The Grit Factor Podcast w/ Karl Jacobi

Murray Smith did not plan any of it. He finished high school, got accepted into chemical engineering, lasted two months, went home and told his mum he was done, and ended up in the Victoria Police because he thought he might like helping people until he figured out what he actually wanted to do. Fifteen years later he was still there, and everything that happened in between is the reason he is where he is today.

The early years were the kind that build a person in ways no classroom can replicate. Within his first year on the force, a serious car accident left him with fractured kneecaps, additional injuries, and a blood clot that put him back in hospital on blood thinners. He returned to work a month after clearing the blood thinners and within his first shift walked into a two hundred person brawl, had his arm broken in the first minute, had people attempting to grab his firearm, and finished the entire shift before realizing the arm was actually broken. Weeks later, while chasing a car thief through a high-rise stairwell at night, he ended up in a sustained fight, covered in the offender's blood through cuts on his hands, and was told by the man he had just restrained that he had AIDS. He spent three months waiting to find out whether he had contracted hepatitis C. He had not.

None of that broke him. What it did was make him ask a question that changed everything. He was lying in a hospital bed, genuinely loving the job, not even sure what day he got paid, and he thought: what am I going to do if I can't do this? That question sent him back to university part time while still on shift work. Then a postgraduate degree. Then a Harvard executive program. Then an MBA at MIT's Sloan Fellows Program, where he sat alongside people who had refinanced entire countries and chose to feel the discomfort of being the least financially literate person in the room rather than take the path that would have been easier. Then a return to Australia, a copy of Traction handed to him by a friend, and the decision to become an EOS implementer.

Today Murray runs Grip Six Implementation out of Geelong, Australia's first and most experienced EOS implementer, with over four hundred and fifty sessions delivered and more than sixty businesses running on the system he teaches. He also co-founded the Independent Executives to close the integrator gap for EOS companies worldwide and runs the Integrator Academy and Global Integrator Awards. This episode is for any founder who has ever felt like they were running the same quarter twelve times in a row and needed someone to tell them there is a system for this.