Adjusting Your Focus with Matt Oliver- CR107

Update: 2025-07-01

Description

Have you ever thought about changing your work setup due to a change in your life circumstances, time constraints, or just stress? At some point in your career, you may face a moment of reckoning, when you realize you can’t continue to sustain your current career, and something has to give. But how do you choose whether to hang on to honor the investments you’ve made or let go to make room for something else?

On Career Relaunch® podcast episode 107, Matt Oliver, founder of Oliver Co, describes his career journey to go from designer to company founder and eventual design consultant for Native Design. We talk about how to pace yourself when making a transition, balancing your side projects with your day job, and the importance of outsourcing and delegating tasks if you want to open up new opportunities in you career.

💡 Key Career Insights

When you’re starting something new, you don’t necessarily have to cut things off completely with your current employer. There may be a way forward that enables you to balance both your current work and future explorations.

Relinquishing control of a project and getting out of the way can open up new possibilities. When you let go, delegate, or outsource, other experts can step in and run things more efficiently to enable more growth.

Focusing your efforts on a single goal in your career has its benefits, but ironically, sometimes adding more onto your plate and diversifying your professional endeavors can enable you to gain a healthier perspective and balance in your life.

💪🏼Listener Challenge

During this episode’s Mental Fuel segment, I talked about the importance of releasing your grip on one aspect of your work to make room for another priority. My challenge to you is to decide on one thing you want more of in your career right now. Then, identify something you could spend less time on so you can make room for that.

📖 Episode Chapters

00:00:00 Overview

00:01:07 Introduction

00:03:21 Chat with Matt

00:42:45 Mental Fuel®

00:50:02 Listener Challenge

00:50:52 Wrap Up

👤 About Matt Oliver

Matt Oliver is a design strategist with a background in product design who’s had to wrestle with this question himself. Matt’s career spans both consultancy and entrepreneurship. He started out designing in-house before moving to a design consultancy, working with global brands like Zenith and TAG Heuer. He later founded Oliver Co, a sustainable accessories brand that became B Corp certified, won international awards, and partnered with Virgin Atlantic. His experience has given him a strong blend of creative thinking and commercial awareness. And today, Matt helps businesses use design as a tool for innovation and growth.

Learn more about Matt Oliver and Native Design.

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📄 Episode Transcript

Introduction and Guest Welcome

From Boats to Watches

Early Interest in Design

Discovering Sustainability

Launching Oliver Co

Balancing a Business and a Job

Going Full-Time with Oliver Co

Returning to Full-Time Employment

Lessons and Advice

Introduction and Guest Welcome

[00:03:22 ] Okay, Matt. Well, thank you so much for taking time out of your busy day to join me here on the Career Relaunch Podcast. It is great to have you on the show.

[00:03:30 ] Matt: Great to be here. Thank you very much for having me.

[00:03:32 ] Joseph: All right. So we’re going to talk about a lot of different things today. The steps you took to launch all of your Co, some of the challenges you’ve faced along the way, and also why you’ve recently decided to return to full time employment. But before we get to all that, could you just kick us off by telling me a little bit about what you’ve been focused on in your professional and personal life lately?

[00:03:54 ] Matt: My current role is at a company called Native Design, so we’re a design and innovation consultancy doing physical industrial design and engineering. So the physical design of products and also digital design as well. So that’s things like user experience and user interface software development. My title is Design Strategy Manager. So really what I’m doing is I’m connecting potential clients with the different disciplines here at Native. So kind of understanding their challenges and then connecting them with the different capabilities that we have here to try and solve those challenges. So that’s what I’m doing on my on my day to day here. So a lot of outreach I guess quite similar to a business development role, a lot of outreach networking, a lot of going to events. Very interesting because I’m working across various different sectors. So one minute I could be in the life science sector. So we do a lot in genome sequencing and that kind of thing. And then the next minute I’ll be an automotive conference. So very different worlds in my personal life. Much more stable in that I’ve moved out of London, moved to a place called Guildford, which is about an hour west of London. Bought a house, got a dog, married a kid on the way, like, okay. Yeah. So that’s in November. Lots going on. Very interesting time.

Early Interest in Design

[00:05:19 ] Joseph: Sounds like you’ve got a lot going on personally. And things are going to change radically for you later this year. And so I do want to talk about your career in design, and I’d say that you’re probably a less typ