Joe O’Mahoney Podcast Transcript

Melody Moore [00:00:01]:
Welcome to the Secret Resume podcast hosted by me, Melody Moore. In this podcast we explore the people, places and experiences that have shaped my guests, those which have influenced who they are as people and where they are in their work life today, or as I like to call it, their secret resume. Before we dive in, I want to tell you about something that I’m really excited about, about which is our being free membership. We’re developing an online community which is designed for people who are interested in personal growth. If you’re navigating career transitions, maybe feeling stuck or burnt out, or simply seeking more meaning in your life, then this is for you. Membership gives you access to a range of resources, a supportive community and monthly group coaching calls. It will allow you to explore what freedom means to you on your own terms.

Head to www.liberareconsulting.co.uk/being-free to join the waitlist

Melody Moore [00:01:03]:
So my guest today is Joe O’Mahoney. Jo, I’m absolutely thrilled to have you here today. I think we’re going to have a really interesting conversation. I think your life is really interesting, what you’ve told me about it so far and also I think you’ve got a really interesting insight given what you the two jobs that you have. So can you just start off by telling us a little bit about who you are and what it is that you do?

Joe O’Mahoney [00:01:29]:
Sure. Okay. So starting now, working back, I am currently, or have been for 20 odd years, a board advisor to consultancies, typically taking them through a growth journey towards sales or some form of equity event. I spend 50% of my time doing that and I spend 50% of my time as a professor of consulting at Cardiff University. How I got there was a long, arduous route through consultancy, working my way up through the academic profession, publishing lots of papers and books on consultancy and also philosophy I’m interested in and prior to that, academia. So I did my undergrad at Oxford in history, couldn’t get a job, so did my Masters in Industrial Relations at Warwick and then did my PhD at Warwick as well. On looking at again, interest in philosophy and business, looking at how existentialism can help us understand how people respond to change companies, that’s probably enough to be getting on with.

Melody Moore [00:02:45]:
Gosh, that is interesting. I would say definitely. I do a lot of coaching and a lot of my clients are definitely having an existential crisis. So yeah, that’s very interesting. I’m just also interested in you, a professor of consulting. So can someone come and study consulting with you?

Joe O’Mahoney [00:03:06]:
They can with me, yes. Yeah. So as part of our MBA at Cardiff or our MBM Masters in Business Management. The final three months is a project and I typically set students up either to work in teams of consultants on the MBM or individually on the MBA with charities or non profits. Or sometimes I set them up with some of my clients to work as consultants and teach them all about, you know, the basics of client engagement, scoping, pricing, relationship building, problem management, all the rest of it. So I’m a great believer when it comes to education in getting your hands dirty and making the mistakes so that you learn.

Melody Moore [00:03:51]:
That’s so interesting. So I did a Masters in Occupational psychology back in 2000 and one of the things that really frustrated me was the lack of real life experience and the practical skills building. And I remember talking to one of the lecturers about that and she said, well, this is where you learn the theory and then you go and learn on the job. And I remember thinking that was, given that it was supposed to be a professional qualification. But also I’m really interested in, you know, we never talked about consulting even though that was where many, many of the people who did the Masters ended up. So it’s fabulous to hear that there are places that are actually actively helping.

Joe O’Mahoney [00:04:39]:
Yes, I mean they’re few and far between, they are increasing. I mean the challenge is that if you’re doing quite well in consulting, you’re going to go on to be partner and make a pile of cash. It’s relatively rare that someone who’s good at it comes out. I’m not saying I was good at it, but I was relatively successful in terms of promotions. And it’s relatively rare that someone comes out and decides to cut their salary by two thirds to become an academic.

Joe O’Mahoney [00:05:06]:
Yes, indeed.

Joe O’Mahoney [00:05:09]:
We don’t get many practitioners generally in universities, at least in the better universities, because they’re obsessed, rightly or wrongly, I believe wrongly with publishing. And it took me a while to learn that lesson. So I, you know, I, when I joined I thought, well, if I want to get on I’ll be a great teacher and a great administrator and all the rest of it. And it was only five or six years in, I realised, well, this isn’t getting me anywhere, so you’ve got to start publishing. And that’s another game which I’m more than happy to talk about.

Melody Moore [00:05:42]:
But yeah, let’s come back to that. I think in terms of what does it actually mean to be an academic? Because I think a lot of people don’t really know and have a, perhaps a sort of slightly rose tinted view of what it means to be an academic. Let’s go right back though to the first person you’re going to talk about, who is your dad.

Joe O’Mahoney [00:06:05]:
Yes.

Melody Moore [00:06:06]:
And a fine man as you described him to me, or a pie man is what I heard, but fine man is what you actually said. So tell me a bit about him.

Joe O’Mahoney [00:06:16]:
So dad comes from a very tough working class family. His brothers were in and out of prison. His dad had several families and, you know, he didn’t see much of him. And so I think dad had his first job at the age of six on the back. Yeah. And, and you know, supported the family as he grew up. He took on the dad figure very young and it is quite interesting. People with that background tend to go one of two ways.

Joe O’Mahoney [00:06:47]:
They either end up in prison or alcoholics or having issues as his brothers did, or they grab life by the scruff of the neck and think, well, I’m going to make something. And he, his, he just worked hard. He didn’t have the privilege of a great education or, you know, even knowledge about the professional world. So someone told him that accountants made money. So he studied his backside off to become a chartered accountant, managed to get in whilst at the same time being an international athlete. And all of this comes from work. So he, you know, he’s a hard, hard worker. But the other great thing is that partly as a result of his father having no interest in him, he was the most praise crazy of people you could imagine.

Joe O’Mahoney [00:07:45]:
My mother was very much the opposite. You know, wasn’t, wasn’t really that interested in, you know, occasionally she’ll say to me, what, what do you do, by the way? And always and always has, but, and she, you know, don’t get me wrong, she’s got her strong points, but praise and support isn’t necessarily one of them. But yeah, so, so we all grew up, I guess the danger is that you grow up thinking you’re wonderful. You know, you show a picture to someone and if they say, if it’s a school of crayon and someone says, oh my God, that’s amazing, let me put it on the fridge. It does wonders for your self confidence but sometimes that can be a trap as well. So then we get into this, you know, the, the parents dilemma of how much do you support and enable and praise your children? And some people, you know, maybe you do it too much. But certainly for me it came out as, certainly not up until my 20s, but after my 20s, sort of a work ethic that I have that my wife rightly complains about sometimes and people often say to me, oh, I don’t know how you do it, Joe. You get, you know, you’re doing the professorship and you’re writing and you’ve got children and unfortunately it’s because I don’t really spend any time on myself.

Joe O’Mahoney [00:09:05]:
I work possibly too hard.

Melody Moore [00:09:09]:
Well, you have two jobs. Many people would think we’re full time.

Joe O’Mahoney [00:09:15]:
I didn’t tell you. I also founded and helped run a charity that’s now got around 2000 volunteers. Fastest growing charity in Wales. It’s an environmental charity called Repair Cafe Wales. And that’s also a, you know, that’s work. But, you know, I, I guess I, I’ve always, I’m one of these people that feels guilty if I’m sitting down watching TV or playing games or whatever. So I, I, I wish when I retire, I’ve got a long list of very lazy things I’m going to do, but I’m not sure I’m ever going to retire.

