Chuen Chuen: What's your advice for young people who are now toying with the idea of an unconventional career?

Aaron: Don't need to think so much. Just do it.  

Chuen Chuen: Welcome to agile leaders conversations. This is a podcast where we invite human centered professionals and leaders to share what it means to lead in today's workplaces. From the personal stories, find out the greatest learning that guides them through disruption and forge a better way forward. The insights will maximize your leadership potential and unlock possibilities for better future. My name is Yeo Chuen Chuen. I'm the author of leaders. 

People love a guide for agile leaders to creating great workplaces and happy employees. I'm delighted to have you listen in today. 

My guest is Aaron Chen, a techno farmer and founder of Werms Inc., Whose mission is to up cycle, clean local food waste into animal feed and organic fertilizer for pets and plants community. 

Aaron and his co-founders run an insect farm, and share a passion for sustainability. They run a series of programs, equipping people with useful sustainable skills that anyone can apply to reduce their carbon footprint. 

Welcome to the show Aaron. So good to have you here. Tell us about yourself, your name, what you do and why you do what you do. 

Aaron: Thank you for having me. My name is Aaron. I run an insect farm. And we are the only insect farm in Singapore that does not practice monoculture. Meaning to say, we have more than one species of insect. So we have about eight or nine today. Reason being, I am very interested in nature. 

Chuen Chuen: Wow, what an unconventional career. When did you discover this passion in insects and worms?

Aaron: So previously, when I was in school, mostly studying business and banking and finance. I figured that's not the path I want to be doing for the next 30, 40 years. Deep down I asked myself what do I really like? What do I really enjoy? The answer came out was something revolving around nature.

So it could be agriculture. It could be pets, it could be plants. Things like that. 

Chuen Chuen: And so far, three years into the process, what's your greatest reward? 

Aaron: Actually it comes every day. 

So in any farm, you always smell nature. And nature is not always very pleasant smelling, right? This smell is ammonia released by the insects. 

So (visitors) they'll come in with a lot of question marks, a lot of frowns, not knowing what to expect. But they always leave happy. Thanking you for the experience, for all the, information or knowledge imparted. So it's always this kind of like non monetary rewards that I find the most important.

Chuen Chuen: And I'm sure the experience you give them as they tour your insect farm is unforgettable, right? Philosophically, it's very deep. Turning frowns into smiles educating people who were ignorant about the value and the benefits the insects brought despite the bad smell. So I think that's the biggest gift you can give to people. 

In this series of podcasts, we want to talk about what leadership means in your realm. And when you think about a leader people will love, who's the first person that comes to your mind.

One of my commanders back in National Service. So he is someone that really earns your respect. So it doesn't really matter how high his rank whatsoever, right? He still earns respect from the lowest of staff. First day in, he came into the room, asked everybody to stand up. And on the very first day, he already memorized everybody's name. So it showed how personalized his leadership is.

Aaron: He's someone that does not believe in shouting or corporal punishment, because I believe a true leader, don't need to lead and shout and use negative reinforcements, and negative punishments. 

Chuen Chuen: Yeah. Did the experience with that particular commander change you for life?

Aaron: More on learning from him. Take in all the positives habits. 

Chuen Chuen: Something you say actually now clicks for me. Earlier, before we started recording, you spoke about the insects as the lowest life form. And here you talk about a commander who earns your respect, even though as a recruit, you are the lowest life form in the ecosystem. So I'm seeing how the work you do. You're actually educating and sharing with the rest of the world. Hey, even though we are talking about insects, the lowest life form, we have to get to know them as well.

Aaron: They are very misunderstood. Everyone thinks there are creepy crawlies. There are like entomophobia, things like that, right? Anything that's six legged or more than four legs is a no already.

They are actually doing very important work behind the scenes, whether in nature or in any insect farm out there. They eat food waste. They convert them to very useful ingredients and nutrients. So not just like proteins and fertilizers, but even more recently other insect farms in Singapore have discovered like biomaterials that are very expensive. All coming from this lowest life form. 

Chuen Chuen: So they give us the value, right? I think actually they're the unsung heroes, isn't it? 

Aaron: Yeah, often overlooked. 

Chuen Chuen: This thing about underdogs, about unsung hero. Actually, it speaks a lot about the character. Even if we are high and mighty leader, we want to give respect to the person who is lowest in the food chain. Because no one is too small to be trampled over. So it speaks about belief that you have. 

Aaron: I don't believe in treating people with different levels, whether or not they are of a higher social status. I just believe just equal. 

