Not content with his Primo Smallgoods fortune, Lederer is back for more

At an age when many would contemplate retirement, Paul Lederer came back to the office and created two of the biggest ventures ever seen in Sydney’s hard-working west.

‘My second passion, outside family, is work,’ says Paul Lederer.

So much for retirement. Paul Lederer tried it for four days before going back to work. Since then, he’s helped create two of the biggest ventures ever seen in Sydney’s hard-working west. They involve soccer and cheese.

Billionaire Lederer made his fortune with the Primo Smallgoods family business.

He transformed it into an Australian food giant before it was mostly sold to private equity in a $740 million deal in 2011.

 

This article is from The List - Richest 250, where Lederer and family is ranked 77th with $1.8bn.

It was then all sold to Brazil’s JBS for $1.45 billion in 2014.

It was then, aged 68, that Lederer attempted to retire, only to go back to work in less than a week. He bought a small Sydney-based dairy business from a family friend for $17 million and started making bolt-on acquisitions. It kept growing and growing.

At the same time, he led the consortium that purchased the licence for the A-League soccer club that he now chairs, Western Sydney Wanderers.

He seems to be working harder now than in his early career. “My wife says to me, ‘You are not normal,’” Lederer says with a laugh, mimicking his wife Eva Marie shaking her head. “She said that to me after I just bought a business in Adelaide last week.” (The move surprised even his staff.)

Today, Lederer’s privately held Real Dairy Australia has revenue of $800 million and just clinched a $100 million annual contract to supply supermarket giant Woolworths with a wide range of cheese products.

Paul Lederer is back in the office.

Not content, Lederer has also started a food distribution business and has big plans for Real Dairy’s expansion, including a push into the US from fledgling operations near Los Angeles Airport. “I think we can double revenue within three to four years,” he says with quiet determination. “There is just so much opportunity there to grow.”

Doing that would mean Lederer has built a billion dollar business in the second phase of his career, complementing his Lederer Group’s string of property and financial assets.

Added to that is his beloved Wanderers, for which he has funded a $50 million training and community facility at Blacktown in Sydney’s west. It is, hands down, the best sporting precinct for any club across all codes in Australia.

On a bright summer morning, Lederer is taking The List on a tour of his two western Sydney passions.

First stop is the Wanderers, where training for the men’s team momentarily halts for Lederer to address the squad. He repeats the speech for the women’s team shortly afterwards, then later for a classroom of wide-eyed sports administration students. The billionaire knows many staff members and players by name.

Then there’s a quiet word with fiery men’s coach Marko Rudan, who is in trouble with the league for complaining about refereeing standards. Lederer says he has to calm Rudan down, but admires his determination.

At the 11-hectare Wanderers Football Park, there are nine full-size soccer pitches, a five-a-side precinct with nine enclosed courts, office and administration buildings, men’s and women’s changing rooms, and junior academy training precincts. The club also offers dozens of community programs, trains juniors for free, has Indigenous and migrant programs, and will soon run after-school programs.

Lederer has also built an area for petrol stations, fast food restaurants and medical buildings that will produce rental income for the club, and he wants to build a hotel on the site.

“Football has been a passion of mine since I was four, and once you have that it never leaves you,” explains Lederer, who was born in Hungary and moved to Australia aged 10. “My father would take me by the hand and we would go to matches. It is like a sickness – it never leaves you.

“My second passion, outside family, is work. So you start building things and a little while later, when you get older, you realise you have to put something back. You realise it is important and, personally, I thought, what better way to do that than through the football world?”

Lederer stresses the club is there to win trophies, but he gets equal enjoyment from its place in the community, and the outreach, education and development programs it has built in just 12 years of existence. “In 10 years’ time you won’t even recognise this place, it will be that big and that important. I am never satisfied. It is always about constant improvement. That’s life. The players here push themselves every day, and it is the same in our businesses.”

Reflecting on his business

Our next stop is Real Dairy at Greenacre, 20km south-west of Sydney’s CBD and just streets away from the huge Primo factory Lederer ran for 20 years. Real Dairy is on the former site of the family’s Presto Meats factory, which burnt down in 2007. The huge fire lasted for days, while Lederer and his family watched helplessly from the street.

Lederer started Primo in 1985 with his late uncle Andrew, who couldn’t have children of his own and treated his nephew like a son. Andrew Lederer had run his own butcher’s shop, then began curing meats himself and buying more outlets, expanding the business into first Presto then Primo. He started with 38 staff and ended up with 4000.

Now, the 40,000sq m Real Dairy factory site has 600 people preparing up to 3000 line items of cheese and dairy products. It imports and makes products for customers such as Aldi and Woolworths, as well as restaurant chains, hotels and other retail and commercial customers.

As with the Wanderers, Lederer personally knows many of the Real Dairy staff. The security guard worked at Primo, as did his father. Chief executive Spiro Michas has been with Lederer for 22 years, having started at Primo.

“Whenever my grandchildren come over, the first thing they do is run to the fridge and grab some cheese sticks,” Lederer says. “It is not just seen as a food now – it is a pastime, a snack. You have a nice glass of wine, you grab some cheese. You make a pizza, it needs cheese.”

With the business expanding into the US, Lederer is keen to target Asia for future exports and expansion. He also sees plenty of room for organic growth by acquisition in Australia, hence deals such as the recent purchase in Adelaide to enhance existing operations.

“It’s an exciting time, it really is, when you’re looking at where the market is and where we’re positioned,” says Lederer.

“But I go back to our staff. That’s critical. Because without people, you don’t have a business. We’ve got to keep supporting them and driving the business. The demographic out here in the west [of Sydney] are hardworking. We’ve always been supportive of the west. That is our area.”