From a modest bush childhood in Gunnedah, country New South Wales, Dr Simone Ryan became a cardiac surgeon before combining her specialist medical expertise with an entrepreneurial epiphany: Australia’s healthcare system was broken.
As a teenager, Simone’s future was shaped by her parents’ poor mental health. Founding One Life, Live It in 2007, Simone is now a healthcare crusader at the corporate coalface, educating employees and their leaders about preventative health and providing treatment by her elite team of health experts and medical professionals.
In this edited extract from Women of Influence, she speaks to Gillian Fox about her experience helping corporates tackle the healthcare crisis, why more of us should “know our numbers”, and what she’s learnt about “life balance”.
You work with a lot of the ASX Top 100 companies, so you have a lot of exposure to some of Australia’s most senior executives. From your observations, what can you share about the toughest things facing leaders in today’s corporate environment?
In addition to observing them, we also get to treat them. I still practise face-to-face medicine occasionally within our business. I know a lot about the health, wellbeing and personal situation of some very big leaders in this country. That will never, ever be disclosed due to patient/doctor confidentiality. There’s privacy and a range of other things.
What I see by and large is that guys and girls who are really sure of themselves – they know what they’re doing and they’ve got the right team in place – are generally the most well. They make time for exercise. They talk about employing the right people to do things outside their own skillset and they live a fairly balanced life.
What I have observed is that the people who are scrambling – who feel like the work demand is too high, have some external family pressures, travel a lot for work – generally lose sight of their health and are less aware of the risk factors that lead them to having catastrophic events.
Many young women might automatically associate what you’re saying with a middle-aged man whose gut is straining against his suit, but as women begin moving through the ranks and taking on more of these leadership roles, aren’t they just as vulnerable to poor health management?
If we look at heart attack, in my previous job as a medical registrar or surgical registrar, Monday mornings we would have 10 people in the Emergency Department with chest pain. Eight of them would be well, fit, healthy people thinking about getting up, getting dressed and going to work – the ‘Monday morning’ phenomenon.
When you’re starting to think about a business model, every Monday morning you’re going into your ED, you’re looking at these people and thinking, ‘Hang on,
8 of these people probably don’t need to be here. We should have got this earlier.’
When you think about things like blood pressure, cholesterol and lack of frequent and regular exercise, we all know about exercise and food, but a lot of people don’t know their numbers. I say to these CEOs, “You’ve got to know your numbers. What’s your cholesterol?” “I don’t know.” “What’s your blood pressure? Put those two together …”
Know your numbers. Put the blood pressure, cholesterol and sugar together. If they’re all high, you’re at real risk of having a heart attack. You don’t know that stuff. These people are fairly time poor, or their priorities with time are skewed towards work, but it doesn’t take much to know your numbers. It’s an hour a year to have a health check and know what you’ve got to do to reduce your risk.
The anecdotal evidence from this series of interviews suggests people who are very successful are also very diligent about looking after themselves – is that your experience?
By and large, really successful, intelligent, thriving CEOs know their numbers. They exercise every day. They balance their life. They have family time. They take holidays. It’s the ones who are struggling, trying to become the CEO or whose work demand is huge, who find it all gets out of whack. You’ve got a few risk factors that start creeping in, and suddenly they have a health event that could’ve otherwise been prevented.
Why do you think you’ve been successful? Do you think there are personal qualities that make the difference between those who do and those who don’t?
We talk about our why. My ‘why’ is preventing other children having busy parents fall off their perch. I was a strong, tough young girl. I was born ahead of my time, and probably went through more than any child should as a result of my parents’ ill health and a stack of other things. I call it a viable passion. My passion is to go out and save healthcare in Australia. That is my life pledge
That’s a very worthy goal. It’s also a massive undertaking. It’s clear where your passion comes from – what makes you believe it’s viable?
We hear about budgets. We hear about healthcare prices. We hear about budget cuts in healthcare. That’s all fine. My life pledge is to go into corporate environments and workplaces and empower them to understand they’ve got the means to save our healthcare problem, because we’re all working longer. If our companies are going to help look after us, then we’re going to work better and be well at work longer. When that’s your ‘why,’ that gets me out of bed every single day without fail. Weekends I get up and think, ‘Today we’re one day closer to the goal.’ That passion – which is now a viable passion, we’ve got a business out of this – keeps me going. Ultimately, the bigger our business becomes, the more Australian healthcare has improved.
You’re a working mum with a young son and an extremely demanding business schedule. For those emerging female leaders with young children at home, how do you approach trying to strike a balance between the two?
