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.

In this episode of The EY CFO Outlook podcast, Carol Phelan, CFO of Dalata Hotel Group chats with Jonathon 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. 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.