How a protege of Visy tycoon Richard Pratt travelled the world to became a business kingmaker
When you have learnt how to avoid being shot in South Africa, it stands to reason Dane Hudson believes resilience in business and life only comes from having some metaphorical scar tissue.
Dane Hudson was 22 when he unexpectedly came face to face with one of the nation’s most charismatic businessmen.
In 1984 Hudson had graduated from Sydney University as a chemical engineer and was one of the four graduates hired that year by billionaire paper and packaging magnate Richard Pratt.
“He didn’t know what to do with me. So he made me general manager of a $5m business that was losing $20,000 a month, told me to fix it and that I would be reporting directly to him,” Hudson says.
“So I was reporting to the second richest guy in Australia at the age of 22 and sitting around a table with all these 55-year-old general managers running these big businesses.”
Hudson quickly learned many of the great Pratt maxims, such as learn to love your customers and lead by example. Pratt’s work ethic was legendary and he would be on the factory floor at 5.30am each morning. He expected his managers to follow suit.
“For three years, I’d get up at 5am and drive from the eastern suburbs somewhere out to Liverpool. I would open the factory door at 5.45am and then I’d shut it at 7 o’clock that night,” he says. “We had about 100 people at that site. So I learned that if you are the leader, you have got to be hands on.”
But Hudson also saw the chameleon character of Pratt.
One morning in 1985, the billionaire arrived at the factory at 6am, got out of his limousine, pulled out his cheque book and wrote Hudson a $2000 bonus for doing what he called “an amazing job”.
Three days later Pratt turned up again.
“But this time, he tore my head off! That inconsistency was so striking. As a leader, you’ve got to be consistent. I just walked away that day wondering ‘What have I done wrong?’,” Hudson says.
By the time he left Visy, the business he was running was making $100,000 a month.
It set him up for a career working for multinationals, starting with Booz Allen Hamilton and then Yum Brands – the owner of fast food chains KFC, Pizza Hut and Taco Bell – where he spent 12 years working in Australia, South Africa and North America.
After that and for 10 years he was firstly the Australian and then the Singapore-based regional chief executive of ISS Asia Pacific – one of the world’s largest facility services providers.
Two years ago he began his own leadership consultancy firm called Impactful Leadership, which has since mentored and advised more than 40 founders and CEOs of start-ups and SMEs in South-East Asia, plus CEOs of businesses with revenues of between $US150m and $US3bn.
Some of his biggest customers are venture capital firms that utilise his skills and experience to in turn mentor the CEOs of start-ups they have invested in.
Over more than two decades Hudson worked in 10 countries and moved house 24 times.
He puts down his restlessness to “loving change, being challenged and learning”, but stresses he could not have done it without the support of his wife of 35-and-a-half years, Melinda.
They have three daughters – Sophie, Emily and Paige, who are now between 33 and 28 years old. The elder two work for Deloitte’s digital practice. The eldest was born in Cleveland, Ohio, in the US.
“It was actually easy for me, I could just go in the office and do what I did. But Melinda’s job was to create the community for our kids and for us. I could not have done it without a wonderful partner who was a community builder,” Hudson says
He recalls the school struggles of Paige, who in Dallas was diagnosed as having ADHD and dyslexia.
“Melinda would spend three hours each night doing homework with her. But some of her teachers thought she was pretty smart. All of a sudden they put her on to Ritalin and she went from the bottom of the year to the top over a two-year period,” he says.
“She’s now 28, just passed her surgical primary exams and is off the charts.”
Resilience from adversity
Hudson has always believed that resilience in business and life only comes from having scar tissue.
His advice to leaders taking on a new role is that in every job, the first year is “really, really hard”. The challenge is exaggerated when you move abroad.
Another of his mantras is being your biggest cheerleader, not your biggest critic.
“Often we second guess and are hard on ourselves but you should actually pat yourself on the back occasionally. Say ‘I think I did that quite well’ or ‘I think I’m actually in a good spot. I’m doing a good thing’,” he says.
Hudson has his own scar tissue from some experiences abroad.
In one negotiation with a franchisee, they walked into the room and put a gun on the table.
In another, a franchisee who he was shutting down interrupted the conversation to tell Hudson the names of his children and where they went to school.
But perhaps the most shocking came in South Africa when his wife called one morning in a panic. There had been a shootout at one of the KFC outlets in Durban. Five people had been shot.
“She heard about it on the radio before I knew about it,” he recalls.
