Rob Ratliff is a marketing and business expert. It was a pleasure to spend time with him discussing business on his Entrepreneurial Odyssey Podcast. In our interview, we emphasize the importance of making conscious choices, going back to the initial passion that led to starting your business, and taking time for self-care. We remind entrepreneurs to reach out for help when needed. I also highlighted the significance of addressing mental health issues, such as alcoholism or addiction, and seeking support from others. Overall, we hope this podcast helps entrepreneurs find fulfillment and success in their businesses and lives.
Audio Podcast
Entrepreneur Odyssey S2 E5 David Greer Admitting You Need Help
Transcript
David Greer (00:00):
I went to a training session with this guy. I mentioned Vern Harnish because all my entrepreneurial friends here in Vancouver were talking about the one page plan, and I didn’t really know what it was. At the back of the room were two coaches and I went and talked to them both, and one of them coach Kevin Lawrence in about a five minute span, he made me more uncomfortable than I had been in probably a dozen years. In fact, I had tears in the corner of my eyes asking me questions, and what it turned out was I was so completely unfulfilled. One of my challenges is I meet a lot of entrepreneurs that need help. Not very many of them are open to getting help. If I can just give hope for one person, then this has been massively successful.
Rob Ratliff (00:55):
Everyone, welcome to the podcast Entrepreneurial Odyssey. I’m your host, Rob Ratliff, and today I am with guest David Greer, a business coach. And I’m very excited to pick his brain a little bit and learn about business coaching and some of the fundamentals that can really help you grow your business. So David, introduce yourself.
David Greer (01:19):
Hi. I’m David Greer. In addition to being a business coach, I’m a 40 plus year entrepreneur, so have been involved in a lot of businesses and now that I coach, I’ve been coaching for eight or nine years now. I’ve had exposure to even more businesses and what works and what doesn’t work. And I specialize in either one-on-one coaching with entrepreneurs who get stuck in some aspect of their business or possibly their life. And I also facilitate strategic planning. I have a whole service around strategic planning. I use a well-known framework, the one from Vern Harish scaling up the one page plan. And it’s all organized around that kind of template framework. So that’s a little bit of my background being around a little while.
Rob Ratliff (02:15):
Yeah, it sounds like it. Do you ever look back on the different businesses that you had and say, wow, that was a fun business. I’m really glad it did that. And then is there one you look back on and say, well, that was a fun business, but I’m glad I moved on.
David Greer (02:28):
Absolutely. When I was 22 years old, getting my computer science degree at the University of British Columbia, I joined a young software startup as the first employee after the founders. And the founder’s names were Robert and Annabelle. And so they put that together to get Robelle. And because a made up name, it Googles well and I liked the place. I stayed 20 years, helped build it into a global powerhouse. 10 years in, I bought out Annabelle, which was incredibly stressful and maybe we can go dig into that at some point. And anyways, and then Bob and I only had one major disagreement in 20 years, but it was a doozy and ended in divorce.
Rob Ratliff (03:13):
Oh no.
David Greer (03:15):
But it then led us to do something utterly fantastic and that few families, people in their lives ever get to do. And then there’s the last gig I did before I became a coach, which I was helping an entrepreneur friend of mine, and I was a VP of marketing of a telematics company. Telematics are companies that take a device and bolt it to your truck or car and track you in real time. And at its simplest can show where your vehicles are in a map, but there’s quite a bit more to it. WebTech Wireless at the time, my roles like 35 million a year publicly traded tenths largest in North America. And I came out of that gig and I’m like, I don’t want to do that again. I am in my mid fifties and I’m like, I worked harder in these three years than I ever have in my whole life. And I do not need to prove to anyone that I can work hard. I’m done proving that I can work hard. Turns out for me, that’s actually pretty hard. I have a pretty deep embedded work hard ethics. So part of my growth in the last decade has been learning how to not work quite so hard.
Rob Ratliff (04:34):
Right. Well, and there’s a lot of, you’ve heard the phrase work smarter, not harder. And it seems to be a growing trend. I don’t know if you’ve heard of the book or read the book, I’m sure you probably have, talking about 10 x is easier than two x. And how oftentimes when you’re thinking about the bigger picture and growing 10 times larger other than just two times larger, it really helps you hone in on the 20% of the clients that are going to be the best fit for what you do. And now you’re spending less time working for the 80% that aren’t paying you as well or easy to work with, focusing more on the 20% that are, and you can kind of continue down that road. When you’re talking about not working as hard, that doesn’t mean that you’re not working. It just means that there are easier ways to run a business and do it. So tell us, what are some of the things that kind of led to you becoming a coach and some of those things that you identified that you’re just not doing the right way that you want to help others achieve?
