Be inspired by my journey through business and alcoholism, as I share with Eric Pratum and on his Unfolding Thought Podcast. We cover these topics:
- How we built Robelle Solutions Technology into a global powerhouse over 20 years.
- My journey through alcoholism and recovery transformed my personal and professional life.
- Grow your business now using my book Wind In Your Sails.
- Using Verne Harnish’s One Page Strategic Plan to focus on long-term vision and quarterly goal setting with accountability.
- Use team alignment to ensure critical business success.
- Use both data and stories to understand and communicate about your business.
Audio
Transcript
Eric Pratum (00:00:03):
Welcome to the Unfolding Thought podcast. My name is Eric Pratum. Today I’m speaking with David Greer, an entrepreneurial coach, facilitator, and author whose journey has included growing a global software company navigating intense personal and professional transitions, and ultimately dedicating his career to guiding entrepreneurs toward clarity and success. David candidly shares experience from his entrepreneurial journey, his path through alcohol addiction and the transformative impact sobriety has had on both his personal and professional life. We discuss practical strategic planning, the nuances of coaching entrepreneurs through complex organizational challenges and how to maintain personal resilience amidst professional demands. This conversation with David inspired me with his authenticity and practical wisdom. And now I bring you David Greer. David, thank you for joining me. Would you mind telling me a little bit about yourself please,
David Greer (00:01:20):
Eric, thank you for having me today. I’m really excited to be with you and the long format of your podcast to let us go a lot deeper into subjects. I am a 40 plus year entrepreneur. I got my computer science degree at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, BC Canada, which is still where I live. And in fourth year I joined a young software startup as the first employee. The business had already been going for a couple years and I stayed 20 years and built it into a global powerhouse. I’m sure we’ll get a chance to talk about some of the stories from that. I unexpectedly ended up on the street in 2001. My former partner and I only had one major disagreement in 20 years, but it was a doozy and it ended in divorce. He ended up buying me out and someone smarter than me sat me down and said, David, your kids will never be 11, nine and five again.
(00:02:26):
I was busy chasing deals in the middle of the dotcom meltdown, not a good time to be trying to find tech businesses to get involved with. And my wife and I decided to do something completely different. We commissioned a sailboat in the south of France and we took our three kids and homeschooled them for two years and sailed more than 5,000 miles in the Mediterranean. I came back and did three years of angel investing, looking about a hundred deals a year, investing in one, working as a director, working for options. I eventually got very, I didn’t realize, but I was very, very unfulfilled with that work. I just was not torquing with people who were close enough to my level. And I eventually met an amazing coach, Kevin Lawrence, at a training event, which we might explore a little bit later because it is a part of my practice now.
(00:03:25):
It was Verne Harnish. He’s a guy, has two books, the Rockefeller Habits and Scaling Up, and he has something called the One Page Strategic Plan. And I went to learn more about that. I had many of my tech entrepreneur friends who used it, and I took one of my young CEOs to go learn about it. And I met this coach who specialized in it, and then subsequently I’ve specialized in it and it’s the tool that I use to facilitate with for strategic planning. And anyways, Kevin made me more uncomfortable than I had been in four or five years. I did tears in the corner of my eyes standing in front of a hundred people in a ballroom, and eventually I hired him and we worked together for nine years in total. But after 18 months, we had cleared off enough clutter off the table and kind of got my career initial steps to reestablish that.
(00:04:24):
He was the first person I ever admitted to that I had a drinking problem. And Kevin, in his personal life, had encountered people with long-term sobriety who were part of 12 step recovery. And he coached me to go to a 12 step meeting. And I did. And I’m now 16 years, four months and six days sober, sober. And yes, I still do it one day at a time. It’s the single biggest achievement of my life. And every morning I have to get up and I have to achieve the single biggest achievement of my life. That’s just what it means to be an alcoholic. And then with Kevin’s help, I did a couple senior executive gigs, always working with entrepreneurs who were friends of mine and working on strategy. They were generally sales and marketing roles. My last role was VP of marketing for a company called Webtech Wireless who was in the telematics space.
