As founder and CEO of Super Fierce, Trenna Probert is working at fixing the female pay gap and financial inequality from a completely new angle, one woman at a time.

Words: Rachel Sharp

It’s no small feat making superannuation look sexy, but Trenna Probert has never been one to shy away from a challenge. Her company Super Fierce – a digital superannuation comparison and consolidation service tailored for women to help women – was born of her own mid-life personal battle.

Despite having a hugely successful international career in the financial sector, Probert found herself starting from scratch again in her early thirties, after her marriage broke down and she needed to borrow money from her parents to establish a new life for herself and her son. That was just over 15 years ago. But the gifted entrepreneur, who’s now remarried with a second child, was so deeply affected she’s made it her mission to help countless others in the same situation.

Super Fierce, which helps clients tweak their superannuation so they end up with more money in their pockets on retirement, is her way of helping women find financial and social freedom. By switching to a lower fee fund, she says, the average Australian woman could save around $100,000 over her working life. “That’s a lot of champagne. Or tango lessons. Or trips to Barcelona. It’s whatever you want it to be because the change you make today means you can do whatever you want tomorrow.”

The social enterprise, which also supports a sister not-for-profit company fostering at-risk and marginalised women’s return to the workforce, is just the beginning, says Probert, who was also diagnosed with ADHD age 40. Here, she shares her experiences, including her ‘superpower’ diagnosis, and why all women – and men for that matter – will be better off getting super fierce.

Take us back to the beginning of Super Fierce. What was the ‘why’ for launching the company?

I'll be 50 next year and I've worked in financial services in one form or another my entire career, so that's more than 25 years now. By the time I was 34, I’d had this big career working in financial services and traveling the world, doing amazing things, working for American Express. My partner, young son and I lived between Colorado in the US, Europe and Sydney. From the outside, everybody looked at me as this amazing successful person and living the life. But the reality is that for me, at age 34, I needed to leave a relationship that wasn't working out, and our harbourside mansion, with a two-year-old under my arm. I had to borrow $3,000 from my parents to be able to [start again]. But as an entrepreneur, you've got this fire inside you and you have this extra lick of energy. 

Can you talk about the experience of being diagnosed with ADHD as an adult, and how it might have affected your work and life to this point?

I was diagnosed at the age of 40, which gave me an extra layer of understanding for who I am and how I operate. It's very common for women [to be diagnosed later in life] because we're good at flying under the radar and coping. There's so much misunderstanding around ADHD because you're not just hyperactive. We're high energy, but we can have deep focus and intensity of focus and that's what makes us great entrepreneurs. I'm quite open about it, mostly because it didn't cross my mind not to be open. I have people reaching out to me on LinkedIn all the time to talk about ADHD and to say, ‘Thank you. I went and got tested because of what you said and my life's changing for the better’ or ‘My children were just diagnosed. Can you give us advice?’.

Do you feel like it adds to your challenge or helps your focus?

I think it's a superpower. Knowing it is very helpful. I take medication now, and I'm so much better with it. The way I describe it is, imagine you are your computer and you've got every browser possible open. For me, they're wrapped around me and each one has its own beautiful colour, maybe flashing lights or a great song or something, and they're all really interesting. With medication, I can still see them, I'm still interested and I'm kind of present with them, but I can choose to be more deliberately present in a smaller number. That's what people misunderstand about ADHD: it's not attention deficit. It's the fact that we pay attention to everything, and we see, feel, hear everything so much more intensely than everybody else. That's why there are so many misunderstandings and why they'll often think that girls are dreamy, whereas we really have ADHD.

So, you were already an entrepreneur when you were diagnosed?

That’s right. I was diagnosed when my eldest son, who probably was about nine at the time, was diagnosed. We had an ADHD coach for Ashton, and he told my [second] husband Craig, ‘the very first thing that you need to do is get your wife diagnosed, then we can get started on Ashton’. He was not shocked, but I was shocked, and hit by this deep sense of grief, which I didn't expect. The grief was founded in the fact that it had been so hard, but people didn't realise because I was extremely good at coming up with strategies and mechanisms to be able to manage. The biggest thing for me was I thinking, ‘Oh my god, imagine how much more I could have achieved by now [if I was diagnosed earlier]. Maybe I would have been more successful or created something amazing’ or whatever. But I've decided to reframe it and think I wouldn't be where I am today if I hadn't had those things happen. I choose to make that just a part of my journey and embrace where I am and the fact that I may not have ended up here without [learning those coping mechanisms].

When did the idea start bubbling around in your head to launch Super Fierce, and how did you go from idea to actual company?