Chuen Chuen: Yeah true. When you hire what qualities do you look out for? 

Aaron: I look out for attitude. Good attitude. But it's been proving to be very difficult to figure out in just one interview. Because I believe if you're not that smart, it can ,be taught. But if your attitude is bad, your outlook towards things are negative. It's way harder to change than just teaching you.

Chuen Chuen: So attitude wise, what are the green ticks and the red flags? So what tells you that they have good attitude? 

Aaron: If they were to make a mistake, they must have the integrity to own up to it, not just like trying to cover over their mistakes, bring up some excuse. And I won't be angry at all, no matter how big of a mistake, because I understand mistakes are bound to happen.

 Good attitude is basically how you manage mistakes and failures. And not let's say I scold you once, right? As opposed to, Oh no, I did something wrong. His impression of me is not that great now, but I'll prove to him that I'm not that kind of person that he thinks I am.

Chuen Chuen: So how they respond to mistakes and failure. Have the integrity to speak the truth. 

So now, in your work, you interact with a lot of different people. What qualities do you believe leaders today need in order to be very effective? Given that our organizations has become multinational, very diverse and transformation is happening everywhere, right?

Aaron: I would say like things like compassion. But in actual fact, there are a lot of things that employees can bring to work. Be it like their family issues, and all this, where does one actually draw the line, right? Will you sacrifice the whole company so that you can sacrifice the bottom line, basically, will you sacrifice profits to retain a staff?

There's probably a lot of like personal outside issues or should you stick to being professional? So learning how to juggle this. It's the most important character trait.

Chuen Chuen: So, it's navigating the gray area, right? With our organizations becoming complex.

People's needs have changed as well. And even just this one thing, compassion. So much gray area. How much compassion is may be indulgent? How little is cruelty, for example. 

So my first book talks about the gray area. For example, the first one is tasks versus people. Do you want to get the work done? Or do you care about the difficulty each person is facing? Will you sacrifice the bottom line or do you help every staff? Because the difficulties are indeed very genuine. So how do you balance between the needs of the people or the needs of the company? Do you have a personal experience in these few years of running Worms Inc? 

Aaron: I tend to give benefit of doubt first. So let's say there was this employee, that comes to work very restless. We'll occasionally see them like heads on the table lunch she would say, It's okay, y'all go ahead and eat. I won't join you all. I'm not hungry. So I, the next step is to ask her, are you going through any kind of financial difficulties?

If not, why are you skipping lunch? So she said, Oh, no, I'm not having any financial difficulties. I don't need a forward allowance. Things like that. So if this is not the reason, right? That might be some other underlying reasons. So afterwards she asked to work from home and her nature of work allows that.

So I allow her to work from home. One full month. I just observed whether she give me updates, whether she meet her KPI. Cause normally if I allow this right. I will do a performance review at the end of the month. So comes the end of the month.

She barely delivered anything. So I've given benefit of doubt. I've tried to figure what's the main cause of concern. And I tried all these methods and turns out the issue wasn't anything that I can solve. So it's out of my hands already. And the results are still poor. Then I have no choice.

It's not that I didn't try, didn't try to understand or didn't try to solve. But there comes the limit. This is out of my hands. This is beyond what I should do, especially when you are new. If let's say, employee with a long history, very great decent performance. And then you start having these kind of issues. Then yes, I will take additional steps to figure out what went wrong. Because I believe in, you've been around for so long, right? I I wouldn't just let you go because of one, two months of poor performance. You have to figure out why. But if you are new, then no. 

Chuen Chuen: So this is one of those complexities, right? And I have so many coachees, leaders in organizations that would speak about the difficulty, like they have tried everything possible to be understanding or to give benefit of the doubt to people.

And yet their team members still don't deliver. They find it very hard to do what's right for the company. Because it will look like they are ruthless. They're not compassionate, but once you have said this whole lesson, understanding our own limits as well. What we are responsible for, what we need to be responsible for.

What I admire is that the attitude is, let me give the benefit of the doubt first, I will not judge, right? But I will still want to look at the evidence to inform me whether my approach is beneficial or not. And if in that case, when there's compelling evidence, you let the person go. I assume. 

Aaron: Yes. 

Chuen Chuen: You did. Was it very hard? Oh my God, I'm a bad boss or what? 

Aaron: Oh, no. I figured it's what needed to be done. But that said, this is a very flat hierarchy. I would imagine if a larger company has to do this for everybody, the HR department will be the biggest department really. But it's not the case. 

It's beyond what most would have done. So yeah, I didn't feel bad about it. 

