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Welcome back to another transformative episode of Investing Yourself, the Digital Entrepreneur Podcast. I am your host, Phil Bed at the Podcast Mogul. And if you're looking to launch, monetize, or grow a podcast in less time than it takes to order coffee, make sure you stay to the end of the episode to hear more about that. But today, we're going to dive into the world of productivity, leadership, and achieving your most ambitious goals with an expert who's dedicated to helping high achievers thrive, not just survive. Our guest is a powerhouse in goal setting, systems, creations, and, of course, leadership development. With a strong foundation in the STEM world, he understands the pressures of tight deadlines, limited resources, and high stake demands. Whether you're managing a team, leading complex projects, or simply trying to reduce overwhelm, our guest specializes in creating tailored systems that free up your time, reduce the stress, and allow you to focus what really matters in life. His mission is also to help you not just survive, but thrive in your career.

With his guidance, you'll tackle obstacles head on, set actionable goals, and build a personalized roadmap to lasting success. So if you ever felt like you needed more clarity, focus, or balance, you know this episode is the one for you. So let's get ready to unlock our leadership potential and elevate our performance. And give a warm welcome to my good friend, Dr. Mike O'. Grady. Dr. Mike, thank you so much for being here.

Thanks so much, Phil. It's great to be here.

All right, Dr. Mike or Mike? I'm just going to go with Mike. We're going to jump straight into it. What made you decide to go from the fun world of stem, you know, there's no stress in that world at all. Into the unshackled Briley tea that is the world of entrepreneurship. What made you decide to do that shift?

I think a large portion of it was to be honest, to. To have more control of my own time and to be able to bring my own skills that I've developed over the years to, to imp. To make a bigger impact. And my career up to now has been, has been fantastic. But I feel like there's so much more I can offer to the world. And the path of entrepreneurship is, I believe, the best way to do that.

So when you're working in the world of stem, which of course is known to be a little high pressured and there's some stress because you got all that fancy stuff you have to do with, you obviously had to figure out how to free up your time, which is obviously the basis of what you're going into, what your business is about. You obviously practice what you preach. When did the development of this system to use systems, you know, set achievable goals, you know, create a, in essence create machines to free up your time or systems to free up your time. How did that come about? And when did you start, you know, noticing it was a powerful tool?

In my most recent role, I was a systems manager in a construction company. And I stepped into that world from a completely different industry, which were medical devices and semiconductor technology. Stepping into construction industry was a completely new environment for me. And my challenge was at that time to bring in different management systems to help us as a company achieve some of the international standards for quality, health and safety and environmental, but not only achieving those standards, but helping the company run more efficiently as well. And so over a period of years as I was doing that, I was learning how to make my time more effective and learning how the operations of the business works. And so accumulating that knowledge and having that hands on practical skills, over time, I was able to achieve NSAI or international credit accreditation for the company. So that was something that then allowed us to be able to attract better business, achieve higher revenue and run more efficiently, which meant that the people working in the company were able to do their jobs more effectively, enjoy their work more, and me personally as well. I was able to over time work on some higher level tasks and projects that I always had in my mind but never had the time to do it.

And by learning the skill of building systems and freeing up time, I was able to be able to package them and set up maintenance systems where I could then run those in a shorter amount of time and free up bandwidth and space to work on higher value projects for the company.

And obviously once you created those systems and the maintenance work for it, in essence your job in that department is just now you're just a janitor because you're making sure everything's working fine in that and While you're working on the higher level tasks, when your management or your superiors saw you doing this, what was their reaction? Were there hesitancies to it? Because obviously changing up decades and centuries worth of how we do things to the new age of stuff can be terrifying for those old school thinkers. Were your management and upper levels, were they open minded enough to see the benefit of it or because you have set up the things during the time you got them used to that change?

I was very fortunate that the business owner was very open minded to me taking control of how this system should be developed and grow and implemented within the company. So it was a company of about at the time, maybe 25 to 30 people, maybe around that. And since then it's doubled in size and revenue has increased significantly since then. And so I believe that having those systems has allowed us to be able to give us stability, to grow in size, to be able to deliver a high quality service to our clients consistently. And that allowed the business owner then to free up things in his, in his own mind that was causing him stress all of the time. And that was one of the reasons why he brought me in at the time because he saw that I had a skill set from another industry and he intentionally wanted to bring someone in that could see things with a fresh pair of eyes. And so that was, that was good that he was open to doing that and he was patient enough for me to learn a new industry and apply the skills that I learned in other industries into the construction industry. And because of his patience over time I was able to learn and, and implement what, exactly what he wanted.

And now looking back, like he doesn't have the same worry or the same level of stress that he had when I started. And that's allowed him to step back from business. He's, he's very much still involved, but it has allowed us to attract better talent into the business that can drive again higher value projects than would have been possible if some of those systems were never implemented in the first place.