David Greer (05:44):
Okay, so lemme talk my journey into a coach. It has some really important aspects. I joined the software company, I built it for 20 years. I have a major disagreement with the other hands up buying me out. I’m in early 2001, I haven’t noticed, there’s this thing called the dotcom meltdown. And I’m in the tech business, I’m busy chasing deals until someone smarter than me sat me down and said, David, do you need to work right away? Your kids will never be 11, nine and five again. And I literally, if you can imagine the most cheesy cartoon with the light bulb going over the main character’s head, that was me in the chair. And so my wife and I hatched a plan to commission a sailboat in the south of France and take our three children and we homeschool them for two years while sailing more than 5,000 miles in the Mediterranean.
(06:42):
And you know what, I was thinking about that before our call today because I don’t think, I didn’t realize how much that was a dream. That was something I’ve been reading books on and I didn’t really realize how much of an embedded dream it was. And if I hadn’t end up on the street out of that business, I’m not certain I would’ve pursued it. It was a really emotional, and at the end, my former partner was making all sorts of accusations and saying I was stealing money and all by email remotely. And It was very emotionally very, very difficult. But I came out of that and then had this adventure. I came back after two years, I did like three years of angel investing, looking at about a hundred deals a year, investing in one, working on the board of directors for options.
(07:32):
And that took me to 2007. And I went to a training session with this guy. I mentioned Vern Harnish because all my entrepreneurial friends here in Vancouver were talking about the one page plan and I didn’t really know what it was. I took one of my young CEOs in the companies I invested in and I was on the board of directors for her to learn about it. But I said I’d come and I’ll learn too, which I’m really glad I did. And at the back of the room were two coaches and I went and talked to them both, and one of them, Kevin Lawrence, in about a five minute span, he made me more uncomfortable than I had been in probably a dozen years. In fact, I had tears in the corner of my eyes and he was just being a good coach asking me questions. And what it turned out was I was so completely unfulfilled. I had joined a young business and we grew up by the seat of our pants and I didn’t even know all the stuff that I knew we had just done so much. And I’m working with these startups and young enroll CEOs and they take a year to bring ’em up, one rung the ladder, which I did between ages 23 and 24.
(08:53):
And it is just painful. And I hired him on my 50th birthday and it was January, or it was August 9th, 2007, we had our first session. And Kevin, at that point when you hired him as a coach, you started with 16 hours together, two eight hour days. In fact, Kevin and I, just as it happens, we’ve just been exchanging some emails over the last 48 hours and I reminded him the second day after lunch. We’re both super energetic guys. We actually left where we were and we walked for three hours nonstop. And Kevin, after 18 months of working together, we cleared away all the clutter and cleared away everything until all that was left was the elephant in the room. And on January 26th, 2009, I had my last beer and I sent him an email saying the subject for our coaching call tomorrow is my drinking.
(09:53):
And on Tuesday, January 27th, 2009, I admitted to Kevin I had a drinking problem and he coached me to go to 12 step recovery. And I agreed to go to a meeting by that Friday. It was a Tuesday and being the overachiever that I am in the afternoon, I had looked online and I had a technology event networking event downtown that went to eight. And I looked and lo and behold, on my drive home, a quarter of a block off the road I’d be driving down, was a meeting at 8:30. And I went to that meeting and I’ve been sober 15 years now, and I made that meeting my home group and it’s still my home group today. In fact, I’m going to take my 15 year celebration next Tuesday. And so your question was how did I become a coach? When I came out of this last executive gig, I finally decided I wanted to give to other entrepreneurs the gifts that Kevin had given to me. And I also specialize in entrepreneurs challenged with alcoholism or addiction.
(11:06):
I kind of bring all my business acumen and experience, but then I have this extra and not like all my clients are that way or that’s a problem for them, but it is something that I openly let people know that. And so really that’s why I became a coach. I became a coach because Kevin literally changed my life. I mean there’s the recovery piece, but he also changed my life in getting me back in my game, getting me into gigs again. He didn’t get me into the gigs, he coached me into what to do and rebuilt my confidence, did a lot of work for how I was showing up, which was not helping me and got me back in the game. And so that’s why I started to become a coach was I wanted to give those gifts to other entrepreneurs that Kevin had given to me.
Rob Ratliff (12:01):
That’s amazing. And it seems like so many entrepreneurs are entrepreneurs and running businesses because they feel as though they were called to something in particular, something important. And obviously you felt that calling to where you wanted to serve others and you wanted to serve other businesses.
David Greer (12:20):
Yeah, absolutely.
