Finding space to breathe
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The work of CEOs and senior leaders isn’t to work harder, it’s to think harder. And given the speed and intensity of our work and home lives, finding space to think, reflect and breathe comes at a premium.
I’ve felt this each time I was a CEO and most acutely when leading a healthcare company during COVID. I was desperate to have alone time sometimes going as far as giving myself a ‘time out’ in front of our young daughters. They thought it was funny but to me, it was much needed relief.
Today, I’m sharing with you an article written by Sasha Radford who detailed how this need gave rise to a project that I’ve been working on in the background. It’s about men, our mental fitness and how we keep contributing to our families while leading in one of the most tumultuous times in history.
I look forward to your thoughts, you can email here.
Thank you Sasha for covering this, I appreciate it.
Campfire Conversations by Sasha Radford
The Male Mosaic | Sep 09, 2026
How laundry has become the secret side door for expanding what it means for men to provide
What do you do when you notice your co-captain, your teammate, your eleven-out-of-ten, ass-kicking wife starts to fall prey to the exhaustion that IS the early days of motherhood, too depleted to even name what she needs?
If you’re Phil Hayes-St Clair, you wedge your six-foot-four frame into a four-foot-six laundry cellar, and get to work.
This has not been dramatised for the sake of art. It happened. Somewhere between the washing machine and folding underwear (as taught by his mother and grandmother), this ritual changed his life, his family’s, and, if Phil has anything to do with it, a growing number of Australian men.
Phil is a husband, father of two daughters, Australian Army veteran, entrepreneur, and twenty-year (and counting) CEO coach who spends his days guiding leaders across special forces, biotech, and aerospace to lead better by living better.
He is also the original Laundry Guy: the man who has washed and folded about seven baskets of laundry for his family each week for well over a decade. Over time, what started as an attempt to be useful to someone he loved evolved into something more powerful than he could have ever imagined. It has not only expanded his idea of what it means to provide for his family, but has also become part of the internal scaffolding that holds him steady when the waters of life are churning.
Which is why he built Laundry Guy. A no-lecture, no-charity side door into mental fitness that challenges the label of provider. This is not wellness content or therapy, just a practical, ritualistic task transformed into positive escapism. It invites, with open arms, all the gruff, foul-mouthed, funny, kind men of Australia to expand how they contribute to their families, taking the pressure off a single focal point.
Provide. Protect. Job done.
This is the script many men have been taught: powerful in its simplicity, yet limiting, especially when life throws curveballs, particularly redundancy and ill health. These experiences challenge men’s sense of certainty, identity and confidence. They become untethered, haunted even, when they realise the agency they felt is an illusion, because:
What happens when men believe their worth comes only from being a financial provider?
It creates a single point of failure with consequences that show up in the statistics. According to the Australian Men’s Health Forum, 73% of male suicides come from working-age men aged 25-64, with male suicide as a whole increasing 25% in the last ten years.
Phil hasn’t abandoned the provider instinct, but by being Laundry Guy, has expanded what it means to contribute meaningfully to his household, reduce his wife’s mental load, and genuinely shift his daughters’ expectations of men.
“It helps us to remember that it’s not always about women doing the chores,” said one.
Her sister added:
“It helps set an expectation about our future boyfriends. I love that dad cares so much about us, and I’m grateful for it, because some people don’t have that relationship with their dads.”
This is the real legacy.
In the almost hour I spent with Phil, I was trying to put my finger on what he reminds me of, and then it hit me. He is a mosaic in action. Intentionally creating his life, one tile at a time. Moving fluidly between the high-achieving executive coach recounting the sleep-deprivation training he went through in the Army, and the piss-taker, the mate, the devoted father, the attentive partner.
Most of the men in Phil’s orbit haven’t yet inherited that range, but we know that a single tile a mosaic does not make.
With Laundry Guy, Phil is carving out a space in the home for the men of Australia that functions like the man shed of old, or the pub, or the bottom of a bottle of scotch, without the negative repercussions. It marries a man’s need for downtime and transforms it into providing for his family in an entirely different, some would say utterly foreign, currency.
For Phil, doing the laundry means leaning into his guilty pleasures without apology: a podcast, a video game, his favourite snacks, and sometimes even a beer, all legitimised by the fact that a load is running and everyone in the house benefits.
It’s care, effort and attention delivered without an audience, not performed, just done in a way that builds a sense of value that goes way beyond a job title.
Laundry Guy, equally importantly, aims to be a community where men connect. Its launchpad, Dirty Work, is a stain-management guide, but I can’t help thinking it will grow into something more. The desire for mastery and the love of tools, toys, and tech run deep in the male DNA. The ability to start, in the comfort zone of small talk - exchanging laundry hacks, sharing with pride some serious stain removal success and trading opinions on the latest laundry tech will be a Trojan horse for the development of real connections. Men who’d never volunteer for anything branded “therapy” end up somewhere close to it anyway, because the door they walked through was the laundry.
Phil also knows men love a laugh, and that irreverence runs right through the brand. His delicates bags come in two colours, each carrying the same instruction:
“Light delicate shit goes in here, dark delicate shit goes in there.”
This, Phil says, is what he would tell a man before his first wash, because since when has becoming more emotionally evolved required you to be boring?
That mutual exclusivity baked into masculinity is what Phil, through Laundry Guy, seeks to challenge.
Why is it so hard to believe that grief can sit beside humour? Ambition next to stillness? Discipline next to care? Why has a single tile had to carry the whole picture for so long?
This is where the project goes well beyond a helpful domestic chore, offering something far more powerful. Agency. The choice to add to his mosaic. Choosing to become Laundry Guy, showing up week after week, one load of washing at a time, is not just a practical ritual but also an act of authorship.
But what holds the picture together is the grout: the unglamorous, load-bearing material between the pieces.
For Phil, the grout is ritual and self-determination. Showing up for something practical, repeatedly, on his own terms, moving him past entry-level household participation — the Saturday sport run, flat white and bacon sarnie in hand, into something closer to meaningful contribution, built from intention rather than obligation. Set that way, no single tile has to carry the whole picture. A bad week, a bad year, a crack under pressure doesn't bring the structure down, because the strength was never held in just one piece. It's in how they worked together.
When I asked Phil what he would want his front-page Sydney Morning Herald headline to read in ten years, he slipped back into corporate mode, where impact is rewarded. He wants the stats: more than half of Australia’s laundry is done by men. But beneath that, what he truly wants is the stories and the knowledge that, because of Laundry Guy, many more men are still breathing.
To follow Phil’s fantastic work, visit laundryguy.com
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