Therese Rein's perfect placement

THERESE Rein's global welfare-to-work empire keeps going from strength to strength. She is now one of Australia's richest people - and self-made.

Therese Rein

THERESE Rein is running late.The chief executive of Brisbane-based Ingeus, one of the world's largest welfare-to-work placement companies, has just arrived in Adelaide after a nightmare trip from Seoul, where she visited her South Korean operations.

Scheduled to speak at a University of Adelaide public forum, she eventually hobbles in, sporting a green orthopedic boot, and takes her seat. "It is wonderful to be here finally after [falling on] black ice in the mountains of Korea where I went hiking, hospital visits, delayed planes through Seoul last night, lost baggage, a missed connection in Brisbane this morning and an unscheduled flight through Melbourne," she says, flashing her 100-watt smile.

The Adelaide-born Rein had taken her South Korean staff on amotivation exercise, a hike in the mountains during a wintry week in late January. "I slipped on some black ice," she explains later. "My team really rallied around and helped me down the mountain to a little hut and then I went to a fantastic emergency department in outer Seoul. They did an X-ray and a doctor gave me a splint. It wasn't how I wanted to spend a Saturday."

Rein established Ingeus in 1989, long before her husband Kevin Rudd entered the federal parliament. It flies largely below the public radar in Australia, but the company employs more than 2000 people in more than 150 offices in eight countries and turns over about $100 million a year.

There are 400,000 people registered with Ingeus offices around the world - looking for a job after years of living on the streets or coping with redundancy. In Australia, her employment counselling business includes advising fly-in, fly-out mine workers A self-described "social entrepreneur", Rein is worth $210 million, according to the latest BRW list of Australia's 200 wealthiest people, and she is one of the few self-made people on the list. Since marrying Rudd, whom she met when they were both students at the Australian National University, in 1981, Rein has also raised three children, Jessica, Nicholas and Marcus, while her high-profile husband has pursued his diplomatic and political career.

After selling off her original Australian business in 2007, after Rudd had become leader of the federal opposition, Rein accelerated her overseas expansion. Ingeus established offices in Seoul in 2009 - it now counsels ex-employees of the giant South Korean conglomerate Samsung the same year the business won contracts to help people on long-term health benefits in Switzerland and new migrants and refugees in Sweden.

At the university forum, Rein's co-panellist is US psychology professor Martin Seligman, famous for his work on "learned optimism", and the subject is how to motivate and generate resilience in people.

Rein has been a big fan of Seligman's work since writing a thesis on his idea of "learned helplessness" when she studied psychology. Rein has a sharp mind and outgoing personality. But as the partner of a prime minister who was turfed out of The Lodge by his own party in 2010 and who remains a high-profile politician in a volatile election year, she is cautious about what she says in public, particularly when in front of the media. Still, she loves telling stories to inspire people, and it has the added advantage of keeping her on politically safe ground.

"There are two women sitting in the reception area of an Ingeus office in London," Rein tells the university forum. "One is wearing dirty clothes. She doesn't smell very nice. Her head and her shoulders are bent and she is constantly rubbing her fingers together. She's at least in her 50s, her hair is messy and she's just had an accident and wet herself. She has been sleeping on the streets of London for three years.

"The other woman is an accomplished secretary and administrative assistant. She can word-process at 70 words a minute. She can also do shorthand and bookkeeping. She has 30 years' experience. She has three grown children, she loves to knit and sing and is passionate about preventing cruelty to animals. Our task is to help them into decent and lasting jobs."

She then reveals the two women are one and the same. Ingeus staff help the woman with a rental deposit; they find her a volunteer position with the RSPCA, which eventually turns into a role as an administrative assistant. "I am fascinated by the idea of helping people live their best lives. I love the fact that we can give them hope." Rein says she and her staff celebrate whenever a client gets a job. "In a lot of our offices, we have a ship's bell and every time someone gets a job, we ring the bell."

As soon as the university forum is finished, Rein has to head back to Queensland to see Jessica and granddaughter Josephine. "She's standing," says Rein, calling up a photo of Josephine on her iPad. "She's a full-on baby. She's gorgeous."

Two weeks earlier, in her Brisbane office, Rein is immaculately dressed in a white suit complementing her slightly unruly dark curly hair. She says she never intended to start her own business. After completing her degree, she travelled overseas with Rudd, who worked as a diplomat in the Australian embassy in Stockholm and then in Beijing. The Rudds returned, first to Canberra and then to Brisbane, where Rein worked part time as a rehabilitation counsellor.

