Heroes in Business - Alex Petrowski, 5EP Podcast Continued Conversation with Bob Mulhern Senior Managing Director Colliers International

Episode Date: May 1, 2023

Alex Petrowski, 5EP Podcast Continued Conversation with Bob Mulhern Senior Managing Director Colliers International and Board Chairman of Great Hearts Academies. Listen and learn as Alex and Bob discuss the topics of priorities, work culture and family life. Be sure to join the growing community on Instagram @5eppodcast.  

Hey Siri, what's on my calendar for today? Today, you have the 5EP podcast. Would you like to keep it on your calendar? 5EP? Yeah! Welcome to the 5EP podcast. Interview interviews and conversations to guide the genesis of personal development, mental, physical, emotional, spiritual, and social, the five pillars of living a five exclamation point life. On now with your host, Alex Petrowski. your host, Alex Petrowski. Welcome to another episode of the 5EP podcast. I'm here with Bob Mulhern, the Senior Managing Director of Collier's International, the Greater Phoenix Chapter, and he is also the Board Chairman of Great Hearts Academies in Arizona.

of Great Hearts Academies in Arizona. Many young leaders today often tell me that they struggle with the delineation between confidence and arrogance in leadership positions. What advice would you have for somebody who isn't as seasoned as to stay confident, yet be willing to learn and not people-please. I think the key is this idea of magnanimity, that if you really are trying to bring out the best in others, right, that's not arrogant, right? But to say, hey, I am in charge,

there's nothing arrogant about that. One of my favorite lines from Chariots of Fire is when, arrogant about that i one of my favorite lines from uh chariots of fire is when you know the the you have the eric little who's you know this great athlete and his his sister's afraid that you know he's not going to come to the missions after because she had this the christian background and he looks at his his um sister and he says you know um god made me fast okay and i and i i feel his pleasure when i'm running, but, but the fact that he recognized it, he just wasn't this fast guy that came out of nowhere, right. That he felt like somebody gave him these gifts and he was going to use them and for her not to worry about that. And I think the same thing sometimes is, and God did not make me fast, by the way, just so you

know, and I can't jump either, but I do, I do that, you know, he has given me a certain confidence level that I can share on something like this. I do think if we really are comfortable with, again, who we are, so that, again, starting with this personal humility, we can tell people, hey, look, I'm good at this, you know, stand back or have the humility to say, gosh, I am, I really have no idea what I'm talking about here. Like, like making a COVID decision, just show people who's, you know, you can make the decision is not a good way to go. But if you really have, again, a deep vision for what you're trying to accomplish, it allows you, I think, to stay humble. And then when people

come, you know, question you, that's where you're going to find out just how solid your decision, in our case, to put teachers and kids in the same classroom had nothing to do with all the different elements people are trying to bring in the conversation, because I was an expert in those things. So I would encourage people, because people ask me all the time, especially about real estate. I don't know the answer. I'm like, let me get, let me get that answer for you. And they think I'm somehow just, you know, don't want to answer the question, but really I, I'm not an expert in all, all things commercial. I'm really an expert leading a commercial real estate business, not what's going on in the office, industrial, retail, land, hospitality business right now, if that makes sense.

It does. And you have this saying that I love, who not how. And I'd love for you to expand upon the meaning of it and how people can derive benefit from that and that they can truly align with their priorities and not have to have to worry about knowing everything. Right. So I got that saying from a gentleman named Dan Sullivan. He has an organization called Strategic Coach. And he says that so many times when when some people, somebody, somebody brings us something, we say, how am I ever going to get this done? somebody brings us something, we say, how am I ever going to get this done? Or how can I assist? We're oftentimes what we should be saying is who can do this better than me or who has the answer to this? And it's amazing how much time you can save and how much energy you can save and how

actually good counsel you can give people is if you look to the who. So when people come to me and say, hey, what's going on, let's say, in the office market, I say, well, let me introduce you to one of my brokers who that's what they do day in, day out. And so you give them the who, or you have a task to get done, like we do in the office all the time. And if you don't have any experts there, it's okay, who can we go to, as opposed to making somebody do something they're not good at, who can we go to as opposed to making somebody do something they're not good at taking twice the time to do kind of half the the quality who does this um and so i would say that if you can ask yourself that every time you have a new assignment that uh that before you just jump

into it if that's your nature like it is mine uh you say to yourself is there somebody who can do this better than me or can make this easier and if and sometimes there isn't or sometimes they're they cost too much and you have to do it a lot of times it's a very easy answer to a um what seems to be a difficult issue and it's funny because you look at right now the um uh chat gpt you know like the other day i wanted to, I had something I was trying to figure out to do. And I just asked that, you know, I asked, I put it into chat GPT and there it was, there was that solution. Who can do this for me? And I got the, it's interesting.

