the founder

Ricky Smit, 35, is the mother of twin boys aged four, and founder and CEO of the Nicholas Rey Foundation Trust.

I thought success lay at the top of the corporate ladder I’d climbed so assiduously, becoming a financial consulting company head. Then in 2001 I fell from my horse in an amateur bush race and the field rode over me, shattering my right leg.

When I could finally hobble back to work two months later, someone else sat at my desk. My leg recovered, but I didn’t. I didn’t fit in any more, I felt expendable, vulnerable, depressed -- let down somehow by the corporate world where I had invested so much of myself.

At 29 I retired to my husband and my horses, and had my children.

Then in 2004, polo-playing friend Nick Rey fell from a horse and was left quadriplegic. It put my own problems in humbling perspective. I wondered how those less fortunate than us survived, and was galvanized into setting up the Nicholas Rey Foundation Trust to assist people with horse-related injuries.

I now know success is finding real meaning and purpose in life – in taking charge of your destiny and doing what you want to do, not what others expect of you, pursuing your passion and helping others

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