Rob Ratliff (12:22):
One of the things that I would love to expand on a little bit, and let’s talk about this a little bit, starting at 50 years old and almost kind of starting a new career at that point, a lot of 50 year olds will look at this and unfortunately in the workplace they probably are going to be more 50 plus people who are either not ready for retirement but forced out of a job and now they need to do something and they can look at their lives and say, I’m 50 years old, where can I go from here? But you’ve done that. What has been your experience from that time to now and what would you tell someone who is 51, 52 years old, lost their job back in the workplace and doesn’t know where they fit in?
David Greer (13:15):
So the opportunities are there. I do think if you can’t afford to hire a coach, I would try and find a mentor. Selling yourself in my opinion is the hardest thing to do, and you tend to be at one extreme or the other, which is you don’t believe that you have a lot to offer or you think you’re the greatest thing since sliced bread and you come on too strong and you got to find this kind of middle road. And even with some entrepreneurs I worked with who’ve had successful businesses, I often reflect back to them aspects of themselves. They had no idea. I said, oh, well you’ve shared to me that you’ve done this and you’ve done this and you’ve done this and you’ve done this. So my conclusion is that you like this or you’re good at X, Y, Z. And they didn’t think they were good at it. They never saw it as a skill or they didn’t think it was important. So anyways, so for anyone who’s 50 or over, I think the opportunities are there. I’m not saying it’s going to be easy, is probably going to be a hard road and likely you’ll need to change some aspect of what you believe in about yourself or your job or what you offer. I don’t know what that is, right? But it usually requires the shift and that shift is very hard to do alone,
Rob Ratliff (14:43):
And you don’t need to have multiple ideas and multiple concepts that you’re covering. I mean, one good idea that you are really good at becomes something very lucrative when you start teaching people how to do that particular subject. And there was a woman, I heard about this, but she does watercolor paintings. And so she has a group of people that pay her $9 a month and then they can just tune in when she’s doing her watercolors every Wednesday at 2:00 PM or something like that. She’s like 4,000 subscribers. She’s making $40,000 a month and she just does what she loves to do. And if you are in your fifties, you’ve had experience, maybe it’s just what is your passion and leveraging that to help other people.
David Greer (15:48):
And some of it, if you did really enjoy what you did, what were you passionate about in that role? Was it coaching and developing other people? Was it bringing teams together and being able to create bigger goals? Again, sometimes you have to take the step and especially if the ending was pretty bitter and oftentimes you get fired, it is, especially if you weren’t expecting it and you end up in self-doubt loops like, oh, maybe. But again, try to go back to look at the last couple years, what were you really enjoying? What were you passionate about? What got you out of bed every morning to go to that job?
Rob Ratliff (16:31):
And those things can become a way to earn money and that you can train people on. Let’s go back a little bit. You realized, or you admitted that you had a drinking problem to your coach. And I think that so many entrepreneurs and so many business owners are afraid to admit that they have a problem in their workspace, in their business. But that’s the first thing you have to be able to admit either you have an employee retention problem or scaling problem. If you’re not willing to admit that, then you’re probably not going to get the help that you need. What would you say is your way of helping businesses to really grasp what they’re struggling at and admit to that so you can start building?
David Greer (17:21):
So one of my challenges is I meet a lot of entrepreneurs that need help. Not very many of them are open to getting help. So usually something like near catastrophic or something really deep, you lose a really key employee that you depended on for say, 10 years and they finally can’t put up with it anymore and they leave. And now you’re really in the lurch. It often takes some kind of event. In my case, it was just being so completely unfulfilled and having that shown to me. So now I was like, okay, I got to do, and by the way, coach Kevin’s card was sitting next to my phone for at least three weeks, and every time I thought about picking up the phone and calling him the phone, oh, must’ve weighed at least 10,000 pounds.
(18:13):
But three weeks on, he called me and said, do you remember me in our conversation? And probably hadn’t thought about anything else for three weeks. I’m like, yeah, I remember. What does it take to get to that point? It’s different for every person, stage, status, business, some, it’s easier. They just realize that they want a softer, kinder way and they just get tired of bashing their head against the brick wall. I mean, how did I get sober really is I got sick and tired of being sick and tired. It wasn’t on the outside. What I have now looks exactly the same as 15 years ago when I came to recovery. I got a house, I got kids, I got two cars, I got money. I didn’t have to go down to some basement crash that everything was gone. I have my marriage, but I’d lost myself. The internal David today is drastically different than the internal David
Rob Ratliff (19:16):
That, and that’s Important. And when the personal things to the business things, what would you say are, give me the top three issues that you feel that most businesses struggle with
David Greer (19:29):
Working in the business as opposed to on the business, taking a step back and looking at the bigger picture. Where do you want to go? You were talking about 10 x versus two x. Well, the framework I use, what we do is we encourage entrepreneurs to start by looking three to five years out, pick some future date in that kind of timeframe.