About five years ago, it came through one of my businesses Revolver Capital. We built a low-cost superannuation fund for a customer of ours and through that process, Craig discovered that they just didn't understand it, or know how to explain the benefits to their customers.

We have another business called Care360, which is [focused on] solving issues in aged care here in Australia and one weekend Craig was busily creating a calculator – more like a seriously epic algorithm – to help explain superannuation to people. Have you seen the movie A Beautiful Mind with Russell Crowe, and the scene where he has numbers over the walls? That's how Craig looks at the world, perhaps with a little less crazy, so algorithms are kind of a weird thing he does for fun on weekends. We worked together for a long time at Macquarie Bank, and our brains are very different but work really well together. 

Anyway, this calculator enabled you to go in and show customers: if you do nothing to change your super today, then this is how much you’ll pay in fees over your lifetime. But if you do this, then you could save that much. I was like, ‘that’s a business’.

At the same time my beautiful friend Victoria decided she wanted to take greater control over her financial position, so I said ‘hey, why don't we dust off this little tool that we created?’. I’ll never forget the look on her face when I showed her that by making a couple of simple changes to her super, she was going to retire with $114,000 more. It felt awesome. I went home and said to Craig, ‘I want to feel that again. How many more women can I help?’. It just led to this point where I decided, ‘Okay, forget focusing on the gender pay gap, which also makes me angry. I'm going to smash apart the gender gap at retirement with a click of a button’. The average savings in unnecessary super fees for a woman in Australia is $103,000 over her lifetime. For a man it's $166,000. So that was where the journey started.

But what was exciting was that I’d linked my head with my heart. I was able to care about superannuation - because, like everyone else, I think it's really boring. 

Well, Super Fierce certainly feels anything but boring. Your website and communications feel exactly the opposite. Was that a conscious decision?

It's funny, everybody always asks who does your marketing? It’s me. We got branding people in who did good stuff with the logos, but they couldn’t get the heart of what I wanted. It actually started off being called Your Superhero (I've got a very expensive URL if anybody wants to buy it, and I'll give you a deal!) but then I moved on from it quickly because it kind of felt like it meant someone was flying in to save you, which was the opposite of what I wanted to convey. Super fierce is about choice. It's about attitude. I want it to be about empowering women to live the life that they want, deserve, and choose. The only way I can get interested in money in general is as a weapon of choice, because we know that women end up in desperate situations when they give away their power and when they don't have access to financial means to be able to choices for themselves.

You’re speaking from personal experience here, as you left your first husband at 34 and had to borrow money from your parents. Is it generalising to say many women let their male partners handle the family’s superannuation?

I'm going to give you a few quick stats. The gender gap at retirement is 47 percent, meaning women retire with 47 percent less super than men. The average woman over her lifetime will earn $2 million less than the average man. The gender pay gap is a big part of that, but the reality is women have a 'lumpier' earning life cycle, because we play more of a carer role in society. We take time out of the workforce to have and raise children. We take time out of the workforce to look after elderly. We are dominant in caring industries, such as nurses and teachers and so on, which earn lower average wages. That said, I was reading some stats about 18 to 24-year-olds saying 43 percent of them no longer believe in marriage and think it’s outdated, but even if you may take time out of the workforce for other reasons – say to set up a side gig or to go sit on a mountain in India and hum at the moon – it still has a powerful effect on super. By the time you're in your thirties, if you make good decisions around your super, it can put you in a position where you can choose to take time out of the workforce later.

You have a strong opinion around women going back to the workforce after children or other carer breaks. Can you tell us why?

Women don't realise when they take time out of a workforce, it's not just the money that you're not earning or saving over that period that’s the problem. When you’re out of the workforce, you're losing pace in terms of skills and visibility, so you don't get access to same promotions later. Women will often go back part-time or even worse, they choose not to go back because they don't see any benefit, because of the cost that goes into childcare. I totally get that, and you should choose what's right for you and your family, but you must do it informed. 

Even if you're not making much more than the childcare, it's great for you and your skills to go back to work. It's great for your future earning potential. And I speak to so many women who they lose their confidence after time away. But if two people have a baby and one person gives up their earning power to do that, then for f*ck sake, at least split the super between the two accounts, or honestly, just put it all inter her account to help balance that gap. 

Is Super Fierce just for women or can men seek help with your service too?

Anybody can use our platform. In fact, 22 percent of our customers now are men. We don't answer discrimination with discrimination. I truly believe that rising tide lifts all boats and that everybody benefits.

We are for everyone, but we really do speak unapologetically to women first because we know that they need our support, and we want them to feel seen, recognised, heard, and valued first and foremost. That's where we are today but we're already working on plans for the next stages of development in the business, which will include insurance and products that are really designed around the different life cycle and needs and desires of women.

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