. Diversity is absolutely key across every across every absolutely element. We're very fortunate in Dalata. You know, 50% of the board is female, 50% of our exec team is female. There are so many strong female leaders.
Jonathan Healy: I doubt that happened by accident. Was that one of Pat McCann's legacies?
Carol Phelan: I think so and I think to be fair, Dermot, as well, and I think it's because you look at people, because people was always at the heart of Dalata you took the person as they came to you. You didn't try and get the person that fitted in exactly what you’re like. You worked with people and enjoyed them for who they were and what they brought and the energy they brought. And then you work hard at that. You make sure there’s not barriers there that you mightn't see. And that's very important that you do that. So from my case, when I had very young children, I had I had twins and it was, you know, a particularly busy time at times.
Jonathan Healy: It would be with twins.
Carol Phelan: It was, yeah. It was slightly busy. It's an enjoyable home schooling experience through Covid when you're working so hard and keeping your business on the road. But you know, they afforded me flexibility because I needed it at that time and I don't need it quite as much now. But I think that's a huge priority. You'll have people who are caring for their parents. You need to look at how you give the flexibility for people to have their lives around their jobs and their roles. And that's hugely important. So like so many hospitality companies are struggling for staff. We have the same level of vacancies because obviously there'll be a lot of people who come through and they're working in college, etcetera. We have the same level of vacancies now as we had in 2019, and that's why we can afford to perform like we are and operate at the levels in our hotels that we do.
Jonathan Healy: I've never met a CFO before who I would expect to literally run a finger along surfaces in a hotel. You are that hands on, I suspect. I mean, do you approach a hotel more from a, well are we hitting the standard here rather than are their financials right?
Carol Phelan: I think and again, I suppose to the point when I made when I was talking about our budgets, you have to be looking at all elements. Like I can make a spreadsheet do anything like. I can put, you know, I can cut costs out great. I look for profitability, I'll destroy the business two years later. But you know, you have to be looking. What are your customers experience? How happy are your people? What are you doing? That's what's going to ultimately drive the business. And you can get I can sit in a meeting or in a budget meeting, and I can tell from the team sitting across me whether they're going to probably do that budget or not, all other things equal, because I can sense the confidence in them. I can sense them. They're working together as a team. I can sense the passion, I can sense the belief in their strategy. So I know the number’s fine. It doesn't matter whether they're all tots up or not. So no. So, for example, I'm judging the, I've been roped in to judge the chef competition in three weeks because I'm a vegetarian and a vegan, so I don't think anyone else wants everyone else wants the nice meat dishes, so I...
Jonathan Healy: But it's better if they impress you because that stuff can be harder to impress people with. We'll move to our rapid fire round if we can, Carol. Apple or Android?
Carol Phelan: Apple.
Jonathan Healy: Books or e-reader?
Carol Phelan: Books.
Jonathan Healy: Cash or contactless?
Carol Phelan: Probably contactless now.
Jonathan Healy: Yeah. You've given up on the cash, have you?
Carol Phelan: Well, there's a lot of raiding of my children's money boxes and IOUs gone back in, put it like that, and never seem to have it.
Jonathan Healy: They forget about it. It's fine.
Carol Phelan: No, they don't. Not mine.
Jonathan Healy: Soccer or rugby?
Carol Phelan: Oh, rugby.
Jonathan Healy: What's the best advice you would give your 18 year old self?
Carol Phelan: Surround yourself with people you enjoy being with. The rest will follow.
Jonathan Healy: If you weren't a CFO, if you hadn't gone with the books, would you have married a farmer or what would you be doing?
Carol Phelan: Married a Frenchman so. No. Definitely far from a Laois farm. I actually, I looked at psychology. It was the other thing I had considered when I was doing my Leaving Cert, and probably in 1980s Ireland, there was more of a career in numbers, and I was good at them, so I followed that. So, I really enjoyed. Like I love looking at people.
