Your transcript

[00:00:00] Gillian: Today, I'm introducing you to someone I met a few years ago at a fancy business retreat in Hawaii. Eight of us stayed in this incredible home in Maui. It was right next to the water, expansive rooms, breathtaking ocean views, tropical gardens, private terraces. I mean, it was beautiful and very luxurious and a world away from home.

And the interesting part is I'd heard about Margo Ward, one of the women joining us. And I was told she was a force, a woman who could have done anything at all with her career but chose to channel all her energy into creating something truly remarkable, KidsXpress. Now one of the most impactful non for profits in Australia, and all because of Margo.
Now when I finally met her, I understood the hype, like Margo is one of the most purposeful, connected, self aware, creative, and genuinely beautiful humans. We got to know each other that week and since then she's become a dear friend. Recently, I said to her, how about coming on the podcast, Margo? I think people have a lot of assumptions about leading in the non for profit space and you could show them what really happens behind the scenes. What do you think?
And to my delight, she said yes. So today, you'll get to hear Margo's incredible journey founding KidsXpress, what the organisation stands for, and what drives her every day. If you're flirting with the idea of moving into non for profit, Margo has insights that might be just what you need.
This is an honest, heartfelt and compelling conversation that shows the true power of a purpose driven career. Let's dive in.
[00:03:42] Gillian: Margo, welcome to the podcast. It is such a pleasure to have you here.
[00:03:46] Margo: Oh, Gillian, this is just the highlight of my week and it's only Monday morning.
[00:03:52] Gillian: Well, it's highlight of my week too, actually. So let's dive in Margo. And I think we need to start with your career because you've had quite a diverse career from your early days in New Zealand to leading KidsXpress. So share with us what inspired you to start KidsXpress and Margo, you better take a moment to explain what it is as well.
[00:04:10] Margo: So KidsXpress is a children’s mental health organisation and we've just gone into our twentieth year. We provide trauma informed expressive therapies to children under 12 through both our centre and community programs, but also our school-based programs. Predominantly the children that are referred to KidsXpress, have been through some thought a significant challenge trauma or adversity.
So, anything you can possibly imagine from domestic violence, abuse, neglect, due to anxiety and depression and generalised anxiety at the moment as well is massive amongst our children of that age group. But also importantly, educating the caregiving network that needs to be able to see the signs so that we can heal the hurt.
[00:04:49] Gillian: Why did you say this has to be my mission?
[00:04:52] Margo: Very early in my career in Australia, I worked at Sydney Children's Hospital where I pioneered play therapy. So play therapy is the way to give children the coping mechanisms through play, through their language to be able to cope with either what had happened to them, what was happening to them, or what was about to happen to them.
And so, I would give children the opportunity to use their imagination to help them with their physical fear and pain, but also their emotional pain and fear. And so children years apart from each other would imagine this place.
They would imagine a place where they could sing and dance and throw paint and it was magical and it was, they always likened it to like a silver castle or a silver sanctuary. And this was a place they would talk to me when they would come out of their imagery saying like, Oh, why isn't this place real? Why isn't there a place outside of our family, the hospital where we can go and there's people there that can help us learn how to cope with what's happening to us in their life.
And so all of a sudden I had this beautiful, beautiful vision of what would become KidsXpress. After 10 years of working with children in that medical setting, I then decided to go and work in a National Suicide Prevention Program. And that role took me predominantly to regional and remote areas across Australia to bring communities together to talk about depression and to talk about suicide.
One community I worked in had had 26 completed suicides within a 12 month period. So, when you bring people together and you bring them into that vulnerable space, I had young people and adults who either had been in crisis or were a crisis or had a loved one crisis all talk about childhood.
All this is happening to me now, but it actually was the abuse, the neglect, the domestic violence, the loss, the grief, whatever it was in childhood. And at that point in time, we weren't taught how to cope with that and so they could clearly paint the pathway. So not only did I have the beautiful vision from the children of this place that needed to exist, but I also had adults and young people saying, this is why we need it.
