In this interview, with Rohit Arora on The Maven Show Podcast, David Greer, a business coach and strategic planner, discusses his journey in business coaching and entrepreneurship. He emphasizes the importance of strategic planning in business growth and success, suggesting a process that involves setting long-term goals and working backwards to create shorter-term plans.
David also highlights the significance of company culture in driving high performance, emphasizing the need for clear cultural values and behaviors that align with them. He advises leaders to hire for cultural fit first and skills second, and to actively coach employees to think critically and problem-solve on their own.
David also addresses the issue of addiction among entrepreneurs, particularly alcoholism, and offers advice on seeking help and navigating business situations where alcohol is present. He concludes by encouraging young entrepreneurs to focus on solving real and painful problems for a specific target market, and to enjoy the journey of entrepreneurship.
Transcript
Rohit Arora (00:06):
Welcome back to the Mavin Show. This is a host ro. Today we have David, the business coach and strategic planner. Thank you David for getting into the show.
David Greer (00:13):
Hi. Thank you so much for reaching out to me and for having me.
Rohit Arora (00:17):
Awesome. So would you just like to give a quick intro about yourself, how you got started with the journey of business coaching and entrepreneurship?
David Greer (00:24):
Sure. I got my degree in computer science and when I was still in fourth year at the University of British Columbia, I joined a young software startup and a condition of my employment was I had to submit an abstract to the Hewlett Packard International User Group convention, which was accepted. And while I was still in fourth year, I flew to San Jose and gave my first technical paper in front of hundreds of people and helped to build that software company to a global powerhouse. Eventually bought out one of the founders, became partners with the original founder and stayed 20 years before moving on. From there I took a break. My wife and I commissioned a sailboat in the south of France, and we took our three children, we homeschooled them for two years while sailing more than 10,000 kilometers in the Mediterranean. After that I was an angel investor, senior executive, always working with entrepreneurial friends of mine, usually on marketing and sales and strategy. And when I came out of my last gig in 2015, decided that I hired an amazing coach on my 50th birthday and he had had a huge impact in my life and so I decided that I wanted to give back to other entrepreneurs like Coach Kevin gave to me. So I became a entrepreneurial business coach and someone who helps with strategic planning.
Rohit Arora (02:01):
Awesome. You are a strategic planner, so anyone who does not like what the strategic planning is all about, so would just like to explain about it and how it work?
David Greer (02:11):
Sure. We all have plans for our business, whether we formally write them down, whether we create budgets so they can be as informal or as formal as we want, but we all have plans. A lot of times they’re just in the back of the entrepreneur’s head and a lot of times we come up plans like with Robelle, which is the name of the company I was with for 20 years. We did incremental planning, so we’d like, let’s do a little better than last year. And we weren’t super strategic. We’re somewhat strategic but not really strategic about thinking about our markets, thinking about our place in the markets and where we wanted go. And I think if you want to really create a high growth company, and especially for owner founder companies, if you want to create a lot of wealth, then I think a more formalized planning process will get you there.
But in his model, so first of all, his idea is that a 200 page binder of planning documents is useless. A one page plan that you tape besides your computer and look at every day that actually has some usefulness. But his big, the watershed moment for me was when he suggested you start by planning, by looking three or five years out, where do you want the company to be in three to five years? What markets do you want to be serving? What kind of product lines do you want to have? And what are the key capabilities that you’re missing or are missing today that that would hinder you from getting to that place? And then from there you work backwards to a one-year plan and from there you work to a quarter plan. And I really believe that if you get offsite with yourself and maybe one other person or with your senior leadership team and to do an annual plan, which can take anything from half a day to two days, I actually spend two days with my clients to come up with a good plan and then every quarter get out of the business and again, get offsite or somewhere where you really think strategically about the business and plan the next quarter.
The advantage of planning for quarters is a quarter is 13 weeks long. In 13 weeks you can make a lot of progress in a business and if you really made bad choices, your execution will inform you where you made bad choices. And they’re not like catastrophic. They rarely would cause you to completely fail the business or have the business go out of business. Got it. So you can course correct. So that’s why this quarterly, 13 week pulses enough time to get a lot of stuff done, enough time to course correct if you need to. The other thing is entrepreneurs generally in my experience, try overestimate what they can do in a quarter and underestimate what they can do in three or five years. So they have 12 goals for the quarter. I’ve never met a business or an entrepreneur that could achieve 12 significant goals in a quarter, ever three, maybe five. If you’ve got a team behind you and you’re very, very focused, that’s possible. And when you get an entire company focused on say, five goals and everyone pulling in the same direction towards those goals, you have a much higher probability of success.