Jonathan Healy: From talking to you there is tendencies still that if there was a passion there, it could have been pursued, if you were able to read a room the way you can.
Carol Phelan: Well, it's just fascinating people and their stories and who they are and how they are. And you learn so much from people and how they go about and, and I think being really empathetic and trying to understand where a person is coming from. It can really form, I suppose, your own experience of how you're working. And I think the person who forgets that in a business like ours is probably not going to last long. We’re not in the business of widgets and units and yields, and we're in the business of people like.
Jonathan Healy: When you retire, and it's a good way yet, what legacy do you want to leave or do you feel you will have left?
Carol Phelan: I think I'd like people to think of me very well. People the people who stay behind that I will have facilitated their development, I suppose. Um, to be honest, at the moment, with two 11 year olds, a lot of the time, I just hope my legacy is that I'll get through the week and won't drop a ball on something. But you know, when I do lift that head and look through, I think that's what I'd like to I'd like to leave behind. I think I'd like to have left nothing on the table. To have tried to, you know, change things, grow things, move things on and leave it better, better than when I arrived.
Jonathan Healy: Carol Phelan, CFO of Dalata Group. It has been an absolute pleasure. Thank you for joining us.
Carol Phelan: Thank you Jonathan.
Jonathan Healy: And that is it for this episode. Thank you so much for listening. All episodes are available from wherever you get your podcasts, and we will catch you on the next one.
Jonathan Healy: Carol Phelan. How are you?
Carol Phelan: Hi, Jonathan. Good to meet you.
Jonathan Healy: Tell us a little bit, first of all, about your role with Dalata. Everybody knows it's a big hotel chain. They've stayed in them. But what do you do?
Carol Phelan: I suppose I've a very varied role. We're a listed company. That means I spend a lot of times interacting with our investors on roadshows, getting out and meeting them, talking about how we're getting on. You know, they're very invested in understanding what our growth plans are and how we're doing. So I spend time doing that. I then spend quite a bit of time with our teams in the hotels as well, which is the part I enjoy about my job. The two parts, the diversity, I suppose, of what I do day to day, week to week, and you're out understanding what their challenges are, what their strategies are, how they're getting on, you know, developing their teams. You know where to next? How are their customers feeling about the hotels they're staying in. Then you're working on things as complex as tax for, you know, jurisdictional, other jurisdictional acquisitions. You're working on the financial reporting that must go for the stock exchange and all of that. So a very wide role, I suppose, which is what I enjoyed and what I started out to try and do.
Jonathan Healy: You sound like you're very hands on, and I think that that is reflected in your background because you weren't naturally drawn to hotels. And I think you, you grew up on a farm.
Carol Phelan: That's right, I did I grew up in a farm in Laois. And as hands on as I am now, I can tell you I was a lot more hands on back then. There was plenty of gaps that I stood in and running around in front of animals and trying, trying to do what I was told. But it was a great grounding, you know, it was 1980s Ireland. You worked really hard. And, you know, we all worked as a family and people forget that sometimes a farm is a business, and it's a business where all the family is in on it. So you're working in it as a child, obviously my mum, my dad were in it as well. And I was very fortunate, I had my dad in particular was from a very large family and there were so many people across so many different businesses that they'd created themselves, and it varied all the way from farms to meat industry to all these different types of businesses. So I got a really good experience, I suppose, of different things that you wouldn't naturally see living down the country.
Jonathan Healy: Did it give you a good sense of responsibility that when you were working on the farm, whether you were standing in the ditch or you were moving cattle or whatever you were doing, that you knew you had to do it and that you had to stand up?