Melody Moore [00:09:56]:
And what does success mean to you? If, you know, you say this strong work ethic, what does that mean to mean? And what is success?

Joe O’Mahoney [00:10:05]:
That’s a really good, I mean, I, I am not, I mean, I deal with multi millionaires, so on, on my, on the business side, I ran a workshop with three guys yesterday on business development and each one of them is worth at least 10, if not more million. I’m certainly, when it certainly having gone into academia, you’re never going to achieve that. And so, you know, I don’t measure my own success in financial terms because that would be a disaster for me. But I remember being very young and my uncle asked me what I wanted to do in life and instead of saying a fireman or astronaut, I said, I want to understand the world. And that’s been a kind of obsession of mine. I’ve, I’ve, Most of my 90% of my reading is factual. I don’t understand the world perhaps any better than I did when I was 8. But this is why I was attracted to philosophy, because you need to start at basics in terms of what exists and what doesn’t exist and how the things that exist influence other things that exist and, or bring those things into being even.

Joe O’Mahoney [00:11:25]:
And once you’ve got that sorted, you can build from a foundation then. And there’s a lot of, there’s a lot of people, especially in academia, who have an incorrect, and I hate to use the wording, it’s very unfashionable to say there’s a truth these days, but you know, if you look at French, French post structuralists or the existentialists or even, you know, some economists have a, have a quite a flawed understanding of how the world works. And so I spent a long time trying to get that right and I’ve written a couple of books on that. And, you know, you never arrive at the truth, but you arrive at a closer version of the truth.

Melody Moore [00:12:06]:
I think that’s fascinating. I see so many people making decisions in business based on how they want the world to be and how they want people to be rather than how it actually is.

Joe O’Mahoney [00:12:22]:
Yeah. And the really successful people in the business are the ones that realise. I just had a call just now with the owner of a firm and he said, oh, I’m thinking of taking private equity, I’m gonna think about giving them 51%. And I’ve spoken to a few banks and brokers and so I’d just like to cheque with you. And I said, you know, it’s not a good decision. And so we had a long chat about what him and his wife and his kids wanted and how best to get that in the short and long term. And no one was. And so he was wise enough to say, I don’t know about how this works, let’s reach out.

Joe O’Mahoney [00:13:05]:
Whereas what we see now, and I’d probably do this myself, is a whole host of people in society who have been told something on YouTube or by their parents and assume that’s how the world works. It’s dangerous.

Melody Moore [00:13:20]:
Yeah, interesting. So out of, I mean, my initial reaction always to when someone says they want to take private equities, it fills me with fear. Is, is. What is it? I’m just curious why, why? And was it that circumstance you thought was a bad idea or do you think generally it, it’s fraught with challenges.

Joe O’Mahoney [00:13:41]:
Private equity is, is, is fraught with challenges. They’ve only got into consultancy really in the last 20, 15, 20 years. They didn’t used to touch it because there’s no assets really, but it’s a cash rich business so eventually they were going to come sniffing. You got to remember with private equity, number one, very often they don’t understand people, businesses, they’re used to businesses where there are things. Number two, they’re out there to make cash. And so they, you know, they write these contracts every day and if you’re coming to that naively, you’re going to be in trouble. And number three, they want a return on their investment. So they will have you running around the world doing all types of work, not seeing Your family, in order to make that happen.

Joe O’Mahoney [00:14:31]:
And then, of course, the final thing, I guess, is the. The unknowns. If you hit a recession or you hit Covid or Mpox does something, then all of a sudden you’re not hitting the targets that they set for you, so they’ll start to make your life a misery. So I’ve seen it. I’ve seen it go wrong much more than I’ve seen it go. Right.

Melody Moore [00:14:51]:
Yeah, interesting. Thank you. So should we move on to your second person who was someone when you were at Wolf. I can’t say I’m saying it wrong. Wolfson College.

Joe O’Mahoney [00:15:07]:
Yeah. So my undergraduate, I did in Oxford and I was actually at a college called Greyfriars. She was at Wolfson and because Grey Friars. So Grey Friars was run by Franciscan monks, for better or for worse. And because we were so small, we used to get people from other colleges to come in and features and. And I can’t believe it, but I can’t remember her name and I apologise for that. And especially if she ever listens to this. I was, you know, my.

Joe O’Mahoney [00:15:37]:
My dad always said, look, Joe, because, you know, no one in my family had been to university. He said, look, Joe, you need to. Once you get to university, you can do what you want. He was actually wrong because he was thinking about his day when, you know, hardly anyone had a degree. You get a degree and. And then, you know, even if you get a third, you’re going to get a job in the city, probably in private equity. Oh, that’s harsh. But actually, these.

Joe O’Mahoney [00:16:04]:
These days you need a 2, 1 to get a professional job at least. But anyway, I did. I. My A. The A level that got me into Oxford was. Was classics, but I’d never studied history, I’d never done a lot of essay writing. I always preferred mathematics. And when I got there, I knew nothing about history.

Joe O’Mahoney [00:16:26]:
So I decided to drink and chase girls and do sports.

Melody Moore [00:16:31]:
Why not?

Joe O’Mahoney [00:16:32]:
Did a lot of boxing. So I thought, well. And she took me aside. I think she was taking me for 18th century Europe or something like that. She took me aside and said, joe, we’re not going to do any history. We’re going to teach you to write. And I thought, I know how to write. I did my A level and she.

Joe O’Mahoney [00:16:50]:
She basically took me through the process of argument in an essay and clarity, how to write paragraphs, all this basic stuff. And it. That allowed me to get a decent mark at undergrad. And then at postgrad I came, I did a Master’s after that I came top of my course. And it certainly wasn’t because I was the brightest or even the hardest working. It was because I knew how to write. And from that I got the offer of the PhD that was funded by the ESRC and then did my doctorate. And so her taking me aside and saying, look, we’re not going to learn anything about history, let’s just talk about writing did me a huge amount of good and it’s a skill I’ve tried to pass on to my students.

Joe O’Mahoney [00:17:43]:
So when I taught undergraduates, my first session with them was how to write an essay. And many of them would come back to me, sometimes years later and say, that session changed my life because there’s a step difference in their marks. And initially I thought, well, that’s not fair, really, because it’s only a aesthetic thing, but actually writing well does actually improve your thinking as well, and it improves the likelihood of someone listening. Listening to you when you’re talking to them. So it’s something I also try and get across to my consultants, perhaps less in an essay form, but also, you know, when you’re doing PowerPoints or writing a report or something like that.

Melody Moore [00:18:29]:
It’s interesting, isn’t it, because many things that we think are going to make us successful are not the things that make us successful.

Joe O’Mahoney [00:18:41]:
Yes. Yes, it’s true, isn’t it? Yeah. I mean, it. It. Is it a shame? I don’t know. There’s obviously a lot of emphasis on exams. If I look at the people I deal with who are consultancy founders, many of them don’t have degrees, many of them didn’t do that well at school, which is why they started their firms very often, because they. They found that professional route a bit of a struggle.

