There are few more distinctive examples of the identification of a personality with a business than Ms Gillian Bowler and Budget Travel.

In a working lifetime, Ms Bowler took Budget from a one-person, one-telephone operation to the dominant position in the Irish travel market. From 200 customers in its first year, the company catered for more than 350,000 holidaymakers last year.

Ms Bowler, with her trademark sunglasses perched firmly on her head, knew her business backwards.

She had a great team behind her, had sold the company twice and found herself in a very comfortable position still running Budget Travel. So she decided it was time to move on.

"My satisfaction from and my addiction to the business had always been when I was learning new things and, with Budget Travel, I had reached the stage where I had ceased to learn," Ms Bowler said.

She had known for five years that she wanted to change and, when the time came, it was difficult but immediately rewarding to leave the comfort zone.

"The truth is that I don't miss it and I am much more stimulated now than I was this time last year."

A quick look at Ms Bowler's commitments will explain why. She is still non-executive chairman of Budget Travel and a director of More Group Ireland, Irish Life and Permanent, Irish Life Investment Managers, Grafton Group and the Irish Cancer Society.

She is also involved in a number of small companies in which she has a stake and she has just been elected president of the Institute of Directors in Ireland. But the English entrepreneur who came to Ireland as a teenager in the late 1960s was not welcomed by the establishment in the early part of her career.

"The first 10 years were extremely difficult. It's hard to believe now, but Budget Travel encountered an awful lot of hostility in the early days and business was made very difficult for me.

"There was a rule at the time that you could only deal with people who were members of the trade organisation. If you wanted to sell travel products, you had to become a member of the organisation and you could only sell to other members. They wouldn't let me in."

Ms Bowler had already been through a lot before she arrived in Dublin and she would not be discouraged. As a child on the Isle of Wight, she had a near fatal kidney condition which kept her out of school for two years from the age of 13. She never returned to school.

"It seems strange now because I liked school and I would have liked to have gone to university, but when you change your life to that extent, it's very hard to go back."

When she was well again, Ms Bowler occupied some of her time organising dances in the local hall until that became successful and the authorities took over.

She admits she hated her home town and by the age of 16 she had left the Isle of Wight and headed for the bright lights of London.

Ms Bowler spent two years in London and found work straight away in the travel business. The company she worked for, Greek Island Holidays, was very small and Ms Bowler progressed rapidly. "By the age of 17, I was doing contracts for accommodation, writing brochures, dealing with printers. By the time I was 18 I was opening offices for them in Manchester, Dublin and Belfast," Ms Bowler said.

Ms Bowler's family background was Irish and she met her future husband in Dublin around this time. When she settled here, she had already gone out on her own in London and she felt she no longer needed the stepping stone of working for someone else.

"At that stage Dublin was noticeably less generous in its working approach to people in the sense of giving responsibility and in attitude towards age and gender. There was no way I could settle for answering the phone and making the tea at a time when it was natural for me to be entrepreneurial."

The standoff between Budget and the rest of the trade gradually eroded as the upstart became firmly fixed in the marketplace over a period of about 10 years.

"We were always different and innovative and we gave real, informative descriptions. Budget became very popular because we were seen to have a very honest approach so we grew very fast."

Ms Bowler is unsentimental about the companies which were squeezed out in a changing marketplace. "I remember the first tour operators' meeting I went to when I was finally accepted. There were at least 80 companies represented there - within 10 years there were five."

The latest challenge Ms Bowler is putting her energies into modernising is the Institute of Directors (IoD).

"Business has changed so much in the last few years that the idea within the IoD is to refresh ourselves to keep pace with a new era. We want to help people to develop themselves and the skills that they might need."

The IoD recently merged with the Boardroom Centre. The centre operates a placement service for companies looking for non-executive directors with certain skills.

"The institute is a bit like a marriage bureau in finding matches for companies and directors. We're also keen on developing individual directors' existing skills or giving them new skills," Ms Bowler said.

The IoD is also focusing on decentralising and recruiting members from new businesses.

One area of corporate citizenship that Ms Bowler feels strongly about is the role of business in social problems. In her experience, there is a huge appetite for participation in some form of charity work among IoD members and business people in general.

"We have around 1,000 members now and we all have skills in business that can be shared . . . The easy thing to think is that something like homelessness is a Government problem but that's not true. Homelessness is fundamentally a problem that people can solve and everyone can play a part."

Ms Bowler has found that, in business, people are used to seeing problems in a very technical light and have the ability to see what can be done. The IoD will support Focus Ireland this year and will be offering members' skills to Focus Ireland as a group.

"I think there is an perception that the more successful we get in society, the more we shrug off other people's problems but I have found in the IoD that there is a great willingness for business to give something back."

As for future plans, Ms Bowler says she has always been able to relax and she likes to spend time with her husband in her house in Wexford, where they keep donkeys and other pets.

"I am involved in a couple of e-commerce enterprises and I am contributing more and more. I wouldn't rule out starting something new myself because, as long as the ideas keep coming, I just can't leave things be."