(19:51):
Where do you want to be there? We built Robelle incrementally every year, make it a little better than last year and hey, it was hugely successful, It can definitely succeed. But I really wonder what would [have] happened if we’d used more of this? Let’s look three years out. Where do we want to be? We want to be as partners. Maybe we wouldn’t have got into a big disagreement, right? Who knows? It’s stepping back from the business and looking at this bigger picture and figuring out where you want to go, which when you’re in the middle of fighting fires in the day to day, that just tends to really get lost. And then a lot of my coaching is once we try and figure out a bigger strategic plan where you want to go, then are you taking a couple hours a day every day of your best hours, your very, very best time for you, wherever that is, beginning of the day, end of day, doesn’t matter. And are you working on the strategy? Are you working on the big picture things that will do that 10 x or are you just answering the next email?
Rob Ratliff (21:05):
And it’s Important, Important to look at this.
David Greer (21:11):
It’s like if you have an entrepreneur, let’s say you’re trying to make someone one of your first reports better if you want to make them 10% better, or do you want to do something to make yourself half of 1% better? The truth is, because you’re the head of the business and you’re the biggest lever, the biggest impact on the business will be you focusing on that half of 1% improvement of yourself, which is not always intuitive for an entrepreneur. They don’t realize just how massive a lever they are to everything else that happens.
Rob Ratliff (21:46):
It is so true. I mean, growing 10 times doesn’t mean you have to be 10 times better. It could just mean you need to be about 10% better.
David Greer (21:55):
Yes. Well, and maybe you need to hire a couple of people around you who are five or 10 times better than you at that particular area. And that for a lot of entrepreneurs is very scary. You start a business, you grew up by the seat of your pants, which means you learned every fricking aspect of it. But then as it grows to a certain point, you have to start letting go, and it’s going to eventually be people who know more than you. And that’s okay. You’re still the visionary, you’re still the driving force. You’re also, I was having this conversation with two young entrepreneurs I work with, and they were like, how much should we share profit numbers and other things with staff and will they all ask for raises? And I’m like, well, they might, but at the end of the day, you two are taking all the risk. It’s your capital at risk, it’s your business. If you don’t mean payroll, you go to jail. No, really,
Rob Ratliff (22:49):
These are things that people struggle with if they is
David Greer (22:51):
Important enough. And so you get the lion’s share of the compensation because you take the lion’s share of the risk. So anyways,
Rob Ratliff (23:04):
It’s about who not what
David Greer (23:07):
A lot of times. So that’s still, again, you are that person. Surround yourself with people who can excel and be way better than if a’s hire Bs, and Bs hire Cs. Pretty soon you have Z’s. And if As hire AAs, then double As hire AAAs and AAAs hire quadruple a, and like you just man, your trajectory just completely
Rob Ratliff (23:34):
Changes. I think it was a quote from Steve Jobs who said something like, we don’t hire people to tell them what to do. We hire smart people to tell us what to do. I think that was one of his quotes. That’s why we, and I think someone else said something like, when you hire the right people for the position that you need filled, they won’t necessarily do as good a job as you did. They’ll probably do better.
David Greer (24:02):
And one of my deep beliefs is that culture and focusing on culture is how you really create high performing organizations. Because culture to me derives what the behaviors of people are. And in my experience, you can teach people a lot of skills, but it’s exceedingly difficult to change their behaviors. If they don’t have high integrity, you’re not going to be able to coach ’em into high integrity. And if you are a part of an organization where everyone in the organization when they say, I’m going to do this, then they do it. And that’s part of the built-in culture of the organization, then you want to make sure you hire people that fit that mold.
Rob Ratliff (24:48):
Oh, absolutely. I mean, it’s hard to list on even one hand how many people you can depend on 100%. Where if they say they’re going to do something, they’re going to do it and they’re going to do it as well as they said they were going to do it. It is very rare, unfortunately.
David Greer (25:07):
And no one can do that a hundred percent, but
Rob Ratliff (25:11):
When you find the right people and the right
David Greer (25:13):
Exactly
Rob Ratliff (25:15):
Can make a huge difference. But that’s what you look for, people who are dependable. And of course there’s the motivation, there’s the team building, the culture building. What are some of the things that you’ve found in some of your coaching experiences where you’ve been able to just turn that culture completely around into a more positive aspect? And what were some of the problems? How did you fix them?