(00:05:28):
They were at the time the 10th largest in North America. These are where you take electronic devices and you bolt them to cars or trucks, and then in real time you can track where they are. And in its simplest form, a fleet manager can see where all of her or his vehicles are on a map, but there’s a lot more sophistication and a lot more reporting and benefits you can get out of that. And I came out of that gig and I had worked as hard in my mid fifties and the three years of Webtech as I had probably in my whole career. And I made a decision that I did not want to, I made the decision that I did not have to prove to anyone that I could work hard.
(00:06:10):
That train has left the station. And I wanted to do something different. And I decided, by this point, I don’t know, Kevin and I had worked together probably for seven or eight years, and I decided I wanted to give to entrepreneurs the gifts that Kevin had given to me. And I decided to become an entrepreneurial coach and facilitator, and I took my coach training with the coach training institute and launched my coaching career. And that was 10 years ago. I just celebrated 10 years of coaching and I wrote my book, Wind In Your Sails, Vital Strategies that Accelerate Your Entrepreneurial Growth, that collected my, at that point, 30 years of entrepreneurial experience. But I also interviewed over 45 people, entrepreneurs and senior sales leaders and marketing leaders. And 10 of those people are featured as case studies at the end of every chapter.
(00:07:10):
A third of my book is actually stories from someone else. It’s not just my experience, but these other people’s hard won experience. And our goal collectively is building a business is tough and there’s a lot of potholes in the road. And if you wish, you can drive into all of those potholes or you can read the book and you can maybe avoid some of them and find some new ones for you to go drive into. And it’s a very practical book. It’s like 10 chapters on about a third of the book is how to think about your business, and then the rest is practical. How do you apply this? I end every chapter with Take Action Now, and I have three steps you could take based on the subject matter of that chapter to move your business forward, that part of your business forward, whether it’s sales, marketing people.
(00:08:04):
That gets us to today. And then the big thing that happened about four years ago with the help of my new coach new seven years ago, Kevin stopped doing one-on-one coaching with entrepreneurs. He wanted to focus on groups and facilitation. He handed me off to his coach, Nan O’Connor, based in Atlanta. And I’ve been working with Nan for seven years now, almost seven and a half actually. And she just noticed every time I talked about my recovery and my alcoholism and going to 12 step recovery, how kind of pure the energy was. And she kind of just kept reflecting this back to me for a couple of years until I finally decided that I would become public about my recovery and talk about it. And it’s on the front homepage of my website. I specialize, I help any entrepreneurs who’s really struggling, but I also have a specialty in working with entrepreneurs challenged with alcoholism or addiction wherever, whether you’re still out there drinking or whether you’re in recovery. Because even in recovery, a lot of business can be surrounded by alcohol. I mean a lot of life can, but I think as an entrepreneur there’s even more examples of how that shows up and how do you navigate that I can help entrepreneurs. How do I close a really complicated big sale in the big last dinner with the senior executives who are all going to drink too much, which is in certain businesses, that’s really common still.
Eric Pratum (00:09:41):
I really appreciate that you went through, I don’t know if I would call them phases, but as much detail as you did because you gave me a greater appreciation for who you are at this point than I often get. You could just describe what you do today or you could start when you were three years old perhaps. And there are positives and negatives of many different approaches, but you provided enough detail that, like I said, I have a greater appreciation. And for what it’s worth, I mentioned before we started recording that we are from more or less the same region of the world. I grew up near where you live and all of that. And I don’t think I had realized this, I worked for a portion of my career with angel investors and was reviewing pitches, sometimes 80 pitches a month in some cases, and deciding what got through the screening process in order to actually get pitched. And then I worked in nonprofit for exclusively nonprofit for about 10 years of my career. And a lot of the focus of my time was with organizations that work broadly in the categories that are often overlapping of poverty, addiction, homelessness, and all of the often related issues. And I would add trauma. Yes, exactly. Yes.
David Greer (00:11:35):
Gabor Maté says that every homeless person on the downtown east side in Vancouver, if you dig into that person, there is a story of trauma.