In 1989, the then 30-year-old mother of two resigned from her job over a difference of opinion about the way the business was being run. She talked to Jane Edwards, a physiotherapist and former Catholic nun who had a practice in the same building. "She asked me if I had ever thought of starting my own company," Rein recalls. "She said: 'Southeast Queensland needs a high-quality, ethical, rehabilitation provider and I think you could do that. And if you were prepared to do it, I would be prepared to invest in it.'" A stunned Rein returned to her office and took out some paper.

"I landscaped it," she says, taking paper and a blue pen and redrawing the diagram she did more than two decades ago. "I went: OK, if you have a psychologist and an occupational therapist with access to a physiotherapist, what are the services that each of them can provide and what services can they provide together? Who would benefit from those services and who would pay for them?"

Rein scribbles furiously, recreating the conceptual map (or "meme", as she calls it), with three people in the middle and lots of squiggly lines stretching out to thought bubbles. The most likely client, she decided, would be the Workers' Compensation Board of Queensland, but she could envisage other clients down the track.

Then Rein picks up another piece of paper, just as she did in 1989, and engages the other side of her formidable brain. She redraws the lines of expected income and expenses down the left side of the page, with columns representing each month across the page. The drawing is very different from the first - this one is clear and logical. On this page, Rein calculates how much income she could get from providing her services and her potential expenses for the first few months.

She went home to Rudd, who was then a senior adviser to Queensland premier Wayne Goss, and told him that she had quit her job and was going into business with another woman. Oh, and she would need to borrow $10,000 against the family home to get it started. "I think you would be good at it," said a shocked Rudd.

And so the company originally known as Work Directions, renamed Ingeus in 2002, was founded. Its initial business was helping injured people to return to work, a scenario familiar to Rein. Her father, John, was a Royal Australian Air Force navigator whose spine was badly injured when his plane crashed in India during World War II. He rejected the medical advice that he might have only five years to live and was determined to continue his passion for planes by studying for a degree in aeronautical engineering at the University of Sydney.

He acquired a modified car and offered free lifts to other students for helping him up and down the stairs to lecture theatres. At his graduation ceremony in Sydney's Town Hall, his fellow students gave him a standing ovation. "He wanted to work and have his own money, to have a reason to get out of bed every morning," Rein says. "He wanted to learn and to be challenged and to be with other people."

Married to Elizabeth, who had been head of physiotherapy at the Concord Repatriation Hospital in Sydney, John received one rejection after another from employers until the chief engineer at the Weapons Research Establishment in Adelaide offered him a work-experience position. Instead of a few mornings, Rein worked the whole week. "They told him: 'John, you've got the job. All the other aeronautical engineers are also sitting down,'" Rein recalls.

John Rein worked in the job until his retirement, aged 65. Along the way he played wheelchair basketball, tennis and swam. He represented Australia as an archer and carried the flag at the Stoke Mandeville Games (predecessor of the Paralympics) in Britain in 1956.

Her father's success came, she explains, by focusing not on what he couldn't do, but on what he could, by setting a goal and breaking the challenge down into small components and working through them. Rein has told this tale often around the world to show what can be done with determination, a positive attitude and some step-by-step planning.

In 1992, the success of Work Directions attracted the attention of the Commonwealth Employment Service. This was at the height of an unemployment crisis and the CES was seeking ways to help the longterm unemployed. Rein advised them at a time when Paul Keating's Labor government was outsourcing CES business to private contractors.

By 2000, Rein began to wonder if her methods could work in other countries. "I went to Britain to see what was new and met all sorts of people and asked them a lot of questions. At the end of every meeting, they said: 'When are you going to come here?'" After an exhaustive accreditation process, the company began to bid for welfare-to-work contracts with the British government. It won two of the nine major contracts and began operations in 2002. It also expanded into France and Germany.

Back home, the business had become the country's third-largest welfare-to-work service provider. But in December 2006 Rudd was elected the 19th leader of the federal Labor Party.

Suddenly, Rein, who prides herself on her ethics, was worried about a potential conflict of interest, given her business was based on winning federal government contracts. Out came the sheets of white paper again as she studied her options. "There were about 25 alternatives, but the question for me was integrity. [Selling] was the right thing to do."

