Kurt Gruber On Supporting Indigenous Youth Through A Sustainable Data Security Enterprise

Kurt Gruber is the co-founder of Worldview Group, which includes Worldview Foundation and the certified social enterprise WV Technologies.

As the highest-certified IT lifecycle and e-waste recycling company in the industry, WV Technologies serves tier-one clients, including top-secret government agencies, ensuring data security and compliance at the highest level.

WV Tech is a leader in protecting national security and community safety through best-in-class data sanitisation and e-waste management, preventing sensitive information from falling into the wrong hands. Under his leadership, WV Technologies has securely processed nearly 2 million kg of e-waste annually, while creating employment opportunities for over 45 young Aboriginal people, empowering them through work and holistic support programs.

Kurt is passionate about social enterprise, circular economy solutions, and safeguarding data integrity, proving that business can drive both security and social impact.

Kurt discusses tackling the problems of e-waste and data security using a social enterprise model to drive change, and supporting Indigenous youth to overcome systemic, intergenerational disadvantage.

Highlights from the interview (listen to the podcast for full details)

[Indio Myles] - Could you please share more about your background and what led to you working in social entrepreneurship and data security?

[Kurt Gruber] - Throughout my life, I have always been involved in volunteering and wanting to contribute to the community. Running businesses was also a way to generate income for myself, my family, and employees.

When I came across the idea of social enterprise, a good friend of mine from school, who I’d known since we were twelve, and I put our heads together. We were investigating social enterprises where you get to do both of those things. You get to run a business and use those skills, but also contribute to society.

We decided social enterprise was the way to go. It's a new way of doing business where you can not only give the best products and services to your clients but contribute to the community.

On this particular journey, I had a bush tucker restaurant. In Australia, we've had Indigenous people on country for 60,000 years, and there's a lot of native foods or ‘bush tucker’, as we call it, that the mainstream hasn't adopted eating. I had that restaurant, and I was interested in trying to employ Aboriginal people to try build prosperity.

I found that when you're trying to help people overcome disadvantage, there are all these challenges a normal business isn't equipped to deal with. You find you're going to court or funerals with people all while you're trying to run your business, and it's just too much. Eventually, we put our heads together and came up with a social enterprise model.

Jamie, the co-founder, had been involved in the IT industry and there was a huge gap there for end of life IT which wasn't being handled to the appropriate risk level. There were some social enterprises trying to process it, but they were not necessarily being run efficiently and effectively. We rolled all that together into one vision.

We started with Jamie's living room as the sales office and my double garage as the processing facility. We tried hard to win work, and eventually, we did. Over time we've grown to seven large warehouses across the country, and we're just about to start going international. We came up with a good vision and made some mistakes along the way. We did some things right, had a bit of good luck, and had a bit of bad luck, but we always stayed true to that vision. We're proud of where we're at today.

Encompassing three major organisations, what is the purpose of the Worldview Group and what impact activities is it leading?

In the Worldview Group there are more than three organisations, but it’s better to think of it as just those three. WV Technologies is a certified social enterprise providing IT lifecycle services to tier one corporates and the government. We handle mainly their end of life IT equipment, but we also do installation and a lot of e-waste recycling.

Most organisations in our country turn over their IT equipment every 2-3 years. That redundant equipment still has a lot of life left in it if you can safely and responsibly remove the data and get it to a new owner.

Some pieces also need to be recycled. That's what WV Technologies does.

In addition, WV Technologies predominantly employs Indigenous youth who are coming from pretty extreme disadvantage. We look for people who might’ve come out of the youth justice system or overcome addiction, homelessness and other types of challenges. They're given a job at WV Technologies, a supportive job where it’s okay to make mistakes. We expect that it will be a little bit of a journey.

Wraparound support is then provided by Worldview Foundation. Worldview Foundation is a separate, registered charity. It owns the majority of WV Technologies as well. As Technologies makes profit, it allows the Foundation to increase the amount of support it can provide. It teaches people everything from how to cook, drive, and budget. It also helps people get out of violent households or off the streets.

It's predominantly run by mentors who've been through our programs. It provides wraparound support so they can overcome barriers as they enter the workforce.

It's a big jump going from never having worked and escaping addiction or other hardships to then working full time. It's too much of a jump. It takes us three to six months, with the support of Worldview Foundation, to get them there.

