Changing Lives With Assistance Dogs

Describe your career trajectory and how you got to your current position.

My career path has been characterised by my desire to seek challenges and grow personally, as I believe it's a lifelong discovery journey, not a race! I never knew ‘what I wanted to be’ early on and worried in the early years, after university in South Africa, that unlike good friends who had settled on professions like engineering and chartered accounting, I was a commerce generalist who had a motivation to be in business, but without really having a plan for what that meant.

 Living in London in my twenties sharpened my focus, as I realised I needed to educate myself further and gain skills to compete for opportunities. I found my way into investment banking and after arriving in Australia in 2004, recently married with a 6-month-old son, was again another huge career growth spurt.  I spent the next 15 years in big banks, starting in the Retail and Business Banking finance team as a management accountant, and after a few years, somewhat unusually jumping across to the frontline, leading customer-facing teams. Banking provided the training and platform to develop my leadership, something I always believed I had but needed the opportunity to develop. Through general management roles across different divisions in two different organisations, which encompassed people leadership, strategy, and transformation, I honed the rounded leadership skills that make me the leader I am today.

Transitioning from Commerce to the Not-for-Profit sector was serendipitous, certainly not by design! Achieving the Australian Institute of Company Directors qualification was a gateway to sitting on the board of Assistance Dogs Australia for 2 years before transitioning into the CEO role in January 2024. Reflecting on the 20-year journey to this role, it has been the pursuit of challenge and opportunities to transform and improve organisations. Challenging people to not “do things the way they have always been done” – that has most influenced my path.

What drives you to do the work that you do?

In 1998, my younger brother had a car accident at just 18, sustaining a spinal cord injury that left him paralysed and, at the time, our family was shattered. We were a family of 4 kids, pretty close-knit, and we watched our parents struggle to come to terms with our brother’s injury. All of us grieved for the life we thought he would not live. What we witnessed then, and since, has been incredible.  He has been the most inspirational person in my life and shown truly that anything is possible with a positive mindset and a determination never to accept less than what you want for yourself. He has gone on to represent South Africa and Australia in wheelchair basketball, was a silver medallist at Paralympics London 2012, has built a successful business career, and was the inaugural Australian Wheelchair Champion at the 2022 Victorian Open golf tournament. He is the proud dad of two boys, happily married and has lived a life that most of us couldn’t achieve in two lifetimes. This example of what is possible is a huge inspiration and motivator for me in working to fulfil the purpose of Assistance Dogs Australia – empowering independence, inclusion and connection for people with disabilities, and hopefully helping other families experience the joy of seeing their loved ones thrive and live independent lives.

If you could go back in time, what piece of advice would you give yourself as you first embarked on your career?

Be calm and trust that things will work out. I have learned more from the negative experiences and the failures that I have had than all the successes I have enjoyed over the years, and inevitably things have worked out. I have achieved most of what I set out to do, it is just that often things don’t happen in a straight line. I stressed a lot about trying to control things in my earlier years, now I understand that by living in the moment and trusting in myself I would have got to the same point without carrying the anxiety.

Any words you live by day to day?

I have always had a glass half full approach to life, believing anything is possible. That translates for me daily into ‘it’s not that hard’. There is no problem that can’t be solved if we put our minds and effort into it, no goal that is unachievable if we work hard enough and believe in what we are doing.

What are you currently watching / reading / listening to?

I am reading a couple of really interesting books at the moment. ‘Great Fundraising Organizations’ by Adam Clayton and ‘1929’ by Andrew Ross Sorkin. Fascinating insights into the great depression and how history is rhyming today in 2026! My favourite podcasts at the moment are ‘The Diary of a CEO with Steven Bartlett’ and ‘The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway’. Scott Galloway is such an interesting guy who helps me stay across world affairs and issues.