Carol Phelan: Yeah. That's a that's a very fair point. I think, you know, I was the eldest that also plays a part. But I certainly did feel responsibility because that was your livelihood. It was your home. So you did what needed to be done. And you assumed that responsibility and it was given to you, actually. And that power. And sometimes I think maybe we don't empower. And I certainly think sometimes I don't empower my children enough. Maybe I protect them a little bit more than we would have lived through, I suppose. We would have been put in at the deep end. And it's amazing, because then you felt part of it and you felt pride as we grew and the scale of the farm grew, and you got to understand what it took to make a living and all those types of things. So I found it hugely rewarding, and it certainly did, I think, ingrain in me a sense of responsibility. And it felt like it felt like my business in a way.
Jonathan Healy: At what point did you realise, though, that you had an aptitude for numbers? You could have continued to stand in the ditch. I mean, that was an option, a career for you but...
Carol Phelan: There was a time, someone did mention that it didn't. I think as I got stuck in a bit of muck one day and I was carried by my father across it, and he said, you'll marry a farmer yet? I said, I don't think so. I'm not quite sure there's a lot of hardship involved.
Jonathan Healy: You've found numbers instead?
Carol Phelan: I found numbers instead. No. When I was in school, when I was going through secondary, I just found an ease with them. You know, they didn't intimidate me. There was clarity to them and what I found, as well as I could bring the two together. I could see the real life in front of me. And maybe that was from the farm or being around family who worked in businesses, different businesses. I could understand what they meant and what they were trying to do. I could I could make them make sense, I suppose, which I often found people were very intimidated by it. I wasn't maybe I was fortunate.
Jonathan Healy: But was that the case with, you know, your classmates; That accountancy was something that they couldn't quite get their head around, but you found, well, actually, no, I like this?
Carol Phelan: Yeah. No, absolutely. Some, some people. Yeah. Very much intimidated by it. Couldn't get their head around it and preferred different types of subjects and maybe more practical or hands on subjects, which I didn't quite enjoy as much. Um, and I suppose that's then, like most things, I was very focused on getting a good Leaving Cert. So you naturally you go to what you're very good at. So I round it out and would have done accountancy for the Leaving Cert, but I always felt accountancy was a set of tools that I wanted to work in Business rather than Accountancy was the ends in and of itself.
Jonathan Healy: You were, of course, a young graduate when you came out of college, and we'd all like to think that we were very intelligent and keyed into the world when we were 23, whereas we're not.
Carol Phelan: No, no. And a breeze.
Jonathan Healy: Yeah. You followed probably what would have been the obvious path at that stage, which was by joining one of the big four. How did that experience translate into what Carol wanted to do?
Carol Phelan: Yeah, I did, and I saw so many graduates continue to do to this day because there's a very good training there. You get to see big businesses, you get to work with people who are very skilled in that side of working with business and working with numbers. And to be honest, there wasn't a huge amount of other options when that was what you wanted to do back then. Like I look at, we have we have a grad program now, actually within Dalata, and because of the various streams of finance that we would have in, we can actually offer an experience to a grad coming in to work in the hotel, to work in internal audit, to work in investor relations, to work in development. That wasn't an option back then. The thing you did is you went to get that professional qualification and then you went out into business. I think there's much wider variety now. You know, I certainly enjoyed the people I worked with there. I really did, and I enjoyed the clients that I worked with. And I still have a lot of those relationships to this day. But standing back at the end of my contract, I didn't feel that that's what I wanted to do.
Jonathan Healy: Were you too far away from the frontline, working as a consultant? Was that something that weighed on your mind?
Carol Phelan: I think that's exactly it. You know, you were advising, and while it was great, you know, that you were living off effectively your own skills and intellect. You wanted to be the person, you know. I was walking away from it at the point they were about to go and live and breathe the consequences of their decision, whether it was a new investment or whatever that might be. And, you know, at the start, I was an audit, which tends to be historical looking, again, an amazing grounding when you're trying to build your skills. But I wanted to be forward looking. And then when I changed within the firm to work on deals and acquisitions again like that, and you're in it at the start working alongside the management teams.
Jonathan Healy: But then you have to walk away.