Eric Pratum (00:11:45):
I think that’s something that when it’s over there, when it’s the other, it’s also hard to appreciate. I said this in an episode with gentleman Andy Bales who I spoke with who used to run the largest rescue mission in the world in LA on Skid Row, that people often don’t realize that somebody who’s homeless on the street typically had very, what I’m going to call common events happen to them. They’re just unfortunately tragic events where they were dealing with trauma from their childhood or a marriage or whatever, and then they lost their job, which puts stress on their marriage. And it’s things that it’s like, well, that happened to me too, or it could have happened to me easily.
David Greer (00:12:34):
That’s what people forget is you might only be one paycheck away from being that homeless person on the wrong side of town.
Eric Pratum (00:12:43):
I am glad you mentioned your book because I have said this plenty of times. For anyone listening to this, it will likely not be a surprise, but I read a ton of books last year, I think it was 189 on Good Reads. I’m going slower at the moment, I’m probably at maybe 65 or 70 for the year so far. But I am halfway through your book at the moment, and honestly, I just didn’t manage my schedule very well, otherwise I would’ve been done with it. But yeah, it’s a very tight book and I like how you weave the, I don’t know if I would call it stories or the little instances of when you were sailing into, I think it’s in each chapter,
David Greer (00:13:35):
Each chapter starts with the sailing story, which I try and make it be a metaphor for what I’m, I’m going to talk about in the chapter.
Eric Pratum (00:13:45):
When did you publish your book?
David Greer (00:13:47):
I just already the 10th anniversary.
Eric Pratum (00:13:50):
Oh, okay.
David Greer (00:13:51):
And I really wrote it very carefully to be an evergreen book. Five years ago I did the audio version and I found two instances of stuff that I felt was dated two paragraphs out of the whole book. I thought, pretty good job. And I’ll tell your listeners, the book is really targeted at owner founders who are still with the first business that they found it. If you’ve done multiple businesses or you’ve being an angel investor, the book will probably be a little too simple for you. But again, I target that’s the particular person. It’s like when we started Robelle, we just grew up by the seat of our pants and we did read some pretty important books that helped us, but we didn’t have a Wind In Your Sails to help us when we were growing Robelle. And it was like where Bob Green and I were in the first five or 10 years of the business, that’s what it’s intended for. It’s not like you can’t … every chapter in that book could be a book in itself easily. It’s like enough to dip into and enough to get you going and moving in the right direction and then where appropriate you’ll find other resources.
Eric Pratum (00:15:25):
One thing you talked about a little bit in your story, which I feel like might also be sort of our path into talking about your philosophy and the work that you’re doing today, talking about that in more depth is alcoholism. And I’m wondering if both in your experience and then also in what you experience with your clients or other entrepreneurs generally, did alcohol play an increasing role in your life or your experience drinking more over time? Was there a turning point where it went from, I don’t know, some moderate amount to an increasing amount? What was your experience and then how does that relate to generally what you see from other entrepreneurs?
David Greer (00:16:29):
My experience with alcohol, I drank, well, I drank because I’m an alcoholic, that’s the most simplest reason of why I drank, but I drank to power up. It was rocket fuel. I drank to make the lows higher drank to make the highs higher. That first business, Robelle, I was a drinker all through that. Was I an alcoholic? Probably not. Early on. One of the things is when did I become a pickle that couldn’t go back to being a cucumber? I don’t know. I do not know because for me, for many people, alcohol as is alcoholism, alcohol use disorder is a progressive disease. It’s very much progressive over time. And a lot of us can’t, not … for some people it’s like I picked up the first drink and it was like I went blackout drunk and I did that until I came into recovery. That’s not my story. My story was I still could operate and I could drink a lot of alcohol and still walk without stumbling and not slur my words, which is probably more typical than not. High performing alcoholics are the norm. They’re your friends, they’re your neighbors, they’re your coworkers. One in 10 people have alcohol use disorder. You think of a hundred people, you know, think of 10 people. There’s a moderate chance one of them as a AUD.
(00:18:05):
What I do know is when I came into recovery, when I look back when my wife got pregnant with our first child, she said she was going to stop drinking when she was pregnant, and I agreed to support her by not drinking. That lasted 24 hours. And I still don’t know to this day how I squared it with my wife, but somehow I did and I continued drinking. I can say definitively when my wife got pregnant with our first child, I was pickled. I’m sure it was pickled before then. I just can’t tell you exactly when. And for me, I still was coping with life on a reasonable basis and nothing really bad happened.
