Former fashion executive and renowned sustainability entrepreneur, David Ward, shares his experiences in the fashion apparel industry and working in Asia. And in an interesting twist, he talks about the elephant in the room – ageism – and one way to tackle it successfully.

Ward’s first start-up, NooTrees, was a pioneering bamboo-only toilet tissue roll that addressed the issue of virgin wood pulp use. After it was sold to Lam Soon (based in Singapore), Ward set about to develop Bambooloo, extending the bamboo proposition with recycled paper packaging – in essence, a fully sustainable consumer product. While still owning the brand, Ward decided to go back into the corporate world and has been vocal about the scourge of ageism, arguing for more support for greypreneurs as a result.

David, you’ve been very experienced in business and your track record speaks for itself. What’s been the highlight of your career so far?

I’ve always been in roles where I’ve been able to come in and make some kind of difference. A lot of times I was either moving into greenfield roles or developing markets for brands and that’s always quite gratifying to see that grow over time. 

The other is when I was brought in to resolve issues that companies are facing. It’s never an easy role for those who bring you in. I just took that as being quite an education. Ultimately that led me into creating startups. I’ve been quite fortunate to have created two runs in the sustainable home care market. NooTrees is 12 years old, Bambooloo is now just over five and a half years old. Hopefully they’ll continue for years to come.

           

NooTrees was the first of its type in South-East Asia. When I was talking to people, it seemed nobody cared. We weren’t getting inundated on our social media showing turtles with straws in their noses or anything else. It was way before people understood that you could make paper from bamboo. Recently, we reached a million rolls sold. So you multiply that by four, if you like, and that’s four million people that came into contact with our product.

 

In your role and experiences with leadership stints, what’s the main difference between how leaders behave in the West and in Asia?

The majority of leadership in the West is driven by empowerment and building your team to operate. I’m not going to say ‘independently of you as a leader’, but effectively your role is to train them so that you are in a sense redundant and they can survive without you. They can make decisions. But if there are problems, they don’t come to the table without solutions, they come armed and ready.

In Asia it’s very much led from the top. It’s the company culture and it’s ‘we’re all in this together’. Absolutely nothing wrong with that but it tends to be about ‘steering the ship’. A lot of initiative is lost or just not there. People will not move until somebody above them takes the responsibility. I think that it seemingly works well for a lot of people. But if you’ve spent your life working at empowering people, it’s a massive culture shock. It’s very difficult to settle it in your own heart because the team around you are not giving their all because they’re not allowed to do so anyway.

 

So what advice would you give a mid-level manager, who’s just starting out in Asia, trying to lead a team?

Not everybody’s driven as you are and you must accept this. Lots of people go to work everyday to do a great job and just want to go home. Nothing wrong with that, their aspirations of life are different. Some might say more balanced or more realistic. There’s lots of pros and cons for both but that’s probably the first big challenge here you’ll come up against. Not everybody wants to break their back like you might want to, even though it’s not your company. It’s very hard to stand out as an individual. You can be wildly successful but you have to have the mental fortitude to be able to live with that. 

 

Let’s talk about where you are now. You’ve founded two companies and then announced that you were leaving recently. Can you share why?

It’s quite sad. Our business is growing but working capital is very tight. That’s a consequence I took, which is the decision to step away. It’s been ten to eleven years with me. In that space, it has also been very difficult during COVID. I felt that there were other needs that I needed to start but can’t get enough of it done. I needed some space between myself and that programme. You know, it’s very rewarding to create something and then see it featured in people’s lives. It’s very gratifying but ultimately, I had to do the right thing.

 

So you’ve gone back into the workforce with all your wealth of experience and expertise. What’s your axe to grind at the moment?

Oh, there’s only one big axe to grind when you reach my age and that is, basically, no one thinks that you are capable of doing a decent job of anything, anymore. 

Is that a recruiter’s problem or a hiring manager’s? 

Recruiter or HR, it doesn’t matter. Calling it HR really is a misdirection of the term because it’s absolutely not using the resources of the workforce. It is pandering to an ideology or a box-ticking approach to basically hiring what we had before. That didn’t work. They want somebody just like the person who left. So why are you asking to look for the same thing again? You know the Internet and LinkedIn have led to roles being broadcast over a much wider number of people. I think for recruiters, as it used to be, they always think, oh we can just go and look for ourselves. But if you end up not looking properly, you’re going to miss an awful lot of talent. 

In many parts of the world, I anticipated that people reaching 45 to 48 years old suddenly find that they are not in control of their career anymore. They’re approaching the age where people will actually suggest that they’re senior because they’re going to be 50 years old.  “Oh, we can’t hire him. He’s gonna be 50 soon.” By today’s data, only 26% of the people who are 50 will be in full time employment by the time they’re 65. A scary 74% of that workforce will not have a full time job. Think about that.

