Suseno learns from old masters

THERE is a framed note hanging in Tri Suseno’s CBD office; it’s penned by legendary investor Warren Buffett and reads, ‘There’s no money like old money’.

It’s a cryptic message that seems at odds with the grit, ambition and entrepreneurship Mr Suseno has harnessed to build his fledgling conglomerate, the Akamai Management Group of Companies.

But its true meaning quickly becomes evident once Mr Suseno charts his career course and the powerful influence a handful of business luminaries have had on the pivotal decisions he has made.

Born in Indonesia, Mr Suseno travelled to Perth at just 14 to attend boarding school. Despite his parents’ determination to secure him a top-class education, there were no vast family reserves to fund his initial foray into business.

He battled to secure bank funding for the acquisition of his first business, Australian Blowmoulding Corporation and poured everything he had into the operation, living hand to mouth to survive those early years.

The first monthly dividend Mr Suseno drew from the business was a princely $800, barely enough to cover his own rent bill.

However Mr Suseno and his business partner, Greg Ditton, quickly saw results from their systematic restructure of the manufacturing operation, which has gone from barely breaking even to returning a monthly dividend of $20,000.

Mr Buffett’s words of wisdom reveal more about Mr Suseno’s appetite for business intelligence and his determination to learn from old masters such as Buffett, former GE chairman and chief Jack Welch, and Visy’s late chair Richard Pratt.

Mr Suseno is a keen reader and when his nose isn’t buried in business literature he maintains a keen interest in science and psychology, particularly existentialism.

Science and more specifically the pursuit of proof has underpinned Mr Suseno’s career and it’s a methodology he is unerringly devoted to.

“I love science, the way I think now is still scientific. I love the way you have to open your mind to different beliefs, you can’t just get locked into dogma,” Mr Suseno said.

“Scientific thinking is what I wanted to do when I finished high school and that brought me to study commerce and engineering as a double degree.”

His success at university drew Mr Suseno in the direction of an academic career but life had other plans. 

At the time, his PhD professor was commercialising his nanotechnology with guidance from a young corporate adviser called Mark Barnaba.

Impressed by the professor’s stories of his top student, Mr Barnaba made contact with Mr Suseno and offered him a job as an analyst.

Plans for further study were shelved and Mr Suseno went to work for Poynton and Partners, where he quickly rose to number one analyst and then number one associate.

During this time, Mr Suseno was applying for scholarships to the US to continue his studies and in 2001 he won the Fulbright Scholarship to study in the US.

But a chance meeting with packaging tsar Richard Pratt shifted his focus again.

Mr Pratt was in the audience for Mr Suseno’s acceptance speech of the Fulbright Scholarship and connected with his story about growing up a migrant in Australia.

“Afterwards Richard Pratt came over and he said, ‘That was a great speech, I was a migrant like you from Poland in the Nazi era … let me tell you something young man, you don’t need a Harvard MBA to be a billionaire’,” Mr Suseno said.

“I got this sinking feeling that maybe I was talking to one [billionaire] and then he said, ‘My name is Richard Pratt this is my number, you work for me’ and then he left the room.”

Mr Suseno worked for the Pratt family for almost four years, during which time he met GE’s Jack Welch and had the ‘life-changing’ experience of reading Warren Buffett’s biography.

“If you’re a disciple you have to see the messiah so I bought one share in Bershire Hathaway and I saw him [Buffett] in 2003 in Omaha and he gave me the note,” Mr Suseno said.

Mr Buffett’s message was a warning not to get caught up in the excitement of the dot.com boom and rather focus his energies on innovating older-style businesses.

It’s a lesson Mr Suseno took to heart. The three businesses that make up Akamai are all niche manufacturing operations; and while he foresees expansion into other areas as diverse as insurance and financial services, Mr Suseno’s scientific eye will ensure the focus never strays far from the financial data.

He dreams of building the business into a mini-Wesfarmers and believes the contemporary conglomerate is a potentially powerful model.

“One of the advantages of a diversified model is you don’t have to be beholden to one industry,” Mr Suseno said.

“If I am a one-industry business then I have to buy a competitor in that industry and that move is predictable so you can end up buying at a premium.”

But there’s no road map for this expansion. Akamai will invest in industries it likes and understands and work hard to ensure ego doesn’t get in the way of sound decision making.

“One thing we try to steer away from is being arrogant; be humble, look at the data because the data is the reality, if it comes back really badly you have to accept that and move on or make changes,” Mr Suseno said.