Rohit Arora (05:49):
Yeah. One vision, one goal, bunch of people for the same for real.
David Greer (05:54):
Exactly. And communicating that and helping people who are at the very bottom of the organizational structure really understand how their work relates to those goals so they can see a connection, oh, if I do these things, it’s going to help me achieve these things the company has said that they’re going to do.
Rohit Arora (06:13):
That’s real, that’s real. So you always used to say about the culture, how culture drive the high performance. Tell me if anyone has a business, how can they improve the culture, the business culture they have, so which can drive the higher performance?
David Greer (06:28):
Sure. First of all I think is to understand that every company has culture.
(06:35):
It’s often invisible, it’s often unspoken, it usually again, owner, founder businesses. The culture is usually driven by the personality and the behaviors of the founder, CEO. In starting to bring culture alive as a couple pieces, one is what is your culture? Have you got it written down? And to me, culture is defining the behaviors that you want from people. So it’s all about behaviors. And again, a handful is probably plenty, especially in a smaller company because again, no one can remember all these things. And when you start making sure that people in the business behave consistently with those cultural values, you actually need to communicate less. People just behave in a certain way because you have people in the business who behave that way. Now when you really define your culture, what usually shows up is there usually are a number of people. Sometimes you’re really high performers are great performers, but very toxic or very against the cultures of the business.
And sometimes you have to make, I really coach a lot around only hire people who meet the cultural values of the company and fire the ones who clearly demonstrate that they don’t, which the second one is usually harder. And sometimes you got to wait for a bunch of people to move on before you can really integrate that culture. When culture is really powerful and you end up making a misfire like the rest of the employees and people, they eject it like it’s a virus. Why did you let this invade into our culture? And on the hiring side, it’s extremely difficult to change people’s behaviors. It’s much easier to teach people skills. Now you can’t wait to totally teach someone a computer science degree, so you got to balance this out. But rule of thumb is hire for culture first, skills second,
Culture first skills second, most organizations hire the opposite way. Oh, can you do this if you’re, my background is technical and software engineering software. It’s can they program in this language? Do they understand this framework and all the things that go with that? Whereas that’s not the first question. Those are important and you do need to validate those things. But if there’s not a cultural fit first, don’t make the investment in figuring out the other parts, whether there’s a skillset fit. And when you do this over time, my experience again is that there’s just less communication, there is more bonding, there is higher people behave consistently. And so the overall performance execution speeds up goes faster and you just become a more efficient, more capable company.
Rohit Arora (10:04):
That’s real. No, that’s cool. So I think in business people skills is the thing as well, like people management people. Because when the team is small or maybe when you just have two, three people, no one cares, but you have more than 10 people, you have to care. If you have more than a hundred people, you have to care a lot. If you have a big company, a few thousand people, a thousand employees, you have to care for a lot. So how people’s skills works into the company and how the business leaders can be the best at it.
David Greer (10:39):
I’ll disagree with you that it’s three people may be actually the time of the business where you need the most people skills. Among my clients, I have a number with a small number of partners who are the co-founders of the business, spend a lot of my time doing relationship counseling or interpersonal counseling because they don’t bring up issues with each other because afraid to for whatever reason. And they need to learn the skills to be able to listen attentatively to each other without judgment and to be able to respond appropriately. And so the first people skill, especially for senior leadership, but I really think for everyone is this ability to listen. A lot of the times if you’re in a business meeting, you can actually almost see in people’s eyes they’re half listening and what they’re really doing is they’re busy building their argument and rebuttal of whatever the person is saying.
