Leadership: Work-Life Balance

Is there anything you struggle with, about work? Work-life balance gets thrown around a lot. It’s a real buzz word. How do you look at it, specifically? Do you struggle with that, as a CEO?

The first thing is, my base is my family. Before accepting the position of CEO, I had a conversation with my wife. I said, we know what it’s going to be like and she said to me, that I would be the one that would be impacted the most. It would be me that would not be able to be involved in a lot of family stuff. So she said that I had to understand, first of all, whether I could handle that. Whenever somebody accepts a CEO position, you’ve got to realize that a lot of your time is going to be prioritized in the company.

What that doesn’t mean is that you de-prioritize your family or those close to you. If it’s not a family, it could be other things. We hear a lot about mental health and we know a lot about some of the challenges that some people feel today. If you’re sitting there doing 90, 100 hours a week, it’s not healthy. You’ve got to break away. For me, I’ve got the weekends with the kids and my wife and then we’ve got the day routine, which is somewhat normal. That, for me, helps me balance. I’m somewhat simple. I don’t need to do, 10, 20, 30, 40 different things. I love what I do at my work. That’s another important element. If you love your work and you love your job, it becomes easier. When you get frustrated about it or you don’t like something, it’s harder.

For me, I’m nice and simple. I love what I’m doing at work. I’ve got a good rhythm at home with the family, the kids, parents. It’s just making sure that both are balanced, really, is what I try and do. Then, of course, take holidays. You’ve got to take holidays. I was in the Emirates at the beginning of the year and it was absolutely brilliant. I’m going to the Dominican Republic later on this year. You’ve got to break away.

It’s how you set up your team. How I’ve set up Push Doctor is that the team can operate without me. I’m sitting here with you today, there are no fires in Push Doctor. Everyone is armed, everyone is a strong leader and everyone has got the freedom to really focus on their area. The Push Doctor team, in my view, is a very well-oiled machine and the leaders there are proper, strong leaders. If I didn’t hire that or have that going on, then I naturally can’t move on to do other stuff. If you don’t have that, that makes things more difficult.

It comes back to what you said before in hiring people better than you and people to educate you. That will actually enable your work-life balance.

It really does. Sometimes CEOs and founders find it challenging to let things go. I’ve never been a founder of a business so maybe that might change if I ever become a founder. But I think it’s easier for a CEO to come into a company, who is not a founder, and can say, well, actually I want a hand off this or that. I think that’s probably a bit easier. Although I’m very attached to the company, it’s not my baby. It is my baby, but it’s not my baby. It’s not something that I’ve been involved in right from the beginning; I’m just helping it mature. The team are there, they’re experienced and they’ve done it all before and they can run the operations without me.