What sort of incredible organisational skills, not to mention huge amounts of resilience and a titanic work ethic, would you need to raise four children all under twenty-six months of age?
CEO Super Mum! Be careful using that title around Annie Gibbins because she’s likely to pull you up faster than a speeding bullet.
It’s understandable, though, why Annie is often labelled that way. She fell in love at seventeen, and married a week after her twentieth birthday, “because my parents didn’t want me to be a teenage bride.”
She had twins at twenty-three and another set of twins at twenty-five, a fifth child at thirty-two, and still managed to become one of the most influential people in corporate Australia.
“I’ve been extremely fortunate that I married exactly the right partner for me,” Annie says. “He’s been absolutely fantastic, so supportive of who I am and who I’ve wanted to become.”
Annie and James have been married for thirty-one years. They both built successful careers while still raising a large family and remaining totally devoted to each other; “we’re still total sweethearts,” adds Annie.
Annie splits her time between her full-time job as CEO of Glaucoma Australia and running her own business, Lipstick Consulting.
Working at Glaucoma Australia is “my day job and it allows me to manage a charity where I can actively make a difference in reducing preventable but irreversible blindness for three hundred thousand Australians.”