And this is a pursuit of a falsehood – that the older generation is not capable or not technologically knowledgeable enough. It did become a big hill that people did struggle with at one stage. But generative AI is changing the way that we can access information. It doesn’t require us to have 25 or 30 years of Excel or PowerPoint experience to do that. 

So do you think AI is having an effect of making people redundant earlier or is it just a coincidence?

I don’t think it’s going to affect people at that level, yet it may affect more junior roles. So whether it’s content writing coding of this nature, which can be easily done by generative AI on car driving. People like to drive their cars and I’m not even sure I’d ever want to get in the car I wasn’t driving. I would find it hellishly boring. At the same time, it’s impairing younger as well as older people because it’s blocking some opportunities that they might have considered. I should know SEO work or coding for instance. If you’re in an e-commerce world, you can just do it better and faster, as simple as that. In accessing that kind of information it was more difficult for older people because they didn’t grow up with keyboards in their hands. So they were probably 35 years old before they ever touched the keyboard.

Today, I can already do it with my iPhone. I can do the audio-to-text by just speaking to my phone and it will put the text into ChatGPT and I can get an answer without typing anything. I think we’re probably 18 months away from having that kind of interface going on with your computer. It will be a leapfrog moment in terms of technology. A bit like our electricity in Africa or telephones in places like Africa or South America, where nobody wanted to lay the cabling or put the poles. It was going to be too expensive, while suddenly, we’ve got solar panels and mobile phones. So it just stepped over a whole level of technology which will never be used. I think this will be a moment for those of an older generation who are still driven to try to deliver some level of additional value or purpose to society. 

 

You’ve experienced this but then you’re also suggesting that this might be prevalent in entrepreneurship. Are they also more likely to be discriminated upon?

Data suggests and supports that founders of companies, over the average age of 44, are likely to be more successful and consistent, over the long term. That’s proven data. At the same time, ask yourself, where are the programmes that are focused on helping such entrepreneurs of that age? And the answer is, they don’t exist. But in reality a lot of older people may have spent a lifetime nurturing a pet project or a side hustle that they can still take forward. A lot of them are very purpose driven businesses because they’ve been able to see the problem. They understand the implications because of their experiences but there aren’t the mechanisms or the tools out there to help them. So that’s what greypreneur is all about.

Many older people find that their experiences are generally universal, that they were at the top of their game and then suddenly couldn’t get an interview unless they were massively lucky. A lot of them struggle emotionally. I do too. All of a sudden, you are no longer the first choice and are too senior. Now you’re being told you will be retiring soon or probably haven’t got the energy etc, which is completely nonsense of course. But also it’s absolutely ageism and that’s illegal. But it happens.

When you’re embarking on this mission to advocate greypreneurship, are you targeting the entrepreneurs themselves or the VCs?

VCs don’t care who’s behind the desk as long as they believe that the companies are worth investing in. Reality is, that you’ve got people harbouring the idea of doing something for themselves. Actually the program is centred on advocating the inclusion of older people into the general entrepreneurial ecosystem. Help organisations build programs that can assist them build their dream company and take back the charge of their own careers. Being a ‘grey’ as we are called is a badge of honour and we all at this age should embrace our true value, which is a lot higher than society in general is aware of today.

Why bring it now? This is because the chances that the introduction of AI usage will bring and in turn what I call ‘positive age technology’ will bring. There are already fantastic tools like Pebble. It takes your 3D render of your product and puts it into 10,000 different backgrounds. You can get AI to do the voiceover, the content, make the video and get all the pictures and not have to go the more traditional, more costly route. Tools like this and others like Beautiful AI, or Pro-Forma are taking on a lot of the heavy lifting in a small start up team, and are so simple that even some people like me can use them.

What’s one piece of advice you’d like to give an aspiring greypreneur?

I’d love to put them in one door and then come out another door immediately becoming more open-minded and receptive. It’s only natural as we get older, that we think we know a lot more than we do. But you have to let that go when you decide to run your own startup. Previously, other people did things for you, so now you have to learn a lot of skills. It’s just kind of normal if you’ve been in an executive position. You didn’t do the PowerPoint, you critiqued and probably planned the workshop but you didn’t do it. Somebody else did it. Now you have to do that. So a lot of humility has to come into it. I’m consciously optimistic there are enough people out there that know how to look at themselves in the mirror and go do what I can do. Even for a younger entrepreneur, it is difficult and challenging for these same reasons. You have to be calling clients and do the presentation. That’s the beginning of the entrepreneur journey, so that’s the first bit. Let’s wash away all of those things that you know, we don’t want to forget them. We just remember that we have to do them.

Editor’s Note: Proving that ageism barriers are disappearing, Ward recently joined Singapore University of Social Sciences as their Venture Builder Program Advisor and Mentor. He’ll be focusing on helping seniors in their entrepreneurship journey. He also brought Greypreneur (www.greypreneur.com) under the wing of Rescalelab (www.rescalelab.com) a training-as-a-service business in the Edtech sector, serving as co-founder and Chief Business Officer.