(00:19:02):
And partly that kept me in denial. And it just got to a stage where I got sick and tired of being sick and tired. And again, the progressive nature of the disease, which actually is part of the neurochemistry of our brain. When we put alcohol in, alcohol doesn’t target a particular part of our brain. It kind of goes after the whole thing and our brain starts issuing countering chemicals to counter the alcohol. And then as we drink more, our brain gets better at faster and issuing more of that. That’s part of why it’s progressive is that our brain wants homeostasis. And obviously you’re not in homeostasis when you’re putting a bunch of alcohol in you and into your brain, but your brain is doing its best job to put you back into homeostasis. When I was in my thirties, I probably six drinks was enough, and at the end it was probably 15 and I probably drank 12 or 15 drinks a day towards the end.
(00:20:14):
And again, I still could operate in the world, but I just got really tired of just being beholden to the alcohol and just I was in denial for long. I do things like on Monday I would go to the closest liquor store and get some alcohol. Well, when you drink as much as I do, you have to go to the liquor store multiple times a week and you better get the empties out of the house. Both of those are quite challenging. If you’re hiding it like I did. On Wednesday I go to a different liquor store. If I went to the same one I went to on Monday, well, you might think that I had a drinking problem. My brain is rationalizing these things that are clearly demonstrating I do have a drinking problem, and Friday I go to a different liquor store again, and then you repeat this week after week after week.
(00:21:06):
It’s just, it’s the craziness of having alcoholic brain and being in your alcoholism. And I noticed someone who isn’t an alcoholic, this probably sounds a little crazy and well, we have a mental health disorder, alcohol use disorder is formally a mental health disease. And when I went into recovery, I had a house and I had three kids and I had a spouse and a couple cars in the driveway. And here, 16 plus years on, I’ve got a house and I’ve got three kids and a spouse and two cars, and now I have two grandkids. What’s different is the person inside the part you don’t see is completely different than that individual who walked into his first meeting on January 27th, 2009, and it’s that internal work that is what has really made me into a different human being. From the outside, you might say, Hey David, it doesn’t really look any different, and you’d mostly be right, but that’s not the point, right?
(00:22:15):
The point is that I had gave up on myself, I’d gave up, the alcohol had taken over, and one of the things I did was when I went into recovery, I committed that I would focus, I would every year do something for my personal growth. And I have done that. I’ve worked the steps in my alcoholism program at least eight times, and I’m also a member of adult children of alcoholics and dysfunctional families. And I’ve worked all three workbooks in that program, which have also been incredibly life-changing. I’ve continued that growth path that I, in many ways ignored for 20 years while I was a daily drinker.
Eric Pratum (00:23:01):
I believe that there wasn’t a lot that you said necessarily in sort of telling your story at the beginning of our conversation, but it was alluded to, but I think I came across it in your book that you built a decent sized business, decent. You were one of two founders.
David Greer (00:23:24):
Well, I was hired as the first employee and then I bought out one of the founders.
Eric Pratum (00:23:28):
You’re fairly central to the business. Nonetheless. You had a lot of responsibility. You were tied up in it. And was any of your alcohol use related to dealing with things like burnout? Because a lot of entrepreneurs can burn out even from businesses that they love or they love the job, but they’re working too much or there’s too much stress or there’s too much, any number of things and alcohol and other things can become a form of compensation for you. Was it like that?
David Greer (00:24:13):
I don’t think consciously, but I mean, the reason I drink is to cover up some feelings that I’m uncomfortable feeling. Whether that’s I’m working too hard, whether it’s I’m scared about the business, alcohol is my cure for what ails me in life. You think about an iceberg, the analogy 20% is above the surface and 80% is below. Well, the drinking part is the 20% above the surface and it’s trying to deal with the 80% that’s down below. And when you give up alcohol, you still have the 80% down below, but now you have to cope. You have to cope with life on life’s terms without your tool of choice, which is alcohol. Yes, my alcohol is how I dealt with everything I drank every day and a certain amount of that was just not to feel whatever it was that I was feeling.
