Coffee with Stuart Lewis
Stuart Lewis
Age 40
Founder of Rest Less
Zoom Coffee
Describe your career path in two or three sentences including any twists or turns ending with where you are now.
There's always been a strong enjoyment of work in my family - even when I was at school, I wanted to be out earning my own money. At 16, I was working in the local supermarket stacking shelves, before that, at the age of 12, I was delivering papers in my local neighbourhood.
I found my first professional job after university. I was very fortunate where I landed up. The company had an incredible graduate scheme and really invested in their people to give them a broad learning platform. For the first time I saw the link between performance and reward, not just financial but more importantly the rewarding sense of achievement. And I found it very motivating. I was excited by the idea that if you put more in, you get more out. It was quite profound for me.
From there, I've had a variety of broad general management roles, mostly in financial services. I headed up consumer cards for American Express in Belgium and did a short stint at Amazon helping them build an online grocery business. Mid career, I decided to transition into smaller businesses. I found the smaller the business, the more of an impact I could make and I found this rewarding. That led me to Octopus, a leading investor in startups and renewable energy. It was a great place to be entrepreneurial and feel like you were doing a lot of good. And then, from there I took the leap to create Rest Less.
What decision / experience proved to be the most helpful to your career?
The trigger point for me was when my father passed away at the age of 87 at the end of 2016. His death was profound for me and crystallised a couple of things. One, as many people feel when they lose a parent, it made me very aware of my own mortality and I realised that I wasn't getting any younger and I'd regret not doing something now, much more than I would if it ended up failing.
Rest Less was also partly borne out of the conversations I had with my father. He took an early retirement after 35 years of working and had spent the next 36 years in retirement. I remember having conversations with him about how he struggled going into retirement, around the loss of social status, the loss of social network that comes from the workplace and it spurred me to want to help others get the most out of their later lives.
Finally, around the time of my father’s death, Channel 4’s Old People's Home for Four Year Olds was on TV and I found the show really moving.] The show took 11 pensioners in their mid 80s in care homes and subjected them to the daily torment of 4-year old children for six weeks. And what was so magical, was the profound impact this experiment had on both parties.
At the start of the series, nine of the 11 people were registered with depression, a couple of them severely. They took readings for physical mobility and mental cognition and by the end of the series, none of the pensioners registered as depressed and their physical mobility and mental cognition had improved too. So it was just this really powerful stimulus for me and made me think about the importance of staying active and being engaged.
With Rest Less, we're not targeting eighty year olds back into the workplace but we are trying to help people stay active and purposeful for as long as they want to. The concept of retirement is so fluid now. When we started, we thought that we would have an average candidate age of 60 but now it’s more like mid 50s. So many people hit 50 and think I’ve got 15, 20 years ahead of me in the workplace - what do I want to do and not what do I have to do? We've got a real multitude of people looking for career changes, looking to step up, looking to step down, looking to transition. The diversity of experience that we see is fantastic.
What decision / experience proved to be the most helpful to your career?
I'm not sure there was ever a defining moment for me but there have been a few big learning points. The first was seeing the link between putting more effort in and getting more out of your career. This was really powerful.
The second was about realising I could have a bigger impact in a smaller organisation.
The third was thinking of ways to combine a social purpose and social good in what I was doing. The idea of linking business with social enterprise is really powerful for me. I'm a huge fan of Martin Lewis and what he is doing with The Money Saving Expert. He proved that you can run a successful business while doing some very worthwhile consumer activity.
What advice would you give your 20 year old self knowing what you do now?
Knowing what I know now, I'd be encouraging myself to think more creatively about career paths and not necessarily so linearly. I never loved academia - I did okay through school and university but it never really connected with me. I couldn't see this link between what I was doing in school and the output I was going to have in my own career or in society. So, I wish I had found entrepreneurialism at a younger age.
What do you think is the biggest challenge for people making a career re-entry or re-invention later in life?
There are two main challenges. The first are internal challenges. Sadly, we come across a lot of self-limiting beliefs. It always surprises me because the wealth of experience and talent, the richness of life experience of the people we see is incredible. They've got so much to offer and they don’t always see it. So there's an element of being confident, believing in yourself and continuing to invest in yourself that is really, really important.
I think the second challenge is ageism and that does feed into these self-limiting beliefs. Definitely, agism is very real, both in the workplace and in society at large. We're great at respecting age in the workplace when people follow that linear career path to the top. For example most FTSE 100 CEOs will be in their 50s or 60s. The challenge is that few people want to, or are able to have that linear career to the top of a multinational corporation. So what happens to the majority of the population? Being told you are overqualified for a role, is one of the most prevalent forms of age discrimination that people encounter on an everyday basis.
So that leads into what do you think are the opportunities for people wanting to make a career, reinvention or re-entry?
They're huge. People are looking up and thinking - what do I want to do? How do I make the most of that time? We have such a diverse set of members who are looking to do anything and everything. Some of the most popular roles we've see on the site are in the charity sector, people are really interested in that idea of wanting to work and earn a living and giving something back at the same time.
Some people take more purpose in work and others find purpose in travel and experiential activities and others by connecting with friends and family more. That sense of purpose is really core to everything people do and people are looking for – and in reality most people want a balance of these different areas.
We’ve seen people retrain as counsellors and teachers. We partner with Lucy Kellaway's programme Now Teach, where they take successful professionals nationally from a range of fields and retrain them to go into secondary schools and teach STEM skills.
And you also have a lot of people going the other way, people who have been in teaching for 30 years and are keen to change out. But the central theme is this idea that a change is as good as a break.
Top tip for people thinking about reinventing their careers?
Lots of tips. The first thing is to believe in yourself. We're going to be living longer, so the idea of investing and believing in yourself is really powerful.
Not everyone has the financial setup to be able to afford to live well longer. At Rest Less, we're very cognizant of that, so thinking about how you create the budget to enable any transition is important. How do you make sure you're financially set up to make these transitions – for example can you study part-time alongside your work. And what support network do you have?
I've gone through this myself with Rest Less. You've got to be open and have frank conversations with your partners and family around the time and resources it's going to require to make these changes. And they can play off each other so you can be less financially secure, but have a stronger support network that can enable you to work as you retrain for example.
Recommendation: Favourite book to read, website to browse or podcast to listen while sipping coffee?
Because of the space we're in I found the Lynda Gratton and Andrew Scott’s book 100-Year Life very powerful. It's profound on so many levels and very thought provoking. The book has been used as a rallying cry by governments, especially in places like Japan and Singapore where the wisdom of age is far more widely respected.
From the podcast perspective, I'm partial to a TED talk. I love hearing people's personal stories.