Tristan White is the Founder & CEO of The Physio Co, a unique healthcare business, that, for eleven consecutive years has been ranked as one of Australia’s 50 Best Places to Work.

Tristan is a qualified Physiotherapist from The University of Melbourne who started his career with a dream to become a Sports Physiotherapist and work with the mighty Richmond Tigers in the AFL. After a short post-University stint in sports physiotherapy, Tristan realised that helping healthy people (elite athletes) become even healthier just didn’t inspire him.

Following months of self-reflection, he sheepishly started working in the much less sexy world of aged care (without telling barely a soul!). As a proud 24-year-old bloke who had told everyone that he was headed for a career in the more glamorous world of sports physiotherapy, he was feeling pretty embarrassed. Over the following 12 months, he created himself a job helping older people in a few nursing homes across Melbourne. He loved working with older people and very quickly had more clients than he was able to treat himself. So…he started employing other physiotherapists!

That’s when, in 2004, his new job became a business and The Physio Co was born. By The Physio Co’s 10th birthday in 2014, the team had grown much larger to be able to visit senior clients in most states of Australia. He had also negotiated a deal to sell a share of The Physio co and enter a joint venture with Australia’s largest owner and operator of retirement villages – the Aveo Group.

Even faster growth followed the investment from Aveo and by mid-2019, that 1-person business that Tristan started in 2004 had become a 150-person team that visited hundreds of thousands of older people in aged care homes, retirement villages and private homes across Australia.

Then, in late 2019, The Physio Co’s leadership team and Tristan made a big change: they pivoted towards a future that was more in their control. Instead of re-committing to being the allied health provider to Australia’s largest group of residential aged care homes, they re-focussed on the people that matter the most: their elderly clients and their families.