David Hahn: Play It as It Lays

David Hahn squints against a bright afternoon light, following my golf ball as best he can. “You’ll probably want to hit another,” he says. “I think that one’s gone.”

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David Hahn squints against a bright afternoon light, following my golf ball as best he can. “You’ll probably want to hit another,” he says. “I think that one’s gone.”

It’s a chilly but dry spring day and we have just teed off on the seventh hole at the Victoria Golf Club, home course of British Columbia Ferry Services Inc.’s head honcho. The seventh is the club’s signature hole, a Pebble Beach-like -beauty called Mount Baker. The snow-capped peaks of the volcano can be seen in the distance. The seventh begins a golfer’s trip around The Point, a -collection of holes that juts out into the Strait of Juan de Fuca with arguably the most stunning vistas any golf course in Canada has to offer.

The hole runs along the ocean and any ball hit too far left will end up in the water or on the beach, where a golfer can, if they’re lucky, still have a shot, depending on the lie. That is where my ball has ended up – on the beach –amid some washed-up seaweed. I decide to give it a whirl. “Be careful down there,” says my partner, allegedly a 15-handicapper. “That can be a frightening place.” No kidding. In 1936, a local man strangled his estranged wife on this beach before taking his own life. Her body was later discovered amid the driftwood on the beach, near the seventh green, by a caddy searching for lost balls. According to club lore, numerous ghost spotters have since seen a greyish mist in the shape of a female rising out of the water off the seventh. On this afternoon, however, I do not see any lady phantoms, just the sand that I am spraying about as I try, unsuccessfully, to launch my ball onto the fairway. I won’t say what I ended up taking on the hole because, frankly, I forget, and whose business is it anyway? Hahn, however, made par. Something he did with regularity all day, while feeling compelled to say after every good shot: “I don’t normally play this well.” Having played with many CEOs over the years, I’ve discovered this is something they all say. I have a theory as to why. CEOs don’t want shareholders – or members of their board for that matter – reading articles about how wonderful they are at lining up putts. The only line shareholders want the CEO worrying about is the ¬bottom line, and too perfect a golf game might imply a little too much time spent on the green. It’s all about appearance and perception, both of which David Hahn has been keenly aware of since taking over the helm at the ferry corporation in May 2003. In four short years he has become the public face of the now quasi-private company. Any time there has been a major issue involving the corporation like, say, oh I don’t know, the sinking of a ferry, Hahn has been front and centre. The first summer on the job, Hahn ventured down to the Horseshoe Bay terminal on a hot long weekend and handed out bottles of water to passengers waiting in their cars. It was the first indication that things were going to be different at the much-maligned company. Hahn wanted to treat ferry passengers like valued customers whose business he desperately wanted, not like people who effectively had no other option when it came to getting back and forth between the mainland, Vancouver Island and the Gulf Islands. Hahn was born and raised in Buffalo, New York. His father sold auto parts; his mother looked after six children. Hahn had an utterly working-class upbringing except for his education: his parents scrimped and saved enough money to send him to an all-boys high school. “It was hard for them,” Hahn recalls. “But it made all the difference in the world. It established discipline around studying and instilled good work habits. It set the framework for everything that followed.” Once he got to university, Hahn was on his own. He had to pay for everything. He completed an undergraduate degree in education at Buffalo State College, where he met his wife, Karen. Together, the couple then went to California to get MBAs. Hahn’s focus and interest was marketing, and upon graduation he got a job with The Hertz Corp. in New York. At Hertz, Hahn became ¬director of marketing, responsible for Hertz’s ad campaigns. He became chummy with the company’s two most high-profile pitchmen: O.J. Simpson and Arnold Palmer. “I made one of the worst ads ever done at Hertz,” Hahn says genially, while sipping a glass of Chardonnay after our round. “It scored one of the lowest scores ever. We were putting out special rates for Lincoln Continentals, I think, and O.J. and Arnold were arguing at the time. But it was just a lousy ad, plain and simple. I didn’t know any better.” (For the record, he remembers O.J.’s wife being “incredibly beautiful” and Arnold having “really huge hands.”) In 1986, Hahn left Hertz to work with the Ogden Corp., an old-line, multibillion-¬dollar American conglomerate that was into energy production, aviation services and entertainment. Starting out in food services, Hahn was part of the Ogden team that won the contract for GM Place. Hahn was living on Long Island and commuting 90 minutes each way to work. His office was on the 33rd floor of the tower above Madison Square