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Jon Dudzinski: Go big or go home Name: Jon Dudzinski Age: 27 Lives: Pickett Occupation: Portfolio manager and chartered financial analyst at Carl M. Hennig, Inc. in Oshkosh. Education: UW-Oshkosh, bachelor’s degree in accounting and finance. What’s on his playlist? “Uptown Funk.” A glimpse of his overachiever-ness: A 45-minute conversation with Dudzinski quickly reveals that he does nothing in a small way. For example, the beekeeping he and his dad started with a few hives. Just a casual father-son hobby? Try 108 hives with plans to expand to 400, a yearly output of 7,500 pounds of honey and talk of exporting their bees to the West Coast. Or his involvement with giving bone marrow. He doesn’t just donate bone marrow – three years ago he started the UWOshkosh charter of Be the Match Foundation, which matches potential bone-marrow donors with leukemia patients through a national database. The young chapter has already had almost 1,000 people sign on to donate bone marrow when matches are found. Donating bone marrow has become faster and less painful than it used to be, and recovery time is quicker, thanks to medical progress. Dudzinski said he’s fortunate to have good genes and feels “morally compelled” to help others because of it. In fact, he even tried to donate a kidney. “Be the Match gives donors the ability to literally save a person’s life – not just temporarily and/or marginally improve their life – with ridiculously little cost on the donor’s part,” Dudzinski said. Dudzinski belongs to the board of the UW-Oshkosh Foundation and the Board of the Alta Resources Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation. In 2014, the Oshkosh Chamber of Commerce named him the Oshkosh Young Professional of the Year. The same year, the academic publication Journal of Investing published an article he wrote on his co-authored research on Warren Buffett’s Cigar Butt equity valuation technique, and he became an article reviewer for Institutional Investor Journals. He also mentored university students in the CFA Institute Research Challenge. In addition to managing portfolios at Carl M. Hennig, Inc., Dudzinski founded his own investment company, Lotnix. Even his leisure time isn’t small – no couch potatoing here. He sails, ballroom dances, exercises, runs, backpacks, kayaks and camps, is involved with Rotary International and sometimes leads student tours for Smithsonian Student Travel, which he’s been doing on and off since college. Oh yes, he’s a certified tour coordinator and event planner, too. “I go crazy when I’m not doing stuff,” he said. “My mind is very active and I can become very anxious if I don’t constantly give myself something to do.” This year, UW-Oshkosh gave him its Honors Alumni of the

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Year Award. Will Morrison, accounting and finance lecturer at UW-Oshkosh, said Dudzinski was the youngest person in recent history to pass all three levels of the Chartered Financial Analyst exam, which has a nationwide pass rate of just 3 percent. “It’s an extremely difficult exam. Even professors don’t always pass it the first time, but he went through it in record time,” Morrison said. Morrison, who is also UW-Oshkosh’s Be the Match program advisor, was impressed by Dudzinski’s energy and ability to get hundreds of potential bone-marrow donors signed up in a single day, including the college football team. “In addition to working hard, he works smart,” Morrison said. “He’s very intelligent and very motivated in what he does. He uses that strategy part of his brain, he thinks things through, and figures out the best way to get things done.” So how does Dudzinski do all that he does? He says his secret ingredient is passion for what he does. “Because if you don’t absolutely love what you do, if you’re not enjoying it, you’re not going to be willing to put in the countless hours and you’re going to give up,” he said. And another tip: Dudzinski delegates or hires out some of the tasks he doesn’t enjoy so much, such as lawn mowing, so he can devote his energy to things he truly loves. Like driving his truck and jamming out to Mark Ronson’s “Uptown Funk.” n Lee Reinsch of Green Bay worked 18 years at daily newspapers before launching her freelance business, edgewise, in 2007.

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