Joe O’Mahoney [00:19:08]:
And sometimes it’s because they were dyslexic or had ADHD and it wasn’t diagnosed, or they didn’t like being told what to do. All fair enough things. We need people like that in the world and they’ve done incredibly well starting their own firms. So, yeah, it’s. And, and, and I wrote a post recently on LinkedIn about luck and how that plays a huge part in success as well. Financial success, but also success in other forms.

Melody Moore [00:19:36]:
Do your founders that you work with recognise the role of luck?

Joe O’Mahoney [00:19:42]:
Oh, that’s a very good question. So I hope he listens to this. I’m not going to name his name because that would be unfair. There’s a very, very success. So I put this post out and because of the. Not necessarily. I can’t correlate it to financial success. Not because it’s not correlated, but I don’t have enough data to make that claim, but humility.

Joe O’Mahoney [00:20:07]:
And the humility to recognise the role that luck plays in one’s life is a characteristic of a lot of successful founders. However, you always get. Because consultants aren’t shy and because many successful entrepreneurs need to be a little bit punchy and aggressive and not take no for an answer and pushy, you also get a set of entrepreneurs who are, and I’ll use quote commas here that people can’t see necessarily scare quotes. They’re the self made men and they do tend to be men as well. Where they, where they. They don’t lack confidence. All success is down to hard work. And if you’re not successful it’s because you haven’t worked hard enough.

Joe O’Mahoney [00:20:56]:
And that’s.

Melody Moore [00:20:58]:
They’re the ones who believe in a meritocracy. Yes, the world’s a meritocracy. If you just work hard enough, then you can be successful too. Yeah, yeah.

Joe O’Mahoney [00:21:07]:
And they’re being taxed too high and you know, you shouldn’t be allowed sick days and you know, it’s. And some of them are very successful. But I work for their company. The interesting thing is, is if you look at the companies founded by those people who are successful, the employees are often unhappy. You’ve got a group at the top who are all in the image of the founder. They’re very punchy, they’re very aggressive, they think they’re self made people. But the employees are unhappy who are working for them. So I would always encourage people to cheque out Glassdoor when they’re going to, you know, apply to any of these firms.

Melody Moore [00:21:46]:
I was looking at Glassdoor the other day, actually. What would you say would be an acceptable score on Glassdoor?

Joe O’Mahoney [00:21:53]:
It’s out five.

Melody Moore [00:21:55]:
I think it’s out of five to five.

Joe O’Mahoney [00:21:57]:
Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think anything over four is relatively rare. So I’d say 20% of firms probably have a score higher than four. And also you want to do a little bit more digging because I have had some people tell me this surprised me. Perhaps it won’t surprise you that some CEOs insist on their current employees going on to Glassdoor and writing how wonderful the firm is. You need a little bit of digging there.

Melody Moore [00:22:26]:
Yeah, I. That doesn’t entirely surprise me. I’m interested. You mentioned that a lot of the, the type of founders you just described there were men. Do you see a difference between male and female founders?

Joe O’Mahoney [00:22:41]:
That’s a really Good point. So I mean men and women don’t differ massively at a population level in terms of their, their psyche or psychology or however you want to put it. The, the women that tend to be entrepreneurs are even more similar to men because men tend. One of the slight differences between men and women is that men are risk takers. Now if you’re a woman that has taken a chance on herself to be an entrepreneur, you’re more likely to be a risk taker. So your profile is going to be more similar. So broadly speaking, those profiles are the same. However, in that 5% of most type I was talking about the more extreme, perhaps aggressive, certainly confident, bordering on arrogant type leader that, that’s almost looking like, you know, it’s looking at the prison population almost because there’s slight differences to men and women.

Joe O’Mahoney [00:23:51]:
The more extremes at one end are going to be women and the more extremes at another end are going to be men. So that type of personality profile, both in society more generally, but also in amongst entrepreneurs, tends to be male.

Melody Moore [00:24:08]:
Why do you think that female founders find it so hard to get funding?

Joe O’Mahoney [00:24:14]:
Yeah, it’s a really good point. I mean some of it is around, some of it is. I mean, okay, the data on this is mixed and there’s clearly one thing the data does say is that there is a very significant disparity between men and women. Sometimes it’s be the biggest, the biggest driver of that difference is the type of companies that men and women found. So then if the highest multiple companies in terms of the multiple of EBITDAR that you get the valuation are tech firms and finance firms. And they are unfortunately the types of firms that women tend not to found, they’re the type that men tend to found. So typically. So if I look at consulting entrepreneurs, it’s probably nearly split down the middle.

Joe O’Mahoney [00:25:17]:
So it’s probably 60% men, 40% women. A consulting firm will be valued at an average of 7 times EBITDA. So buyers and investors, they’re kind of interested, you know, if it’s a nice one, fine. If you’ve got a half decent tech firm, say you’re doing SAS or software development or manager, whatever, something in AI investors love it because your multiple, your multiple is 20 times EBITDA and the return on investment can be crazy good. So the biggest contributor to the difference in funding between men and women is the type of companies that they found. There’s lots of other stuff, but I don’t know enough about the other stuff to make to say anything with confidence.

Melody Moore [00:26:11]:
Interesting. I’m Using my electronic notebook and it’s just turned off because I was listening so hard to you there. Lost my notes.

Joe O’Mahoney [00:26:19]:
Yeah, I don’t. I mean, I can, I’m always happy to give opinions, but I, obviously with my background, I’m. I try and be evidence based, so.

Melody Moore [00:26:28]:
Yeah, amazing. Yeah. I mean, I’d much rather that than just. Just making it up.

Joe O’Mahoney [00:26:34]:
Sure. Yes.

Melody Moore [00:26:36]:
We’ve got plenty of people who do that.

Joe O’Mahoney [00:26:38]:
Yeah.

Melody Moore [00:26:40]:
Talk to me about. In my notes, it says a guy called Simon.

Joe O’Mahoney [00:26:46]:
Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So this, this was a. This was a shift in my career, I guess. And after my PhD, I wanted to. I liked academia quite nice, it was quite relaxed and, you know, I had lots of free time, but I didn’t want to be one of those academics or professors who had never experienced the real world, so. And academics would say, well, this is the real world.

Joe O’Mahoney [00:27:12]:
I’m like, no, it’s not. So I decided to go out to work in consultancy and, you know, get as much experience with as many different companies as possible. I joined this firm called Zanza. Now, if I’d known what I know now, I wouldn’t have joined the firm, I’d have joined someone different. But they, they were more of a process firm, lots of tech. They were starting up a strategy arm and they asked me to join it and I said, I said yes. And I’d done a bit of consulting during my PhD and it was enough to justify me going to the firm and doing a little bit more. Anyway, I ended up.

Joe O’Mahoney [00:27:53]:
I mean, I remember my first report I produced and I thought it was great, I thought it was creative, I thought it was going to make a difference. I thought I identified the value drivers. And my boss came back and basically said, didn’t say anything about the report, but started talking about the alignment of the paragraphs and the colours that I’d used, dotting the I’s and crossing the T’s. And I. My heart sunk. And then I ended up in a windowless office in stains doing the photocopying for some awful firm. And I was thinking, this is awful, I’ve jumped wrong. And I thought, well, I’m going to go back to academia.

