When illness prematurely ended Craig Hudson’s professional rugby career at 23, it signalled the beginning of his wellness journey.
Quite a few twists and turns later and Mr Hudson recently joined Dunedin-based startup Givenwell as chief customer officer to help scale its impact in workplace wellbeing.
Meeting Givenwell’s founder Jonny Mirkin last year was a pivotal moment; Mr Mirkin’s passion for wellbeing was evident and his own story resonated with Mr Hudson who had battled with mental health issues.
Mr Mirkin landed in hospital badly burnt out while building successful tech business Nomos One, having put all his energy into the business and failing to look after himself.
That kicked off a transformation of his life and ultimately led to launching another startup, the team wellbeing platform Givenwell, on the back of his own experiences.
The combination of Mr Mirkin’s passion, coupled with Mr Hudson’s own background, was aligned and while the product was in its infancy, Mr Hudson could instantly see the potential value creation and impact it could have.
Originally from Tauranga, where he grew up on a kiwifruit orchard, Mr Hudson has done OK for someone who failed School Certificate.
He candidly admitted school was not for him but sport was and he was selected for his first representative team in his last year at secondary school which was his ticket to a professional sporting career.
Picked up by the Crusaders rugby academy, he headed to Christchurch straight after school and went on to have a successful professional rugby career, and travelling the world with the New Zealand Sevens.
But while playing for English club the Worcester Warriors he caught a virus which attacked his heart and ended his career. The impact was “massive”, given it was his whole identity which was affected, he said.
From the lifestyle that professional sport afforded to his wife Bronwyn having to provide for their family, he could not walk to the letter box without it requiring a three-hour sleep.
He was fortunate his doctor in the UK was the chief medical officer for the Olympic committee and gave him a programme of pathway through it.
After 18 months of “slog” to build himself back up, he worked as a part-time swim coach; it was exhausting but good for his mental health, before he landed a job in online sales in a startup business.
He realised that was what he was good at; he was a good orator, connector and salesman, but during that process, he lost himself. “I could be everybody but me,” he said.
As a high-functioning depressant, he felt that he was not the husband or father that he should be. His in-laws covered the couple’s mortgage for several months which allowed him to leave his job.
A new role in family-owned fuel distribution business McFall Fuel was a turning point. Six months in, the company’s founder arranged counselling for Mr Hudson, framing it as business coaching. Those sessions enabled him to see “the wood from the trees” and set him on a path to get better.
He also helped the company drive some “amazing” business success and he caught the bug of productivity gains through technology.
Mr Hudson’s next move was to small business accounting software company Xero, initially as a tele-sales rep, but his career quickly took off.
The Hudson family had moved to the UK in 2014 and he played a key role in expanding the company’s presence in Europe, the Middle East and Africa.
Following a call from Xero founder Rod Drury, he returned to New Zealand in 2017 as managing director for Xero New Zealand and the Pacific Islands, leading a team of about 1500 and being the face of Xero in New Zealand.
His impact extended beyond business, driving national conversations on mental health and wellbeing in the workplace. Under his leadership, Xero introduced wellbeing leave, flexible working practices, and new initiatives to support small business owners and their teams.
He introduced XAP, a free counselling support system that every business that subscribed to Xero could access for themselves, their family and their employees to help with all aspects of life — physical, mental, social and financial — and it had proven “super impactful”.
Mr Hudson acknowledged his gratitude to Mr Drury, saying the tech entrepreneur had changed his life in what had undoubtedly been a “pinch yourself” time, and he took every opportunity that was afforded to him.
Ironically, while he was at Xero, he contacted his old school to see if it would be interested in having him talk to students. The offer was declined.
After Xero, he joined New Zealand Trade and Enterprise as general manager, export customers, where he was “looking after the best of the best of Kiwi exporters”.
Mr Mirkin first came on his radar about October last year and he was impressed with the idea of Givenwell. The original idea of the wellbeing platform was for employers to give their team wellbeing allowances in the form of digital tokens.
Employees then accessed a marketplace, where various offerings — which had been curated and vetted — were available and they could spend their tokens confidentially on whatever they chose. It then morphed into providing wellbeing for anyone that would receive benefit from it.
Mr Hudson saw it as “something pretty special” to help employees “stay at the top of the cliff rather than the bottom” and to be well more often than not, without impacting business performance.
If employees went home at the end of the day better than when they arrived, then that had a positive impact of their families, relationships and capability to volunteer. “If you’re better, you give more which means better economic returns for everyone,” he said.
It was after he left NZTE and was keynote speaker at an event that Givenwell was sponsoring that Mr Mirkin approached him told him he wanted him in the business.
So they talked for a few months around how that might work. With four children — the eldest at university and three still at their Waihi Beach home — Mr Hudson wanted to be present for his kids.
He was now working remotely about 20 school hours, four days a week, to help scale what the Givenwell team had built and get it into as many companies as possible. He was able to leverage his profile, connections and ability to sell and scale.
There was a tangible return on investment when employers invested in wellbeing and it was “the right thing to do to look after your people”. In turn, those people would look after you.
Givenwell meant any employer could buy a practical and impactful wellbeing solution for their team off the shelf “without them having to have the hard conversations”.
Mr Hudson described it as a geniusly simple idea but one that had massive implications and huge benefit for so many not just in New Zealand but potentially internationally.
As for his own wellbeing, Mr Hudson said he was “trying to still figure out this new cadence of who I am without a big job title and logo”.
But that anonymity was also something that he loved. “I don’t crave the limelight, that profile that you get in certain scenarios is great but has a massive down side to it.”
“I’m in a good spot . . . I’m passionate about what we could do here.”
