Keeping the Balance Mat dream (& me) alive

This long-form story is intended to dispel any confusion about the respective roles of Balance Metrix and Balance Mat Pty Ltd personnel.

In light of an announcement on LinkedIn by my fellow board member George Tulloch in April 2024, “After a fulfilling journey as CEO of Balance Mat, I’m thrilled that Ian Bergman is ready to retake the helm …” I feel it’s helpful to provide some background.

The Balance Mat board is composed of myself as co-founder and Managing Director, Sylvia Tulloch as co-founder and Chairperson, and Sylvia’s son George as Director.

The company Balance Mat Pty Ltd owns the intellectual property and also manufactures and further develops the patented, TGA-approved Balance Mat technology.

I am the named inventor on the patent and on 17 October 2022 my then new business Balance Metrix became the first licensed distributor of Balance Mat products.

This followed Sylvia and George Tulloch taking control of Balance Mat Pty Ltd marketing and George being named as CEO during my treatment and recovery from some severe health issues.

Throughout my illnesses I continued to undertake my Managing Director responsibilities, including ongoing research and development of Balance Mat systems, aided by two team members Abishek Shrestha and Binod Shrestha, while my partner Margaret Metz ran my Balance Metrix distributor business.

The Balance Mat Pty Ltd board has always envisioned having a number of distributors for Balance Mat products, and Balance Metrix is the first.

Health issues posed a corporate risk

It is perhaps unsurprising that Sylvia would want to protect her significant investment in Balance Mat Pty Ltd given that my health issues were so severe. They included two years of chemotherapy for non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma from March 2020. At that time the small town of Bellingen was home and I was in the habit of commuting to Canberra for work. However, the cancer treatment meant that I was stuck in Canberra for most of those two years.

The treatment successfully wiped out the cancer and I am in remission now, but it also wiped out my immune system, making me one of those “immuno-compromised” near statistics when the Covid-19 pandemic struck.

I landed in the Canberra Hospital suffering from Covid-19 and a shower of pulmonary embolisms. My hospitalisation lasted for just over a month and included four nights in intensive care. I survived thanks to up-to-the-minute treatment – intra-venous antiviral drugs and a five-day transfusion of immunoglobulin – an experimental treatment at the time.

Once out of hospital I soldiered on for several months, going to the office at Watson on the outskirts of Canberra each day, leaning on a wheelie walker for a time and being helped up the four steps at the front of the building by my two team members Abishek Shrestha and Binod Shrestha.

George and Sylvia stepped in

It was during my slow recovery in Canberra that Sylvia injected George into the company. I continued doing what I had always done – developing the Balance Mat technology.

At last, one day I was ready to travel back home to Bellingen. Once again, I commuted between Bellingen and Canberra for several months but once again illness struck, this time in the form of a massive heart attack. I was rushed by ambulance from Bellingen Hospital to Coffs Harbour Hospital, where I waited for a bed in Sydney for several days before being flown down to Prince of Wales Hospital for a triple-bypass operation.

Being a glass-half-full person, as the photograph accompanying this blog post well demonstrates, I was excited to be going in a plane – it was like having my own private jet (the aircraft on the way back was a jet!). After the open heart surgery I woke from the anaesthetic to watch my mother’s funeral in Melbourne, beamed to my bedside via a laptop. Audrey Bergman passed away on the same weekend I had the heart attack. (Spooky!)

Soon afterwards, before being completely healed from that surgery (my heart specialist said it was a “wonderful” result though), the Coffs Harbour Hospital doctors decided to take the risk of performing urgent abdominal surgery. Once again, this operation was completely successful. I’m not only a glass-half-full person. I’m also very lucky too!

Fast forward six months and Margaret and I moved from Bellingen to the beachside town of Port Macquarie. We were just sitting down to Christmas dinner when I was taken ill again, this time with vomiting and severe trouble breathing (the eventual diagnosis was Covid pneumonitis). The Covid isolation room I occupied for nine days was like a hotel room, where I looked out over gum trees and watched a lot of TV.

Like all the other emergency departments I’ve been to and the hospitals I’ve stayed in over the past two years (Canberra, Bellingen, Coffs Harbour and Prince of Wales), Port Macquarie Hospital provided the best care anybody could wish for and once again I survived to tell the tale. It was quite miraculous! The doctors, registrars, specialists, nursing staff and ambulance officers were all exceptional. It really drove home how lucky we are in Australia to have such an excellent health system.

It was in Port Macquarie Hospital that a lung and cancer specialist recognised I should have had regular immunoglobulin top-ups. He gave me some more antiviral drugs and another transfusion of immunoglobulin, and he organised for the local haematology team to start me on regular immunoglobulin therapy, which is about to start in June 2024.

So while George has had a “fulfilling journey” over the past couple of years, my recovery has been a long road to hobble along, with Covid affecting my thigh muscles – hence the wheelie walker. Not to mention that I recovered from a life-threatening blood cancer and then nearly succumbed to Covid-19 twice!

Importance of the team and supporters

Just like they have for the past two years, Abishek and Binod are doing a sterling job managing Balance Mat software systems, supporting the researchers and clients who are using Balance Mat systems, and performing ongoing software development. They’ve even taken some photos of themselves on the BESS Balance Mat and the Neurometric Balance Mat for the balancemat.com website – which I have now retaken control of, thank goodness. It was touch and go there for a while.

As the Netflix co-founder Marc Randolph recently said, there are three important factors for the success of any startup (and he stressed that the third one may surprise you). They’re “The Team; the Team,” and wait for it – drum roll – “the Team.”

I’m forever grateful to Balance Mat Pty Ltd team members Abishek Shrestha, Binod Shrestha, electronics engineer Dean Vey and technical contractor Lech Starczewski as well as my good mates Mark Simpson, Geoff Buchan, Dave Bowman and Ben Hall and my long-time buddy and business associate Roger Hausmann for helping me personally during a difficult time, and of course my partner and Balance Metrix business manager Margaret Metz and her digital marketing team of Susie Dove and Louise Scott. Over the past eight years you have all played your part in keeping the Balance Mat dream (and me) alive.

Moving forward

Thank you for showing interest in the Balance Mat story. If you need to contact me I would love to talk Balance Mat with you. I’m available on 0457 123 852.

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