Joe O’Mahoney [00:28:34]:
And I’d only been doing this for about three months or so, but then I passed in the corridor, chap called Simon Forge and I think he was reading a book about Japanese haikus poetry. And I thought, well, he’s interested. So I kind of followed him down the corridor and waited and got a measure of him. And that type of book is unheard of. In consulting. But because I’d done an arts undergraduate, I was obviously interested poetry and history and culture. And so I started to talk to him about Japanese art and Japanese poetry and he was really interesting. He said, what are you doing, Jaron? I said, oh, you don’t want to ask Simon? And he said, he said, drop that.

Joe O’Mahoney [00:29:21]:
He said, come with me. 3G is starting up. And this was the first time that phones had done anything other than text and phone calls. And so all of a sudden we were getting video, music, games on phones, see each other for the first. This technology hadn’t been invented yet. He said, come with me and we’ll. We’ll see what we can do. And he wrote me an email on Boxing Day and said, what do you know about 3G Telco? I said, nothing.

Joe O’Mahoney [00:29:53]:
He said, well, I’ve rewritten your cv. You’ve got an interview with this startup which was three, the mobile phone company. They’re thinking, they’re thinking of buying a 3G licence. I want you to go along and. And interview. So I spent all night reading about it and then went for the interview and got it and ended up running quite. You know, I became head of, in effect, consulting in the firm and, and, yeah, and that. That was a step change.

Joe O’Mahoney [00:30:22]:
So from there I was. I went from. I can’t even remember what I was doing in this windowless office, but it was boring. No growth, no challenge to this world where there were billions of pounds being invested in new tech. There was lots of room for creativity and I thrived in that environment. And so Simon, and I’m still in contact with him now, Simon pulled me out of one and put me in the other and I’ll always be grateful to him for that. And I had massive imposter syndrome because obviously I was put in running a firm of, you know, running the department of tech tech people. I knew nothing about it.

Joe O’Mahoney [00:31:01]:
And Simon would just calm me down, he’d say, it’s all. It’s not about texture, it’s about business. You know, just focus on what, what is important to the buyer, you know, what, what. What’s important to you. Don’t worry about how it’s done. And it was great advice. So he was a really good mentor for a couple of years, but more importantly, just got me out of one hellhole and got me into an accelerating, exciting place.

Melody Moore [00:31:28]:
I think most consultants, myself included, would recognise you’re reading a book overnight to become an expert in something.

Joe O’Mahoney [00:31:37]:
Yeah, yeah. I mean, that’s the other great thing about consulting is that I mean, you. You learn fast and you. I mean, for better or worse, I mean, no one wants to be the blagger, but if you. If you learn fast enough, you can normally get up to speed within a couple of months and very often accelerate beyond people who’ve been doing it for years. And that’s nothing to do with. I always say to my boys, intelligence works in many different ways. And I’m very, very good in one or two ways, and I’m pretty awful in the rest.

Joe O’Mahoney [00:32:13]:
That’s okay. Just need to find the niche that celebrates your form of intelligence.

Melody Moore [00:32:19]:
I think consulting, for me, anyway, a lot of the time is about taking something that’s a bit conceptual and making it real so people might intellectually understand something. But actually, what does that actually mean in practise? So there’s a very practical element to consulting, which is a different kind of intellectual.

Joe O’Mahoney [00:32:42]:
Yeah. And I say to my students, you know, there’s different forms of consulting. There’s the form of consulting where someone tells you what to do and you do it. So it’s the delivery side of things. And that suits some people. And so a lot of my students get rejected from IBM or Accenture or Tata Consulting, but it’s good that they get rejected because they’re not that type of person. And then there’s another form of consulting which is a bit more based on relationships, thinking creatively, creatively. Strategy, that type of stuff.

Joe O’Mahoney [00:33:15]:
And that suits. It suits me a lot more, and it suits some of my students a lot more. It’s just harder to get into in some ways.

Melody Moore [00:33:22]:
Yeah. And why. Yeah, I’m really interested in the fact that. Did you know this guy Simon before, or did you literally just bump into him in the corridor?

Joe O’Mahoney [00:33:32]:
Bumped into him. But I don’t know about you, but. But I. I have a radar for people that I’ll get on with, and I can almost tell by looking at them. And I don’t know why that is. I think there’s a certain. We’ll talk about depression later. But I.

Joe O’Mahoney [00:33:55]:
I very often find that the people that I chime with most. I don’t know anything about Simon’s mental history. I wouldn’t want to. Don’t want him suing me. The people that I try in with most are very often those that have suffered from depression or anxiety and, you know, are quite bright, but have maybe that brightness has caused some struggle in their life because they think too much about things. And. Yeah, so there’s a few people like Simon who I’ve, you know, latched Onto because they seem to appreciate and struggle with some of the deeper, more complex things in life when perhaps they don’t need to maybe.

Melody Moore [00:34:40]:
I mean I’m a great believer in some kind of, you know, energy side of things. So, you know, on some level, on some unconscious level you’re recognising them even if consciously you don’t know why or how. It just happens.

Joe O’Mahoney [00:34:58]:
I remember when I was, I was dating someone who was very wrong for me and Mum remember Mum saying, is she. Does she feel part of your tribe and though that I don’t want to be too exclusive about this type of thing but sometimes someone is clearly in your tribe.

Melody Moore [00:35:15]:
Yeah, interesting. And I think, you know, it’s not always that we connect with people who are the same at us. Sometimes it’s the difference that we connect to on, you know, I think it’s complex anyway, but I don’t think we necessarily understand it. So you ended up doing consulting. You’ve then found that you really loved it. At some point you though you went back into academia and then also started your business. So can you just give me a sort of.

Joe O’Mahoney [00:35:49]:
Yeah, sure. So I have always struggled, well, until recently, struggled with depression, anxiety and working at 3, it was the largest startup in the world at the time. We had nothing other than a piece of paper and we had to launch within three years from start to finish the build. And we were creating technology that had never been seen before. It was, it was rocket science. And it’s not just getting videos onto mobile phones, it’s protecting the videos, it’s being able to charge people, it’s having the handoff between mobile phone masks and there wasn’t a mobile phone network for this stuff because people didn’t know how it would work. And I worked too hard at this. I was in the office before anyone.

Joe O’Mahoney [00:36:46]:
Well, I mean when I joined There were only 16 of us and eventually there were thousands and thousands. But I was in the office before anyone and I left after everyone and I took the growth of the company personally and that meant things happened, but it also meant that I was wearing myself out and at the same time the person I was dating had quite bad depression as well. So I was coming home to, you know, sometimes my clothes being cut up or various other household traumas. And so I, we launched the company and then I thought I can’t cope with this anymore. So I thought I’m gonna go, I. I’m gonna go back to academia. And I tried a year at Lancaster and just didn’t take to it. At all, it’s a very odd political atmosphere.