David Greer (25:38):
I try not to get aspirational about culture when I go in with a new client, it’s a discovery process, and usually most of the culture is derived from the founder’s belief systems and how they behave. I focus much more on what is the culture that’s here and then bringing it out and making it more visible, and then making sure that you put in actions that are aligned with that culture. For example, if someone really violates those cultural norms, will you fire them? Will you make sure that every new hire meets those culture has those behaviors?
(26:29):
And then are you as an entrepreneur, we come up with this great list, are you going to actually live those? Because the one thing employees will know instantly is when the people at the top are not consistent. So they can say, here’s our culture. And then if they don’t live it, everyone’s like, oh, well, you’re not serious about this. You don’t mean it. It’s just back to business as usual. I do a lot of coaching around are you showing up in a way that’s consistent with what you’re saying the culture is? Maybe we haven’t defined the culture, right, if you’re not, right. Sure. Yeah, absolutely. And the other thing is I believe deeply that we run businesses by the data and not by the last story we heard, not the last salesman who told us they lost the sale, we don’t have this feature, right? Yeah. Well, how many sales have we lost? What’s the actual data for that? But I believe culture is driven by storytelling. I encourage people at weekly team meetings share at least one win and an example of a person who is demonstrating a core value.
Rob Ratliff (27:40):
Well, and one thing that I’ve really noticed, at least in the cultures and teams that I’ve worked with is in order to help an employee to grow, to learn that employee has to be willing to learn and grow,
David Greer (27:57):
We’re back to the entrepreneurs need to be willing to learn. It’s absolutely the same with employees.
Rob Ratliff (28:04):
If you’re not willing to change, then nothing’s going to change.
David Greer (28:08):
And in some really long held organizations or big organizations, sometimes you just have to wait out till the person retires.
(28:17):
Seriously. You can’t really get rid of them. It’s like, well, here’s the date and they’ll be retiring. And sometimes those sometimes are the really hard, the hardest decisions are where an entrepreneur has a right hand person that they have a lot of trust with, and that person is an A player, but they’re a toxic A player. They get there by stomping other people or standing on people’s heads or they’re really hard to let go, but they’re so toxic to the organization and especially if it’s someone you have a long time relationship with. And sometimes my coaching is just, it might take months or even a year to just be pointing out, oh yeah, it’s funny, you should mention that. And this person is behaving and just over time showing how the behavior is showing up and it’s not serving the entrepreneur or the company and they have to let the person go. And those are really, I don’t want to sugarcoat it. Those are really tough.
Rob Ratliff (29:19):
They can
David Greer (29:19):
Be, but they’re the healthiest thing for the entrepreneur and for the health of the organization.
Rob Ratliff (29:26):
Yeah, absolutely. No, you’re absolutely right. Let’s go back a little bit. You talked about the sailing, and you mentioned in some of the material that you sent me pre podcast here about wind in your sails. Tell me a little bit about that.
David Greer (29:41):
Oh, okay. Wind in Your Sales is my book, which is not a sailing book. It’s a business book. Correct. What I did was when I decided to become a coach, I decided to distill, well, I did a couple things. One is I interviewed over 45 sales and marketing leaders and entrepreneurs, the changing, so this was around 2014, the changing landscape of lead generation and how social media and all those things were impacting it. And I did all these interviews. Then I collected my own 20 year experience with Robelle and other business experiences, and I think there’s like 10 aspects of businesses roughly like most businesses. And in my experience, owner founders who’ve started their own business and grown it usually are excellent at four to five, are good at three to four and have two they’ve never heard of.
(30:43):
It’s a book with a little bit of theory, and then it’s like a third of the book is case studies from these entrepreneur friends of mine who I interviewed. And It was a lot of other material. It’s like a little bit of theory and a lot of practice. The idea is you can pick up the book if you still believe in paper books and look in the index when you’re stuck and read 2, 3, 4 pages and have an idea to move ahead, then every chapter starts with a sailing story. That’s where the wind in your sails comes from. I just use these stories to provide a metaphor for what it is that I’m trying to get across about the particular aspect of business I’m going to talk about in that chapter.
Rob Ratliff (31:31):
Yeah, I mean, that sounds absolutely phenomenal. And having a chance to sail and take your family and live that dream life doing what you want to do, I mean, that’s real freedom.
David Greer (31:43):
It is. And it has its scary moments.
Rob Ratliff (31:45):
Yeah, I bet.
David Greer (31:46):
The opening story in the book is what we had to do when we were in the middle of the Adriatic. We were more than 10 hours sailing from any safe harbor, and there was a thunderstorm ahead of us that was easily 75 miles wide lightning striking the water every one or two seconds.
Rob Ratliff (32:02):
Goodness.
