7 minute read
Well-Being
A modern CEO merges equal parts successful innovator and servant leader
BY ANNE BAGAMERY A As a girl growing up in Southern California in the 1980s, Asma Ishaq often attended nutrition-industry trade fairs with her father, a biochemist who founded
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and ran his own supplements company with help from her and her brothers.
Today Asma attends the same trade fairs, but as a company chief – and over the years she has frequently come home with industry awards for product excellence or innovation.
“Those are real ‘pinch me, I’m dreaming’ moments,” she said.
Asma, 42, is chief executive officer of Modere Inc., a global, multi-hundred million-dollar company that produces dietary supplements, household and personal-care products and markets them through the direct selling distribution channel.
The role, which she has held since January, is the latest in a professional journey that has taken her from premed studies at UC Berkeley to an MBA from Rice in 2002, and from office-product sales in the Bay Area to finance at BlackRock in New York and to product development at a biotech firm.
She says she never lost sight of her ultimate goals: to be an entrepreneur and to run her business with an eye to doing good in addition to doing well.
Through creating her first company, Jusuru International, in 2009 and merging it with Modere in 2017, Asma has become a leader in the field of nutraceuticals — wellness products that combine natural ingredients with pharmaceutical elements, like collagen and hyaluronic acid, to promote beauty and health. Along the way, she has played a leading role in setting industry standards both in products and in practices, and served as a mentor and model for women at all levels of business.
“I want to give people, especially women, more chances,” Asma said during a recent interview from her office at Modere headquarters in Springville, Utah. “I never started out thinking, ‘I need to be a CEO.’ I had simple but meaningful goals: take my daughter to school every day, be able to pay for college. So I really understand that success means different things to different people.”
Those who know her are not surprised at her achievements, nor that she is modest about them.
“She sets the bar for integrity and thought leadership,” said Ivan Wasserman, a partner in the law firm Amin Talati Upadhye in Chicago, who has worked with Asma on industry policy and standards. “She is not driven by ego — titles, money, achievement of goals — but by bringing out the best in people,” said Michael Hannigan, president and co-founder of Give Something Back Workplace Solutions in Oakland, California, a certified B Corporation which uses the power of business to solve social and environmental problems. Asma credits her upbringing in an entrepreneurial family with giving her a clear-eyed view of what it takes to run a business. “My brothers and I did everything, from working on the product line and packing boxes to answering phones,” she said.
Although she went off to Berkeley with a T-shirt that said “Surgeon” on the front, Asma took a summer job at Give Something Back and discovered that her true vocation was in a company that valued the “triple bottom line” — sales, profits and investment in the community.
“At the end of my interview, I knew I wanted to learn from them and said: ‘I’ll work at anything. I just want to be here,’” she recalled.
She joined the company after graduation in 1997 and moved up the ranks in sales.
“Everything she did for us, she did extremely well,” said Sean Marx, co-founder of Give Something Back. “But she also got the whole concept of the ‘servant leader’ — that your success is directly connected to the success of those around you.”
Marriage, motherhood and a move to New York followed. In 2000, when her then-husband needed to move to Houston for work, she enrolled at Rice as a Ben F. Love scholar to build her skills.
“She was concerned about the finance, since that wasn’t her background,” recalled Sanjay Sood, a marketing professor who now teaches at UCLA Anderson School of Management. “She dug in and actually majored in finance as well as marketing.”
Sood recalls those years as exciting ones for the Jones School. A new dean, Gil Whitaker (Rice ’53), had arrived from the University of Michigan in 1998 with ambitions to move Rice up in the rankings.
“It was still a very small MBA program, so everyone knew everyone else,” Sood said. “But you could feel the positive momentum.”
Students felt it, too. “Jones was relatively young and aspirational, and we thought, we can make it our own,” said Sean Ferguson, who was a year ahead of Asma and worked with her in the Graduate Students Association on diversity issues.
“Entrepreneurs don’t always buy into the status quo,” said Ferguson, now associate dean and director of the MBA program at the Asia Business School in Kuala Lumpur. “She’s skeptical and critical, but in a positive, constructive way — looking to make things better. And
The nutrition industry is self-regulated, so it’s really important to be an advocate for best practices, to protect the industry from bad players,” she said. “With direct selling, which is shifting toward adopting self-regulatory concepts, it’s an exciting time. Our model — company success derived from customer success — is powerful, but it needs to be done right. ” “
she was always willing to roll up her sleeves and work.”
For her part, Asma “just fell in love with Rice,” she said. “It was such a closeknit community of students and professors. We developed real bonds.”
A few years at BlackRock in New York followed graduation from Rice. But she found herself yearning to start her own business, for professional as well as personal reasons: Her marriage had ended, and she needed more autonomy to balance work and single motherhood.
Leaning on her background in nutritional supplements and spying an opportunity in the emerging field of nutraceuticals, she joined a company called BioCell Technology before founding Jusuru in 2009. Jusuru, she said, was “a case study in pure sweat equity,” and in keeping a close eye on costs to be able to grow without needing outside capital. A crucial lesson, which she learned by asking other CEOs, was not to grow beyond your means or expand internationally too soon.
Merging with Modere was the opportunity she was looking for to gain global exposure, especially in Japan, where consumers are sophisticated about nutraceutical products. “Modere was in Japan and other markets as well,” she said. “It was a good match of complementary business skills.”
Modere markets itself as a “healthy, safe and clean-lifestyle brand,” according to its website, and as CEO it is her job to make sure that it lives up to that promise, both in its products and in its practices.
“People want to know that what they are using, and selling, is safe and responsibly produced,” said Farah Ahmed, president and CEO of the Fragrance Creators Association, an industry group, and formerly a lawyer with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
Asma acknowledges the challenge. “The nutrition industry is self-regulated, so it’s really important to be an advocate for best practices, to protect the industry from bad players,” she said. “With direct selling, which is shifting toward adopting self-regulatory concepts, it’s an exciting time. Our model — company success derived from customer success — is powerful, but it needs to be done right.”
Those who know her give her every chance of success.
“A lot of companies in that industry are not managed according to best practices,” said Len Monheit, managing partner of Trust Transparency Center, a consultancy that works with industry groups. “Doing that well is a differentiator. She is doing it well.” u
Anne Bagamery is a journalist based in Paris. She formerly was with Forbes Magazine in Houston and a senior editor at the International Herald Tribune / International New York Times. This is her first article for Rice Business.