Carol Phelan: And then you walk away and you lose, I suppose, the sense of achievement afterwards and learning, you know, what you thought might happen and what you intended to happen and what your strategy was. Did it unfold?
Jonathan Healy: You then went and joined a small enough Irish investment firm?
Carol Phelan: Yes.
Jonathan Healy: But timing is important here. When did that happen?
Carol Phelan: Yeah, timing was interesting, I suppose. It was back in those heady days in 2007, when Ireland was taking over the world, and we were all spending money like it, it grew on trees and there were so many deals being done in Dublin. It was such an exciting time and I felt, you know, I want to get in and be in in these and further embedded in the deal and the consequences afterwards. So I arrived in, in 2007, sort of the middle of the year. And towards the end of that year we closed a great deal in oil trading and blending business, and then about three - funded by Anglo - And then about three months later...
Jonathan Healy: That happened.
Carol Phelan: That happened I think was seared in all our memories. But what I will say is I probably got the best, you know, education and training and experience out of that. Far more than if things had continued to tip along as they had been for years. Because suddenly you're in and you're a strategy like that was built around a beautiful model was ripped up and straight into the bin. We were negotiating with banks, and you were trying to organize working capital for a business and oil business, where oil was heading towards $200 a barrel. And actually, that deal was supposed to be the starting point for adding other businesses to create something much bigger, which obviously was not going to happen in that environment. So I spent a year over and back to London.
Jonathan Healy: What was that like? Because, you know, Dublin was chaotic, London was chaotic, but on a different scale.
Carol Phelan: Yeah.
Jonathan Healy: What was it like as a relatively new just out of her first real job, now trying to find your way amongst all these kinds of bullish guys who were more panicked than they were letting on?
Carol Phelan: Yeah, it was very interesting. The oil business tends to be male dominated and tends to be very risk embracing. There were certainly some very interesting characters, the characters and the cowboy boots and the personalized nameplates on the back of the motorcycles and all these types of things.
Jonathan Healy: You wouldn't get that in Laois.
Carol Phelan: No, you certainly wouldn't get that in Laois, Jonathan. You would be absolutely kicked out the back door if you started doing having notions like that. But you like, you just had to find common ground. They had been owned by an entrepreneur who was a trader himself. Totally different structure. So there was no structures in there when we went in and we had debt, we had covenants we needed to meet. We had investors who had invested money, so we had to step in. And basically spent the year, we brought in, we extended the management team, and I had to try and bring in a clarity and reporting to give us insight, exactly the different elements of what's going on in the business with the team there. And that stood me to great stead when I arrived into Dalata, because thankfully, it wasn't at all the same situation when I joined Dalata in 2014 and it had just listed, and we had such ambition and such growth targets that we wanted to meet, and at that point we needed to do was create finance teams that were able to manage the reporting, able to take in the acquisitions, able to do the financing. Tax was getting obviously far more complex. So that learning I got from that, which, you know, was a stretch and was difficult to do at that type of time was absolutely brilliant. And then I had no fear walking in because you said, well...
Jonathan Healy: I've done it.
Carol Phelan: What could possibly go wrong again?
Jonathan Healy: I've lived the worst possible. Well, there's something could happen later, when you were with Dalata, which we'll come to in a little bit, that that definitely proved to be more challenging and inconceivable when you would have started. But in the middle of all of that, you had some chance meetings that became very important to your career as well. Tell us about those.