And literally three months later, I went to an old friend's 40th. His name is Paul Hines, he owns an insurance brokerage called General Security Australia, or he did at the time. We ended up going out for dinner and he asked me a critical question. He asked me as a heart-based leader, he asked me the question of, do you think what you're doing today will save the life of a child tomorrow? And I had to say no, because what I was doing at that time, working in suicide prevention is I was literally pulling people out of the stream, out of the bottom of the stream.
We needed to go upstream to find out why people were falling in. So I still have the email that Paul sent me the next day. So don't give up your day job just yet, but we're going to make this happen and together, we formed KidsXpress. Almost 20 years later, we've just gone into our 20th year, we’ve supported thousands of children. We are nationally accredited, internationally recognised as being best practice of working with children impacted by trauma and to go from nothing to be where we're at now, it certainly has been an amazing journey.
So I think the important part of that is title. It's easy to say I'm founder because people understand that. It’s not true. I'm a conduit of a vision, but it's a deeply held vision that was held by those that I've chosen in my career to support and guide and they are my legacy.
[00:08:13] Gillian: That is such a beautiful story, Margo, and I've heard a lot of that story before, but it is such an inspiring story and the power of a vision, right? Because you just seem to attract the things to enable that, even though you didn't know you were attracting it at the time.
Just thinking about your role at KidsXpress, working with children who have experienced trauma, like I imagine that is incredibly rewarding, also incredibly challenging work as well. Wwhat aspects of your role you find the most joyful? What do you love doing most in your role as CEO of KidsXpress?
[00:08:48] Margo: It's always the children. I can think of two amazing examples that always hold me steadfast. So one is walking back into KidsXpress one day and there was a little boy climbed up on a step, he was about five or six, to eyeball me. And he asked me, what are you for? And I said, I'm the CEO of KidsXpress.
And somebody else said, oh, Margo created KidsXpress. And Gillian, he looked at me in absolute disgust and said, I didn't ask you what your job title was. I asked you what you stood for.
And you would think, right, how precocious, etcetera, but knowing his background, knowing that if he had ever done that to another adult that he didn't feel safe with, he would have been thrown against a wall. That he came from really severe domestic violence.
The courage that it took for him, because we had given him permission to have a right to feel that he could question who was coming into his safe space. He had every right to do that. And I realised in that moment, it’s not your job title, it's how you turn up. So that for me, the opportunity for children to question, that brings me so much joy, as odd as that sounds.
And even recently last week, I had the beautiful opportunity to go to our programs, to visit our schools. And we were in this group, and this was a school that has a lot of refugee children who have seen the worst of the worst war-torn countries. They have seen trauma that, that our children in Australia will never see or experience. And she and a little girl in a group of, she was about eight or nine said to me, why did you start KidsXpress? And I said, it was a dream that children created and they gifted me to make reality.
And it was a place that children felt that when life hurt them, there was a place that they could come where they could heal. And that was a place that they belonged. And she came up to me, Gillian, and she held my hands and said, I had the same dream. And when you know that she's had to flee her country with her family, some of her family, not all, you know that means a lot.
And then she hugged me. That left me speechless. So I think about those moments. They are random. They're never rehearsed. They're never planned. They just happen. I've also had another, a group of boys asked to meet the CEO of KidsXpress. When I turned up, one little boy said, you're a woman, but also you don't look intelligent enough to be a CEO. So it comes in roundabouts, right? But that is my greatest joy. Because that to me is what I'm all about. I'm all about how do we create a future that all children deserve, where they feel safe enough to express themselves, safe enough to question and have the internal strength and fortitude to believe in themselves that they have a right for their future.
[00:11:44] Gillian: I personally feel, and I'm really interested in your perspective on this one, Margo, that there's a lot of ambiguity around non for profit companies. I hear when I'm talking to the women that I coach and work with, there's a desire for some of them to at some point transition from corporate to a non for profit, and I do think at the back of their mind, they might think it's a bit easier. But when I sit down and I chat and catch up with you, you are unbelievably busy and in demand, and I see all the skills of a highly accountable, commercially driven visionary leader.
But my question is this, Margo, how different is it working in non for profit.