Joe O’Mahoney [00:37:39]:
I thought if I’m gonna, you know, I, I cut my salary by 2/3, maybe more, go back to academia. And I had to start at the bottom again as a lecturer. And then I thought, well, I’ll try Cardiff. And at the same time I met the woman who was going to become my wife and she was down that way, she was going to Bristol. So I thought, well, I’ll try Cardiff University and my family from Cornwall. So it was near enough there. And at the time I wanted human relations. I wanted to be me, my fiance as she became, and I wanted to be near my family.

Joe O’Mahoney [00:38:15]:
So I tried Cardiff, expecting to be there for a year or two. And that was 20 odd years ago. And it was hard because academia is a completely different kettle of fish. You have to, you know, the longest thing I’d written in consulting had perhaps been you know, 1500 word report or a long email or something like that. And all of a sudden you’ve got to write deep academic papers or books that are evidence based and peer reviewed and there’s a hierarchy of marks that you get for different types of papers. And that was a real struggle. And also moving from a team environment to an individual because you’re by yourself in academia, you don’t have a team that you work with, generally speaking. And it was a real shock.

Joe O’Mahoney [00:39:06]:
And also all of the administration and bureaucracy and you know, that stuff that you don’t have in consultancy so much.

Melody Moore [00:39:14]:
So you would. I be right in saying then you were burnt out by consulting by that role at three. Why then academia? What, what made that seem attractive to you?

Joe O’Mahoney [00:39:30]:
It, it was easier, I guess I specifically wanted to trade money for time in academia. You don’t have to travel, you don’t have to sell, you don’t have to pretend. I knew I loved teaching. The big driver for coming back, the writing I knew I could do if I could remember how to do it. So it was relatively low pressure.

Melody Moore [00:40:03]:
Now.

Joe O’Mahoney [00:40:03]:
Times have changed over 20 years, it’s got a lot tougher. The money’s even worse than it was when I joined in relative terms. So it’s not a place I would necessarily encourage people to have a career in now. But at the time I thought, well, I, I need something easy, easier. So I took, I think I took about a year out and thought, well, you know, let’s become an academic. And it’s a str. You know, it’s, it’s like any hierarchy, it’s hard to, it was hard to make professor and So I, I, I did continue to work hard, but it gave me time to recover. In fact, it was so, it was so little work initially, I started a company in my spare time.

Joe O’Mahoney [00:40:51]:
So I started a firm called Stay Mobile Technology, which is a small tech firm that I eventually sold a few years later. Not for, not for a lot of money, but, you know, certainly more than covered my costs. Yeah. So it was, I, I think it was primarily to recover because I pushed myself too hard.

Melody Moore [00:41:13]:
It’s interesting that you came to recover, had pushed yourself too hard, but because it was a bit quiet, you started another business.

Joe O’Mahoney [00:41:22]:
I’m my own worst enemy. I can’t. Oh. Tell you what, there is, I, I can’t prove this. There’s no, I’ve looked for statistical evidence on it and I can’t find it. Every time I’ve been on antidepressants, I’ve started a company, I think anti, and this is a hypothesis that I would love a medical research to pick up on. I think antidepressants reduce your propensity, the sensitivity to risk. I think there’s something, maybe, maybe it’s just in a specific population or there’s some comorbidities or so I don’t know.

Joe O’Mahoney [00:42:06]:
But you care less about consequences. Your anxiety about, you know, waking up in the night thinking about the mortgage or thinking about what are people going to think of me is less. And so I think, then I think, and I’ve got other anecdotal stories around this from other people. I think potentially there’s a, there’s a correlation between the use of antidepressants and entrepreneurship. Interesting. PhD there perhaps. But at the time I was on antidepressants and I was, I’d taken a year out, I was in academia, I was doing okay and I thought, I’m a bit bored, I’ll start another company. Which I shouldn’t have done.

Joe O’Mahoney [00:42:46]:
It was, yeah, it wasn’t, it was, again, huge amount of work. Yeah. But I think I sold that in 2007 and since then on the academic side of things, did relatively well. Went up the ranks, did some, you know, papers and books, became professor. But what happened with the consulting side was that people who I had known as a consultant, they went up the ranks. Some of them didn’t make partner, so they left and started their own firms. Then when they started to grow their firms, they realised that there wasn’t a queue of people outside their door all of a sudden. Because if you’re a partner at kpmg, clients are going to come to you.

Joe O’Mahoney [00:43:34]:
When you’re starting your own firm, no one’s heard of you, no one cares who you are. And so they came to me asking for advice. And so really from 2003 onwards, I was giving free advice to a lot of my friends on how to grow their firms and all the rest of it. I realised that a lot of the advice I was giving was based on my own experience, which I don’t think is sufficient for you to be a board advisor. I think it needs to also be based on research. I’m very suspicious of board advisors who have grown and sold their own firms, but have never done any, you know, research on what works, because the fact that you sold Your own firm 20 years ago doesn’t give you the right to comment on a different firm in a different time, different place, all the rest of it. So then I started researching what works in terms of growth and I published a book three or four years ago called Growth, which was a culmination of all of my findings. And during that process I decided to start charging people a bit.

Joe O’Mahoney [00:44:34]:
So I didn’t charge my friends, but I started to charge people that they passed me on to or made referrals to. And so now that’s, I guess, 50 of my role. So I. I went down to 50 at the university, especially if the university work has got basically, once you get to professor. Sorry to keep talking, once again, that’s good. You either go up through the ranks and become an administrator, which I hate and I’m rubbish at, so you become dean of the school, or you come. Come Vice chancellor, or you go down to part time. So I thought I’ll go down to part time so I don’t have to do an admin role, so I can just teach and write, which is what I love.

Joe O’Mahoney [00:45:15]:
And then 50% of my time I act as a board advisor.

Melody Moore [00:45:20]:
And how does that work? Do you split your week? How does it work being 50? 50.

Joe O’Mahoney [00:45:24]:
Oh, I wish I could give you an answer. It. I mean, when the university wants me, they want me intensively for a short period. So I’ll have, you know, a month of teaching solid or a month of marking for the rest of the time. They don’t need me that much, so as long as I anticipate those peak times, I’m okay. So it’s very much finger in the air. HR wouldn’t like me saying that maybe they’ll contact me after this, but it’s more IT work. It will work out roughly at 50, 50, but I don’t keep track of it.

Melody Moore [00:46:04]:
But you is your. Because consulting is by its very nature very unpredictable. Is the university work. Do you know more in advance when you’re going those times you’re going to be needed?

Joe O’Mahoney [00:46:18]:
Yeah, yeah. So I normally know a few months in advance when I’m going to be needed. My consulting work, it started off quite unpredictable, but once you’ve got your marketing sorted and your brand and people know who you are, you can then. You can then be in a position to say, well, I can do this, but I’ll do it in two months. So it’s up to you whether you want to wait for me or not.

Melody Moore [00:46:44]:
And do they usually say yes?

Joe O’Mahoney [00:46:46]:
Yeah, yeah. I mean, there’s very. I’m a consultant to the consulting industry and there’s very few of us and those of us that do do it are very often associated with banks or brokers and they’re biassed because they want you to sell your company to them immediately or have them as a brand. So I guess, I mean, I’m relatively active on LinkedIn and the consequence of that is that people come to me and I’ve got more demand than I can supply. So I’m in a very lucky position where I can say no to people, give or take, I think.