I, I, you, you mentioned something that I want to touch on because I think it's very important is the fresh eyes you brought to it, considering you come from, you came from like the medical field, which kind of has like nothing to do with construction other than the construction people to build the hospitals and the places where medical people work. You know, that's the, that's the closest you come to, you know, interacting with those two fields, but bringing that perspective because you had that analytical business type of thing and you had to do use systems because it's so much simpler because there's a lot of technical stuff. When you're building those systems over in the medical fields, you have more rigors in that. Your, your boss was a forward thinking person. The owner of the company was a forward thinking person. He's looking to the future, obviously knows the value of having outside perspective to bring, you know, something new to the idea. With what you're doing now, you know, you're, you're helping, you're creating those individual plans for overworked business owners, those service workers, service owner, business owners. How did you, what is the process like? I, I come up to you, let's say I'm an overworked business owner.

I'm like Dr. Mike, I need your help. What's the first thing I should do to, you know, get this my world a little more free up some time so I can look at the higher value tasks, not looking at the one and $1 to two dollar tasks, but you know, the 50 to $100 tasks that actually make me money.

Yeah. One of the things that I do with everyone is offer them a free time audit where I look at where they're spending their time most of the time in their day and their week, where does their mind go and where is their time spent. So there's a mental bandwidth that everyone has and that gets used up with the amount of things that they feel like they need to retain inside of their head. And that could be like a large volume of customer requests, it could be issues within the company, it could be so many different things. And that can prevent a business owner from even just switching off or even sleeping at night. And so it's important to address and identify what are those biggest concerns mentally. But what are they spending their time on day to day that is consuming most of their time? Maybe they're firefighting. They're trying to resolve issues that just keep cropping up again and again.

And if some of those issues could be resolved, like what are the kind of dream kind of things that they would like to get resolved. And what I generally do is try to identify what would be the low hanging fruit, the easiest things to resolve, that the quickest things to resolve that would give the biggest benefit and start, start with that and kind of create a little plan to implement some sort of a change in the way that they're managing their workload, but also like using their mental bandwidth. And so it's about strategically setting up like a plan to go at a nice and easy pace that they can manage. And that's kind of the general strategy of how I go about it.

I love that, just taking it slowly, looking at what's costing money versus what's making money and slow and steady wins the race. I want to look at your leadership technique because leadership is obviously about failure because you can't learn unless you fail. You can't do a task and you can't teach a task unless you failed at the task. So you know what not to do. With the leaders that you've worked with. What is, what is something that you see they're challenged with similar across the board that you have been able to help them just get rid of that issue because it's something that's just like a low hanging fruit, if you will.

Yeah, I think one of the most important things, especially for let's say for example an employee who is like a highly skilled worker may not necessarily want to become a manager or lead teams, but is an important contributor to the success of the team or to the output for the company. The one thing I noticed there is that they need to see a new definition of leadership and that is through the process that they're managing and understanding that what they're doing, how it's connected to the outcomes of for the team and the business. And so a lot of the time people might think that they are destined to become leaders, to become team leaders, but. But they may not be. And that's one of the things that I see a lot. So having a clear picture of where an employee is going in their career is really important. But similarly for a business owner, having a clear picture of where they're going in a few years time, having that vision or that roadmap of where they want to go two to three years from now and then creating a plan from the present day up up to then is is is what's needed the most. And it's just having that belief and that clarity around how to get there is what's often missing.

I like that because it is true. We sometimes see the big forest. I was just reading Wisest fuck book and he's talking from a perspective like you want to get to a town, you're standing on a mountain. You see the marshes, you see the forest. You start thinking about all that work that it takes. But you need a good leader can say hey, you want to get there but let's just move over here. Maybe this is the path you can take and you miss through all those hard things. And I like that.

That's a great sign. Of a leader. I want to jump into the world of self development because it's obviously leaders need to be self developed because that's the only way you become a great leader is being a leader to yourself and moving forward in life. What are one of the non negotiable methods that you invest in yourself to become a better version of the Dr. Mike O' Grady like what, what is it? Like what is one thing that you say? This is always going to be part of my investment strategy.

I would say without a doubt, it's being, it's, it's in something that is totally unrelated to, to the work that I do and that is more in the area of spirituality and, and energy work. So what I discovered probably about nine years ago was as becoming a father for the first time, I realized how much stress that could come into your life as a first time parent. And balancing that with the pressure of a leadership role in STEM was probably the biggest amount of stress I've ever felt at the time. And I was looking at all sorts of ways to, to manage my own stress level so that I could function as a parent and as a leader. And I was exploring different modalities and things in the area of energy work that allowed me to discover so much about myself that's created a level of stability, kind of wounds this I feel without that I be able to think well and the path that I'm on to be able to help with all the muscles. It's so important to be able to be able to manage my own state, my own mental and emotional state that I continue to invest time, money and energy in learning and, and developing that emotional intelligence, that ability to read my own energy and other people's energy. And that allows me to understand myself better, but also really on a deep level understand other people, what's really going on for them. And so it just brings more depth to my life to be able to have that even with my own kids and my family, but also with the people that I work with.