That’s not listening in. No part of that is listening. In fact, if you catch yourself doing that, then you’re not really listening. And the other thing is to really hold space for someone else’s point of view, even especially when it’s not yours. And to honor it, you don’t have to agree with it, but you should release some judgment around that and be open to what those people, because there might be a lot to learn the cultural piece. Hiring for culture first is a deep personal skill because you have to interview around these cultural things, which means asking very open-ended questions and then being able to listen to the answers carefully and what they’re telling you and what they’re telling you in between the lines by listening to their response. So even there where you want to make culture a much more important part of the business, this is all soft skills, people skills. And then in management, again, my rule of thumb is that managers should always have one minimum 30 minute meeting with their first reports every week. And in those meetings your first report should probably be doing 70 or 80% of the talking and you shouldn’t be doing more than 20 or 30.
And again, people skills, another thing I coach around a lot of is if someone, an employee comes to you and asks a question and you just give an answer, there’s no motivation by the employee to go figure it out on their own. There’s no motivation for them to really remember the answer. They know if next time they’ve forgotten it, they just come to you and you give the answer. So as a leader, your goal is to help coach people to what would you do in this situation? What are the top three ideas that you have? Please don’t come to me with a question unless you’ve thought about it for a bit and you have a couple suggestions for how you think it might go. And oftentimes they can’t. And if they can’t come up on their own, then you help coach them like how you would think about the problem.
And then ask them, if you thought about it this way, what might your answer be? And again, some people won’t at first be able to come up with answers, but if you keep working at it and keep challenging them to come up with answers, then eventually they will. You can only grow so fast as a leader when you’re providing all the answers. Then as you have more people, more first reports, you just get more questions because everyone turns to you for the answers. So again, I have to coach people to reverse this around and do not automatically give an answer.
Rohit Arora (14:25):
And that’s why I think in the management perspective, big companies or companies has the chief people officer to take care of the people they have and the entire management it does.
David Greer (14:38):
And I still think it drives from the CEO right down to the whoever’s the first reports to the CEO and how the CEO behaves with them because then that’s how it behaves with others and again, sets that norm for the company. I still think a chief people officer can be really important, but I think there’s some things only the CEO can lay the true groundwork around and has to lead by example. If we can switch back to culture, one of the things that becomes really obvious to people is if you say, my culture is that I’m always high integrity and honest, and then you’re a person who you fudge the facts and you’re always kind of skirting around really whether it’s that way or not, people are going to call your bullshit. If you really start opening up about culture, you have to live the culture as a leader, you have to actually behave in a way that’s consistent with what you said the culture is. And if you don’t, people should and will call you out on it.
Rohit Arora (15:43):
I think from Dean to getting into business, like leading people from the small age to,
David Greer (15:50):
I think for some people it comes a lot easier than others. Completely agree with that. And I think there is a lot of room to help build the next generation of leaders and I think it’s a very much teachable skill. Again, I think your role as a leader is to spend much more time coaching and coaching people to become their next best self so that someday maybe they could become much more of a leader than they are. And in fact, in my experience in working with a lot of different companies and entrepreneurs, the single biggest limit to high growth in a company is growing. The next set of leaders that is the biggest limiter is growing the next set of leaders. So I work with people to spend a lot of time figuring out how to grow that next group of leaders and you can jump, you can hire and bring some people in, but a lot of it has to, if you’re growing 30% revenue year over year, then you have to figure out a way to help grow the people who are already in the company, already know the systems, know the markets, like they’re the ones best able to grow.
But again, not everybody is capable. Not everybody wants to, but if you want a high growth company as a co, I think that’s one of your primary jobs throughout the company, how do you help everyone help grow the next generation of leaders throughout the whole organization top to bottom.
Rohit Arora (17:15):
Got it. Cool. Awesome. So you used to talk about the entrepreneurship addiction as well. Everyone has the addiction, some smoking, weed, wine, and stuff like that. So how should entrepreneurs get over this addiction and how they can avoid or probably.
David Greer (17:33):
So let me be honest with you and your audience. So first of all, I want just be open that I’m an alcoholic
(17:42):
And I was an alcoholic. I was a high functioning alcoholic for a very long period of time, decades. And I used alcohol to make me feel better when things weren’t going well and I made the highs go higher when things were going well. There was always an excuse to drink. Business is tough. Only about 10% of the population ever become entrepreneurs because it takes, you have to be very special to become an entrepreneur and it is really stressful. And there are other things, other roles in life that are very stressful, but I specialize in entrepreneurs. I guess the first thing is if you think you have a problem, you probably do, and I want you to know that there’s hope. For a long time it was just I coped with it and I really didn’t have hope that there is a solution. It’s the most powerful approved drug in the world.
