Fidelma McGuirk didn’t make life easy for herself when she decided to set up her own business in 2016.
The concept was to simplify payroll for global companies – but how does a start-up in Westport, Co Mayo get fast-growing firms with operations all over the world to sign up?
“From the very start, I was a small company who was going to be contacting a multinational saying we can standardise and automate your payroll management. Give us all of your employee data for a mission-critical process that cannot fail any month,” says the CEO and founder of Payslip.
“Those are big asks you’re asking – and you know the saying, nobody ever gets fired for choosing IBM.”
Two of Payslip’s key early customers were Irish multi-nationals Fyffes and Combilift, which she made contact with through networking and word-of-mouth. Getting these international players on board was only the beginning – it now counts several global companies as clients.
‘Basing projections on uneven Covid growth patterns has been the heart of the problem’
Last year the company secured €8.3m in Series A funding. MiddleGame Ventures led the round, with additional participation from Mouro Capital, Frontline Ventures, Tribal.vc, and an impressive line-up of angel investors such as David Clarke, former CTO of Workday; Brian Williams, co-founder of One Source Virtual; and Phil Chambers, CEO and co-founder of Peakon.
At the time, it was announced that the business would take on 150 people and indeed the business is growing steadily.
“Just before the Series A last year, we had 27 people. We ramped up to 74 in about five months last year, and we now have 90.”
The company has hubs in Ireland, Spain and Bulgaria, but McGuirk, who previously held senior roles in Eircom and Taxback.com, has been an accidental beneficiary of the pandemic move to remote working.
“We had people in products and engineering and technology who relocated to Westport or Mayo during Covid,” she says.
However, the company is, like many others, taking a cautious approach to hiring. “We’ve been preparing all of our budgets for next year, and we’ve done what we would call gating – so we know which other jobs we might want to hire for in certain areas of work, and we’re connecting them with specific milestones or KPIs that we will meet. And then once we meet those, we’ll continue with some of the other roles.”
‘Some of the tech giants are absolutely right-sizing, because they maybe over-recruited’
McGuirk is, of course, well aware of the jitters taking hold in the tech scene in the wake of losses at Twitter, Meta and Stripe. She believes that basing projections on uneven Covid growth patterns has been the heart of the problem.
“Many of them worked on a growth rate forecasting model that was based on the previous three-quarters growth, for example. And those three quarters got skewed during Covid if they had hyper growth, and then it was feeding into continued hyper-growth forecasting.
“But we have a lot of technology customers in Payslip, we have all their headcount on our system. None of them is letting anybody go, that we’ve seen so far – and some are in the news – and we haven’t seen any drop.
“We might still see some, but fundamentally, the whole world is so much more tech-enabled than it was four years ago, and tech-dependent.
"Tech companies won’t disappear, and I don’t think there’s going to be huge pressure on the tech companies. Some of them are absolutely right-sizing, because they maybe over-recruited.
"But I would still think that technology companies are very strong employer opportunities for people in Ireland and other countries.”
McGuirk, who is originally from Wexford, studied business and German in Trinity College Dublin. Her father worked in Coillte, as a research forester, and her mother was a stay-at-home mum who gave up a job in insurance due to the marriage ban.
“I realised that when I went to Trinity and I walked in to study business, I actually did not even know one person who was a business person – except for people I bought stuff from at the shops,” she says.
She did a masters in business and HR and then took a job in Eircom, which was in the process of being privatised.
"Instead of the traditional human resources role she had anticipated, McGuirk was thrown into accelerated recruitment. it was a time of massive redundancies at the former Telecom Éireann, but also of recruitment of new telco skills. After six months, she became recruitment manager.
‘Payslip helps our customers to be recession ready. They have everything standardised, visible, the data flow organised’
“I was about 24 at that point, and had a budget of IR£5 million. It was like setting up a business, because we had to set up a thing called a website, and employer branding, and these were all really new.
“Then the next project was all about setting up a new thing called broadband. We had to set up a new unit of 700 people in six months to help roll out the broadband. So, I ended up with a team of about 15 people, between recruiters and support – and I did that for about two years.”
Later she joined the company that became Taxback.com, which organised income-tax returns and refunds for students at the time.
She went in as a project manager to set up what was, in effect, a call centre team, moving to Bulgaria for a couple of years. She went on to become operations director and then CEO.
Around 2015, she and her husband Chris decided it was time for a lifestyle change.
“We got sick of the M50, we were spending three hours a day on it, both of us, and not seeing the kids. So I left my role in Taxback and we moved to Westport.
