Aformer Financial Regulatory Compliance professional with nine years of working experience, Smiley Chaudhary today is the Executive Director of Zero Waste City, an engineering consulting business specializing in the reduction of waste for commercial and industrial facilities. Smiley, from the very beginning, was adept in accommodating herself into various roles and tailoring her skills according to them. Over the years, this exceptional quality has opened numerous paths for her to grow as a tenacious individual. She has worked across multiple organizations in India & Singapore where she has been known for being a remarkable communicator who brings tough people and complex projects together with ease to deliver exemplifying results. Smiley Chaudhary together with Remi Cesaro, the Founder and Executive Director of Zero Waste City is working towards driving innovation within the organization and helping clients build & incorporate zero-waste practices into their businesses. Let’s hear it from Smiley.

What are the different responsibilities that your current role encompasses within the organization?

My role at Zero Waste City is to help the organization grow and progress. Initially, when I joined the company, I was the Business Development Manager and from there my role evolved to being the Head of Growth, handling the growth of all our stakeholders who join the company internally as well as externally. Recently, I was offered a stake within the company and since then I have been the Executive Director of Product Development & Growth supporting various businesses in setting and meeting their Zero Waste Goals.

Tell us about the challenges that you encounter at Zero Waste City and how you mitigate them.

Our first challenge was to bring the attention of our target audience toward building their sustainability resilience through optimized waste management. While the world of sustainability encompasses Envi­ronmental, Social, and Governance, people tend to focus mostly on either energy reduction or targeting to reduce their carbon footprint without realizing that waste management is also a vital part of the environmental aspect of sustainability. We have been working to share such zero-waste knowledge on a granular level where it would not matter which industry you belong to for it to make sense. From there, the organizations we were engaging began to acknowledge the idea that a big sign of both commercial and environmental inefficiency is based on how much waste they generate, and that they are symbiotic in nature. Zero Waste City helps some of these companies identify the gaps and look out for ways to go zero waste, save money, and save resources while being sustainable.

Secondly, for us, growth came too fast and as proj­ects were coming in, we realized that we needed indi­viduals who had the know-how and were driven toward delivering high-quality, impactful opportunity assess­ments and practical implementation roadmaps. Putting together such a team for a nascent sector like Zero Waste Consulting, was particularly tricky but we set out to tackle this challenge by incubating the concept that Zero Waste City would be an educating enterprise. With that in mind, we decided to centralize our resourc­ing strategy around hiring talent who is keen to go the extra mile viz. hands-on training and agile knowledge transfer.

"Organizations we were engaging began to acknowledge the idea that a big sign of both commercial and environmental inefficiency is based on how much waste they generate, and that they are symbiotic in nature"

The final challenge is maintaining a transparent relationship with all our stakeholders. We work very specifically with people and organizations who believe in what we believe and see value in the work that we do. With that, comes the challenge of maintaining our service quality at every level. So, when sometimes too many projects are happening all at the same time, rath­er than just rushing through, I prefer to switch gears, pause for a bit, put in the time and effort towards the quality assurance, and then get right back into it.

What are some of the most significant milestones that you have achieved throughout your professional journey?

For me, success will always be a team sport; it never is one person's achievement. Plus, I am a big believer in leaving a place in a better shape than I found it. This has always been the core value ingrained in me and I intrinsically resonate with the high significance of identifying the need of my team or a client to bring together an agile solution. As a result, my milestones or successes are always tied to these aspects.

Throughout my career so far, whether it was during my time as a financial auditor in the corporate assur­ance sector or after my master’s when I was working with a design firm towards luxury brand management and retail merchandising – for me success has been when each time I have combined the ‘Art of the service’ with the ‘Science of the service’.

When COVID hit, the company I was working for at the time had to let me go since they couldn’t afford a foreign employee. Even so, during that time my entire team & clients there came together to put the word out and support me by sharing what I would bring to the table for anyone who was looking to hire. That to me has been my most valuable achievement to date.

How do you foresee the zero waste policies evolving?

The awareness of waste management best practic­es and its related policies has been evolving rather rapidly and organizations are recognizing how a lack of a well-rounded waste management ecosystem not only depletes our natural resources but impacts their business resilience as well. In Singapore, three major governmental regulations are being mandated as a part of the National Zero Waste Masterplan – Mandatory Packaging Reporting, Mandatory Waste Reporting, and Mandatory Food Waste Segregation. With these policies coming in we are seeing a gain of momentum from businesses looking to implement opportunities to reduce, reuse and recycle better.

What would your advice be to young women who aspire to become business leaders in the future?

Firstly, I’d say expect that there will be challenges coming your way from the get-go; even so, you must consciously choose to keep moving forward. Secondly, one must understand how it’s almost never about you. It is always about putting your team first and acknowl­edging that leaders always eat last. Lastly, recognize the fact that the organizational culture and the mindset you inculcate around you is the most important part of becoming a successful leader. My personal favourite quote that captures this concept beautifully is:

"Culture eats strategy for breakfast, technology for lunch, and products for dinner, and soon thereafter everything else too", - Peter Drucker.

Smiley Chaudhary, Executive Director, Zero Waste City

Smiley pursued a Bachelor of Commerce, Accounting & Finance from The University of Newcastle, a professional chartered accountancy affiliate certification from ACCA UK, a Master’s in Digital Marketing & Luxury Brand Management from ESSEC Business School, and, recently, she has been certified as a True Advisor (Total Resource Use Efficiency) by the Green Business Certification. She has been part of leading companies including Raffles Corporate Consultants, EY, and Qingwa.