Carol Phelan: Yeah. So I suppose how I've always approached my career is I try to build experiences, but I also try to build relationships and working with people who I can learn a lot from. When I was in that private equity company, I met Dermot, who's now the CEO of Dalata. Our paths crossed there. You know, I really, I really thought he was a great person. He was involved. We were trying to do some things in there and the way he speaks, he had such a deep love for hotels. He'd previously been in Jurys and when he joined Dalata, an opportunity came and I was able to join as well, I suppose. And that that was, that was key to my decision actually to going into Dalata, because I believe your career is in the hands, ultimately the people you're working with to a certain extent, sorry, it's in your own hands as well, but it is very much formed by those who are around you. And I knew that his values and my values aligned. And when I went in there as well, I met Pat, who was the CEO, Pat McCann. So a big figure in the hospitality industry who was a CEO then. And I, I met him, he called me into the office to have a quick cup of coffee before I got the job, and he said, I'm not going to be talking to you about finance now. I you know, I don't I don't know too much about that. But he said, I am long enough in the teeth that I don't want to work with people who are not nice people, who aren't decent to those around me. So I wanted to see the cut of you. So I thought, oh hallelujah, this is exactly so honest and forthright and totally about working with decent people. I thought, that's exactly where I want to be.
Jonathan Healy: We'll talk about the Dalata journey in just a minute.
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Jonathan Healy: Pat is an incredible leader in Dalata, but the company was undergoing its own transformation as well. The hotels were very distressed at the time. The economic crash had taken their toll. It wasn't easy either going in there, but you say the learning that you had in London with the oil barons...
Carol Phelan: Yeah...
Jonathan Healy: Paid dividends when it came to talking about hotel rooms in Ireland.
Carol Phelan: Absolutely. Well, I wasn't phased by, I suppose, the role that I had at that point, which was really trying to build out some of the structures around finance and financial reporting and as that team grew. And to be honest, when you heard Pat and Dermot speak about the opportunity that they saw, you'd have followed them into the fire. You'd have gone anywhere. You knew they were going to do it one way or the other. So, to be honest, it didn't feel like a big sort of a punt or a risk or anything like that. And I've never shied away from a challenge. I like when you're sort of out of your comfort zone. That's where you learn. That's where the magic happens. It's a bit of fun. There's different things going on and you know that that point. Like when I look back, when I joined Dalata did 80 million of revenue that first year. We did over half a billion in revenue last year. Like, it's been transformative over the last few years. And when you're around that, the amount you learn, the experience you build is fantastic.
Jonathan Healy: But how much has changed in that intervening period, particularly when you go down the chain. You know, do you treat hotel managers, do you treat hotel staff differently the bigger you got? Did you lose some of that personality?
Carol Phelan: No. And that's you know, that's always something you have the forefront of your mind because to be honest, what makes Dalata is it's culture. Like and if I look, you know, our people are absolutely the key part of our business. Like we are hospitality. If we make our peoples experience at work great, they will make our customers experience great. That will make our business grow and deliver profits for our shareholders. So it's absolutely critical. And there's one thing that's quite different about us compared to some hotel companies. And that's we very much believe in a decentralised model. And what that means is we empower those teams in the hotels to run those businesses as if they are their own. They have their own full management teams, they present their strategy every year. They lay out how they're going to go about their business. And then what we provide at Central Office and it is Central Office. It is not head office.
Jonathan Healy: No dictation from the top?
Carol Phelan: No dictation. But we provide that support and we do provide oversight. We obviously are a publicly listed entity. We have to make sure we're making returns for our shareholders. But that is absolutely key to the business. When I go around, we, you know, we go around twice a year for budgets and sort of what we call our May reviews, interim reviews. Like we listen to the teams talking to us across the table about what they’re doing. You know, the first thing they talk about is the people they have in the business. What are their priorities with their teams? How are they feeling? Who's on development programs, how is that going? And we work our way steadily through all the other key priorities that Dalata as a group has; be it sustainability, be it looking at our customer scores, how are we doing? Where are we not doing so well? Do we need to put investment in this? Do we need to put something different? And our last slide is the EBITDA slide and the earnings slide. And I think that is that really underpins what we believe. That will come. That's the result.
Jonathan Healy: When you say you go around Carol, do they not all come to you and head office in Dublin and sit down with sweaty palms downstairs waiting to be called in?