David Greer (32:04):
And you got your family, the people that most important to you in your whole life. It’s like one thing about that kind of situation is you have to deal with it. You just, yeah,
Rob Ratliff (32:15):
Well, you got through it. And in the practical business, you’ve got storms ahead, but you just have to work your way around it and think through it,
David Greer (32:24):
And you too can get through it,
Rob Ratliff (32:27):
The storm. Yeah, absolutely. So you talked about the 10 different things that, what would do you want? You don’t have to talk about all 10, but you maybe list the things that people really
David Greer (32:40):
Need. Oh, I haven’t looked at the book for a little while. I don’t know if I can do it, but so entrepreneur, so the entrepreneur, him or herself, there’s a whole chapter about that, including just things like listening. For way too long, I need a lot of coaching from Coach Kevin to become a better listener. And listening is not your busy brain with what you’re going to say to rebut that person. It’s actually hearing what they, and honoring a different point of view. Then corporate, again, this idea of looking three years out, going offsite or actually having formal planning sessions that are booked in the year. I talk about corporate strategy, I talk about marketing strategy separate from sales strategy. I think they’re very different disciplines
Rob Ratliff (33:32):
Definitely.
David Greer (33:33):
And people have trouble understanding the difference. I try and make that clear. I talk about innovation strategy. One of the case studies I feature in the book was a local tech company here in Vancouver that they were building workforce automation. So handheld devices primarily designed for co-op utility for their people in the field to use and for what work they were going to do and report back. And there was a lot of innovation in the product itself, massive amounts of innovation in the product. But the clients didn’t really care about that. And the innovation was that they eventually got it so that the sales manager could go to conferences and could have everything on his laptop, like the server software, client software, and he had a mobile device so that someone in the booth could enter data onto a sample form, and then he could go over to a client screen and he could show how it was updated in real time. And that made a massive difference to their sales. But that was the innovation was, and I’ve had other cases where the innovation is more around the sales or the delivery. So anyways, I have a whole chapter of examples of innovation. I think there’s a lot of room for innovation even in very traditional businesses.
Rob Ratliff (34:57):
Always should always be innovating.
David Greer (35:01):
And then product strategy, people strategy and finance, strategy and exit.
Rob Ratliff (35:11):
Wow. Capture through all of them.
David Greer (35:15):
If you’ve got some knowledge about all of those areas, even if you decide not to develop it, but at least you’re aware of it, I think you’ll, you just position yourself better for success is my belief. And again, you don’t have to believe me, I’ve got a third of the book as other people’s stories showing their hard won wisdom and their scars, all the potholes that they’ve run into.
Rob Ratliff (35:41):
Looking back, can you think of a case that where you coach someone that was in desperate need of help and you’re able to turn it around? Do you have one of those things where you just look back and go, wow, that was one of my best experiences as a coach?
David Greer (35:59):
I probably have those in smaller, bigger ways. Almost every month. I had a young entrepreneur I’ve been working with for a year and a half or so, and he has two businesses, very much tends to be a workaholic, was pointing some of this out to him, making suggestions. And finally last summer on a Sunday, he just called me and he’d got it. Like he said, I’m just going to the beach today and I am just going by myself and I don’t have any plan and I’m not going to focus on the business.
Rob Ratliff (36:45):
That’s a big step.
David Greer (36:46):
And for him, it’s a massive step for him. This was huge. And he’s just suddenly got the whole insight and could see it and get it. Now, I’d probably talked to him on and off probably for 18 months about it. Where was the moment where it shifted? I don’t know. It’s just the moment happened and he recognized it and it was very kind of him to call me, and he was so excited. And normally on a Sunday, I wouldn’t pick up the phone, but this individual doesn’t call very often, so Right. I picked it up and I’m really glad I did.
Rob Ratliff (37:30):
It’s amazing how with the wrong type of mentality, you trying to grow a business, you can forget about the me time. You can forget about the family time or not spend as much time with family. I remember when I went full time into my marketing agency, I had done it before, and then I went into the corporate world and then went back to my agency. And this last time I just said, I’m going back to the agency focusing on that. But I have to make sure that I know when to put the pen down or put the mouse away and go spend time with my family, go spend time with the wife, the kids, and like you said, go to the beach. I mean, I don’t live near a beach, but if I did, I would totally go there
David Greer (38:23):
On the, or the lake or the park or that’s good for business. And I encourage entrepreneurs to think heavily about their texting and email interactions. Can they take a break from that on weekends?
Rob Ratliff (38:38):
Yeah.
David Greer (38:39):
Wow. Right. Which can be very challenging for them.
Rob Ratliff (38:42):
Absolutely. But rewarding.
