Why Emma Isaacs doesn’t believe in work-life balance

UNIVERSITY dropout Emma Isaacs has built Australia’s largest network of businesswomen — by crying foul on the “relentless” search for balance at home and in the office.

Emma Isaacs: “When you’re passionate about what you do, you don’t think about having to take a break from it or need to escape.” (Pic: Dave Wheeler for Stellar)

EMMA Isaacs is bubbly and full of beans as she mugs for the camera at Stellar’s photo shoot — so energised, in fact, that you would never guess she’d just stepped off a long-haul flight from the US.

The Sydney-born, now LA-based founder and global CEO of networking organisation Business Chicks says she is just happy to be in her hometown, even if just for a hot minute — she’s jumping on another plane to Melbourne later in the day. Tiring? Undoubtedly. But there are no complaints or negative vibes, just Isaacs’s infectious, jet-lag-defying enthusiasm.

Yet if you know anything about Isaacs, you’d expect nothing less. She is mother to five children under 10, and the kind of woman who makes the average person’s busy day look like a holiday. She is a university dropout who, at just 18, became co-owner of a struggling recruitment company where she’d been employed as a junior, transforming it into a successful business.

CASEY DONOVAN: ‘I KNOW MY WORTH NOW’

GEMMA WARD’S NEXT BIG MOVE

But Isaacs insists there is no grand plan at play here; as she tells Stellar, she’s just winging it — and she wants wannabe entrepreneurs to do the same. Jump in, she says. Take a (calculated) risk. After all, Isaacs claims she had no idea what she was doing when she bought that recruitment company; when she took over a networking events company called Business Chicks at age 26, she had never even run an event.

Today Isaacs can say she has turned Business Chicks into Australia’s largest and most influential community for women, now operating in 11 cities across two continents, and producing more than 100 events each year for its members. At present, it has a reach of more than 400,000 women.

Isaacs has turned Business Chicks into Australia’s largest and most influential community for women. (Pic: Dave Wheeler for Stellar)

Of course, Isaacs has done well out of all this: she owns a portfolio of properties and has raised more than $10 million for charity. And she is, arguably, one of the driving forces — or at least one of the most visible faces — behind the country’s growing rise in female entrepreneurs.

If it all sounds exhausting, Isaacs happily admits that yes, it certainly can be. Just don’t ask her how her work-life balance is going — because she doesn’t believe in the concept.

“When you’re passionate about what you do, you don’t think about having to take a break from it or need to escape,” Isaacs tells Stellar. “When I started 20 years ago it wasn’t a thing.” It’s become uncool to work hard, she believes, with many people caught up in the notion that working past 5pm is unhealthy.

In fact, Isaacs believes the idea of balance is the problem. “We seek to control and compartmentalise and order. We’re doing so much of this that we feel like we’re constantly failing. Everything has to be in a little box — this is work, this is play, there’s too much of one, or the other... it’s relentless.

“There are some weeks where I have green smoothies for breakfast and I take off my make-up every night and I go to my kids’ school concerts. Then there are lots of weeks where I work my tail off, the kids haven’t brushed their hair for days, I’ve only eaten the crusts of their cheese sandwiches... and that’s life. I just try to bring an awareness to the fact that it’s all chaos — sometimes it works and sometimes it just doesn’t.”

That doesn’t mean working around the clock, she insists, or bouncing a baby on one arm while answering emails with the other. “I’ve mastered the art of completely switching off from the kids when I’m at work. That’s not to say that I don’t completely love [them] but I can switch off,” she says.

“The flip side is that when I’m with my kids I’m really with them. I turn 40 next year and I feel a sense of calm about life. I just try to come back to the fact that I’m showing up and I’m doing my best.”

Isaacs is open about the support she has: a nanny and Rowan, her husband of 10 years, who is also an entrepreneur. “There’s no point being resentful, sitting here saying ‘I’m not being supported.’ It’s about thinking, ‘How can I get support?’ If it means we need to get that from someone else, then we do.”

Emma Isaacs features in this week’s Stellar.

When daughter Milla was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma at the age of four, Isaacs says she only grew more determined to find a solution. She grows momentarily subdued as she explains: “Every time I have a baby or something happens that might be seen as a setback, I get more ambitious.

“Being touched by the concept that your daughter might die — or at least go through pain to get through to the other side — makes you sit up a little taller, pull your shoulders back and think, ‘Right, why am I here? Who do I want to be?’ It made us really band together; it was a gift to us. We can say that because it was a happy ending.” Today, at age nine, Milla is healthy and resilient.

Isaacs is quick to warn that being an entrepreneur is much harder than it looks and is honest in acknowledging that success stories are the exception rather than the rule. But she knows there are smart ways to go it alone, and encourages everyone to give them a go.

“We live in really exciting times — we have co-working spaces so you don’t feel isolated, where you can start small rather than quit and risk it all,” she says.

“I want to see more women doing it, but it needs to be one foot in front of the other. Don’t sell the house, but do trust your gut, take calculated risks, network a lot, ask some questions. Dip your toe in — as soon as you can.”

Winging It by Emma Isaacs (Macmillan Australia, $34.99) is out on Tuesday.

READ MORE EXCLUSIVES FROM STELLAR.

Originally published as Why Emma Isaacs doesn’t believe in work-life balance