Carol Phelan: Absolutely not. No way. We go around like it is. It is so energizing to be out at the front of the business with the teams like it really is. There's such passion across - because they genuinely hold that business as part of their own. A little bit like when I was, you know, back in the farm that was your business, you know, you were part of it and you mucked in and you did whatever was needed. And I think even about during Covid, what some of the teams did when our hotels were shut or locked down for people repainting their hotel, you know, the management teams were in there. We tried to hold on to everyone. Everyone just did what needed to be done to protect the business and not just for shareholders, but for the people who worked alongside them, who had jobs and careers tied up in all of this. It was all about keeping that going to come out the other side in strength.
Jonathan Healy: I want to talk about Covid because that's what I was referring to earlier, the crisis that simply could not have been foreseen and eclipsed, particularly in hospitality everything that had gone before. What was going on in your mind when it became obvious that you were going to have to close your hotels?
Carol Phelan: Um, I suppose one of the things we do, and we're very agile, we react well. So I think we sort of sat down and went, we've no real idea where this is going, what’s going to happen, but it's not looking good. They were the early days. We were looking at what was happening in Italy. First thing we did, we went into our banks. We said, you know, we just need to carve out the time and space, you know, put waivers in place so we're not concerned about covenants, and we need to get on with protecting the business. And that's where we took it. It was always looking at the long term. It was reacting, but reacting in a way to protect the long term future of the business. So when the hotel shut and we didn't have business coming in the door or very, very limited business, obviously when it was essential services only, our first priority was to say, how do we keep as many people as we possibly can in this business because it will reopen again. Science will get there. And that was in the days when nobody was sure whether...
Jonathan Healy: You put a lot of faith in that.
Carol Phelan: Well, you know, what was the alternative? That that's often what happens when people have to you find your way. But we did that. So I remember sitting, you know, it was 2:00 in the morning. I was on with the Chief People Officer, we were working through and our shared service centre in Cork. We had a fantastic payroll team. We were so fortunate with centralised payroll down to Cork and the ability then for us to utilise the subsidies that were put in place, in particular by the Irish government, but also within the UK, with furlough. Like our ability to work through the mechanics of that, because it was hugely complex. It was about version 17 at one stage when a lot of people just had to give up, they didn't have the teams or people in place who could work through it and keep paying people. We were able to do that. We held on to as many people as we could. Our Dalata Academy, which is the backbone of our learning development programs in the company - We had all of them online. What we didn't have online, we got online so that the people who couldn't come in, who were working at home, supported by the government, were able to do courses to stay connected with the business. We're able to fill their time. We're able to do things that they might not have the chance to do in normal times, when they had jobs and families and running around to different things with their children. And that was hugely important to stay connected, even when we all couldn't be together within the hotels or visiting hotels.
Jonathan Healy: In the middle of all of that, you were still trying to keep the business alive. You strike me as a resilient character. You know, you had the 2007 experience, you had this experience, you had the grown up on the farm experience. Did you feel resilient at that time?
Carol Phelan: Yeah, I think I did. And I think, you know, that's one of the reasons I always wanted to, to work with really good people. You know, when you're in those types of situations, how you come together as a team, you know, really helps, you know, get you through. You lift each other because everyone will have the darker days, you know, and everyone had their own challenges in home and family life trying to juggle be it, you know, schooling and all those types of things. We lifted at each other. And there was always somebody who would have found the piece of news that said they were getting there and the vaccines, or there was this or that emerging and going on, or it was starting to fall away, and we just kept going. Looked to the long term, we're going to come out of this strong. We were fortunate. We did a big sale and leaseback on one of our hotels in Dublin when the hotel was actually shut, and that was the strength of our partnership with that fixed income investor that brought in cash. We then went to we waited, you know, there was still a little bit of uncertainty, obviously, was how it was all going to go. So we decided to raise equity from our shareholders, which was very well subscribed. And we just kept taking the steps calmly. When we could open, We opened, but we did it safely. And if you're always looking through to the long term, that helps. And if you have good people around you that you know you can rely on, that helps too. So yeah, I think, I think resilience and probably never shied away from a challenge. So, you know, you kept going. It was good.
