Alumni stories

Ken Griffin

CEO of Australian Primary Health Care Nurses Association (APNA)

I left school wanting to be a journalist or a lawyer.

I began my Bachelor of Communications Degree at the Monash Berwick campus of Monash in 1996.  It was part of an experimental double-award course that saw me studying a Diploma of Professional Writing and Editing.  I knew I wanted to go to Monash but the idea of combining the Diploma and Degree was really attractive to me.  It was also a great example of Monash trying new approaches to education.  I took a lot away from that time and decided to major in Public Relations, following in the footsteps of my father.  The campus was brand new, state of the art and there was a real buzz and strong culture amongst the staff and students that anything was possible.  I was the editor of the campus magazine, Ink, in my third year and President of the Student Union in the fourth. I do have a confession, I had been so focussed on my PR course that I ignored the marketing mix.  At this stage in my career I thought that marketing was advertising.

Monash gave me some ‘once-in-a-lifetime’ experiences to develop my new skills.  I was on the team that launched the first Leukaemia Foundation Shave for a Cure. With six interns on borrowed laptops, one CEO and a part-time fundraising manager we raised $800k in the first year.  I did everything, PR, Advertising, volunteer coordination, speeches for the celebrity supporters, events management.  It was a great grounding in the need for tenacity.  Later I worked with the Monash Institute of Reproduction and Development in the era of Alan Trounson and David de Kretser.  I was helping to do internal Comms and support the small Comms Team increase the public discussion around stem cells and cloning.

Jumping in the deep end

My first full-time job was in London.  The competition at the time was intense but I began working for a PR agency specialising in food and alcohol.  It helped that I was Australian and the Agency had the Jacob’s Creek account.  It taught me how dynamic FMCG brands could be and the fundamentals of client management.  I was working on global brands and loving the lifestyle but it never quite hooked me in.  I shifted quickly into healthcare with a very new agency that doubled in size and propelled me into higher roles. In healthcare, I found my niche working with a brilliant team that was strong, diverse with driven leaders.  We launched new medicines, vaccines and grew to become the agency to watch in London.  It was hard to leave but it was time to get back to Australia.

Ken Griffin speaking at the Australian Primary Health Care Nurses Association Plenary

For a while, I was seen as the ‘Comms Guy’ but that soon changed

Coming back to Australia I started the healthcare arm of a marketing communications agency, Haystac. This was a significant step up to be responsible for a P&L and building a new division.  I began mentoring Monash students at this time and regularly hosting interns.  It was great to work directly for the founders in a rapidly growing agency and to experience the buy-out by Mitchell Media.  I took my first in-house role at GlaxoSmithKline as a Brand Manager in the Vaccines Division.  I had always wanted to work in vaccines and the in-house experience was great.  GSK sent me back to Monash to complete an Executive Development Program in Strategic Marketing and I was able to apply those skills during the swine flu pandemic, several whooping cough outbreaks and two product recalls.  I began actively looking for roles that would use a broader range of skills which led to a series of external relations roles, first with GSK and then with Hospira (the old Mayne Pharma) and then briefly with Pfizer.  Working in the innovative industry and then the generics, sterile injectables and biologics sector was an excellent grounding in the importance of policy, governance and logistics in medicine and healthcare supply chains.  At GSK and Hospira I worked in, and led, teams that influenced all of these.  This eventually led to Linfox where I was the General Manager of Marketing and Corporate Affairs. Seeing the contract supply chain first hand has had a significant influence on my development as a marketer and taught me to appreciate the benefits of technology when it is implemented well and used at scale.

The chance to use all my skills

In 2019 I stepped into the role of CEO at the Australian Primary Health Care Nurses Association (APNA). It has been great to accelerate the growth of a young organisation that has the capacity to directly influence the health of Australia through the 82,000 primary health care nurses working outside hospitals. The most striking realisation in this role is that marketing has barely touched many parts of the healthcare sector.  I’ve used my skills to develop APNA’s differentiators and worked with the team to significantly increase our project work, increase our advocacy presence and continue our membership growth.  There isn’t a day that goes by where I’m not referencing Marketing theory or something that I learned at Monash.  Most years we also have four or more Monash interns.  They keep me and the team fresh, bring new ideas and thinking and remind us of the need to keep up with change.

Some advice to anyone looking to follow

Marketing skills are transferrable and can be applied anywhere. Never work for people, or in places, where you feel you’re walking on eggshells – it’s not worth it. Don’t believe the people who say that the ‘Comms Guy’ can’t be the CEO.