At 22, Louise Phelan took “the biggest risk” of her life and left her job as a paediatric nurse at Crumlin Children’s Hospital.

“I was too emotionally involved,” she recalls. “I remember going home to my parents and saying: ‘I can’t do this anymore’.

“My father said: ‘I’m spending no more money on you, but I will give you a commercial course’. There were 22 of us on the course and there was one job interview for Mars at the end. As we were going out on a bus to the interview, the teacher said: ‘You’re to get the job.’ And, thankfully, I did.

“I would always say to kids that sometimes you don’t know what you want to do. I took the biggest risk of my life at 22 to change career and do you know what? It’s not necessarily about the exact path I went. It’s about the learning I had on that path.”

A path that has lead Irish Country Living to PayPal’s European operations centre in Dublin, a sleek glass and steel hub where fresh-faced staff clutch Costa coffee cups, and we get stuck in a revolving door on the way in.

Maybe it’s nerves. Louise’s schedule is tight and the interview questions we have prepared have more in common with the Dead Sea Scrolls than a firing round with the PayPal global operations vice-president.

This year, she was voted Ireland’s most trusted leader, having seen the company grow from 200 staff in Ireland when she came on board in 2006, to 2,169 today between Dublin and Dundalk. It’s forecast to hit 2,500 by the end of 2014 and almost 3,000 (or 2,926 to be exact) by the end of 2018. She sure has energy to burn. She hits the gym before work at 6.30am (“And a wash may have gone on in the meantime,” she laughs.) and we struggle to keep up, as she strides through the corridors in her heels and a Heidi Higgins dress, greeting every PayPal employee that passes with a bright: “Morning”.  

“To people that don’t say: ‘Good morning’, I’ll say it twice,” she explains later.

“I would constantly make sure that they stop me, they chat to me, that I’m accessible. The most important people in my organisation are my teammates, who come in and answer the customer queries every day. If I did not come in, they may not miss me. If the teammates did not come in, our customers would miss them.”

Rural roots

As vice-president of EMEA operations, Louise oversees the support of PayPal customers in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, as well as Australia and America through the night shift. Businesses that use PayPal are also supported by Louise’s team. Compliance, recruitment and staff training are also conducted here.  

Louise is keen to press staff retention (above 85%) and the perks at PayPal, which include an education bursary for those who have been with the company one year, and a four-week paid sabbatical on their fifth and tenth year of service.

“We don’t want somebody here that wants a ‘job’,” says Louise. “We want somebody here that wants a career and sees the opportunities.”

Louise’s rise through the ranks is testament to that. The second youngest of 17 children that were brought up on a farm in Donaghmore, Co Laois, her late parents Pat and Delia instilled her work ethic.

“He delivered the milk to the local town, he was an auctioneer, a county councillor,” she says, “and my mother was a senior vice-president in the grand scheme of things, because she kept everything going. He was a great risk taker and a business head, and she would be behind the scenes making sure everything else happened. We were very fortunate they decided to invest in us and in private education. To put 17 of us through that; I owe everything to them.”

The Brigidine convent girl’s first job after leaving nursing was “literally, answering phones” in Mars.

“But they saw something in me that I didn’t,” Louise adds, explaining that after four years, her boss advised her to spread her wings.

“He was a great advocate of mine,” she smiles. “He said: ‘I think you need to move on because there’s no room for the two of us’.”

Which brought her to Woodchester (now GE Money), where Louise worked for 16 years, purposely changing roles every two years to garner as much experience as possible. Though until she got the head-hunt call from PayPal in 2006, she had no intention of switching jobs: “I had never heard of them,” she admits.

Louise had 16 interviews for her first role in the compliance department. Six months later, she took over risk, followed by customer and merchant services, before her appointment as vice-president two years ago. But she stresses that when it comes to recruitment, PayPal is not just looking for people “with master’s and degrees”, with many recruits coming from retail or catering because of their customer service experience.  

“You don’t need a third level education to come in and work your way through here,” she says.  

“When I was starting out, college wasn’t an option. We all had to go and get some kind of a job and work into that. I went back and did college at night-time and funded it myself. But the idea of an apprenticeship? Parents are allergic to it.

“I think an apprenticeship is a fantastic opportunity. Not every child is suitable to go to third level education and some children are suitable to go into an apprenticeship and will succeed and do better than their peers. So I think we need to open our minds up to that again.”

Women In business

The role of women in business also comes up for dissection. While Louise describes the Trusted Leader award as “the most humbling” she has received, notably, she was the first woman to win the Michael Smurfit business achievement award.

She believes that employers need to offer better support to working mothers, and that women in power need to help their peers (she currently mentors three female PayPal staff), but stresses that women also have to get out from behind their desks and make themselves more visible in the workplace.  

“I remember coming in [to work] and firing the handbag in and thinking: ‘Ok, if I don’t look out, I’ll get my work done’,” she says.

“And the realisation for me was I probably slowed my career down because I was so busy doing the job. That’s not enough anymore. You can be doing a great job yourself by keeping your head down, but the reality is nobody might know about it. So it’s really important as you go through your career to manage your ‘brand’ and manage the day job, but your brand is as important as the day job.”

Indeed, she acknowledges that she was once her “own worst advocate” until she stopped second-guessing herself.  

“We always start with saying: ‘I have to think about that, there’s a certain part I can’t do’, instead of saying: ‘Yes I can do it all and I’m going to come back and tell you how I’m going to do it!’” she says. “Say ‘yes’ first, then we’ll worry about how we get there.”

Certainly, development at PayPal continues apace, as they connect with small and medium companies as well as consumers.

“We are changing the future of money and PayPal is the safest way to pay and get paid online through the mobile device, and we’re building everything through the mobile device,” she states emphatically. “We will not need money in our wallets going forward.”

As well as PayPal, Louise is president of the American Chamber of Commerce in Ireland and a non-executive director of Ryanair (which might have something to do with Michael O’Leary showing his cuddlier side of late).

She also supports the Cuisle Cancer Centre in Laois, most recently, the charity 10k run around the ploughing site in Ratheniska, and contributes to business events in the county.

“Laois is still home for me,” she says.

Married to builder Noel Kelly (“I couldn’t do what I’m doing without him,” she smiles), she is stepmother to Andrew and Heather and aunt to 45 nieces and nephews. Shopping is a passion and while she is reading Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In, you’re more likely to find her flicking through The Phoenix.

The morning we meet, it’s her last day before a two-week break in Portugal. She refuses to look at emails on holiday. If the team need her, they can check in by text or phone.

“If I can’t switch off, I’m not doing a good job,” Louise says, “and if they [the team] are not able to do it, I’m not setting them or PayPal up for success. There’s a bus coming at some stage that’s going to knock me over and it will be somebody well able to take this role. I’m very proud of the team I have and very proud that I can walk away.”

One day she hopes to have her own shoe shop, she says as she gathers her things for her next meeting. And then she’s off, and we just can’t keep up with those heels.

Whoever eventually steps in to Louise Phelan’s place certainly has big shoes to fill.

• PayPal allows any business or individual with an email address to securely, conveniently and cost-effectively send and receive payments online, building on the existing financial infrastructure of bank accounts and credit cards to create a global, real-time payment solution.