(00:25:16):
And then as I’ve got sober, I’ve had to go explore that more and also dig deeper into it. Turns out, I shared earlier in our conversation how I decided after working harder than I ever had in my career at Webtech Wireless that I’d do this coaching gig. I wouldn’t work as hard. Well, it turns out for me not working hard is really, really hard work. I am super, super hardwired to work hard and it’s a very ongoing, still 10 years, in 10 years of being coached, 16 years of sobriety. And my taskmaster spirit still shows up in new and interesting ways that I’ve never noticed before. They were always there, it’s just now I’m better able to see it. That’s what produces this kind of very driven activity. And I’ve done enough personal work, I know where it comes from. I know why it showed up, but it’s deeply, deeply entrenched in me that it shows up in, it just comes out. And for me, I visualize it as an octopus. If you’ve got eight arms, you can really get me to do a lot of stuff, but you’d also be really sneaky because paying attention to how you’re trying to make me do stuff over here and then you actually have me out going for a walk down to Starbucks that I hadn’t even realized that’s what I was going to do.
Eric Pratum (00:26:39):
In your book, I feel like, I don’t recall if you state this or not, but it came across pretty clearly to me that you are barely committed to or you have a philosophy that planning is very important, strategic planning for example, but also just being explicit about, I forget some of the chapters, forgive me if this is not exactly one chapter or another, but some of it comes across to me like, well, if you have an ideal customer, if you have a goal, if you have things that you need to accomplish this year, let’s do some planning and write them down and then we’ll know what we need to do and we can refer to them and on. And I am wondering if maybe there’s some personality or behavioral traits that predispose you to things like that. But also I also wonder if there are some similarities perhaps between things like the clarity of a 12 step program, how do you deal with addiction? Here it is, these are the steps. You follow these, and I forget what one program or another says, but there’s some phrase like work the plan or something of this nature. And I feel like there are some similarities between the clarity that a 12 step sort of program provides and the clarity that I think in your book you’re trying to get your audience or perhaps even your coaching clients to develop for themselves. You have goals, let’s follow a plan that we can become or we can be who we want to be.
David Greer (00:28:44):
My biggest request to my clients as a coach is conscious intention. If you consciously want to go without a plan, I actually have a client who’s being super high performing. He just exited one business and he wants a six month period without a plan. And I’m really supportive. I mean within some certain caveats around financial things and a couple things, but it’s not like you have to have a plan. But again, are you doing it just because without any conscious intention and without any knowledge and you consciously doing it knowing the consequences of not having a plan or are you just letting life happen to you? And you’re right in twelve step recovery, we have these steps. There are solution to life. Like I said, we take away the alcohol. That was our solution. We don’t need a solution much to our not drinking. We need a solution to how do we cope with life without the thing that we always used to cope before. And what we have is the 12 steps and in recovery we say 12 steps are easy, the work is really hard, they’re not that hard to understand, but to be motivated enough to do the kind of work that those 12 steps ask of you, that is actually quite challenging. Personal work in my experience. Now, let’s go back to Robelle. We built a business for 20 years. Did we have really clear cut goals?
(00:30:23):
Sometimes, sometimes not. And what we did was I think very classic entrepreneurial was kind of why don’t we will do 5% better this year than we did last year? But then that’s kind a wish because we wouldn’t sit down and work out a plan for how would you get there in one year? I remember I might talk about this in the book, we had about an 18% increase in revenue and we were really congratulating ourselves, man, we [are] hot stuff. And then eventually by the time we got the Year end financial statements and we met with the accountants and we worked it all out about 15% of that growth. We are a Canadian software company whose principal market was the United States, and 15% of that growth that year came from the Canadian dollar sinking against the American dollar. We priced in US dollars. This thing we were busy dusting ourselves off and saying how great entrepreneurs we are had nothing to do with us.
(00:31:31):
It was something completely outside of our control in which we probably couldn’t have planned for. And that’s I think the risk you take by not having better knowledge of your business and what’s going on in your business. And if you don’t create plans and try and execute the plans, then you generally don’t know your business as well as you could. And a lot of the work I do with entrepreneurs now who I work with is just literally helping them to understand their business at a much deeper level. Again, people who’ve started their business, grown it done very well, but several years ago they were a million dollar a year business, now they’re 8 million a year. And little tiny permutations in that can have much bigger consequences and there’s a lot more moving parts and a lot more people. Sometimes it’s like, are you really making money while entrepreneurs focus on top line revenue?