Jonathan Healy: You now have 53 hotels, over 11,000 rooms, 1300 rooms coming. How big is this going to get?
Carol Phelan: Oh, we're not finished yet Jonathan. We we've just, so if you think about it. As a hospitality company coming out last year, we added seven new hotels to our portfolio and our first in continental Europe in Dusseldorf. This year, we've acquired two hotels in London, which is traditionally extremely difficult to get into for a hotel company because you're going up against so many competing funds. We've added a site in Edinburgh, which is a beautiful building we're going to convert over the coming years, and we've just added our first hotel in Amsterdam as well. So and the thing is, we came out probably stronger financially even than we went in. So we've been primed sitting there because we feel that's where the opportunities are going to come. When you go through a level of distress like that in the market and now you have rising interest rates, which will start to weigh heavily on people who may not have the same balance sheet we do or have approached our financing the way we did. Opportunities will shake loose and we were sitting ready, waiting for those, I suppose, and we're delighted. And having the teams there that we kept through Covid means we're able to. Because a building is only a building, you need a person and a team in place to make it come alive.
Jonathan Healy: You talked about that Dalata Academy and the importance that that played during Covid and continues to play as you're growing and expanding your business. People as a people are a problem insofar as they're hard to find.
Carol Phelan: Yeah.
Jonathan Healy: How were you managing that? How were you making sure that your addressing diversity in the sector properly? I mean, you're one of a handful of female CFOs in the country. You know, how are you making sure that you're doing the right thing when it comes to leadership and bringing people through?
Carol Phelan: Yeah. Well, I suppose first of all, if I speak about it more widely across the business. You have to really prioritise treating your employees well. And a lot of people speak to that, but then don't do it. So as a leadership team, when we go around the hotels, one of the first things we do is we look at the back of house areas. Is the staff canteen in good shape? Is it the type of place that you want to be? Are the staff meals good? Are they of good quality? Is there a variety there? Are there changing rooms? Are they all good? Because if you treat people well and pay them well, they’re going to want to stay with you. And then we offer them the opportunities through our academy and the, the, the training and development we put behind them and the opportunities as we grow for them to grow their careers. Like we give people every reason to stay with us. And that's really important. And you're absolutely right. Diversity is absolutely key across every across every absolutely element. We're very fortunate in Dalata. You know, 50% of the board is female, 50% of our exec team is female. There are so many strong female leaders.
Jonathan Healy: I doubt that happened by accident. Was that one of Pat McCann's legacies?
Carol Phelan: I think so and I think to be fair, Dermot, as well, and I think it's because you look at people, because people was always at the heart of Dalata you took the person as they came to you. You didn't try and get the person that fitted in exactly what you’re like. You worked with people and enjoyed them for who they were and what they brought and the energy they brought. And then you work hard at that. You make sure there’s not barriers there that you mightn't see. And that's very important that you do that. So from my case, when I had very young children, I had I had twins and it was, you know, a particularly busy time at times.
Jonathan Healy: It would be with twins.
Carol Phelan: It was, yeah. It was slightly busy. It's an enjoyable home schooling experience through Covid when you're working so hard and keeping your business on the road. But you know, they afforded me flexibility because I needed it at that time and I don't need it quite as much now. But I think that's a huge priority. You'll have people who are caring for their parents. You need to look at how you give the flexibility for people to have their lives around their jobs and their roles. And that's hugely important. So like so many hospitality companies are struggling for staff. We have the same level of vacancies because obviously there'll be a lot of people who come through and they're working in college, etcetera. We have the same level of vacancies now as we had in 2019, and that's why we can afford to perform like we are and operate at the levels in our hotels that we do.