It's becoming easier and easier to find the who in our society. How do you see chat GPT being utilized in the real estate industry? Well, it's interesting because like I was on a panel the other day and it came up and I said, you know, it's going to be all about leadership, right? It's going to be, you know, I said none of our brokers are going to lose their job to chat gpt but they are might they might lose their their edge in the market to somebody else who does use it right so that's why we have to keep an eye on these uh these technologies that can save us time saves energy find information that used to take a long time we can still use the old way if we want okay uh but it's just going to, there's going to

be a cost for that. It might cost, again, our health or our family because we just have less time for them. So I believe that for those who use it correctly and strategically, it'll save a lot of time and energy. But how that will, it's just way too new to know for sure but i'm excited to know that that again it's not going to displace anybody but it could displace a number of us in our if in what we do if someone else figures out how to use it before we do we don't pay good enough attention so i'm a big believer in find the easiest way to do things that's where the who not how uh stems from and of course now the who sometimes is not human. It's somebody, it's again, it's artificial help,

but that's okay too. It's a great example of leveraging technology to its full extent. Right, right. I want to transition to your family life now and ask for somebody with so many children and then several grandchildren, how do you manage the competing priorities on a daily basis? Yeah. Well, what helps there too is to remind the kids of our priorities. So I've always let the kids know

that mom, you know, no offense to them, but mom's more important to me, Tina, than any of them, right? And so, like, when we used to, we still have date nights. We still go on weekend trips together, and guess what? We miss games. We miss, you know, piano recitals. We miss things, right? And we say, well, but, you know, piano recital is important. Teen is more important. And so I do think that helps them. And so I grew up, I was the eighth of 12 kids. And I understood that my parents couldn't come to everything I did, right?

Now, brother or sister could. And then, of course, you're part of a team anyway. So for me, it's been easy to pass along, because my parents did such a good job at that, to just remind us that although this is really important, it seems like my third grade soccer game at the time seems like, what could be more important than that? At some point, they realized that all of these things um really if you if you can't keep again start to learn how to keep your kind of priorities in line that happens and then we do have conflicts obviously sometimes we have i remember we used to have like you know five

little league baseball games or softball games on the same weekend right or the same saturday and so you do divide them up and you ask some friends to help out. But I do think it's good for kids to not feel like they're the center of the world that were really important. Because I don't think there's any question each of my kids would know that I would literally die for them. At the same time, that doesn't mean I can go now

because they're older. I can't go necessarily rock climbing with them tomorrow, which I actually have an invitation to tomorrow and I hope I can do it. But, you know, it is sometimes you say, I can't do it because we have another family commitment. But I do think that, again, this vivid vision is very, very clear that we're in this together. So I love being a Mulhern. I love you as our kids. We're grateful for you. And, oh, by the way, can't come to the piano recital. I believe one day in the future, though, your kids will realize how much of an example that you were in being a good husband and how they can emulate that for their future relationships. So even though you're not being able to attend everything, you're still setting

that example. And that all stems from your priorities and that one day they'll realize it one day. Well, so right now I think a lot of them, cause my oldest three, so they do realize it and they spend time, you know, I mean, I, I, and of course I realized where I got some of these ideas. My, my, my wife, Tina's Tina's dad, he told me one time, the most loving thing you can do for your kids is to love your wife. Because there's so much of their futures wrapped up in this relationship that if you can keep it strong, it's a great gift to them. And I never forgot that. And so I got i got to live that and now my kids the older kids that are married are living that too because like because we actually have nine grandkids number 10 on the so oh wow just a little aside alex the

this saturday we have everybody in town because a couple of them live out of town right now and there'll be 23 of us are are just our immediate families that 23 people we're gonna get a picture because we need to do it before. Cause one of our daughters in laws is expecting in the picture. I'm going to be good for four months. Family's going to be 24. It's a great life. And I told one of my other sons who's used in his early thirties,