[00:12:21] Margo: Oh, my goodness. You know, Gillian, I'm so pleased we're talking about this because it's one of those things that tends to infuriate me, if I'm honest, is once my career is finished or at a certain point in my career, I'm then going to go on the not for profit. It's actually quite a disrespectful comment.
One of my thirsts throughout my career has always been for more knowledge, more experience, more challenge, more growth. I had the wonderful opportunity to go to Stanford University back in 2011, where it was an executive leadership program for the not for profit sector and the professor from Stanford came in and said, from now on, you will not call it not for profit, you need to make a profit.
You need to be savvy business people to ensure that your vision, your organisation is sustainable. We run a business. We might not do profits share, et cetera, but we run a business and we have to be clever and we have to be savvy and we have to think about the future, whilst we're also dealing with all this emotional content.
So when I think about what I need to do and you ask the question, what I do from a daily, what inspires me, my day is so broad. So I will start with the concept of who are we serving and why are we serving them? And then I have to do exactly everything else that a CEO of any other business needs to do.
So it is actually in my belief, because I sit across both not for profit and corporate, which I'll explain, I think it's far harder. We have far less resources. We have far more expectations. We are driven by a cause. If we fail, we fail those that we aim to serve and that can haunt people.
So I really think people need to think very carefully about at this point in my career, which often dictates when I'm financially successful, I will go into the not for profit sector. Yes, not for profit sector doesn't necessarily can compete with certain corporate, but we as a sector also have to raise the game.
We need to ensure that our people have the right resources financially from a professional development, career development, as anybody else does, because they have every right just as much. So I can really get on my soapbox about this one. I think if you want to come into the not-for-profit sector, why?
Why would I, somebody already in the sector, want you coming to the sector? What do you have to offer that the sector needs? Because the sector has a lot of diversity in it. It has a lot of passion and a lot of drive in it, but it equally has the same things that we need to balance within a business that any other business does.
[00:14:49] Gillian: So Margo, aside from purpose and being highly motivated, what other qualities are important to be successful in non for profit?
[00:15:55] Margo: It's the same as any other business. You've got to know your numbers, you've got to know your people, you've got to know your cause, you've got to know what your vision is. You've got to be able to inspire people. If I was running a cafe, I'd be doing exactly the same thing.
I'd want to know my customers. I want to. You know, make sure that my staff have all the work health and safety and all the things that they need to be able to safely work in their environment. I don't think it's that different. It's not that different. So I think when people say they want to come into the not for profit sector, it’s because they want to be motivated and people want to leave the world a better place.
So, I fundamentally believe, I mean we all have the same purpose in life, we are all human kind and our purpose in life is to be human and kind to the very best of our ability. Neither of which is actually easy. To be truly human and truly kind requires great strength and fortitude and vulnerability. So I can understand why people think at that point I will do good, but you can do good anyway. You can do good every single day. And I think one of the things that's really important, which I often challenge people when they approach me going, I'm at this point in my career, I now wanna come into the not-for-profit.
At this point, you could possibly actually do more within your own business for the not for profit sector or for the full purpose sector by staying where you are using your skills and being a champion for change within your own business, then you will be coming into the not for profit sector. So before you even think about that, get some really good coaching, understand how you can actually create change, in your own environment before you think jumping into ours.
There's one thing I do know is people, when they do that transition, depending on when they do it, they can be quite disappointed because it doesn't give them the emotional sense or purpose that they thought it was going to, because they could be too removed from what they believe they're going to be doing or what the cause is. So I think getting really clear vision, counsel, coaching to understand why they want to do that, but really look at where you are and what you can create.
I had a conversation recently with somebody in a big corporate business, and she's just had her second child and she's in her mid thirties. I want to come into the not for profit sector. I actually managed to get her to understand you can create more change from within your current business than jumping ship and going into a not for profit because your skillset isn’t necessarily going to be a priority within the not for profit sector.
[00:18:24] Gillian: How was that received, Margo?