Melody Moore [00:47:34]:
I’ve also been consulting with World for a long time, over 20 years. And one thing I think, having worked closely with other consultancies, you know, I worked for large consultancy where we were very much, we would say yes, I would say to, and we would bend over backwards to make something happen in the client’s timescale. I also worked for a small consultancy prior to that and because they were small, they couldn’t make things happen in their client’s time scale. And I’ve seen other typically smaller consultancies actually just learn to say no.

Joe O’Mahoney [00:48:13]:
Yeah.

Melody Moore [00:48:13]:
And then the client, you realise that those deadlines were completely made up anyway. Someone just decided today. Most deadlines are literally just made up and then much, much more flexible than people would, would, would tell you. And you learn that when you work, you know, you bend over backwards, you work like crazy to meet a deadline and then all of a sudden it shifts anyway.

Joe O’Mahoney [00:48:37]:
So, yeah, and there’s a certain type of consultancy, we’re actually saying no gains you respect, you know, I’ve got a backlog, I’m not, not going to work for that price. If you want to work with me, there’s a contract and it’s for a period of time and, you know, I’m more than happy to recommend people to other individuals or even other firms. But I remember the friend of mine called Martin, who’s a marketing guy, he. He said, your confidence in negotiations and the prices you charge is entirely a function of whether your mortgage is being paid that much. And, you know, you suddenly find, if you do have a full pipeline and you’ve got money in the bank, you suddenly find that actually you’re much more confident in negotiations and people respect that and they’ll pay you more and they’ll treat you better. Key thing is to have that mentality, even if the pipeline isn’t there.

Melody Moore [00:49:37]:
Yes. I was talking to someone the other day. They used to run a lot of retreats and were extremely successful. And someone said to him, the fact that you’re full is God’s way of telling you to raise your prices.

Joe O’Mahoney [00:49:54]:
Yes. Yeah, definitely. Yeah.

Melody Moore [00:49:56]:
Really made me laugh.

Joe O’Mahoney [00:49:57]:
And if you’re not saying no, or even if you’re not being rejected, you know, at least 50 of the time your prices are too low or you’re doing something wrong because, you know, people will say, you know, I’ve got 100 success rate with my proposals. Well, that’s awful. You’re. They’re clearly going for you because you’re. You’re cheap because there’s loads of competitors out there, no matter what you’re doing. So, you know, if you’re getting 100 success rate, put your prices up.

Melody Moore [00:50:27]:
Love that. Tell me about that work life balance, then, of. You know, you run two businesses, you have a family, you have this strong work life. Work. I can’t say it. A strong work ethic. That’s what I’m trying to say. And you’ve struggled with anxiety and depression through your.

Melody Moore [00:50:54]:
Through your life, through your career. How do you. Do you think there’s a relationship between how hard you’re working and. And your depression? Is it completely unrelated? I don’t know. I’m curious.

Joe O’Mahoney [00:51:08]:
Yeah, no, it’s a really good question. Yes. Yeah. So I. I mean, I. I’ve been on these wonderful pills for six or seven years now. It’s called citalopram. It works for me.

Joe O’Mahoney [00:51:25]:
Very low dose. I no longer get anxiety or depression. I’m so much happier now. Depression has hit me hard two or three times in my life, quite badly, but I’ve always had sort of, they’d call generalised anxiety disorder. I’ve, you know, I’ve always been anxious, even as a child. And we can talk about why if you want, but maybe we don’t want to go there, but. So that side of things is under Control. And I.

Joe O’Mahoney [00:51:57]:
Before going on to those, I tried everything. So I tried the talking stuff, the therapy stuff, exercise, sunlight, you know, all types of stuff. None of it really worked. This stuff works fantastically for me. I don’t know about anyone else, but this is. So the consequence of that is that long hours, they exhaust me. But mentally I’m fine. That may not be a good thing.

Joe O’Mahoney [00:52:29]:
I. Because, I mean, I’m not interested in getting wealthy. I turned my back on that when I left consultancy on the partner. So these days I’m a lot better at managing my work life balance. My wife perhaps would say, no, you’re not. But you know, I took the boys into school today. I’ll see them when I pick them up. Occasionally I’m travelling.

Joe O’Mahoney [00:52:58]:
I was in London yesterday for a couple of days, but usually I’m around at the weekend. I’d say 50% of the time I don’t work at the weekend. Usually during the day I will work from half eight to five, half five. So it’s not. It’s much better than it was. You know, I used to burn the candle at both ends. I’m 51 now. I haven’t got the energy for that.

Joe O’Mahoney [00:53:23]:
So I think my work life balance is better. It’s hard as a dad because my work life balance is my life bit is my family time. What I’m not very good at is getting time for myself. I should go to the gym more, I should do stuff by myself more. I should make some friends. I don’t. I don’t really have time because my personal time, my life bit is my kids and family. I think again, my wife might disagree, but I’d like to.

Joe O’Mahoney [00:54:01]:
A good friend of mine said, you need. You’ve got the work stuff, you’ve got your family stuff and you need the you stuff. And I’m not very good at the used stuff.

Melody Moore [00:54:10]:
I’m curious as to why not. Do you. Does it not feel important to you or the other stuff’s more interesting?

Joe O’Mahoney [00:54:20]:
Not more interesting. More interesting. I mean, I guess I. I don’t really have. I’m more of an introvert. I have. Outside of family. I have one friend who I made about three years ago and I really like him.

Joe O’Mahoney [00:54:37]:
He’s a lovely guy called Gareth. Apart from him, who I probably see once every couple of weeks, lives about a mile away, I don’t really have friends, but I don’t feel I need them so much. If I had, I’d love to go to the. I’d love to get bit again, but. But you know, it’s the struggle of any parent, especially women, I think that, you know, if something’s got to give, but it’s not going to be work because you’ve got to pay the bills, it’s not going to be your family because your kids have got to be brought up as functioning individuals in society who are reasonably happy. If something’s going to give, it’s probably going to be you. And I’ve had, you know, I don’t want to say up until I had kids, but I was, I was quite lucky. I travelled, I did exciting things, did the festivals and all the rest of it and now I’m quite happy to sacrifice a bit of my time for other things.

Melody Moore [00:55:42]:
I was funny, I was thinking this morning when I was dropping my daughter at school, school about can you have it all? And I was thinking, you can, but maybe not all at the same time.

Joe O’Mahoney [00:55:53]:
Yeah. How old’s your daughter?

Melody Moore [00:55:55]:
She’s 14.

Joe O’Mahoney [00:55:56]:
Okay. All right. Yes.

Melody Moore [00:55:58]:
But I’m a single mum so it’s kind of got the extra challenge of.

Joe O’Mahoney [00:56:02]:
Huge amount of respect. I don’t know how. I don’t know how you do it. It’s. Yeah, it’s tough. So well done.

Melody Moore [00:56:10]:
Yeah. Sometimes I don’t know how I do it. Her dad’s involved as well, but on a sort of day to day in the week basis it’s just the two of us. I’m curious if you’re happy to talk about it, about the anxiety side of things and the fact that you said you’ve always been anxious. How do you. Well, I’m interested if you have a sense of where it’s come from and how you manage that on a day to day or how it impacts, if at all, in. In your work.