And so it's something that I will never take away, I will always be doing for the rest of my life. It's really hard to describe how important it is, but it's just a magical ingredient that I feel that if I could give to someone and go this is. If you had this one thing like it would spark an amazing amount of clarity and creativity and joy in your life. Yeah, that's, I hope, hopefully that makes sense what I'm saying.

It, it does because I've recently also been on a Spiritual path, not due to fatherhood, but I do have a Neph is like a son to me. I mean, his godfather, so, you know, kind of fatherhood, if you will. And as I look to be a better version of myself for him to be the version of an uncle that I wish, I do see myself, you know, trying to figure out stuff, becoming more spiritual, understanding the emotional side of life. Because children are nothing but emotions. That's what I've learned. Children are nothing but emotions, and you need to understand your emotions to be able to, you know, work with them. And that has helped me dramatically in my business because people connect so rapidly. And again, also with my interviews, because I understand where my guests are coming from on those points.

Dr. Mike, I want to know, where do you see yourself in 10 years? What is the Dr. Mike doing in 10 years from now?

Oh, 10 years seems so far away to be. To see where I'll be then. But what I would love to be able to do is to have my own team where my business is freeing up people's time in their day or in a business. Just. I like creating space for people. And when that space is created, people can use it to create whatever they feel they can or they want to. It's giving people that choice to break out of the patterns that they're stuck in from day to day, whether that is, whether you're an employee, a leader, or a business owner. And so I want to be able to do that on a larger scale.

I don't know exactly how it's going to look like just yet, but. But to be able to do that beyond just myself and to create programs and different vehicles to deliver that kind of a service, to make that kind of an impact would be hugely rewarding because it impacts not only people in the professional sense, but like it impacts their personal life then as well. Because your family life and your work life are deeply connected. And so I understand that myself. And I understand that by working in a family business, I know that when people go home, they bring the stress home with them and vice versa, they can bring the stress from home into work. And I know how much of a difference creating that space can have in the work life balance, but in the enjoyment in the time that you spend with your family and the time that you work. And like, I really do believe it's important to enjoy what you do. And that's the ultimate goal, is to be able to create that space so people can really, truly enjoy what they're working in.

I love that. I want to See that happen for you, because it's 100% a goal that I love. I love seeing people have more free time to do things that they love and having systems in place that, you know, you can help them set up and understand how to be a leader. I want to go back to leadership because this is something that's really important because you come from stem, which is a background that allows you a unique perspective on problem solving. Right. So I want to know how does those translating. How does translating those skills to leadership strategy work across the different industries? Because you work in different industries, right? You're, you're a smart man. You work in STEM or you got a doctor before your name.

You're. You're smart. We know that. But how do you take those ideas and transform into leadership strategies using different industries?

I think one of the important things to do is to extract what the kind of underlying principles are behind your thinking and decision making in one industry and, and testing them and seeing if they apply in another industry. I'm trying to think of. I'm trying to think of an example. Like, it's, it's very, it's very difficult for me to think of an example, but it's fine.

I know you're kind of on, I'm putting you on, on a spot here. Let's take a look at what is, what is one of the techniques you use in stem, Right. To help leaders. Leaders grow in this aspect, become better leader and have better leadership.

Yeah. So if, if, if, for example, I'm. The goal is that we want to free up someone's time. One of the things that you'll do is look at what is the kind of main issue that keeps cropping up. Something that is either costing a lot of time, money, money sources, and it's basically doing like a root cause investigation of why is this problem happening, what's actually causing it? Is this problem appearing in, in other areas of the business? Because, because it might not just be appearing here. So these are the kind of general questions that you could be asking. Once you identify what the actual root cause is, you can then come up with a hypothesis around what the solution is, and then you can go test that solution to see if the issue goes away or not and kind of monitor it over time to see does your solution work. And that's the kind of general idea around trying to stop things, stop things that are causing issues like constant firefighting and getting pulled into things that distract you from the work that you want to be doing.

And so by doing this repeatedly, Having a process to review issues, logging issues, tracking them, tracking solutions, monitoring the effectiveness of solutions, and monitoring frequency of issues appearing over time. You then should. What you should start seeing over time is less issues occurring that are, you know, a big can cause a lot of trouble or a lower volume of issues. And you will eventually start seeing that you have more time on your plate. Maybe you have certain people in your team that now all of a sudden have more time to take on other work. And so as a leader, as a manager, you have the ability to shift resources around once a lot of the issues are gone. That is one of the kind of ways I'd be kind of thinking about how to make things more efficient in a team, but also on an individual level then as well.