(00:32:35):
I’m like, well, that’s great, but how much money are you making? I don’t think businesses should be charities. I think they’re here ultimately they should make you money now. They should make you money by finding a market with a really deep pain and with a solution that is a great pain pill to solve that pain. And that creates a lot of value and from that you will make a lot of money. But at the end of the day, is there pain? Are you creating value the way is at the end of the year, did you make a bunch of money? That’s the acid test.
Eric Pratum (00:33:08):
It sounds to me like you probably deal with quite a few clients that maybe at the time that they come to you, they feel like they haven’t created a business as much as they’ve created just another job for themselves.
David Greer (00:33:29):
Generally people only come to me because stuck on something, right? If everything’s smooth running, why do I need a coach? It can be everything from some owner founders. The part that really gives them joy is that early stage and figuring it out and building the business and building the initial processes. And now it’s like a 5 million a year business and they’re spending all of their time fighting fires and operating the company and they’re not doing anything to find a new market and a new product. And one of sometimes just the first question I asked new clients is “Why’d you start your business? And what was fun about starting your business?” Then they’ll go dah, dah, dah, dah, dah. And I’ll say, great. And how much of your week in the next week, how much of your time will be spent on the da, dah, dah, dah, dah? You just told me. And often it’s like zero, right? And that’s one of what you kind of alluded to. That’s where you reach that it’s not fun anymore. Well, it’s because you were hugely successful, but the fun part of the business is not the stage you’re in right now.
(00:34:47):
But rather than kill the business and blow it up you have something to fix, which is what someone like me would do, because more of that, I love the figuring out the process, documenting it, getting people to use it, and then as soon as I have to do it more than five times, get me out of there because I’m bored. That’s also partly my coaching strategy is I always get people to take the strength finders. Strength finders is like a book that you can buy and in it is a coupon. You go do an online assessment. And the book talks about I think 42 43 strengths, but out of the assessment comes five. And my coaching and life philosophy is that we should operate in our strengths and then we should backfill with processes, money, time, people, those things that we’re weak at to the extent that we can.
(00:35:44):
I think it’s way more important to take a strength from 95% to 95 and a half than to take a weakness from 10% to 20%. I mean, it’s probably more work to take the weakness from 10% to 20% and you won’t move the needle at all. This is part of the, and the other thing is then entrepreneurs will hit a ceiling where they’ve grown their business a certain level and then they can’t get it to the next level. And typically that’s because they need to make a change in themselves because what got them to where they are will not get them to where they want to go. And they need my help to reflect back with them and help them figure that out.
Eric Pratum (00:36:25):
Do you have a large portion, let’s say, of the clients that you work with that come to you in part because they don’t have advisors or impartial parties to talk to? It’s often sort of lonely at the top?
David Greer (00:36:46):
Definitely that, and also I encourage people if you can’t afford a coach is to go find like a peer group. But I find peer groups, peer groups help and it helps to talk to entrepreneurs and their problems, but you don’t get the accountability piece and the one-to-one you meet once a month, you get some ideas, they may or may not be using the best tools. Whereas as a professional coach and a very successful entrepreneur, I built a really big toolkit. It’s also I say again, if you’re not going to get a coach, at least get a mentor. But what I found in mentoring other entrepreneurs is it’s just the accountability piece. They’re not as willing to be accountable to a mentor. Whereas when you pay someone every month, I charge a fair coin, but it’s reasonable. And to some of my clients, like my fee, it’s not even measurable as rounding error, but because they pay me, they show up for every call. It’s just funny how that works. They pay me. They show up for every call and for the most part they do the work between the calls.