"And then I had to start thinking about what to do – Westport’s a great town, really well-known as a destination tourism spot, really well-known because Allergan makes Botox. But unless I was a customer, I wasn’t going to be of any use to either of those really.”
‘Irish payroll will always be different to British payroll or to French payroll or Indonesian payroll’
She had met Paula Fitzsimmons, the co-ordinator of Going for Growth, a business initiative supported by Enterprise Ireland and KMPG aimed at female entrepreneurs, some years earlier. McGuirk has spoken at some of its events from the perspective of an executive in a big company who had taken an entrepreneurial approach in that company.
“I had left Dublin and was in Westport, and the time when I was thinking and helping the kids settle into the school, and not working. But Paula kept inviting me to lots of these events. It’s amazing how many tickets she happened to have,” laughs McGuirk.
“So I’d end up, every couple of months, going to some sort of a conference and meeting lots of other people. And they were always entrepreneurial based, so that was also very useful, because it gives you an extra tribe to mix with and to learn from and to tap into.”
Entrepreneurs involved in Going for Growth include Louise Phelan from PayPal, and Susan Spence from SoftCo, who McGuirk calls fantastic role models. She credits the whole culture of the programme, where she has been a lead entrepreneur in recent years, as helping push her to set up her own business.
When it came to an idea, one stuck out. “I kept coming back to some business problems that I had not seen a solution for on the market – and one of them was to do with global payroll management.
“I found it amazing that there was no software to standardise and automate it, because payroll is mission-critical in every company, and payroll is always local.
"So, Irish payroll will always be different to British payroll or to French payroll or Indonesian payroll.
"And if you’re a company, you need to ensure that you’re compliant and you do it the right way, in each country. But as a global company, you need to be able to manage it in a standardised way.”
Set up in May 2016, the business was self-funded until it took in its first funds in 2018. Among those to back the business in the seed round was Frontline Ventures.
“I filled out a web form on their website,” she recalls. “I got a reply from them, they set up a briefing conversation, and that was the start of the process, that’s how I got the investment offer.”
Having completed the Series A round in May 2021, will Payslip seek to raise more funds in the foreseeable future?
“Once you get on the funding train, you’re always on the lookout for funding,” says McGuirk. “With the markets wobbly on valuations at the moment, nobody wants to go now if they can avoid it. So, we would be hoping to be pushing out until quarter one or quarter two of 2024.
“Even if you’ve grown your business substantially from the last round, in the current market, that might not get rewarded with the valuation that you would have had then, so you’re better off just letting the market kind of cool itself down a wee bit.”
‘The whole world is so much more tech-enabled than it was four years ago, and tech-dependent’
She believes her business is in a strong position to offer efficiencies to companies, which places it well in challenging economic times. “Payslip helps our customers to be recession ready. They have everything standardised, visible, the data flow organised.”
She remarks just how much the market has changed in recent weeks and months. There is now a new focus on profitability from investors and she says Payslip is on track to reach profitability at the end of next year.
“There’s kind of a flip in the market – from only looking for growth versus now looking for a path to profitability. We’re also balancing both of those in terms of our budgets and our plans.
"We’ve grown already by over 150pc this year. And in the plans we have for next year, which we see are very realisable, would see 300pc/350pc growth and we would already be able to account for more than half of that growth,” says McGuirk. “We’re still in major growth mode.”
Curriculum Vitae
Business Lessons
What advice would you give to entrepreneurs, female entrepreneurs in particular, who are thinking about starting up a business?
“Talk to those of us who did it. Ireland is a very friendly community, so it’s not too hard to contact people. And then just make a plan and let things happen.
“You do have to trust that people are there to do the job that you are giving them to do.”
Fidelma McGuirk is on the advisory panel for the business development scheme for female entrepreneurs, Going for Growth. The deadline for applications for the upcoming programme is this Friday. #
Curriculum Vitae
Name:
Fidelma McGuirk
Age:
48
Position:
CEO and founder of Payslip
Lives:
Westport, Co Mayo
Experience:
Senior roles at Taxback.com; HR manager at Eircom
Family:
Married to Chris. Sons Aaron (14), Hugh (12), Conan (10)
Pastimes:
It’s usually outdoor sports – hiking,
kayaking
Favourite book:
For business I like Malcolm Gladwell’s books – The Tipping Point is good or David and Goliath. In terms of fiction, I like Milan Kundera’s books
Favourite film:
As Good as it Gets