David Greer (38:45):
Yes. Yeah,
Rob Ratliff (38:47):
It’s important. I mean, the entrepreneur, you don’t want to work yourself, like you said, it’s not about working so hard. Sometimes you need those breaks to get those epiphanies to get you through the next level.
David Greer (38:57):
Absolutely. That’s one of my big arguments. You need to go on holidays and put your phone away and not answer any emails and make it clear to everybody that you’re offline.
Rob Ratliff (39:13):
I think that’s fantastic. I mean, listening to you and the things that you’re talking about, it’s really neat to have someone who’s not really interested in helping you in your business, but also helping you to have a more passionate, abundant life. And I think that’s something that I think that you could set yourself apart as where a lot of coaches are focused just on let’s get you from here to here in your business, but more on the personal development side and giving them,
David Greer (39:48):
I’ve had some clients say, we’re only ever going to talk about business. And I’m like, we’re only ever going to talk about what you want to talk about.
Rob Ratliff (39:58):
Yeah. Yeah. Well, and you said something earlier where you said, where do you want the business to be three to five years from now? But not only that, but I can tell by talking to you and the way you do your coaching, it’s also who do you want to be three to five years from now?
David Greer (40:16):
And that coach, Kevin Lawrence that I hired, he has his own book Your Oxygen Mask First, which is a great book, and he has a master planning template. His core thesis is, as entrepreneurs, we’re super passionate about our business career, maybe our investments, like the money that we make, we’re typically really passionate about our life, our friends, our family, but we get Involved with both that we totally squeeze ourself out in the middle. His master template has a column for your business, a column for your life, but there’s a middle column for self. What are you going to do this year just for yourself? You just going to get on a motorbike and go with some friends and go off for a week? And to do it consciously, how do you build your resiliency and to actually plan it as part of your year? Because if you don’t plan it, my experience overwhelmingly is people will just squeeze themselves out in the middle because they’re so passionate about these areas and they say, well, I’m being selfish. Well, yeah, you are being selfish, because if you’re not selfish for yourself and building up your own reserves, then at some point you cannot be there for the other aspects of your life. You can’t be there for your business. You can’t be there for your wife and your kids. So you need to proactively make sure that you’re doing things to sustain you.
Rob Ratliff (41:59):
So looking back on the conversation, we’ve covered a lot. I mean, recognizing that you have a problem and being willing to take ownership of that problem and being willing to ask for help with it, whether it’s personal or business, whatever that is. I mean, those are so critical. Is there anything that you would say that if you were just going to give advice to entrepreneurs who are struggling or not as passionate, what are some of the things that you think or feel that they would be able to start doing today that could help them to feel more passion? Or at least, even if it’s not a passion thing, maybe it’s more of a comfort thing where they, I’m passionate about this, but I can just feel I’m losing myself in this. But
David Greer (42:54):
I have a couple different things. One is the single biggest ask I make of every client is that they make conscious choice. I mean, it’s their life. They’ll make the choices that they want. But by conscious choice, it’s like if you don’t, then the waves will be crashing on the beach and they’ll throw you any way you want,
Rob Ratliff (43:15):
Right?
David Greer (43:19):
So first of all is that please try and take a step back and make a conscious choice. And then if you’re not feeling it for your business, then the single biggest question I ask is, why did you start it? Go back to the beginning. What got you to do this? Because as a business grows and it morphs and you hire more people, like all of that tends to get totally lost. And oftentimes you get an entrepreneur to pull back and go back into, oh, it’s because I look after customers like this. Well, maybe you should be spending more time with customers, less time operate, get someone else to operate the business. Or maybe it’s you do more prospecting because that’s the part you really love. And bringing new people into the fold and showing them what you can do for them.
Rob Ratliff (44:11):
Get back to the things that you enjoy in the business, and try to find the people to feel the things you don’t enjoy in the business.
David Greer (44:17):
Yes. I always challenge entrepreneurs to do when they’re not feeling happy or fulfilled in the business is go back to the beginning, what you to start this, what got you out of bed every day? And it may have changed and morphed, but if you go back to the beginning, then you can see that, oh, right, and then it changed at year five. And then that can remind them that they actually changed their passion as they moved along. So now they can get passionate about something new because it’s like, oh, I’ve made this transition before.
Rob Ratliff (44:54):
Exactly.
David Greer (44:55):
Right. So that’s my big question that I ask in cases like you suggest,
Rob Ratliff (45:03):
Well, you mentioned a little bit again in some of the material that you sent, there are three things you could do. Read the book, get a one-to-one, and I don’t remember the third one, but some things that they could do to really kind of turn things around.
David Greer (45:19):
And I’ve forgotten the, oh, you can book a free hour with me.
