People often ask me what a ‘typical day’ looks like for me. There’s no such thing as a typical day in the life of me! With running MedRecruit, MedCapital and MedWorld, I am often bouncing around various places in the world advancing our work.
Yesterday (as I write this) is quite representative of my varied life, so this is a Wednesday-in-the-life of me.
4.45 a.m.
I wake up early, not because I’m one of these people who sleeps three hours a night whilst only eating whole foods following the Paleo diet while constantly feeling superior to everyone else, but because I’m in Australia and as I’ve come from New Zealand I’m still on New Zealand time.
The extra two hours is useful though, so I hit the gym for a weights session then get back to my room and clear emails and liaise with the New Zealand team.
7.15 a.m.
Every morning, whether I’m in the office or not, my senior management team and I have a ‘stand up’ meeting to share the previous day’s wins and losses and to collaborate on the day ahead. I am a firm believer that the heart of a business is its rhythm, the habitual human interactions that flow the strategy into daily operations and allow daily operations to feed back to influence strategy.
9 a.m.
I get in to the MedCapital office which is in the CBD in Sydney. I’m spending the week here because we are starting our new CEO, so we are refining the strategy and planning the projects for the upcoming year. We have three new team members starting in the next week so we are making sure we’re ready for them.
10 a.m.
This year we sponsored the Central Queensland Hospital and Health District staff appreciation awards. I am involved in the judging of Team of the Year. I beam in for the judging via video conference. It’s a pleasure to see the three teams presenting, and the winner we pick is an incredible group of people going way outside the call of duty to do good things, so I feel quite privileged.
1.45 p.m.
I head out the door with our CEO, Richard, and one of our Private Wealth Managers, Malcolm, to pick up the rental car to head up to Newcastle for an event we are co-hosting with nib to thank some doctors. We use the two-hour car trip to plan our presentation, so by the time we’re there we are ready to go.
6 p.m.
The event kicks off. I talk about the work we’re doing in the doctor wellbeing space, then Richard and I talk about how we’ve designed the MedCapital service to handle all aspects of doctors’ finances by having everything in-house (accounting, tax, financial planning, insurance, debt, property, legal) to make life easy for the doctors.
They like that, but they are more interested in hearing some of the powerful strategies we’ve created to:
Pay private school and university fees pre-tax
Claim the entire value of investment properties in deductions even when the debt is paid off
And other things.
These are all things that they can relate to, and that create a feeling of “I’m missing out”, which they are.
We then move on to the wine tasting. It’s funny, I get everything (literally everything!) wrong throughout the night, but when we get to the final competition I somehow manage to pick that it’s a 2014 NSW shiraz so I win a bottle of wine.
10.30 p.m.
It’s late, it’s been a long day, we’re driving back to Sydney, and we should be tired; but we are too excited. Our interactions with the doctors tonight have confirmed what we already thought; MedCapital is a service that is relevant to every single doctor in Australasia. When we talk through our strategies we are yet to meet a doctor who wouldn’t receive a massive benefit. Every single doctor there tonight has booked in for a wealth assessment with the team.
11.15 p.m.
I fall into bed, exhausted, but thrilled.