If there’s one thing Ricky clearly understands about orthopaedic trauma, it’s how important it is for patients to quickly regain their mobility after a fracture. He has been on both sides of the operating table several times in his life. “I’ve broken maybe ten bones riding bikes, playing basketball, snowboarding – just boys doing dumb stuff, basically,” Ricky says. He broke his clavicle, his arms, finger, and toe, to name just a few. “In addition to my spirit and bank account,” he adds jokingly. “But seriously: Working in a field where it’s all about giving people their quality of life back feels really good.”
Motivated by that mission, Ricky regularly visits about eight hospitals in the region. The administrative hurdles to get new products on the shelves are high in Australia, he says – especially in public hospitals, which is where many trauma cases are treated. When it comes to our “reducing complexity” approach, it’s all about convincing the surgeons what they don’t need: “Other systems come with bells and whistles, so we need to demonstrate why simplicity is better and more cost-efficient.” But getting surgeons to try out our products in the first place is the hard part, Ricky says. “Sometimes a unique plate like the TAMINA TF gets us a foot in the door. Then you go: Look, you can use the same set of instruments for all the other 3.5mm plates! And that makes sense to the OR staff, too – the nurses love to work with just one instrument tray that doesn’t take up the whole OR trolley.”
His first year and a half at Bonebridge have been a steep learning curve, he says –with some set-backs, but also many positive steps in the right direction. “It’s definitely not your average 9-5 job,” he says. “But I’ve built up a business before, and the challenge is what attracted me to it in the first place.” It also isn’t the first time Ricky has worked for a Swiss company: Before joining Bonebridge, he was a Clinical Support Specialist for arthroplasty at Mathys, where he first crossed paths with Roger Baumgartner, now General Manager of Bonebridge Australia/New Zealand. “The Swiss are good people to work for,” he says. “It always felt like everyone went above and beyond.” Ricky was acutely aware of this during the Covid pandemic, which hit Melbourne hard. While other companies were downsizing and people were losing their jobs left and right, Mathys navigated the crisis without any major disruptions.
After the company was acquired by Enovis, however, Ricky’s position was affected by the subsequent restructuring. A few months after leaving Enovis, he got a call from Roger, who told him he had taken up the GM position at Bonebridge and would soon start hiring for the Australian team. “That was how I first heard about Bonebridge, and I really liked what it was about,” Ricky says, emphasizing that he was especially impressed by the line-up of surgeons already involved. He spent the few months that led up his new position traveling around in Japan and also used the time off to educate himself on orthopaedic trauma. “Arthroplasty is really quite simple: You identify the bad bone and replace it,” he says, describing the difference between the two fields. “Orthopaedic trauma surgeons, on the other hand, are more like real-life McGyvers in the operating room.”
While his own injuries originally sparked Ricky’s interest in the healthcare industry, he admits that chance played a big role in shaping his career path. “I have moved up the ranks a little bit, but I really started out as a glorified dishwasher,” he jokes. Ricky grew up in a small southeastern suburb of Melbourne, Victoria, where he attended high school. Once he completed the VCE, the certificate required for university entrance, he took a few courses in software applications and information technology. Because personal responsibilities with family and friends kept him occupied, Ricky didn’t pursue a higher education beyond that. Instead, he started doing “anything and everything”: After working at a supermarket and bottle shop, among other things, he moved into the medical field by taking a position as an instrument technician. “It’s funny because when people hear that title, many of them assume that you’re doing something musical,” he says. “Then you have to explain to them that your job involves scrubbing off blood and bones, which of course sounds much less poetic.”
You can tell from Ricky’s bookshelf that although his interests may be varied, he’s deeply curious and loves learning about all kinds of things. “I’ll read anything,” he says. “Non-fiction, fiction – whether it’s crime or science fiction or fantasy,” he says. “My to-be-read list is ridiculously long, probably in the hundreds.” Another passion of his is snowboarding: At age 24, Ricky even moved to Whistler, Canada – “mostly for the snow,” as he admits. He stayed for two years, though he never managed to land the much-coveted lift-operator job at the ski resort. Instead, he worked as a housekeeper – an experience which he jokes has left him “exceptionally good at cleaning.”
These days, Ricky still snowboards regularly, preferably in New Zealand or Japan. His love of travel will hopefully take him to South America soon, where he hopes to explore Uruguay, Chile, and Argentina. “There’s still so much to see, and I haven’t even discovered all of Australia yet,” he says. “Though, to be fair: a lot of it down here is just open countryside and outback.”