It’s hectic sometimes. My work/life balance has evolved into life balance. I used to think that work and life needed to be separate, that I needed to switch off one and go into the other.
Now I’ve got goose bumps, because this is really what’s happened and it has made an enormous difference to my life: one day a week, I would pick up my son and he wouldn’t see me near my phone. It was Mummy and Maxie time and that was that. But what happened was that I started getting a bit anxious and stressed: ‘I haven’t been at work since 2:30pm. What’s happened in the last three hours? We’ve got lots going on at work, but I don’t want to be on the phone. It’s Mummy time.’
Struggle. That doesn’t work.
In our business, we now promote life balance. Particularly with the introduction of technology, I’m not saying go around your house on your phone all day, but you can work and be present at home in a very fluid environment. We have a rule in our house that no one sits on an electronic device while there are other people present. That’s a rule for our babysitters, my husband, Max (who likes looking at cartoons on iPads) and me.
Have you devised any practical or lateral strategies for managing the conficting needs of your business and your boy?
Max has just turned 5. He’s yet to start big school, but he is at a preschool 5 days a week, between 9 am to 3 pm. I spoke to the school very early on. He’s been there 3 years. I said, “I’m a working mum. I travel a lot.”
The last 3 years, crucial years for Max at preschool, I have been travelling excessively as a result of the growth of the business. I wrote to the school – typical ‘Type A personality’ – a letter outlining the benefits of Max travelling with me for work. It would require significant amounts of time away from preschool, but what he was going to learn was about travel for work, aquariums in Melbourne, zoos in Perth and very commonly my husband would travel with us. We would travel as a family and right now he understands that sometimes, Mum goes to work on a plane and that is no drama. It’s not this big, “Mum’s gone to work. We can’t come.”
Do you think that freedom explains the rising number of Australian female entrepreneurs?
More women need and want the freedom to say, ‘Today, you’re coming with me. Tomorrow, I fly solo,’ but it’s also significant that you’re managing his experience of your career in such an inclusive way.
It’s just our life, which has been absolutely beautiful. I don’t outsource my kid. People talk about outsourcing your kids so you can keep working. By that, I’m sure they mean bring in babysitters or nannies. I’ve employed help, but not with respect to Max, with respect to the rest of my household: the washing, ironing, dishes, cleaning, gardening. I’m pretty strict about that. I’ve got rules written in our kitchen of things I want done. As I said to one of our babysitters recently, “I work too hard to be paying people money and not have any value out of that.”
My value of money comes from my upbringing, so I outsource as much as I can. That means that I can put Max in the bath and play with him, rather than do the washing while someone else bathes him. That has worked for me. It’s phenomenal. We have a life balance where whenever I’m not physically in the office, I’m present and available, but I might still be working. That’s cool. That’s the way I set it up in our household.
Do you think being a mother has made you a better businessperson?
Absolutely. The day I became a mum, I became a Nazi with priorities. My son turned 5 yesterday and that brought back so many memories. I put up a Facebook post today: ‘This kid turned 5. I have 4 university degrees and I’m a fellow of the College of Medicine in this country, but this kid blows my mind.’ I mean that.
If he ever said to me, “I don’t want you to go to Melbourne every second week,” I would need to think about that very clearly and talk to him about what’s going on. That would be a very serious conversation with a bright 5-year-old. If it meant he was suffering, I wouldn’t go. I flat out wouldn’t go. I would make other adjustments. He means that much to me.
Was that always clear to you, or are there things you’ve learnt that you wish you knew back when Max was born?
Five years ago, our business wasn’t the business it is today. I had gone bust and was making a comeback. It was tough. I purposefully fell pregnant during that time; I bet my husband. We were older. We needed to start thinking about children from a medical and health viewpoint. I fell pregnant intentionally and Max was born in the comeback. I went back to work the day after Max was born.
That is not the way that anyone should do it in my view. From a medical, mental, health, wellbeing viewpoint, you must put the tools down. There are so many changes going on in your body that is not conducive to working at that point. I had a big tender we were applying for and I was on a comeback after going under.
I had a couple of people working for me part-time, but they weren’t tender writers, so I sat in our hospital and wrote the tender, which we won. It still holds a piece of my heart today. I went back to work on day 6. Max came in his capsule and we went back to doing face-to-face health checks.
Women’s Agenda readers can download an exclusive preview of Woman of Influence ahead of the official launch of the book on May 17, 2016. To download your exclusive preview, simply visit here.
Check out more from this series:
Tracey Fellows on why leadership is like love.
Marina Go on going from magazine editor at 23 to CEO and board chair