Sean Price & Mick Barry

The TPM Podcast

This week’s podcast hosted by Sean Price of Velez Managed Services is with Mick Barry.

Growing up as a "military brat" in Germany with his father, who at the time was based there after WW2 had ended. After three years Mick left seeking an education in Wolverhampton where he then left school at the age of 16, working for a year at an automotive factory, before buying a one-way ticket to Australia at the age of 17! Soon after Mick arrived in Sydney, he started a job in a warehouse unloading trucks and he soon found out the cargo office equipment (typewriters, calculators etc.). After seeing all this equipment, a young ambitious Mick Barry decided he was going to get out of the warehouse and into the lab as a technician repairing office equipment, this soon developed, and he became a fully-fledged field technician. Mick is one of the lucky few to see the rapid evolution in technology first-hand from mechanical devices such as typewriters and calculators to the digital world and what we have on our desks now!

Today Mick reveals how he climbed the business ladder to eventually have his own company Octopian, and compares the traditional business industry to the modern digitalised era. Hearing stories venturing from; travelling the world for 10 years on his boat, embarrassing moments, getting an electric shock so powerful it shot him right out of his chair, soaking up the sun in different marinas around the world... And his decision to come out of retirement.