At age 70, Mike Bradshaw radiates wisdom. He’s full of the kind of insights gained from a quirky life path.
Consider his 10-second resume: dishwasher, line cook, yacht chef, restaurateur, midlife college student, software company stalwart, cable TV manager, business incubator guru, teacher, cancer survivor, wise man.
We sat down with Bradshaw last week seeking insights from a “wise man” — our term, not his.
Bradshaw’s actual job title is director of the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga Center of Innovation and Entrepreneurship, which places him at the center of UTC’s contributions to Chattanooga’s nascent start-up business culture. Two weeks after getting this prestigious appointment in 2023, he was diagnosed with throat cancer.
A grueling 35-day course of radiation treatments late in 2023 put him nose-to-nose with death and left him temporarily mute. But now Bradshaw is back at his desk at UTC, pushing forward with a life sharpened by grit and polished with gratitude.
Here, in his “words of wisdom,” are some of his deeply held beliefs, and some of the backstory on how he landed on these thoughts.
— Words of wisdom: “Sometimes, a large period of time gets collapsed into a series of images that have emotional resonance.”
Backstory: For a stretch of whirlwind years in his 20s and 30s, Bradshaw dropped out of college and landed as a restaurant dishwasher. He worked his way up to line cook, a job he still believes was the closest he has come to true mastery.
Eventually, he gained control of a restaurant in Washington, D.C., then called Childe Harold (a reference from a Lord Byron poem) and helped lift it from $300 a day in sales to $14,000 a day at its peak.
This was in the 1980s, an era when operating a trendy restaurant and bar in the nation’s capital was exhilarating, but also filled with temptations, Bradshaw said. Still, he was able to survive a back-breaking daily schedule and channel his energy into something positive.
“I learned how to take post-adolescent energy, in an extraordinarily tempting time, and rein (myself in) and begin to live a life that an adult would,” Bradshaw said. “The restaurant business was an invitation to extended adolescence.”
— Words of wisdom: “Leadership flows from effort and vision. People with extraordinary talents will lend themselves to you if you have a passion for ideas.”
Backstory: While working in the restaurant business, Bradshaw said that he learned to lead by example — and how to delegate.
He noticed that his hard work and focus rubbed off fellow employees, including some whose natural talents might have exceeded his.
Learning to exchange and amplify energy was something that would serve him well as he followed his path of nurturing entrepreneurs as director of The Company Lab here. Start-up company founders are tireless workers who depend on talented lieutenants to help reach their dreams.
(READ MORE: The Company Man, Mike Bradshaw leads students.)
— Words of wisdom: “I feel like sometimes things run their course and another thing has to happen. … (Opportunity) is real sneaky.”
Backstory: Bradshaw was refilling coffee cups in his restaurant one day when he overheard a discussion at a table that piqued his interest.
An executive of Time Life Co., who had access to a then-new technology called CD-ROM, was lamenting a problem that had his team stuck.
Bradshaw, the restaurateur who had studied engineering in college, deftly inserted himself and offered a solution that surprised and delighted the executive. Soon, the executive circled back and offered Bradshaw an unpaid position with his team, which ultimately resulted in Bradshaw changing jobs and put him on a lucrative career path.
(READ MORE: Chattanooga’s Company Labs, offers mobile support.)
He went to work for the Learning Co., an American educational software company that was eventually bought by Kevin O’Leary, a Canadian businessman famous for his appearances on ABC’s “Shark Tank” program.
— Words of wisdom: “If you can breathe, you’ve got a lot be grateful for.”
Backstory: Bradshaw’s 2023 cancer treatment, more than a month of full-on radiation and chemotherapy, is notoriously one of the most grueling and painful procedures in medicine.
“If you could go through what the cure required, you had a good chance of being OK,” Bradshaw said he was told. “I was a little shy of 70 years old, (and) I wondered if my body would be resilient enough. What were the chances to regain at least a little strength and be able to do the things I’ve been gifted by God to be able to do?
“I’m happily surprised by what’s happened. They say the treatment is about as hard as it gets — but the alternatives were far worse.”
— Words of wisdom: “Mistakes I’ve made have all been balanced by extraordinary good fortune. …I got extremely lucky. Where did that luck come from? It is grace.”
Backstory: Bradshaw is from a small town in northern Virginia and seems genuinely surprised and humbled by a string of successes he’s had in life.
Still, at 70, he says he prefers looking forward to looking backward, and he hopes to have years of productive service left to give UTC and the greater community.
He says UTC administration, faculty and students have rallied around him during his cancer fight, giving him strength to reengage.
“It was one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen,” he said.
Life Stories is published on Mondays. Contact Mark Kennedy at mkennedy@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6645.