The final organisation is Worldview Pathways. Once our people have done three to six months of work and they are job ready, they've often got a few tickets. Some of them complete a certificate at a vocational centre, they’ve often got housing, potentially a license, and even a car. Now they’ve got their lives together, so they then move into Worldview Pathways, which is a labour hire recruitment company.

This doesn’t make money. It doesn't make a cent, and we never even wanted to set it up initially. We set it up only because the guys needed it. It allows us to place the graduates into different jobs, so they can try a couple of things and different employers can try them out. It's a softer landing into progressing out of our supportive work environment into mainstream employment.

There's always this balance in social enterprise between wanting to help people on one end and needing to make enough profit to exist on the other. The way we've dealt with that is to break it into the three interconnected organisations. It allows the WV Technologies team to be driving for performance, aiming for the best customer service, products, and to make profit. That profit then flows back into Foundation. That team can work on how to support the young people to capitalise on the opportunities provided to them and set them up for success.

How does Worldview Technologies support the development of the circular economy?

Every couple of years you probably get a new phone and a new laptop. Potentially at work, you get a new phone and laptop too. There’s also the servers, switches, and everything in the data centre supporting your business. We're a digital world. All that equipment gets turned over so regularly that it creates both risk and waste.

People are often not aware their data is stored not only in the hard drives of that equipment, but in microchips and things like the graphics processing units.

As devices get smarter, there are also risks developing that people don't fully understand. Disposing of that equipment responsibly is difficult, it’s not just about pulling out the hard drive and thinking the job is done, or worse, just deleting things and thinking they're deleted. Using a company that is certified mitigates that risk entirely.

There's a certification regime that ensures the company knows what they're doing. It’s crucial for banks and higher security environments like government, but also places like doctor's surgeries, or home accountants.

These businesses often have really important information of all of us in the community. If you go to the doctor, it’s your information that's going to get out there, not necessarily the doctor’s. They're not really equipped or educated on how to treat end of life equipment.

We do a lot of work trying to educate people on those risks and the need to use a properly certified company. There's a lot of cowboys with a website who will say “military grade” this or “defence grade” that. The reality is there is a certification called NAID, and you need to have that.

We joke that you need a licensed person to install your light switch or your toilet, so why would you not need one to handle your end of life equipment?

Funnily enough, even large corporations, like banks, still don't click that you need a proper certification. There'll be big problems for them when they have data breaches. If you can safely ensure their equipment is ready to be passed on to a new user, much of this equipment's got as much as five more years of life.

Often people in high level executive roles need the latest machine with the highest power to access the programs they're using. However, if you're a young person in school in the Philippines, you just need to be able to do basic processing and access the internet.

By getting as much of that IT equipment back into the circular economy, we can be less and less reliant on digging up the earth to keep building the components that go into these devices.

It depends on the model and various factors, but between every 15 to 20 laptops that are reused, that's the equivalent of removing two Australian households from the grid in electricity use and one car from the road in greenhouse gas emissions. This is due to the resource intensity of the materials that go into making devices; the numbers are astronomical on what you can achieve through reusing IT equipment.

We report on this impact to our clients and try to help educate them, so that instead of sticking their equipment in a storeroom for three years (where they're then going to have no reusability), they can get them as out as quickly as possible so people can reuse them for those three years.

Where devices can't be reused, we have to recycle, which means pulling them down to precious metals. Over 99% of all IT equipment is recycled in our company. There's only a very small amount which can't be recycled. We deal directly with smelters and leaching companies. We also make gold ingots and sell those on the London Metal Exchange and then provide value back to our clients.

What advice would you give to an aspiring change maker who is hoping to integrate impact into their business model?

My response here may not be popular, but we see a lot of social enterprises who think they're in the business of being a social enterprise. They forget they need to deliver a valuable product or service that a customer wants.

Just because you're helping people doesn't mean you're going to be successful. Our view is you need to be the best you possibly can be at delivering a product or service.

You're trying to lead the industry, and the fact you help people is more of a cherry on top than the other way around. That's not often what we want to hear, but that’s the reality.

It's good to think about your own purchasing decisions. Say you're going to buy a new car, if the sales people say the car is probably not going to work and it's twice the price but it was made by refugees, are you going to buy it? Unlikely.

You still need to make the best car but have that social impact as an extra. You want people to see your product and think “oh yeah, now I really want to buy it”. If you think about being in procurement, like in a B2B environment, you have a mandate to achieve value for money.