Rein announced the sale in May and it was completed in December, the month Rudd was elected prime minister. Ingeus filings with the Australian Securities & Investments Commission stated a net gain on the sale of more than $12 million. But there was clearly no joy. When asked about it, Rein turns to look out the window, her upbeat persona gone. "It was painful for people ... " But keeping the business would have been "just too hard".

She refuses to dwell on what could have been, particularly given Rudd's abbreviated stint in the top job. She continued her offshore expansions and Ingeus won more contracts. In 2011, she sold half of the British operation to accounting giant Deloitte.

One source says Rein's mother, who lives around the corner in Brisbane, has been a major influence, a pillar of support for her daughter as she developed the business. Rein calls her mother almost every night, ostensibly to check on her, but the conversations have proved a regular source of reinforcement.

Given Rein's determination and organisational skills, it's easy to see why Rudd might have unusually high expectations of people working with him, expectations some would find difficult to meet. How has she done it? "There is not one person doing all of this. There are thousands of people around the world who are part of this journey. I have a wonderful team of friends and colleagues who work together. I get a lot of energy from my work and I love what I do."

And what about Rudd's role in his wife's business success? Rein is instantly on guard. "What has been helpful is that the support and encouragement works two ways."

One of Rein's skills has been to tap astute and well-connected people to help expand the business. Wayne Goss was on her board for a time, as was Rod Sims, who left when he became chairman of the Australian Competition & Consumer Commission in 2011. Mike Codd, a former secretary of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, was the chairman from 2007 until 2009. When he decided to step down, Rein approached Sydney businessman David Gonski, who is close to some of the nation's wealthiest business people.

Gonski became fascinated with her business model. "I thought: This woman is really going places. She has a different way of looking at things. She is someone who has [created] a new and developing sector in which you can make money in businesses where you are doing good."

Far from benefiting from her political connections, Rein's Australian business, Gonski points out, was in fact hindered by her marriage to a prime minister, although the sale may have had a positive outcome by forcing her to expand overseas.

In 2011, Rein re-entered the Australian market, buying employment counselling service Assure Programs, which focuses on the private sector, including some of the large mining companies. And it is here that she is trying to put Mark Seligman's ideas about psychological resilience into practice.

But she's wary about being too specific on her plans. With the nation already in election mode and the public spotlight firmly focused on her husband, Therese Rein, award-winning businesswoman, mother, grandmother and political wife, rushes off to catch another plane.

- Additional reporting by Mark Schliebs.

THERESE REIN
1958: Born in Adelaide
1981: Marries Kevin Rudd; graduates from Australian National University with Bachelor of Arts (honours in psychology); moves to Sweden and later China
1986: Rudds return to Canberra; Rein works part time as rehabilitation counsellor
1988: Rudds move to Brisbane; Rein works as rehabilitation counsellor
1989: Founds Work Directions with Jane Edwards, providing rehabilitation services
1992: Commonwealth Employment Service approaches Work Directions to expand into welfare-to-work services
1993: Work Directions wins its first federal government contract for welfare-to-work services
1998: Rudd enters federal parliament as the Labor member for Griffith
2002: Rein expands into Britain; Work Directions group is rebranded as Ingeus
2005: Ingeus expands into France
2006: Edwards dies and Rein buys her share of the business; Ingeus expands into Germany; Mike Codd, former secretary of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, appointed chairman; in December, Rudd defeats Kim Beazley to become leader of the opposition
2007: In May, Rein announces sale of Australian operations including Work Directions Australia, Clements Recruitment and Clements Industrial; in December, Rudd is elected prime minister
2009: Rein expands into South Korea in outplacement services; wins contract to assist people on long-term health benefits in Switzerland; expands into Sweden with operations to assist newly arrived migrants and refugees; David Gonski becomes chairman of Ingeus
2010: In June, Julia Gillard ousts Rudd as leader; Rudd becomes foreign minister
2011: In March, Rein sells 50 per cent stake in British operations to Deloitte UK; in April, Ingeus announced as preferred contract provider for seven locations across Britain; in June, Rod Sims resigns as Ingeus director before taking up role of Australian Competition & Consumer Commission chairman; Ingeus UK expands into Saudi Arabia and Poland; in October, Ingeus re-enters the Australian market, buying employment counselling service Assure Programs
2012: In February, Rudd leaves Cabinet after an unsuccessful challenge to Gillard; in October, Rein is named Telstra Business Woman of the Year for Queensland