I'm like a big family is a very expensive lifestyle. It's necessarily a lifestyle. It is expensive, but it's worth every minute of the investment of time and energy and money. they just don't know. You don't know until you know, and you're a prime example of being totally fulfilled with a huge family and how beneficial that has been to your life. Yeah. Yeah. In fact, it's my identity. I mean, where I go, what I make sure I do when I meet people and they'll say, oh, this is Bob. They might introduce me as anything, but if they don't bring up that, you know, that have been buried 35 years and have nine kids. I work that right into the conversation because that's the very important identity for me is that, that people see me that, because sometimes I'm going to say no to other people too. I'm going to say no to business dinners. I'm going to say no to all kinds of things because of that. And so everybody needs

to really understand. And it's interesting because you would think that again, in my business, it's interesting because you would think that again, in my business, which is again, a sales, I run a sales organization and I, I'm home for dinner, you know, all but a couple of times a month because I've, that's more important to me than anything going on at work. And, and here I am, you know, later in my career and guess what? It worked out fine because other people, instead of like, you know, criticizing for you, they and guess what? It worked out fine because other people, instead of like, you know, criticizing for you, they kind of admire the fact that you're willing to stick with what's most important in your life. Yeah, I admire it greatly. And in order to do that, you truly need to be self-aware. So I want to ask, what are some avenues that young people today can take to start that journey of self-awareness and to truly know why they are the person they are today and what they value?

Yeah. Well, I think, you know, part of it is silence, quiet. You know, I think our lives are so busy. They're so loud. I'm up every morning before anybody else in this household and i find quiet i don't put things on i just give myself time to learn from myself and you know you you you become conscious of of what you've heard and um what you're feeling conscious of of what you've heard and um what you're feeling and so you you have to give yourself the chance to do that and and that's so important so every day i get probably i i tell people when

i've talked to groups that i go through you know get the you know my wife and the nine kids i i spend at least an hour every day and and what people call either meditation or spiritual exercises or practices and i'm in pretty good shape for an old guy again and i run a pretty big company and i do and uh in the great hearts is the you know pretty big responsibility and i said i probably have more quiet in my life than almost anybody here um and and it, it's because when people have quiet, they put music on, they put something that, you know, they're always listening to something.

There's just this constant going on. And so part of my secret sauce is giving my own mind chance to kind of reflect on life and priorities. And even before this podcast, I mean, my hope was that I didn't come rush into it and and and not be fully present so that I could questions, Alex. And that come just again today already finding time to just to just be me and and to and to pray and to read too, but all in the silence.

Being unapologetically yourself. And that makes me remember the example you gave to me way back when, when you had a speaker series program where you talked about Mother Teresa and her priorities and silence was the number one. And you talked about how it led to prayer, which led to faith, which led to love, then to service and then to peace. So when you're making your own priorities, do you think about what each priority leads to when you rank it? Yeah, absolutely. And actually from that mother Teresa quote, it's made me even dig into the silence more because we think of Mother Teresa

as a woman of faith, which, you know, she said silence leads to faith. And then we think of a woman of great, you know, you wonder how she could not wear herself out because we thought of she, a woman of faith and service but before faith she had silence and after service she had peace and why did she have peace because she knew that was her call right she knew this is what god's plan was for her and so she could find real peace in that so instead of being worn out by all of the responsibilities um she uh found great peace and then of course started the next day, started every day in silence. It still requires, you know, the sisters, it's part of their order that they

have to spend an hour in silence every day, in the waking hours, right? So that they can, again, not get carried away with all of the distractions that the world has to offer. not get carried away with all of the distractions that the world has to offer. What advice would you have for young people these days when they say things like, I don't need religion. I don't need to go to church. I just need to make sure I have a high paying job and I get this, this and this benefits. I don't feel that having any sort of religious affiliation is going to benefit me at all. Well, what would you say to that? Well, I would say that that community is what we were made for. I mean, if you look at, you know, in the beginning, you know, God made man and woman and they were, you know, there was a community there.

There was a community there. And I do think that and even in, you know, it's in my own life as a Christian, as a Catholic, you know, you look at Jesus world. He was constantly calling people together, constantly having these and these and he wasn't and he did go off on his own. That was it. And had his silence. Right. But he he always brought it back to community. And so I've found that the people I see who are hacked with what really believe deep inside, two things is that, first of all, again, they've taken the time to understand who they are. And secondly, they're sharing that with a whole bunch of like-minded people. And the best place to find like-minded people in my world is people of faith. At work, we're like-minded in certain ways, we have different priorities, right? And

other families are that. Wherever you're working out, it's different, but there's, that uh where you're wherever you're working out is different but there's usually faith communities have a very similar uh and hopefully uh you know a very established set of of um intentions that i think really allow the heart the soul the mind all be tied together a bigger body which is where again i think a lot of strength comes is where, again, I think a lot of strength comes from. And I know my own life, a lot of my strength comes from that. And then, of course, I'm not just involved in going to Mass as a Catholic, but I'm in a fellowship every Thursday with a bunch of other guys that are going through life like I am. And it's really great to know we're in this together.