You can't buy a fleet of cars that may not work for double the price just because you've ticked a social procurement box. It’s important people keep that in mind because without customers or profit, you have no social enterprise.

I know “profit: can be a dirty word, particularly in this space, but profit is not a dirty word. Profit or “surplus” is what you need to be successful. That's the lifeblood of a business. You can't run things expecting grants, handouts, and for customers to use you even though your product breaks down.

You need to build a sustainable business model in an industry that can be profitable or generate surplus, because with profit comes opportunities for your beneficiaries to grow into bigger roles. It's how you fund innovation, how you can try and fail, and get better. It's how you attract the best team.

Given the cost of living, you can't approach a good, high level, rockstar operator who's going to help you fulfil your vision if you can't compensate them accordingly. They might be attracted because they're contributing to a cause, but they’ve still got families to feed, and they need to be rewarded for their work.

Maybe not everyone thinks profit is a negative thing, but a lot of people I speak to feel like it is immoral to be shooting for a profitable social enterprise. It's a vital part; it gives you freedom to try things and grow. That's the advice I can give that you might not ordinarily get. It's also about all of your normal advice such as having good values, but you can read those in any book.

How have you seen the business for good movement evolve and what do you think is required to help it gain more traction and create impact?

I hope to see more of an evolution towards social enterprise leading and being a new force in business. It can't do that unless it's delivering, at a minimum, equivalent products and services. Ideally, it would deliver superior products and services.

We think that's achievable, because if you can pay people appropriately, you will attract the best people because they want to be involved in what you're doing. They enjoy the social purpose of their work. You don't have the same staff turnover; people stay because it's invigorating to come to a workplace when you know the profit’s actually helping people, not going to some fat cat you don't see or shareholders you don't know.

The other thing is your customers are often very sticky. They're not necessarily going to chop you as soon as the competitor offers a slightly better price, as long as you've worked out how to deliver that value back to them.

We think the days are gone where a big corporation can donate one percent of their profits to feeding children while ignoring the sweatshops they’re utilising. People are too savvy these days. Anyone can do the research and most have phones with cameras. those days are numbered, if not already gone.

As a social enterprise, if we can position ourselves to be superior in our products and services, while also helping people, we’ll attract the best staff. Our customers will also love us, so we can then learn from what they need. We think that's an evolution that’s starting to appear, but hopefully that gets taken on board and it helps grow the sector.

What inspiring projects or initiatives that you come across recently creating a positive change?

I think any program where the people graduating then become employed to reshape and run the program are not only inspiring to me, but also effective. I love to hear that; we do a bit and need to do more.

There's no point in someone with a degree in business creating a program for refugees or, in our case, Indigenous youth. You need someone who's come from that same origin, someone who has grown themselves who will not only resonate with the cohort you're working with but fully understand. They'll see gaps in your program you just can't see. That to me is inspiring.

Another one, which we're trying to get better at, is that if you're a well-run social enterprise, hopefully you don't need grant funding or too much support, maybe just for innovation or scaling. It's ultimately your customers who are paying for the social good you're doing. Share that value back with them so it's sustainable. You can't just charge a high price and then do some social good behind the scenes.

If you are slightly more expensive, there's value you can give back to your customers in saying this project also put 20 youth through a driving program. You're giving them value for using a social enterprise, not just ticking the box on your own spreadsheet. Where I can see that happening is inspiring for the sector, because that's what will make it sustainable.

Really, your customer gets the goods and services, but also in their annual report they can say they helped 10 people do something important. You're giving them real value. It makes you a valuable partner, not only for the goods and services, but it makes your social enterprise more sustainable without the need for external funders or philanthropy.

To finish off what are some books or resources that you'd recommend to our listeners?

It depends on where you're at on your journey. Towards the beginning, any books from Jim Collins, like Good to Great, are helpful. Even though it's a bit dated, the E Myth, was good in terms of helping me to get systems in place.

The Ultimate Question, which is about using the NPS score throughout your business is good. That simple question of, “would you recommend working here or our services to a colleague or friend?” is a simple way of ascertaining how you're doing with your employees, customers, and suppliers. We've taken on Scaling Up by Verne Harnish and I really recommend that for as you're scaling.

Ultimately, anything and everything you can find about your industry is good to have. You need to be an expert in whatever industry, product, or services you're trying to deliver, because you need to be able to run a sustainable business. If you're not an expert in your industry, that's going to be a problem.