[00:18:25] Margo: She's now a champion for change in her business. She's thriving in her business. She's actually got a promotion. She's been able to balance her work life with her children and she's like, it's just given me a whole different, she was ready to leave after I think it was almost 18 years within that business, but it's given her a whole different lease on life. And also it's advanced the company's vision of what they want to do from their corporate responsibility, et cetera, what they want to be doing, because they now have somebody putting their hand up in the business to say, I want to be the one that creates, to be the champion of change.
[00:18:58] Gillian: Yeah, how great, non for profits are aligned with everything you've been saying. They're just like any other big business that you're running. You will encounter financial challenges, perhaps even more in some ways, cause you've got to chase down the money. You've built something from ground up.
There's going to be unexpected disruptions. During those tough times, and I'm talking about from a business sense here, what strategies or mindsets, Margo, help you and your team stay motivated and resilient?
[00:19:25] Margo: It is really difficult because from a view sense, we're not selling something, we are in one aspect, but know, sometimes we'll be in a situation where people will have pledged X amount of dollars and then it just evaporates. It doesn't happen. So it is really difficult in terms of the nature of it, because there's a lot of trust within the not for profit sector. And when people say they're going to do things we can even have a, an agreement that, for example, they're going to do a fundraising activity and then they get too busy and then it doesn't happen.
But we've actually put it into our budget because we have an agreement and we agreed on it. And we've also put internal resources to make it happen. So it can get very frustrating. It can get very disappointing. There are definitely times when it feels incredibly difficult.
And you wonder, for us in particular, so we're at the moment where I've got a growth strategy, and we're growing because the demand is so massive. So you can get ahead of yourself a little bit in terms of the demand so massive, it can become overwhelming. So sometimes you've got to bunker down a bit, come back as a team.
Look at what's in front of us. Look at what we can do now or in this period of time. Be really clear on what we're doing. Be really clear on our roles, what our individual roles and what they're doing. And also, I think it's about celebrating the win sometimes. And I know that's a catch thing. Yeah, celebrate the wins, but the wins outside of the normal as well, I think is really important.
So, in all honesty, Gillian. There are times that it's been extraordinarily difficult. One of the things I do is that, that network that wraps around me. My friendship network, my family network, those that I turn to for guidance and support, they know who they are. I've got five people that I'll go to. Then it's those times where I have to be vulnerable. I think being vulnerable as a leader to say, I don't have this right now, you know, you can talk about strategies that make you feel good and do all that stuff. I think sometimes the greatest strategy is being vulnerable. So those trusted people in your network that you go, I'm not coping well, this has happened, and I don't know how to deal with it.
I don't have the skillset to deal with it. I just don't have bandwidth right now. I tend to think that that's a greater strength. Now, in other sectors, what I do, you know, I sit on a number of corporate Australia boards as well, the workload from that can be quite massive.
And I think understanding how you create balance. I don't actually believe in balance. I believe in the pendulum swing. So life will take you where, wherever you need to focus on the time and sometimes you need to push the pendulum. But for me, trying to create balance just doesn't work because life is always going to happen.
As soon as you think you've got it, it will tip it up.
[00:22:06] Gillian: Yes. Margo, talk, us through working on boards as well. You are the CEO of KidsXpress, which is a huge business to run. So tell us about the board component and how that came about.
[00:22:19] Margo: So KidsXpress has a lot of support from the insurance industry. And so I had profile within the insurance industry, I guess.
But I was invited to sit on Chubb Insurance Australia's board. So I've been an independent director there for quite some time now. I'm so honoured to sit on that board as an independent director. I remember, meeting some of the regulators in the early days, and they looked at me and said, well, Margo, you are the only true and dependent director because you're not from the industry.
But I think huge, huge kudos to Cubb. When they first approached me and I was like, why would you want me? Honestly, I mean, I didn't get it. And they were like, well, it's not just about diversity in terms of gender. We want diversity in terms of sector. So that kind of got me the third sector.
And we want diversity in terms of thought leadership. I'll be honest, I don't think like anybody else on that board, but I'm really clear on what do I need to do to be at that level? You have to be really clear on what you need to know on a board and what you need to govern, but also to be really clear on why you're there.
