Leave behind a legacy

LICE MOVONO

27 May, 2017, 12:00 am

CHOOSE a growth area when you decide your career and when you make decisions for your business, think about leaving the world better than you found it.

This was the gist of Rosemary Vilgan’s address to attendees of the Women in Business Awards held at the Grand Pacific Hotel on Saturday night.

She spoke about innovation, about the exciting places that business interests took her, about how important it was to leave behind a legacy and shared with the women the attitudes which led her to a success career at the head of QSuper, a superannuation fund.

Vilgan, whose trip to Fiji was funded by Westpac, the main sponsors of the WIB Awards was Australia’s top business woman of 2013.

At the time she was chief executive officer at QSuper which is one of Australia’s largest superannuation funds — a $45 billion business. Vilgan said she learnt early in life that a societal attitude towards the sexes was such that men went to work and women did the shopping.

“Men just don’t go to work and women just don’t go shopping. We love it but my goodness we contribute a lot more than that,” she said.

Vilgan described her time with the QSuper group where she worked for 27 years in total and rose to become its chief executive officer when she was only 33 years old, one of the youngest to do that. She also became the first female to chair the board of the Association of Superannuation Funds of Australia (ASFA).

She was a leading superannuation executive for 18 years, an achievement the woman is also praised for given that the industry rose to now be worth $2trillian AUD.

She said, having grown the second youngest in a family of five girls gave her an early appreciation for the potentials woman had.

She observed her parents making what was an unusual decision a few decades back to send her eldest sister to a state school away from where the family lived, so that sister could complete the necessary high science subjects she wanted, to further her tertiary education.

That sister is now a professor.

“One of the first things I tell women is find an area of growth,” Vilgan said.

She told the women that having a legacy, something to leave behind was an important part of her business and she encouraged winners to make decisions which were aimed at leaving the world better than they found it.