Rob Ratliff (45:24):
Okay, perfect. How did people that
David Greer (45:27):
Coachdjgreer.com. It’s coach D as in David, J as in James greer.com. And every page has my email address and my phone number. Okay. So just send me an email and say, I’m struggling, I’m stuck. Can you spend an hour on a problem with me? And I’ll be glad to do that.
Rob Ratliff (45:48):
Yeah, I think that’s such a fantastic service. What’s the one thing that you think that people are most afraid of why they don’t pick up the phone and call?
David Greer (46:03):
That’s a good question. What was I afraid of that the phone weighed 10,000 pounds that I wouldn’t call coach Kevin. I was afraid of change, just afraid of change and letting someone else in. I can only coach someone to the point that we’ve built trust and it takes time. And so again, I encourage you to find someone you can trust. It’s not a professional business coach. Can you find a business mentor? Can you find someone that you trust enough that you can talk over some of these problems?
Rob Ratliff (46:48):
Is there anything that you, thinking back about the experience where you were on the high seas, we’ll say for how long did you say that was?
David Greer (46:59):
Again, two years.
Rob Ratliff (47:00):
Two years. Were there any, I guess, epiphanies you had while you were just kind of out there floating where you just realized, wow, life is good and it can be really good?
David Greer (47:16):
Yeah. There’s one story that I share about my recovery because I think it was the universe trying to touch me. And we did a number of overnight passages where you go like 24, 36, 48 hours nonstop, and you set up a watch system and you’re going all through the night, through the day, through the night. And our second overnight passage was in the Western Mediterranean Sea between the Balearic Islands and Corsica. And there was a high pressure system, so actually there wasn’t any wind, we were motoring, but it also created perfectly clear skies. And we were now, I don’t know, a couple hundred miles from any land, any light source. And my son, Kevin, who was 10, he and I came on watch at 2:00 AM and as far as the eye could see, above us was the Milky Way. And we kept mistaking stars for the lights of other boats. It was literally that bright and it lasted pretty well. Like our watches in the middle of the night were three hours and oh, it’s probably starting to get a little bit light by 5:00. But we had a couple hours where it was just the two of us in the Milky Way. And that is still one of the most extraordinary experiences of my life.
Rob Ratliff (48:43):
Well, and when you don’t have city lights and things drowning out the light of the stars, it’s a different experience.
David Greer (48:48):
It’s completely different. And again, it was very early in our adventure. It was only our second overnight. So everything is still new as well. Yeah, very magical.
Rob Ratliff (49:01):
Did it make you feel a little bit smaller?
David Greer (49:05):
It did. And like I say, once I got to recovery, I realized that was the universe trying to show me that there’s something way bigger than me and something there was a lot of possibilities.
Rob Ratliff (49:18):
Well, I love that you’ve taken this passion for helping other people and that you were able to face your fears and pick up that phone and that you were able to admit, Hey, there’s a problem that I need to deal with and get that help and then turn around and help other people. I think that’s absolutely phenomenal. And I truly hope that this podcast helps reach that person that can say, I could really use Coach Greer’s help. He sounds like my people.
David Greer (49:53):
If I can just give hope for one person, then this has been massively successful.
Rob Ratliff (49:58):
Yeah, that, that’s so good. Well said. Any final words, anything that you want to leave with the audience before we end the podcast?
David Greer (50:09):
Yeah, I’d like to end on the recovery piece. Alcoholism is a mental health disorder. It’s not a moral failing. You don’t need to pull yourself up by your bootstraps. You need help. And I’m here to tell you that there’s help. I mean, I’ve got there through 12 step recovery. There are a lot of other ways to get and to stay sober. But what I believe deeply in my heart of hearts is it’s impossible to do alone. You can’t recover from alcoholism or addiction on your own. And scary. And as difficult as that seems, if you’re struggling, reach out.
Rob Ratliff (50:51):
Well, and if there’s anything that we’ve covered in this podcast is you really shouldn’t do anything alone.
David Greer (50:57):
Yeah, that’s true. But especially that piece, especially that piece,
Rob Ratliff (51:03):
If you need help, there are people out there who can help. And that goes for a addiction recovery to building your business.
David Greer (51:10):
Yep. Absolutely.
Rob Ratliff (51:12):
Well, I really appreciate your time. I thank you so much for joining me. It’s been a pleasure talking to you. And feel free to email me any other links if they’re not included already, that I can put in the notes of the podcast. I’ll put this up on YouTube. I’ll put it in various Facebook groups where we have a few thousand people following, and just let’s get the word out about Coach Greer.
David Greer (51:38):
Thanks, Rob. I’ve really appreciated the time together today.
Rob Ratliff (51:41):
Well, thank you.