I love that because it is. You're not only freeing up time for the leader, but also the team as well with these systems because they're taking away useless work or busy work as we like it. I want to know because there are some leaders who see, oh, there's free time, let's give you other busy work, work that's not necessarily your pay grade, if you will. How do you help those leaders get out of the mind frame of finding busy work for their employees when they're freed up to making sure that they're working on tasks that make money, not just make us survive, you know, where we want to thrive, build that boat so that we can take care of those tides and not be keeping our head above water.

Yeah, often what happens, what's happening there is. There's not clarity in the goals at the business level, the management level and the individual contributor level. So it's important to get alignment in understanding what is priority for the business. What are we aiming towards? What are, what's our number one goal or number two goal, number three goal and using that as a framework for deciding where what's priority for the manager, how to assign resources effectively and making the your team aware of what the manager is thinking, what the business owner is thinking in terms of what we're trying to achieve. And so by knowing that you can individually make better decisions on where you're going to put your time and energy into. And it means that when you focus on one aspect or one project first ahead of another, it's because you understand what's priority for the manager and the business owner. And there's like a straight line, there's alignment between all of you. If you don't have that, the things like you said can happen where you end up working on things which are need to be done, but they're not the most important things in terms of the business goals.

And so you do need to have a conversation. If you're like the manager, you need to have that with the business owner. And if you have your own manager, you need to have that alignment conversation to make sure you're both working off the same hymn sheet. That's probably one of the most important things to get right from the start because if you don't have that alignment, it's going to create issues and so make sure that that is there. It's so, so, so important.

I love this because you're talking to both business owners who already have a team and have management in place, but also to those entrepreneurs, the solopreneurs who are just branching into hiring their first employee right there. They need to be clear on their leadership and this is a great episode for them to pay attention. We are coming to the end so I'm going to get you to hit on the last question, my favorite question actually of all my guests because it harkens back to the little person inside us all. So, Dr. Mike, I want to know, I got your 10 year old self right beside me. What's one piece of life advice, business advice, love advice, whatever you'd like? What kind of advice you would love to send back to your 10 year old self so that they could, you know, have a bit of an easier, simpler way of life?

Yeah, it's, I, I think the most important thing that I would tell him is to not take things too seriously. Like to, to, to, to bring out the joy and the fun in the work because work doesn't have to be so serious. And when you do that, you bring out that inner child aspect that, the playful aspect and that brings a creativity and an ability to navigate challenges with ease and with grace. And so I need to remind myself more often to speak to my 10 year old self to bring that side of me out whenever I'm faced with a challenge. And I would recommend that for anyone then as well.

I love it. I think that's some great advice for whatever age you are. From the 10 year old to the 30 to 40, 50, 60, 70, 80, 90, even the 100 year old person should always remember to remember their 10 year old self. Dr. Mike, I'm going to jump off stage here because I know a lot of entrepreneurs are probably looking to free up their time, become better to lead leaders. You're the man to go see, so I want you to let them know where they can find you follow you all that fun and jazz. The floor, sir, is yours.

Yeah. If you're a manager, a business owner or a high achiever and you're looking to free up your time as much as one to two hours per day, then what I would invite you to do is to go to my website, it's be wise and rise.com and you can book a free 30 minute consultation with me. And what I will do is I will help you identify any time leaks in your day and set one or two kind of priority actions for you to be able to get an immediate benefit to our consultation. So go to my website and if you also would like to connect with me, you can find me on LinkedIn. Just search me. Michael Grady and that's it.

Alex, excellent. Dr. Mike, I want to thank you so much for being here. You're an amazing guest. I know. I'm personally going to take some of your advice to heart because I'm going to be hiring my first employees. So that's a big, big, very nervous thing. So I want to thank you so much for being here, not only being an amazing guest, but also the final guest in the studio and for the year.

So thank you so much for being open to being this guest.

It was great. Thank you so much, Phil.

I want to thank my audience, you guys, for listening. Like I said in the intro, if you're interested in launching, monetizing and growing a podcast in less time than it takes to order a coffee every year, check out the show notes. There's a link to something special for you. But I want to thank you for listening, thank you for being here and as always, remember to invest in yourself self.

Thanks for joining us on Invest in Yourself, the digital entrepreneur podcast. The podcast mogul reminds you that your journey to freedom and success starts with one powerful move. Investing in yourself. If today's episode sparked your fire, hit that follow button on Spotify and drop us a comment. Share your wins, your challenges, and what drives you to break free from the corporate glass grind. Remember, you're your best investment. Always invest in yourself because your potential is limitless. Until next time, keep hustling and take control of your destiny.