For a while after Orla Stevens was made managing director of leading Irish fuel supplier Certa, she would mumble her job title when people asked her what she did for a living. But that touch of humility should not be confused for impostor syndrome.
Stevens grew up in a “very working class” area of Walkinstown in Dublin and her father, who worked with Smurfit Kappa in Ballymount for 51 years, instilled in her the ethic that you work hard and you get what you work for.
We are sitting in Certa’s offices in Bray, Co Wicklow on a Friday afternoon and it is deserted.
“It’s a work from home day,” she explains, while the occasional tinkle of a Teams notification from her laptop reminds us that the work of the company continues on.
Stevens, having completed a degree in communications studies at Dublin City University, initially had designs on becoming “a famous broadcaster” with her sights set on a career in radio.
She got some work experience with RTÉ and worked with a couple of radio stations in the early 1990s, including 98FM and the “ill-fated” Radio Ireland, which went on to become Today FM. There was, however, a dearth of opportunities, and she decided to “exit” radio.
“I don’t think the world of broadcasting is any poorer for my absence,” she laughs. Despite the bump in the road, her time in radio involved some work in sales which was to set the wheels of the rest of her career in motion.
Her next job with Golden Pages involved ringing companies to talk them into buying more prominent slots in the business directory.
“It sounds so archaic now,” she says. “I don’t think most kids these days would even know what a phone book is, but that’s how I started.”
The job gave her “a really good grounding” in customer service, sales training, and working towards targets. “How to build rapport, and how to ask for the sale,” she explains.
After that, she worked for Esat Digifone, which was a start-up at the time, and which went on to become O2 and is now Three.
“I really enjoyed setting something up from scratch,” she recalls. “I ended up having to hire a team, train them, and I was only young myself.”
From there, she went to Bank of Ireland where she worked in a number of different roles and was involved in setting up the bank’s online 365 service.
“Navigating a very big business like that was new to me,” she says. “At that time the bank had a lot of people who were there a very long time. So it was kind of who you knew, and you had to find out how to influence people.”
Following further stints with Vodafone and SSE Airtricity, she has now been with Certa for the past three years. Having previously been the group’s commercial director, she has been in the managing director’s chair for about six months – her first foray in a top job.
She tries to start most days with a walk, accompanied by her 18-month-old Labrador, and she is at her desk by about 7.30am. She works as long as she needs to but insists that making time to switch off is a company-wide policy.
Coming to the role, she had been quite used to the commercial and sales side of the business but was “not deeply” into the operations or finance side. She was “probably a bit apprehensive” as to how she would manage that, she admits.
“I can lean heavily on the finance director but that is a big learning curve,” she says. “I am typically very hands-on so the big challenge for me was stepping back from the day-to-day. Maybe I’m just nosy, but that’s something I am getting used to.”
Certa, which is part of the DCC services group, is one of the biggest home heating fuels businesses in the State, with a national network of 23 depots and 100 trucks. It also operates a network of 49 unmanned “pay at the pump” forecourts and is in the solar energy space too.
The company was created when DCC Oil Ireland’s six consumer brands – Emo Oil, Campus Oil, Jones Oil, Certa, CC Lubricants and Source Lubricants – were each brought under the umbrella of the Certa brand just two years ago. It employs almost 400 people across 25 locations in Ireland.
“Emo Oil had a very strong commercial base,” says Stevens. “They had very long relationships with really big Irish businesses. Campus Oil were really well versed online, so they were digital, very domestic, lean, efficient – a little bit ahead of their time.
“Then Jones Oil is where we have our depots all over the country. They’re local, in the community, and they would have dealt with a lot of small to medium businesses and agri groups.
“We also at times buy other smaller distributors and businesses with maybe five or six trucks. DCC is an acquisitive business, so we will continue to do that.”
The company has a home heating base of about 100,000 customers that it delivers to, many of whom are of an older age profile and who live in rural parts of the country. This inevitably presented challenges to the rebrand in an industry where loyalty and familiarity are key.
“The main relationship our customers have is with our drivers,” says Stevens. “We wanted to make sure they were still dealing with the same people even though they might be wearing a different colour uniform.
“They see them two or three times a year for filling up and the driver knows if a gate is a bit rickety. They go into the back garden, fill up, and none of that changed. The livery on the truck was different but it was the same people and the same friendly face they [the customers] had known.”
Certa has big climate ambitions and believes its roll-out of hydrotreated vegetable oil (HVO) can be a major player in helping the State meet its carbon emissions targets.
HVO is produced from waste plant matter and can be used by motorists as a direct replacement for diesel without any need for vehicle or engine modifications as well as by companies or events to simply generate energy, while it produces up to 90 per cent less carbon emissions.