Joe O’Mahoney [00:56:39]:
Yeah. Okay. How does it. So I had. We never know where these things come from, whether it’s nature or nurture. But my. On my dad’s side, unfortunately there’s a lot of mental health issues. I also had a relatively unstable upbringing, so it was a little bit violent, a little bit more violent than I would have liked and it was a little bit more unstable than I think is good for a child.

Joe O’Mahoney [00:57:22]:
Whether or not that is the primary cause, I don’t know. But all of the children in the family have struggled with. There’s five of us, I’ve got four, four younger sisters. All of us have struggled with anxiety and depression. How has it impacted my work? I would say it’s made me less in inverted commas, successful. So I could have. If I was a different person, I could have stayed, you know, I’ve got a good friend who always reminds me, joe, if you’d stayed in consulting, you’d have been partner by now, you know, and you probably would have retired with a yacht and all the rest of it. And that’s prob, you know, probably, probably true, but I can’t cope with that amount of pressure.

Joe O’Mahoney [00:58:19]:
And, and also it’s, it’s, it’s made life harder. I mean, it’s, it’s pain, isn’t it? I mean, anxiety and depression is genuine pain and that pain takes a toll on the body and the mind. And I am not either physically or mentally, perhaps the person I could have been if I hadn’t had that amount of pain. But then, you know, some people would say, well, you know, I mean, look at my dad, he went the other way. He had pain in his childhood and he turned into a success. So I think it, you know, I think it depends on who you are, but you can’t do much about how you respond to these things. And. But perhaps it’s.

Joe O’Mahoney [00:59:09]:
Maybe work harder as well, because I do. I hate doing a bad job. I can’t stand being thought badly of by someone. So I often, you know, if a client engages me for a day, I’ll typically do two days work on something because I want it to be a really good piece of work. I ran a workshop recently for the first time with these guys I was telling you about, and it was a huge amount of work and I got them to practise and I got them to polish and I got them to, you know, and so I’m a little bit of a control freak there and. Yeah, but I think, okay, so that all of that’s, I think all of that is probably in the past now. Generally speaking, I don’t have that burden now. The downside about these pills, as with most antidepressants, is that it curtails the lows, but it slightly curtails the highs as well.

Joe O’Mahoney [01:00:13]:
So colours are slightly dimmer, music is slightly muter, and that’s heartbreaking, but it’s less heartbreaking than the feeling of depression, which is crushing.

Melody Moore [01:00:27]:
It’s a price worth paying for that, I think.

Joe O’Mahoney [01:00:32]:
So other people would disagree, but there’s only one way you can make that choice, and that’s individually.

Melody Moore [01:00:40]:
You must have met many, many founders over your career. Do you. I have a sense that, you know, where does that real drive that founders have to have? You know, I know plenty of people who have started their own business, who maybe their childhood has been less than perfect. And there’s. That drive has come from somewhere, you know.

Joe O’Mahoney [01:01:05]:
Funny, isn’t it?

Melody Moore [01:01:06]:
Yeah. Also, I think people who maybe are different, diverse in some way find even just getting into, you know, the regular sort of mainstream professions difficult, therefore start their own business because they just haven’t, you know, for whatever reason, systemic reasons have found it difficult either to get in or to, to really fly. So, you know, go off and do it for themselves.

Joe O’Mahoney [01:01:37]:
Yeah, definitely. I mean, there’s the risk thing and then there’s the reward. And some people don’t know about the reward. So some people don’t have the confidence or the knowledge or expertise to start up their own company. But there’s also this burning platform side of things, which is people who don’t necessarily fit into the square hole that someone has drilled for them because they’re a round peg. And you can apply to Accenture all you, all you want, but if you don’t get it, you shouldn’t see that as a failure because there is a round hole somewhere for you. You might need to make it yourself. So I think, I think you’re right.

Joe O’Mahoney [01:02:17]:
I think a lot of founders have that mentality. But I remember talking to, as an undergraduate, I befriended the, she was the chief psychologist of the British government or something and she was dealing with the mop up after the King’s Cross fire disaster where something like 3,000 people needed counselling afterwards. And I asked her this, I asked her a similar question and she said, she said, you’ll get someone with a, you know, tough childhood was violent, they weren’t cared for, they always thought their parents were going to leave them and they will use that to drive themselves into a place where that isn’t. That threat isn’t there. So you get a lot of people who are very successful, but then you have somebody who is broken by it and will end up in prison because of it. And she said that divergence of exactly the same childhood causing two completely different outcomes. We always like to think it’s down to the individual or down to will, or down to some mystic spirit that person deserves. But she said, you’ve got no more choice about that than you do of anything else in your life because it depends on the type of person you are.

Joe O’Mahoney [01:03:42]:
There isn’t this mystical, you know, separate bit of you that determines that you’re going to go one way or the other. You know, it’s mechanistic.

Melody Moore [01:03:52]:
I also believe that no one, no two people have the exact same childhood.

Joe O’Mahoney [01:03:58]:
That’s true.

Melody Moore [01:03:58]:
So I I studied Developmental trauma is something I’m really interested in. It’s something I’ve studied. But, you know, you’re. You’re one of five those, I’m one of four. We’ve all had different experiences. Our parents actually behave differently towards us. You know, where, where we are in the family has an impact. What was going on in the world in our family, especially when there’s a number of you and therefore there’s 10 years between the oldest and youngest in my family of siblings and quite a lot changes in 10 years.

Melody Moore [01:04:31]:
So no one ever has an identical childhood, even if it looks like it from the outside.

Joe O’Mahoney [01:04:40]:
Well, you might have had the same experience as me in terms of my training is as a sociologist, really. So, you know, if, if you do a PhD in an arts area, which a business is, you’ll be taught all about nurture. As soon as you have children, you suddenly realise, you know, they’ve got their own personalities and you can, you can influence them, you can give them confidence, but there’s a line that they’re following and, and so then you realise that nature plays a big part in this.

Melody Moore [01:05:15]:
As well, and your nature interacting and nurture, interacting with their nature as well, you know, so that, you know, that’s why parents, some parents have favourite children because they find some easier than others, you know, it’s that interaction. Yes. Sorry, I didn’t say that. I’ve only got one child, so it’s fine. Let me finish off by asking you what’s next for you? For you, your business, the World of entrepreneurship, do you think?

Joe O’Mahoney [01:05:42]:
Okay, so I’m writing two books at the moment. One is on artificial intelligence professional services. The other one is on business development in professional services. I’m trying to get. I’m trying to codify what’s in my head. That’s my big challenge is I’m a great believer in getting what’s in your head and getting it onto paper, in effect. So I’m doing that at the moment that’s going to take three or four years to finish, but I’ve built a set of, I know, maturity frameworks, questionnaires, blogs and all the rest of it. So that’s part of it, I think AI is very, very interesting in terms of what it’s going to do to professional services and when and how.

Joe O’Mahoney [01:06:35]:
So that’s taking up a little bit of my time and, you know, the rest. I’d like to, you know, see the kids grow up relatively sensible, maybe even start going to the gym a little bit more.

Melody Moore [01:06:48]:
And what Advice would you give to your younger self?