Eric Pratum (00:38:01):
Somewhere. I came upon with you that you recommend breaking down your strategic planning or maybe even your measurement of your progress into quarterly planning and
David Greer (00:38:18):
Yes and no. Again, back to Robelle very successful company, did it kind of the classic we’ll do a little bit better than last year. The problem with that approach is let’s say you’re in a market that is growing at 10% a year and you don’t stand back and really look at that bigger picture and you’re not growing at 10% a year, then you’re losing market share and you might not even be aware of it. The thing when I went to this Verne Harnish event that I mentioned early in our conversation, his two books Scaling Up and the Rockefeller Habits, what blew my mind away was his process is you start by picking a future date that’s three to five years in the future. Where are you going to be on that date?
(00:39:12):
How much revenue? What markets are you going to serve? Maybe today you only serve Canada, maybe by then you’ll also serve the United States. Again, it’s unique to each company, but it’s some market ideas. What are the markets you’re going to serve? Is it the same market you have now or a different or adjacent one? Is it the same product lines and have that discussion, what is it going to look like? Where you’re aiming for in three to five years and you identify maybe three to five key capabilities or key hires that you need to happen in that timeframe.
(00:39:51):
If you don’t sell into the United States today, you’re a Canadian company here in Canada, then a key capability is you need to build the capability to sell into the us which it might be easy to build that capability or you might need a distribution center, you might need a manufacturing facility. That would be on the list of the key capability we need to build is by the end of three years from now, we need to have a manufacturing facility established in the United States or the Western US or whatever you work out. Once you’re clear on where you want to go in that longer timeframe, then you work out where do we need to go this year we can get to where we want to go in three or five years. It’s this. I think Robelle, we would’ve done even better than we did if we had used this kind of process where we looked farther out.
(00:40:48):
And then once you are clear in where you want to go for the year, then decide on what you’re going to achieve this quarter. And again for the year, I restrict it to a maximum of five goals. That’s part of the one page strategic plan. And for quarter, like a quarterly corporate goal to achieve no more than five. And sometimes with teams, I’ll actually ask them and they’ll look at how much stuff is on their plate and they’ll say, no, you need to restrict us to four, which can be really hard in a planning session to eliminate that one. But that often is that’s the difference between getting four done and having five and not getting three done because you pick too many goals. And then part of my work as a facilitator is I help people really get clear on what those goals should be and that they have clear finish lines.
(00:41:45):
Like I tell people we need to meet three months from now, we need to be unequivocal. You achieved it or you did not. Improving customer service, that’s an aspirational goal, have no idea, but is a terrible goal to put down for your quarter because I’ll say, well, how do you measure customer satisfaction now? Oh, well we don’t. Okay, well maybe for this quarter a reasonable goal would be to have a system in place and to have at least one survey completed from a customer on the customer satisfaction. And then maybe next quarter we’d set a goal to monitor that for a quarter and then in the next quarter we could actually set a goal for how we want to move that. No, why quarters quarter is 13 weeks and my argument is in 13 weeks you can get a lot of shit done, but if you completely go off in the wrong direction, you can course correct without killing the company.
(00:42:44):
It’s very hard in 13 weeks to go bad that you literally have risked the whole company. I can come up with scenarios and that’d be true, but it’s a lot harder. And this whole thing about the Rockefeller habits and this one page plan, it’s about a meeting rhythm for planning where you meet every quarter to plan the quarter and then once a week you meet offsite and you take twice as much time and you re-look at your three to five year goals, maybe they need to be modified. Then you come up with new one year goals for the new year and then you come up with what your first quarter goals are. And you keep repeating this process quarterly tends to be very tactical, very what’s the next thing we need to do to achieve the year’s goal? I mean I bring up the three year goals and just no new brutal fact has showing up that would completely invalidate this.
(00:43:42):
Now. Interesting. We look at COVID and the pandemic for all my facilitation clients, not one of them changed any of their three to five year goals. They changed their one year goal and the quarterly plan got completely blown up and completely changed. But I found it very interesting, the long-term where they’re aiming, what they’re trying to achieve, where they want to go, that didn’t change even though no one knew how long the pandemic was going to last. I’m talking in the middle of the pandemic, no one knows when it’s going to be over. No one even really knows what its impact is going to be, but this is still where we want to move to business even with having to deal with this new brutal fact.