Garden. Eventually, he became chief operating officer of Ogden’s aviation division and took the company into Europe. He helped smash KLM’s ground-handling (baggage, cargo and counter services, and fuel) monopoly in the Netherlands. He started an operation in Macau, which became the largest profit centre in the division. He expanded business into South America and New Zealand. On the morning of September 11, 2001, Hahn had a meeting at the World Trade Center that he was forced to cancel. But he was in his office when the two planes hit the trade centre towers: planes, he would later learn, that were fuelled by his company. It would not be the last crisis Hahn would have to deal with over the next few years. “I talked to my wife at 9 a.m., after the planes hit, and told her I was okay,” remembers Hahn. “I didn’t talk to her again until 3:30 in the afternoon. My children were freaking out because they were watching it on television at school and wondering how their dad was. “From my office I could see everything that was going on in the city. It was mayhem. I was trying to shut down our fuelling operations. I had our operation guys phoning me from Kennedy [John F. Kennedy International Airport] every half hour asking me what I wanted relayed to the field. We instituted emergency plans across the company.” Here, Hahn stops the story. Tears well up in his eyes. It’s hard for him to talk about, even today. “I had to walk eight or nine miles out of town,” he says. “At least it felt that far. And I got on this train to go home and no one said a word. There were no phone calls, no cell phones; there wasn’t a word, just dead silence. It was the strangest experience.” Hahn knew at least eight people who died that day. [pagebreak] A few years later, after Hahn had left Ogden to take his current job with BC Ferries, he was once again in crisis mode. He got a phone call from Italy. It was July 2004 and Hahn was in New York with his wife at the time. His daughter Valerie, then 16, was studying art in Spoleto when she collapsed after a heart attack. “You can imagine what that call was like,” says Hahn, who also has an older son, David, studying law in the U.S. Valerie, it turned out, had a rare congenital heart defect known as Long QT syndrome. It is often a killer. In an unbelievable stroke of luck, the world’s leading expert of the condition was based in Pavia, just outside Milan. “They put Valerie in a military helicopter and flew her to Milan,” remembers Hahn. “After the doctor had a look at her, he said he wanted to put a pacemaker and defibrillator in her to steady her heart, and they needed my permission. I said, ‘Do it.’ “It was a pretty awful time. Lots of tears. Valerie was scared, my wife was extremely upset. But it turned out okay.” Valerie is now studying closer to home, at UVic. She is in excellent health with a promising long-term prognosis. The next crisis Hahn would have to deal with would be the sinking of the Queen of the North. (At the very least, this was his next major crisis. The first week Hahn was on the job, the Queen of Surrey caught fire. Three weeks later, the wharf on Saturna Island burnt down. On June 30, 2005, the Queen of Oak Bay plowed into a marina at the Horseshoe Bay ferry terminal, destroying 22 recreational boats. Miraculously no one was hurt. None of those emergencies, however, would stack up to what is now considered the worst incident in BC Ferries’ history.) Hahn has generally received high marks for his handling of the disaster. He was front and centre in the immediate hours and days after the ferry sank after hitting Gil Island in Wright Sound on March 22, 2006. Hahn was in his Victoria home when he received the first call from Captain Trafford Taylor, an executive VP with BC Ferries. It was about 12:50 a.m. Over the next few days, you couldn’t turn on the news or open a newspaper without seeing Hahn. But there was never any doubt in his mind about who would be answering the inevitable questions the calamity raised. “As the CEO, you’re ultimately responsible,” says Hahn. “It’s non-negotiable in terms of whose responsibility it is. I mean the whole thing. My job was to answer the questions, and if I didn’t have an answer I needed to find one.” A BC Ferries investigation into the accident found that human error was the cause. There is little question that Hahn has brought much-needed energy, drive and direction to the ferry corporation. There are new vessels being built in Germany, a move that generated a fair bit of controversy. Hahn, to his credit, didn’t back down. The German shipbuilder offered the best deal. Period. Hahn believes the ferry corporation has the potential to delve into new areas, such as the large-scale movement of commercial goods. It could also drive more tourism traffic, he thinks, by opening up new routes. At 55, Hahn has many more years at the helm of the operation – if he wants them. “As long as it’s fun and challenging,” he says, “why not keep doing it? It has enormous potential as a company. There are challenges, lots of them, but I think we’ve done a lot of good things so far, a lot of things that should have been done years ago.” And he gets to play a pretty nice golf course any time he wants to as well. “I don’t know what got into me today,” Hahn says as we head outside. “I never hit it that well usually.” Sure, David. Sure.