Joe O’Mahoney [01:06:56]:
Number one, get on these pills quicker. I’d had those when I was 17. I’d have been. I’d had a very different life. Be kinder, I think maybe especially boys. And I’m not saying they’re psychopaths until they’re 30, as my mother would say, but I think some of them can be. So I think I. I would have been more gentle with some of the relationships I had early on, but that was a result of how I was treated quite young.

Joe O’Mahoney [01:07:32]:
Yeah. So I think those two things would probably get me. Get me quite far. Yeah.

Melody Moore [01:07:39]:
Does that kindness extend to kindness to yourself?

Joe O’Mahoney [01:07:43]:
Oh, I’m getting better at that. I took. My wife gave me permission, she might have even suggested it. But I was in London for a night, do this workshop and she said, why didn’t you take another night and go and see your new niece? Which is something I wouldn’t normally have done. And I did. I stayed another night in a lovely hotel, watched a film and then in the morning I went to see my niece in London. That’s something I wouldn’t have done five years ago. So slowly getting there.

Melody Moore [01:08:17]:
I like that. What about books? Obviously you’ve mentioned your book Growth. Have you written any other books? And see, there’s two more in the pipeline.

Joe O’Mahoney [01:08:27]:
Yeah. So I. Well, no, I wouldn’t. I wouldn’t recommend reading any of the other books that I’ve written. Growth. If you’re in consulting. Growth is. Is a good book.

Joe O’Mahoney [01:08:35]:
It’s evidence based. There’s a lot in there, probably too much in terms of consultancy. There’s a great book called the Boutique by Greg Alexander. I’d highly recommend that. It’s nice and simple. There’s a really nice book for those of you that prefer fiction. There’s a book called Getting Naked by Patrick Lencioni.

Melody Moore [01:09:00]:
I love him. I’ve not seen that one actually.

Joe O’Mahoney [01:09:03]:
Oh, it’s a good one, I think is his best one. I mean, it’s, it’s more. He doesn’t tell you so much stuff. It’s more of a story.

Melody Moore [01:09:10]:
All of his books are story based, aren’t they?

Joe O’Mahoney [01:09:13]:
Yeah, yeah, that’s true actually. What else have I got on my desk? Oh. So those of you that are interested in AI Co Intelligence by Ethan Mollick, you’re interested in AI and the professions and teaching. He’s a great guy to follow, even if it’s just on LinkedIn or Twitter. So outside of consulting, if you’re a student listening to this, I love the Economist. I think it’s probably the best businessy or even social commentary that’s publicly available. And it’s less right wing than you would think. In terms of fiction.

Joe O’Mahoney [01:09:58]:
I’m a big fan of science fiction. I. I like the classics, Arthur C. Clarke and Asimov. My favourite book this year has been it’s not the Pursuit of Happiness. Oh man. What’s it called? In Debt of Pleasure. It’s so.

Joe O’Mahoney [01:10:22]:
I love food and I love cooking and good food and it’s a murder mystery that’s wrapped up in a culinary journey. Really good. Yeah, it’s not. It’s not particularly deep. And even though it’s a. More of a teenage book, I’m still a big fan of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, which got me interested in ontology.

Melody Moore [01:10:49]:
What’s ontology?

Joe O’Mahoney [01:10:52]:
Theory of being. So what exists? So you know, for. If you’re a pro structuralist, all you think exists is words or language. If you’re an atomist or you think that exists are events. If you’re an actor, network theorist, all that exists, relationships, obviously the world is more complex than that. So there’s. I met a wonderful philosopher called Roy Bhaskar who invented an ontology called Critical Realism, which is the closest to the truth that I think exists. So anyone that’s interested in Critical realism, there’s lots of books out there on the ontology of social science.

Melody Moore [01:11:36]:
Interesting.

Joe O’Mahoney [01:11:37]:
Quite a variety there.

Melody Moore [01:11:39]:
Yes, I’m loving your variety. Our final question. What can you think of a title or a strap line for your story?

Joe O’Mahoney [01:11:48]:
Oh, well, I. It’s. Something’s just jumped into my head and it’s from a poem many years ago. I’m just having a quick look. It was a poem by Stevie Smith called Not Waving but Drowning. It’s a guy in the ocean. Nobody heard him, the dead man, but he’s. He.

Joe O’Mahoney [01:12:20]:
But still he lay moaning. I was much further out than you thought. And not waving but drowning. Slightly depressing, but hopefully I’m waving, not drowning now, but for much of my life I felt like it was the other.

Melody Moore [01:12:36]:
Brilliant. Thank you. I love that and I love that it came from a poem. So thank you very much. So I. I have had the best time this morning that has been so interesting. We’ve covered therapy. I am a therapist, so.

Melody Moore [01:12:56]:
No, really, really such a broad range of topics that we’ve covered and. Fabulous. So, yeah, thank you so much, Jo. I really appreciate your time.

Joe O’Mahoney [01:13:07]:
Thank you. Really enjoyed this.

Joe O’Mahoney [01:13:09]:
I was really excited to have Joe come on my podcast. I didn’t know him before inviting him. But I followed him for a While on, on LinkedIn and always really liked what he was talking about. So I knew it was going to be a really good experience talking to him. I didn’t really know how good it was going to be. And what I really enjoyed and what I think makes for the best podcast is that balance between a personal story and the honesty with which he talked about some of his challenges, about his depression, anxiety, but also how that he balanced that with his expertise and really being very generous and sharing his expertise, and particularly as his expertise is around entrepreneurship and consulting in particular. And having been a consultant for over 20 years myself, it’s a world I know only too well. So I really enjoyed, you know, I guess all sides of my interest were satisfied that there was that deeper connection of connecting to him as an individual and also, you know, that kind of understanding and sort of throwing around some ideas and thinking about the.

Joe O’Mahoney [01:14:25]:
The worlds of consulting. I was particularly interested when he talked about his anxiety and depression and how that would he could identify that potentially has roots in his childhood and really what impact that’s had on him was a very interesting area to explore. You know, how, you know, maybe he feels it’s made him less successful in the more traditional sense, but then it’s also made him work harder. And I could really hear some people pleasing in what he was describing, you know, that not being able to be thought badly of somebody and, you know, just a really interesting thing from my perspective about how the things that can make us successful. So wanting to please people can, you know, be really positive from some perspectives and often get us to where we are in life or get us to quite a successful level. But also there are downsides to things like people pleasing, where maybe it leads to burnout, maybe it leads to having a lack of boundaries. Joe very much talked about working very hard and not putting himself first. And, you know, we ended talking about how much time he makes for himself.

Joe O’Mahoney [01:15:38]:
And I think that’s such an important thing to consider when you have a tendency to put others feelings and needs above your own. I really wanted to put this interview with Jo as the first for the Entrepreneur series, because it’s kind of a broad overview in terms of someone who understands the world of consulting and entrepreneurs from an academic perspective, which is quite unusual. As we discussed earlier on, next week we’ve got Stephane Dubois, and Stephane is the chief exec of a tech startup and he again talks very openly about himself and about his entrepreneurship journey. So make sure you tune in next week. To hear his story.

Melody Moore [01:16:20]:
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