Chuen Chuen: That's good. So that's where the real life learning is to be able to recognize the gray area. Yeah.

Okay, so now I want to move into another theme about your career, because your career choice, honestly, when someone recommended you to be on my podcast. I was like, wow, this person is so interesting. So what inspired you to create this business? Can you remember that one defining moment in your life that helped you take this step? 

Aaron: There isn't a particular incident, but a gradual understanding of what I want. In any job, I would be the person that would say, okay, I let me try first. Don't be too eager to say no. Don't be eager to turn things down.

Yeah. So rather try. See whether you can actually be decent at it. So I tried something on management training. 

I went through front, middle and back office. So your corporate banking and then your consumer banking. And then the back end compliance. So I tried all this over the course of one year. And then, I look at my peers. They are so smart. They have GPAs that are above them. Some of them have GPA four point something and then they are competing their, all their CFA certs and everything.

And I know that if I try to keep up, it'll be a very painful process. Cause I'm not a natural at it, I really need to put in extra work to just keep up and not even equal or better, just keep up, right? I figured this is not the direction I want, I asked myself what I really want, and it was something to do with nature.

Chuen Chuen: This is good because in my Agile Leadership Framework, the first pillar talked about leveraging your strengths. I believe in developing strengths, be more of who you are rather than changing who you are fundamentally. So in your banking and finance experience, you realize there's something that other people can do quite intuitively, but you couldn't.

And it's not for the lack of trying, you have tried your very best. You are very open. So you always tell yourself, okay, let me give you a shot first and see what happens. But when you look at the evidence, it's like, this is not working for me. If you compare your experience in the banking and finance versus the first time you came to do something related to nature, what was the difference?

Aaron:  There's a common intuition, like a natural sense of how things should happen. although it's not 100%, but it allows me to catch up faster. So let's say, for example, the two most recent insects that we have the flightless fruit flies. So this is very new to me.

I've never even seen them, but there was a demand for it. There was a purchase order lah with it. Okay, I told myself, I told them, give me a couple of months. Yeah, so within a couple of months, I managed to learn and how to breed them properly. It comes to me slightly more naturally. 

Chuen Chuen: It comes naturally to you, you know that number one, you're very curious. You're very interested about it. And when you learn it, you can understand it very quickly.

Aaron: There's the intuition like, oh, this is clearly not going to work because, and it comes naturally to you. 

Chuen Chuen: Before we started recording, you were sharing with me the original vision for worms Inc. And over the years, it has pivoted. Yeah, at the same time, I work with different organizations. I know the need to innovate, be relevant is top of mind for them. Yeah. It's not that easy to do. So could you share with us that journey of worms, right? How did you decide how and what to pivot into to keep the business afloat and viable? 

Aaron: We started with trying to create fish feed for the fish farmers. So it clearly didn't work because there's a lot of change in our education involved and a lot of money, So we didn't have that money. We didn't have the time. We didn't have the benefit of a lot of things and resources.

So it's a change or die kind of situation. So the next natural thing was to sell it to pet owners because they are not unfamiliar with this. They are no stranger to a lot of these insects because they have been a staple feed for many decades. More importantly, it will take a while to pick up, right?

So in the meantime, I thought to myself, what other avenues are there to potentially make this work? So it was recalling that in primary school, we learn about life cycle. Adaptation for either survival or like for the prey and for the predators, right?

All this will learn and taught using insects. So I thought, Hey, why not? I come in with something unique. Something more helpful that will help these teachers to teach. And we decided to do workshop also. So our insects are used for feeding and they are also used for teaching. Yeah. So right now, these are our two main verticals. 

Chuen Chuen: Yeah. Can I ask were there parental obstacles when you wanted to do this? 

Aaron: I think Asian parents right, they were first doubt the kid. Can you do it? You sure or not? Yeah. Then, even one year in, are you losing a lot of money? Yeah, things like that. 

I think their stamina not very strong, so eventually they'll stop nagging. 

Chuen Chuen: Are they convinced now?

Aaron: Sometimes they still say, oh, why you choose a job that's so dirty. But they don't understand that.

Chuen Chuen: Is it hard for you to hire young people? They will think, why is this job very smelly or whatever?

Aaron: No, actually it's easier to hire young people. 

Chuen Chuen: So how do you think young people's thinking are changing now? 

Aaron: Okay, so if we were to go back to the pioneer generations, pre-1950 they work for survival mostly. They work to make ends meet, put food on the table for the children and everything. Then it comes the Merdeka (post 1950s) generation where they work for quality of life. They work to improve their living standards, which is where you see people start living in nice houses and all this.

