“I’d like to be known as a good boss, parent, wife and friend”. Emma Maye talks to Tom Lyons about her professional journey
“I’d like to be known as a good boss, parent, wife and friend”: Emma Maye on being an unexpected CEOEmma Maye learned about construction during hard times. Now on the other side she leads a thriving homebuilder and a building supplies business. In this interview, written in collaboration with The Currency, the overall winner of the IMAGE PwC Businesswoman of the Year Awards talks to Tom Lyons.
It is a lot less glamorous than when we met last at a packed black-tie awards ceremony in the Clayton Hotel in May for the Image PwC Businesswoman of the Year Awards. That evening, Maye was named at the end of the night as the overall businesswoman of the year. Her mother Anne was struggling to deal with a sprawling business that spanned Ireland, Britain, Europe and the United States. It was all held within the Estate of Liam Maye, which, grouped together, was known as ELM Holdings. It was a large complex group of assets and debts. Often, it multiple partners who, as the crisis unfolded, were all facing their own financial problems.
At 4 pm on May 29, 2009, Maye finished her last day in Salesforce to go on maternity leave. “At 5 pm that day I’d a big bunch of flowers in my hand and my waters broke,” she recalled. Her first son William arrived safely but by now it was clear that the financial crash was here to stay. She sat down with her then husband Alan to figure out what to do next.
We had to go see banks here and in different countries in Europe. We had to go to the US. I love problems. I love management. I love leadership. But it was tough. “I was getting the red eye in the morning and coming back that night or staying over until the following morning,” Maye said. “Between everything you just had to give a piece of yourself to it.”
“It was intense. It was very hard when I was either pregnant or I had hyperemesis. You have to press pause on your personal life. I had two miscarriages. I had three Nama babies. I probably had the baby blues. I had hormones running left, right and centre. It was really difficult but you just have to keep going. When I look back now, I realise what I did but when you’re in it you just have to keep going.
Emma Maye watched as assets built up by her father were sold off at a discount to large international funds who often made a killing later on.“Things in Ireland weren’t going well at the time,” she said. “There wasn’t much money around. You just had to survive and keep going. Ardale got planning for a site which it sold on, and this helped give it the capital to build more homes. To date, it has built more than 400 homes and it has a pipeline of hundreds more either under construction or in planning. It has also built retail units for Aldi and Lidl near its housing developments as well as coffee shops for Costa Coffee.
In 2015 Emma Maye opened her first building supplies business in Clondalkin, followed by Coolock the following year and Blackrock in 2017. More sites followed and it then took over a business in Ringsend. About two years ago it rebranded its entire building supplies business as CORE. Maye is undeterred going up against larger building materials suppliers and she wants to grow the business.
It was also involved in Asador, a restaurant in Dublin 2 for a number of years. It helped the business get planning for an outdoor extension, before they later sold out of it. Maye and Hegarty are currently working on a new venture, which they hope to launch in the final quarter of this year. In 2018 Taaffe had won her award for Digital and Technology Businesswoman of the Year, but this time Taaffe was not with Maye. She died in 2019.
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