If today the makers of alcohol went to our various governments like in the United States would the FDA, so if you were in the United States and you invented alcohol and you went to the FDA to get approval, it would never ever get approved. You’re dealing with an incredibly powerful drug and if you are drinking to change your feelings, then potentially you have a problem. I mean, there’s other simple things, but I want you to know that there’s hope and don’t do it alone. I’ve never met a person who got sober or got free of drugs on their own. You need some kind of group. I mean, I’m part of a 12-step group, the best known one, and I’ve even been to meetings in your country. If you’re really averse to that or it really doesn’t work for you, there are other groups and you need to find a peer group that you can plug into.
And in my experience, zoom and virtual groups and Facebook groups that do this can help. They’re not sufficient. You need the actual face-to-face or human accountability with another person. There’s that aspect if you still are really using alcohol or drugs to cope. And then there’s the piece around what it’s like to be an entrepreneur in sobriety because for many entrepreneurs, some aspect of their business has involved or does involve alcohol.
I’ve been involved in a lot of high-end selling. There’s always this point where you a couple times usually have to fly down and meet all of the prospective people in the prospects and go out to dinner. And it’s very normal that everyone has two drinks before dinner and a bottle of wine each, which by the way would meet the criteria for you do that a couple times in a month. You’ve met the criteria for alcohol use disorder in Canada or the United States.
And so what do you do in those situations if you’re an entrepreneur, if you’re still expected to go down and be the face of the company and close the final sale. And I’ve been through all of that, I know what it’s like. So for one thing, always make sure you have a drink in your hand and just make sure it’s not alcoholic and you don’t have to justify to people why you don’t drink. You can just say, I made a health decision and I don’t drink alcohol. You got to figure out what you’re going to say, how open you’re going to be, whether you’re going to continue those policies. That’s some of what I do coaching and work with entrepreneurs who maybe have a couple years of sobriety, but they’re still struggling. How do I keep the business aspects where alcohol still keeps showing up? I go to networking events, everyone’s drinking, like how do I cope with this? How do I deal with this? And I have a number of strategies for how you do it because I’ve managed to stay sober for more than 5,000 days and more than 14 years.
Rohit Arora (21:29):
Any best advice do you have for anyone who is getting started with the entrepreneurship? You said entrepreneurship is not easy. I know that you know that many people know that. Who are entrepreneurs? Any best advice do you want to give to anyone? Young entrepreneur? Just want to be,
David Greer (21:43):
Yeah, young entrepreneurs, my biggest advice is go find a problem that people find extremely painful and then find a product service solution that is a fantastic pain pill for the pain that they’re in. I find a lot of people who they describe to me their market and what the problem is. And it’s like that’s a want. People want this or want that, but they don’t actually need that. Find those things that are keeping people awake at night, even in retail, what keeps an individual awake at night and why is buying your thing make them feel better? And that’s often the weakest point I see in most business plans is that that’s not articulated well enough. Or the other thing for young entrepreneurs is find your segment and go focus on that. First you only have a small number of resources and if you’re trying to sell to the whole world, people say to me, well, who really needs this?
And they’re like, oh, anyone. I like to hear, oh, they’re between 25 years old and 35 years old. They’re male. They come from this, they live here, they’ve gone through this in their life and this is what’s really bothering them that I can work with. I very rarely get that level of specificity, or sorry, that was a big word. I rarely get anything that specific, but you know what? The really good entrepreneurs get that specific and learn how to market and address that particular niche and do it really well. And then figure out, so what’s the adjacent niche to that? But start very focused before you jump over to the next niche. So that lack of focus I see. I’ve seen hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of business plans and that’s a consistent weakness that I’ve seen in business plans. And my other piece of advice is enjoy the ride. And remember, it’s a marathon, it’s not a sprint. It is right. It’s a marathon. Enjoy it because it’ll take a while. Enjoy it every day.
Rohit Arora (23:57):
Awesome David. Well thank you so much for having in with the show, sharing these insights regarding the people skills, people management and entrepreneurship, addiction as well, and how to get over it. So yeah, thank you so much for having in.
David Greer (24:11):
Thank you for having me.