So the children of the Merdeka generation, us. We don't work for survival, clearly. So we now work for a purpose. We now work for something that we believe in. I've seen friends taking pay cuts for a better work environment, for a better meaning of work.

So it shows that the reason why we work, has changed. 

Chuen Chuen: Yeah, actually, what do you think about it? All this laying flat or whatever.

Aaron: If they can afford it, then so be it. Because they're still spending money, so they're still contributing to the economy, so not wrong.

Chuen Chuen: So economically, it won't be bad because they are consumers. Yeah. Personally, I worry because I feel work is a big part. What we choose to do as a vocation, shapes us. So work changes life experiences and what you say is spot on. The millennials. We no longer work for quality of life. Some of us still do, but we generally now moving towards working for purpose.

So for you. Even though your job doesn't look very attractive to older people because they will think about, ah, why is it so smelly? That kind of thing. But for the young people who can see the purpose, it's easy for you to attract them.

Aaron: It's easier to get younger people who are more receptive than older. 

Chuen Chuen: Because they believe in the purpose of the company. So actually from your experience, it actually tells us that organizations now need to work harder to appeal to the workforce.

Aaron: Previously, it was, why should I hire you. Now is, why you should come and work for me?

Chuen Chuen: Why you should come and work for me? So the employers now need to pitch to employees to attract them the right talent.

That's a good insight for people. A lot of people I know are struggling with hiring.

I can't find the right people with the right skills or the experience. What's your advice to leaders in such organizations on attracting the right people to join the companies. 

Aaron: I can't advise. It's a norm. Even our minister of manpower says that It's only going to get worse. Stay lean as much as we can. So I believe that every organization, they will always stay as lean as they can. 

Chuen Chuen: Any regrets for you? 

Aaron: I always joke about it. When I have to work into past the midnight or facing any curveballs. Some days I'm like why did I do this to myself, right? In the grand scheme of things, the answer is no. 

Chuen Chuen: The perfect question for you to close this interview. What's your advice for young people who are now toying with the idea of an unconventional career?

Aaron: Don't need to think so much. Just do it. They have the time, right? They have the time to recover if things go wrong. Just do it. 

Chuen Chuen: And see what you can learn from it. 

Aaron: Yeah, even the worst case scenario failure. You can move on from here.

If you were to fail, you'll have experience that no one else has. If a interviewer asks you, Hey, why your business fail? They confirm will ask right? They want to see your learning points, learning outcomes, rather than why are you a failure, but it's not.

I think companies value people with startup background a lot more. 

Because let's say like startup founders. It is a must to be someone like jack of all trades. For sure, you have to wear many hats. So you have practical hands-on experience. 

Chuen Chuen:  In my book, there's this one track called the agilist, right? Which is maintaining the ability to learn, re invent, pick yourself up from failures, right? So from what you are saying, if any listeners now is thinking about pursuing an unconventional career, as long as you can pick yourself up from the experience, however it goes, just take it as a learning experience. Because the entrepreneurial mindset is actually very important. I can see in many organizations now when people refuse to learn or have forgotten how to learn because they look at failure as something terminal. But the way you say is actually it's not. Whatever we learn from whatever startup experience is okay. Just process it. And you learn so many other things along the way.

Aaron: I think it's also because we have that mindset, right? Mostly because in school. They don't really teach about failures. They feel bad for like people who come in last. So they give participation trophy for everybody. So you don't ever have to face a loss in your early childhood.

As long as you try, you'll be rewarded with something, but that's not how it works, right? You can lose a lot. Are you ready for it? Yeah. So we have learn to like, everything I do, I must be rewarded for it. It can only go up, it cannot go down, right? The education system has taught us that.

So once we step out into workforce, you'll face setbacks. Then you don't know what to do already. Like, where's my trophy? There isn't.

Chuen Chuen: And I'm sure from your experience in the past few years, you have learned a lot, right? How to deal with setbacks, what to learn, how to maximize your setback even.

Yeah. 

Aaron: I did some calculation. Hey, if I didn't make all these wrong turns right, how much 

would I have? Don't think about it. 

Chuen Chuen: Good. This is a very interesting conversation. I'm definitely going to bring my kids to visit the farm and I want to see how their frowns will be transformed into smiles, right?

Because they'll become more knowledgeable. They will see what these unsung heroes, right? Or mostly neglected lowest lifeform. So it's really good to have this conversation with you. Thank you so much for being on the show. 

Aaron: Thank you for having me again.