Jonathan Healy: I've never met a CFO before who I would expect to literally run a finger along surfaces in a hotel. You are that hands on, I suspect. I mean, do you approach a hotel more from a, well are we hitting the standard here rather than are their financials right?
Carol Phelan: I think and again, I suppose to the point when I made when I was talking about our budgets, you have to be looking at all elements. Like I can make a spreadsheet do anything like. I can put, you know, I can cut costs out great. I look for profitability, I'll destroy the business two years later. But you know, you have to be looking. What are your customers experience? How happy are your people? What are you doing? That's what's going to ultimately drive the business. And you can get I can sit in a meeting or in a budget meeting, and I can tell from the team sitting across me whether they're going to probably do that budget or not, all other things equal, because I can sense the confidence in them. I can sense them. They're working together as a team. I can sense the passion, I can sense the belief in their strategy. So I know the number’s fine. It doesn't matter whether they're all tots up or not. So no. So, for example, I'm judging the, I've been roped in to judge the chef competition in three weeks because I'm a vegetarian and a vegan, so I don't think anyone else wants everyone else wants the nice meat dishes, so I...
Jonathan Healy: But it's better if they impress you because that stuff can be harder to impress people with. We'll move to our rapid fire round if we can, Carol. Apple or Android?
Carol Phelan: Apple.
Jonathan Healy: Books or e-reader?
Carol Phelan: Books.
Jonathan Healy: Cash or contactless?
Carol Phelan: Probably contactless now.
Jonathan Healy: Yeah. You've given up on the cash, have you?
Carol Phelan: Well, there's a lot of raiding of my children's money boxes and IOUs gone back in, put it like that, and never seem to have it.
Jonathan Healy: They forget about it. It's fine.
Carol Phelan: No, they don't. Not mine.
Jonathan Healy: Soccer or rugby?
Carol Phelan: Oh, rugby.
Jonathan Healy: What's the best advice you would give your 18 year old self?
Carol Phelan: Surround yourself with people you enjoy being with. The rest will follow.
Jonathan Healy: If you weren't a CFO, if you hadn't gone with the books, would you have married a farmer or what would you be doing?
Carol Phelan: Married a Frenchman so. No. Definitely far from a Laois farm. I actually, I looked at psychology. It was the other thing I had considered when I was doing my Leaving Cert, and probably in 1980s Ireland, there was more of a career in numbers, and I was good at them, so I followed that. So, I really enjoyed. Like I love looking at people.
Jonathan Healy: From talking to you there is tendencies still that if there was a passion there, it could have been pursued, if you were able to read a room the way you can.
Carol Phelan: Well, it's just fascinating people and their stories and who they are and how they are. And you learn so much from people and how they go about and, and I think being really empathetic and trying to understand where a person is coming from. It can really form, I suppose, your own experience of how you're working. And I think the person who forgets that in a business like ours is probably not going to last long. We’re not in the business of widgets and units and yields, and we're in the business of people like.
Jonathan Healy: When you retire, and it's a good way yet, what legacy do you want to leave or do you feel you will have left?
Carol Phelan: I think I'd like people to think of me very well. People the people who stay behind that I will have facilitated their development, I suppose. Um, to be honest, at the moment, with two 11 year olds, a lot of the time, I just hope my legacy is that I'll get through the week and won't drop a ball on something. But you know, when I do lift that head and look through, I think that's what I'd like to I'd like to leave behind. I think I'd like to have left nothing on the table. To have tried to, you know, change things, grow things, move things on and leave it better, better than when I arrived.
Jonathan Healy: Carol Phelan, CFO of Dalata Group. It has been an absolute pleasure. Thank you for joining us.
Carol Phelan: Thank you Jonathan.
Jonathan Healy: And that is it for this episode. Thank you so much for listening. All episodes are available from wherever you get your podcasts, and we will catch you on the next one.
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