“Two security guards were shot. Another poor man was out the front of the KFC and one of the random bullets went through his head and killed him.”
In Johannesburg in 2001, Hudson and his wife also learned how to be shot and live through the experience.
“Most robberies in South Africa are with handguns. A bullet only goes in 7cm. So you’ve got to learn to turn away and put your hand in front of your face,” he says, without flinching.
Yet despite the terrors, he says working for two years in Johannesburg were the favourite of all his CEO roles.
The biggest business challenge of Hudson’s executive career came in 2006 when he gave up his senior role at Yum Brands after four years to return to Australia as CEO of McGuigan Simeon Wines, later known as Australian Vintage.
“I would have stayed at Yum, but we decided we didn’t want to cart our kids around the planet any longer. That is what happens when your kids are in their teens,” he says.
“If you stay overseas, that is where they end up and become settled. We didn’t want to become Americans and we didn’t want our kids to stay over there.
“The hardest thing I’ve ever done was to quit that role and come back to Australia, but it is the best thing I’ve ever done from a family standpoint.”
Once back home Hudson was confronted with the biggest drought and oversupply of product in the local wine industry’s history.
Profits tumbled and the company’s share price plummeted from $3 to 11c.
“That was never going to look good on my resume, ever. I didn’t do the due diligence I should have,” he now laments.
“I’m actually okay with that now but it took me a while to get there. I was better being a cheerleader for myself after that. I was proud of what I achieved, we did a lot of good things in a difficult industry.”
Hudson will be forever grateful for the advice his late father, Bruce, gave him at the start of his career, to study engineering and do an MBA. The latter he completed at Columbia Business School in New York.
Bruce Hudson was second in charge at stockbroker Ord Minnett for 25 years before retiring to a farm at Cootamundra in southern NSW for the last 17 years of his life. He passed away seven years ago after a battle with colon cancer at the age of 81.
“He was diagnosed, then had an operation and supposedly got better. Then he didn’t get better so went quite quickly. It was just very, very sad,” he son says.
“He was a wonderful mentor and gave me great advice.”
Hudson’s mother, Carolyn, turned 84 at the start of December at the Moran aged-care facility where she now lives in Sydney’s eastern suburbs.
“She broke her back so she’s not very mobile. So she’s probably 50-50,” he says.
“But the good news is that she is very happy and content.”
The king and queenmaker
Since starting Impactful Leadership in 2021, Hudson has trained more than 460 C-level and high-potential leaders.
He says he is successful because he knows how to be a CEO and has a toolkit to show for it.
His model centres on three key pillars of leadership: Being disciplined, mastering how to drive change and being a hands-on and practical operator.
He says the methodology includes frameworks, templates and a systematised structure which frees a leader to concentrate on their own personal style and lead with impact.
It is now being taught in the MBA program of the Singapore University of Social Sciences.
One of his key clients is Wavemaker Partners, a Singapore-headquartered Venture Capital firm that, over the past ten years, has invested in more than 160 start-ups South East Asia.
Hudson is now coaching 20 CEOs at any one point in time, 18 of whom usually work for start-up companies owned by venture capital firms.
“My wife calls me the king and queenmaker. I’ve always had a reputation of retaining people and growing leaders. I love doing that,” he says.
Asked what is his key point of difference in the saturated market of executive coaching, he answers with a single word: Accountability.
“I know exactly how to hold people accountable. I go through some 10 pages with leaders and show them exactly what they need to do to be able to hold their team accountable,” he says.
“A huge amount of what I offer is my framework. That’s the point of difference.”
Curiously, Hudson has a variable charging model. He takes either cash, a mixture of cash and equity, and for 20 of his clients he has been paid only in equity.
Of the latter, he says the number of failed investments can be counted on one hand.
He and his wife – who he calls his chief investment officer – have often invested together. Melinda is now 60 and Dane turned 62 at the end of November.
“We’ve always been a partnership. We’ve always respected each other’s decisions and priorities. She could have been a CEO in any business but instead she married me and ran around the world,” he says.
“She’s an immensely capable person and everyone who knows her would acknowledge that. So I trust her judgment and she trusts mine.”
Hudson has always believed that the acid test of any joint venture, whether it be in business or in life, is being able to look in the mirror with comfort.
“I think that’s one of the reasons why my wife and I have worked out. We’ve always been very aligned around our goals,” he says.
“You have got to be able to look at the other person and feel that you are looking in the mirror. That they have the same values and aspirations about where they want to end up.”
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