Episode 6: Steve Butler of Punter Southall Aspire: The Future of Work when Age is Just a Number

Steve Butler is Chief Executive at Punter Southall Aspire, an investment consulting group.  He was previously the founder of Camradata, a business author and a visiting industry fellow at Oxford Brookes Business School.  He has a particular focus on areas such as #futureofwork, #olderworkers, #inclusiveculture, #intergenerational, and #retirementplanning and writes extensively on the topics on LinkedIN, which is where we met.  He is pursuing a Doctorate in Business Administration which is examining the effect of Covid 19 on different generations in the workplace. Our conversation starts with Steve’s upbringing in England’s idyllic New Forest and how his university career endured some twists and turned, but ultimately led to an appreciation of the importance of hard work. He found he was naturally inclined to the people aspect of a business development role within financial services and thrived there, in roles that also took him to Latin America. We move then to what drove him to found Camradata and the problem that that was designed to serve – the provision of investment data at a time when few data sources were consolidated in that way.  The business caught a wave of when analytics and peer group analysis were burgeoning, although Steve does describe the scrappy start-up stage quite vividly.We move then to his current focus at Punter Southall Aspire and his particular focus on ageism and busting myths that persist about older workers, their preferences and their strengths. Covid and the shift to remote and hybrid working has had an effect on this as well as other demographic groups. This podcast series was made possible by the kind support of Darwin Alternatives. Darwin Alternative Investment Management Limited offers innovative, alpha-driven investment solutions that are uncorrelated with traditional asset classes and feature business areas which have not previously been considered by investment funds. The firm aims to create new opportunities for investors to further diversify their portfolios and achieve stable absolute returns.