We have a group chat and text. And today there's already been a number of comments to encouraging and somebody needs this or that. So I just think that going at it alone just isn't a good idea. I remember one time, because I was pretty independent in high school and college. And this guy said, hey, I can tell you're a self-made man by the bag size.

So his point was, you know, you're working way too hard, buddy. And he was one of the guys that helped me really develop my faith because he says, look, you're on this on your own and you're carrying way too big a burden and you're going to just wear yourself out. Most young people today also, in terms of young men, don't fully realize the benefits that having fellowships like yourself with other men can really benefit them on a deeper level and really provide that support can you can you describe some support you've received well yeah

it comes i mean like we meet thursdays it used to be nine o'clock and now it's 8 30 at night um because we got to get the kids down you do all those things so a lot of times by thursday at 9 p.m i mean i was really tired right but i would i would go kind of make myself go and every time be so, I'm so glad that I do, because it's here that I see life being, you know, we're kind of working our life, what they say, like in fear and trembling. And you realize you're in this together with a lot of other people. And something you're going to learn the hard way, you can learn easier by just some counsel someone gives who's faced the same issues. So I've just found that there's certain things that I can understand. Man has a mind that works differently than a woman's and just like mine and even with my wife and with me.

than a woman's and just like mine and my, even with my wife and with me. And so when you have other, in my case, a lot of married men here, they can help me think through things and talk to me about things that, but again, I just, you know, I remember there was a book one time, you know, I think, you know, men speak one language, women speak another. I can't remember what those were. And sometimes that's what I feel like that these guys are translators to help me go home and really be what I want to be. I want to be the husband of teenage dreams and I'm able to, to be more loving, more supportive and just a better husband and dad by hanging around other husbands and dads. Yeah. A lot of people these days don't,

don't realize the basic fact that men and women are different. We need each other and we need to be treated and given similar opportunities. Yet when it comes to that deeper level of understanding, there's just times where you need to counsel other men and get their perspectives on certain things that women just don't have the life experiences to give and that's something that's coming from all love that's just facts so right right yeah there's the the again there there is many uh gosh hurdles that i didn't have to you know run into the into the hurdles, so to speak. I was able to go over just by getting good, practical, loving counsel from other men that I can trust

and who trust me. And with that, I have one final question for you. Sure. What advice would you give your past self between the ages of 18 and 25 on how to live a fulfilled and meaningful life? Yeah, I would definitely say to myself back then, the things I've learned now is don't throw all your priorities on a table and figure out each day, which one you're going to work on. Line, understand how they build on each other and they strengthen each other. And so each day doesn't mean you're not going to do them all. And then, but, but don't just pick one up today and then let the others, the others go, because I think what happens is that becomes a habit and a lot of people that's how they you know they put this checklist and they start prioritizing stuff and and it's it's this whole idea if you don't know where you're going any road will take you

there and at at my age now i have a lot of people around me that they ended up on this road they don't really know how they got here and it doesn't mean they're not happy it just means that they along the way they sometimes they've lost something. They've lost sometimes their faith, sometimes their spouse, sometimes their kids, sometimes their health, you know, or they didn't have time for the community. Most of them haven't, most of them held onto their job. That was that. But I think if I had heard that earlier, I would have saved myself a lot of energy. And again, those, those bags under my eyes would have been quite so big as I was trying to carry all of these uh these ambitions my own forward without really understanding

exactly where i was going just that i wanted to keep moving i want to move um you know moving the wrong direction is is not a long good a good long-term goal but that's what that's the advice i give myself bob i appreciate all the wisdom you shared today. It's going to help many people, many young people on their path to fulfillment and leaving a positive mark on this world. So for that, I applaud you. Well, thank you. And I really appreciate you asking me and the good work you're doing to make that happen for so many deserving and great young people. Thank you, Bob.

All right. Thank you, Alex. And that concludes this episode of the 5EP podcast. I'm Alex Petrowski, tuning off. Have a great week. You've been listening to the 5EP podcast with Alex Petrowski. Interviews and conversations to guide the genesis of personal development. If you enjoyed the show, share it with friends and family. Thank you.