Most people know me for my football career in the AFLW playing for Collingwood and assume that I transitioned to something new after it.
I didn’t move into a new career after footy. I had this one the whole way through it.
Every one of us worked full time. That wasn’t a choice; it was the only option we had. I’d be up at four in the morning for work, working until half five, at the ground for training by six, and there until half ten at night. Then do it again the next day.
I’ve been in this industry for just over twenty years. It has always been my career. It’s what has always put food on the table.
When I started my career in this industry, I was in operations at one of the largest traffic companies in Australia, and I was the only woman there. About twelve men. They were lovely, genuinely, and I got on with all of them. But I felt I had to become one of them to fit in.
Two years into the role, I was in a position above three of the men who reported to me. They were still being paid, on average, fifteen to twenty thousand dollars a year more than I was.
After leaving that business, I started my own company from scratch and built it myself. Over eleven years, I was able to grow the business to over three hundred crew. Nobody taught me how to run a business; I taught myself.
I made every decision based on what I believed was the right thing to do, not the quick thing. I hired on the qualities I could see in people rather than what was on paper, and I backed them.
Everything I built, I built on quality and safety. By year three, I had stopped making sales calls altogether, because clients were coming to us on the strength of that.
I spent most of those twenty years in operations, and operations means being on call around the clock. You’re never really off. You can’t be fully present with anyone, and you can’t go on a holiday without working through it. That stopped being the life I wanted.
Planning is the part I’ve always genuinely enjoyed, and I’ve been doing it for just as long. I still do consultancy alongside it, helping businesses get started, scale up, design their management systems and understand their operations, so I’m still very much in that world through other companies. But the planning work lets me do my job, switch off at five, and be there for my kids.
What helped shape how I run a team came from football. What surprised me was how deliberately a football club handles communication. The same message doesn’t go to every player the same way. It gets tailored to the person, their personality, and how they need to hear it.
I learned that sitting in the coach’s box. The coach sends the message however he wants, and the person on the other end of the phone knows every single player well enough to relay it the way that player will actually take it in.
That’s what I took into business. Understand every employee the way a club understands every player. What drives them, and what’s the best way to get the best out of them.
I started in a room as the only woman, with men reporting to me who earned more than I did. Today, I own my traffic management planning business; I run it, and I decide what comes next.