So I was there to bring a different voice. Obviously people, culture and mental health was the thing. One of the things I did very early on was ask for mental health to be put on their emerging risks register, way before COVID, and then COVID hit. And so a lot of the strategies we put in the business, we were far ahead of others because I knew this is something we need to be conscious of because the stats, et cetera, with the mental health in Australia, were getting worse, they weren't getting better. And then we had to deal with COVID. And as an independent director, I think the business also leant a lot on me, particularly on those early days of around how do we support staff. What do we do about it? Those sorts of things.
It’s a huge honour. I think for me, as far as I know, I'm the only person from the not-for-profit sector that's always been not for profit that has ended up on a corporate Australia board. There's been corporate Australia coming to not for profit, the other direction.
And so I'm, I'm truly honoured by that. I also sit on GSA, the founding sponsor, founding company of KidsXpress. I now sit on their board as well, which is, very different company but a wonderful opportunity that full cycle to be able to give back. And I think also that part of legacy that, you know, the story that sits within GSA and KidsXpress and now for me to be able to have that influence at that level.
And then I also am advisor to a number of other predominantly insurance company around ESG and people and culture and mental health, et cetera. And people often say to me, Gillian why the insurance? Like, isn't that so removed from KidsXpress or what KidsXpress stands for? KidsXpress is absolutely at my core, but insurance companies deal with trauma every single day. To me it is about trauma. So my role is to elevate the knowledge of how we deal with that through a community level. That's how I see the connection. We are all about how we best support people in their most vulnerable lives.
[00:25:13] Gillian: Do you think there's been any, key lessons from all of this? Cause so many things in your career have happened in an unexpected way and you've accomplished so much and you're still very committed to it going forward. What is the one thing that you've learned or realised along the way that's been important?
[00:25:31] Margo: Being open and being curious about life in a way that builds your trust of self. I think that's key for me.
[00:25:40] Gillian: And how did you do that, Margo? Did you just allow yourself? Did you talk to yourself? Was it intentional or organic? How did you build that self-trust?
[00:25:49] Margo: I probably wouldn't have answered it 1that way if you’d asked me 10 years ago, because I was just deeply curious. I'm deeply curious, even now in this point of my career, I'm deeply curious about AI and how we can be pioneers for that in the therapeutic space and what that's going to do in the world. So, I'm just deeply curious around people, how people communicate, how people cope, how people connect.
And so I think that's where it really came from is being deeply curious. And then it's just been, as life's happened, it's like there's been these moments of, uh huh that's the next part. That's what I'm meant to do now, or I'll just follow that because the person that has told me to do is, funny, it’s like the board saying to me, you can stay being a really good therapist and you'll have a small business, but if you make this paradigm shift, you could bring a whole lot more to a whole lot more children and families. And I trusted that they knew me well enough at that point and business that I would be able to do that.
So I think one of the things that we get really locked into, is my career is going to look like this. We put the blinkers on and we aim that this is where the learning is. It's not there. You'll get the credentials there, but the learning and the richness is actually in your peripheral and it's allowing those to guide and influence.
It's trusting people. It's also, I think there's a point, Gillian, where you also know who you can't trust or what you can't trust. I think it's also important.
[00:27:20] Gillian: For sure. For sure. I think you get better at that as you get older too,
[00:27:24] Margo: Yeah, I think they do too.
[00:27:26] Gillian: And just being able to read that. Yeah. Such great advice. Margo, thank you so much for joining us today. I think it's such an inspirational career journey, having built this incredible business from ground up and all initiated by you. And I know you've had some incredible stakeholders supporting you along the way, but you have driven it and I just know our audience is going to gain a lot from it. So thank you so much, Margo.
[00:27:50] Margo: Thank you. You know, we are a collective. We're meant to communicate, and we're meant to change the world together for the better. So the more we can have conversations with each other, and I encourage anybody if they want to reach out, please do because change happens when we have a conversation that the intention is good.
[00:28:09] Gillian: Agree. Thank you, Margo.
[00:28:10] Margo: Thanks, Gill.