She traversed the five continents during her 20s, set up her own interior design business back home, then married and helped build her husband’s family business into an empire.
Now Karen Neuendorf is a women who needs diary entries to find time for things like ‘yoga’ and ‘reading’, but says she’s looking forward to slowing down - one day.
From a young age the Melbourne girl was keen to take on the world, leaving home at 22 to travel, live and work in a staggering 60 countries, predominately South America.
“I didn’t have a return ticket, I left on a ship for a six week journey and really that didn’t stop… I discovered that there was this extraordinary world out there with lots of different people – good, bad and different coloured skins, different religions,” she says.
She returned home three years later to work in public relations but still managed to go abroad for three months each year. One of these places was the USA, where she eventually returned to attend the New York School of Interior Design.
After graduation, Karen began interior design in the hospitality industry, work which brought her to the Sunshine Coast where, through friends, she met a man from Buderim named Keith Neuendorf.
Keith was busy growing the interior design business his parents started in 1959, Neuendorf Interiors, and although they worked in the same industry, Karen said this played little part in their attraction.
“I think it was very much boy meets girl. That was the sheerest of coincidences because I don’t recall talking professionally… It didn’t occur to us that we’d ever collaborate in those early days.”
Indeed it wasn’t until after they were married and Karen had established her own small business that they considered working together.
“I was spending some time in their business helping out anyway and it just seemed a natural thing to do,” she says.
As time went by Karen took on management roles and set up divisions within the company, in between bringing up two daughters who are now 11 and 13 years old.
Yet she also began to diversify by focusing less on administrative duties within the business to become involved in organisations like the Sunshine Coast Business Council, University of the Sunshine Coast and Matthew Flinders College, to name a few.
“I have now a lot more time to do things in the business arena, out into the community, in a philanthropic capacity.”
Karen has also presided over the Sunshine Coast Business Women’s Network for five years, a group she says particularly helps women balance their life, a problem she knows well.
“My diary is very much the mechanism in which I manage my life, the relationship with my husband and my children, plus all the other people who touch my life… but I make sure the health is there, the wealth creation is there, the community is there and the family is there.”