Certa’s clients include Dublin Airport, Amazon Web Services, John Sisk and Son, M50 Truck and Van Centre, the National Ploughing Championships, Dublin Port, the Irish Open, and Electric Picnic.
“They use it on site and in all of their generators,” says Stevens of John Sisk and Son. “It’s a drop-in replacement for diesel so they don’t need to buy new equipment. But they noticed that even the air quality on site was better.”
The group also has agreements in place with a number of operators of data centres to power their facilities with HVO while they wait between two and five years to get a connection to the grid.
Buoyed by the success of HVO, Stevens thought long and hard about how it could be rolled out even further.
“I really wanted to get it out to private drivers, so we started with a site out in Liffey Valley last year,” she says.
Eleven of Certa’s unmanned forecourts now offer HVO alongside other fuels.
“So you drive in and you can choose from diesel, petrol or HVO,” she says. “It’s a pink nozzle, so you can’t miss it. We’re going to keep rolling that out as time goes on.”
As well as the HVO offering at the group’s forecourts, it also has an electric vehicle (EV) charging station at its Liffey Valley facility. However, while DCC has a lot of EV sites across Europe, Stevens says Certa is “taking it quite slow” in Ireland.
“At the moment we are just in Liffey Valley with EV charging,” she says. “I would like to see more EV charging at our sites and we have plans to do that. It’s a large capital expense but it’s the way to go.
“We’ve seen all across Europe that that slowdown in demand is there. We will roll it out but probably slower [than initially planned] – probably the same as what we are seeing on the Continent and among our competitors in Ireland.
“Our sales of unleaded have gone up this year which would suggest hybrid cars are more of a choice now. I suppose people are trying to decide whether EV is the way to go and whether there are enough chargers. It’s kind of a chicken and egg scenario.
“There is a lack of infrastructure still so there is some anxiety among people driving EVs about where they will be able to stop and charge. I would like to see more charging points come available and I am hopeful we will be able to fill some of that gap.
“We’re not a retailer like some of our competition but we are moving into non-fuel income streams. Where we can, we sell anything that is related to cars. We also have our own coffee which we designed ourselves. That kind of light retail is something we are watching and trying to see if there is more of an opportunity.”
One of the biggest ways in which Certa believes it can play a role in reducing Ireland’s carbon emissions is through the home heating market where 700,000 households still use liquid fuels to heat their homes. The residential sector currently accounts for 10 per cent of emissions here.
Just a few weeks ago Certa rolled out EcoMax for the home heating market, which the company describes as a “lower carbon blended biofuel”. It comprises 20 per cent HVO and 80 per cent kerosene, which Stevens points out would lead to a significant reduction in household emissions if adopted across the board.
“It can be used without any need to replace or modify your home heating boiler,” Stevens says. “We did a lot of work on it to make sure it was absolutely safe. We did a lot of trials with our own people internally who had boilers at home.
“I know the government is very pro-retrofitting and insulation and solar which we absolutely buy in to, but for some customers that is out of reach at the moment. Changing the home heating oil is not out of reach. They don’t need to spend any money.”
On the solar side, Certa acquired specialist Alternative Energy Ireland last year, which installs panels for a lot of residential customers while also maintaining a strong commercial and industrial base. Certa, through DCC, has also launched a “solar as a service” business.
“For businesses that want to get solar panels installed but don’t have the capital to do that, we can provide the funding,” Stevens explains. “We see that as a strong solution for smaller businesses who don’t want to put their money on the roof. I think that will be a big focus for us into next year.”
Stevens admits the company has “a lot of irons in the fire”, but says she manages to maintain a reasonable work-life balance. She has four “grown children” but says there is still “a bit of picking up and dropping off to be done”.
“They kind of keep you normal, and you have to just close the laptop,” she says. “My eldest has just gone to Australia. She finished college a couple of years ago. She is going for maybe a year or two – I hope – and then is coming home.
“It’s a busy house. There is always somebody who needs something. We had Leaving Cert last year and we have it again this year. I think it takes a whole family to do it. My husband and I have a great partnership so we pick up the slack for each other.”
Among her other interests, she sings in a choir, does Pilates and loves to read. She recently read The Heart’s Invisible Furies by John Boyne, which she describes as “absolutely amazing”, and a book that “leaves you really thinking”.
Her favourite book of all time is Pride and Prejudice.
“If I have nothing else to read, I’ll pick it up on any page and just read it,” she says. “It has a woman heroine, but what I really like about it is she broke out of her social circle and beat the odds. It really resonates.”
CV
Name: Orla Stevens
Age: 55
Job: Managing director of Certa
Family: Married with four grown children
Interests: Singing, walking, reading
Something you might expect: She likes structure and being organised
Something that might surprise: She likes to speak a bit of Irish, but more so at home
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