Eric Pratum (00:44:29):
It sounds to me like part of the reason for that is that you and I might describe this a little differently. We might put a different label on it, but part of what I think we’re still ultimately going for when we talk to some clients is I will put things in terms of more or less, what’s your vision? 10 years, 25 years, a hundred years from now, what’s the world or how are things different or whatever, if you fulfilled upon your mission, vision, values sort of thing, and we can go back further, we can come closer to home and less is going to change, right? In three years versus 10 years, whether it’s in your business or it’s in the world potentially. But the closer that we come to today, the more confidence that we can have about how things are going to be or go by that time. And yet still, I suspect that a contributing factor to your facilitation clients not changing their three to five year goals, I think was the word there, or their plan or whatever
David Greer (00:45:46):
Key capabilities. And
Eric Pratum (00:45:48):
It was more like a vision that, well, we might get there via a different path now, but whether it’s five years or it’s five years and six months, we are still committed to hitting that finish line pretty much right on time
David Greer (00:46:06):
And am skipping over some parts of the plan. The plan actually starts with your core values and articulating your core values and what they are. And then the next piece of the plan is in Jim Collins, Good to Great, what is that 30 year purpose? Why are you here? Why do employees get out of bed in the morning? It can be a more specific goal, but it also can be more something that is driving change in the world or change in markets. And then also as that part of the one-page plan would be again, a Jim Collins concept, which he actually is copyrighted or trademarked, which is the big hairy audacious goal.
(00:46:54):
And that’s much more a measurable piece like 30 years from now, how will you know made the change that you did, what is your big hairy audacious goal to have achieved that? That actually comes in front of figuring out where you want to go to three to five years. Again, it’s all the same process. It’s really that long-term visioning, that long-term purpose, why are we here? And then the five years making it much more concrete, the one year extremely concrete and then the quarter, this is what we’re absolutely going to get done this quarter. And the big thing is a lot of at Robelle, we didn’t write most of this down, some of what really changes is when you actually just write it down and get it on a piece of paper because that ends up holding people accountable. One of my very first facilitation clients, three partners, they brought me in, we did our first plan.
(00:48:01):
Two of the partners suspected that the third really didn’t do what he said that he was going to do. And we had written down the quarterly goals we had who was accountable for each goal and two months in, one of the partners was wildly off in a completely different direction, was doing absolutely nothing to achieve the goal that he had agreed to. It just made crystal, crystal, crystal clear to the other two partners that their third partner was never going to be accountable. And they broke up. They split the firm in two and the two partners went off with one and some of the clients and the other person went off with theirs. And the person that went away I never ended up working with again, but the two that decided to stick with a plan and to extricate themselves from one of the partners, they’ve now been a nine year client and have done amazing when I look where they were nine years ago and what they’ve achieved today is in their private equity firm. And in terms of assets under management, it’s really, really remarkable. It builds something very special. But we did it in this process and kept moving the goalposts as appropriate.
Eric Pratum (00:49:20):
If an entrepreneur is listening to this and you were to say, Hey, if you do nothing else, you start here. You start with these three things sort of thing. You said one of the questions, if not the first question that you ask people often is why did you start your business? And then in your book you have some things that people should do, and you’ve talked about some of them here, but as a starting point, whether just an entrepreneur, they have no specific pain points right now or they are drowning or they’re burnt out regardless of where they’re at right now. If you were to say, Hey, if you do nothing else, do this 1, 2, 3, however many things, where would you tell them that they should start
David Greer (00:50:20):
Write down something that you want to achieve for the next quarter? Here’s the deal, if we actually write on a piece of what our goals are, we are 50% more likely to achieve them even if we never take the piece of paper and look at it again, if you want to up that bring the piece of paper out once a month and see how you’re progressing, if you want to up the probability, again, show the piece of paper to someone else who you will be accountable with. It’s literally that simple and that hard. It’s like a lot of these tools, they’re not all that complicated, but you got to use them. That’s the challenge. And people get dizzy and it’s part of my role as the coach. It’s like, Hey, we’re starting to do a new quarter. Have you met with your team? You decided what you’re going to do this quarter? Oh yeah, well we haven’t done that. Well, when are you going to do it?
Eric Pratum (00:51:22):
Yeah. When someone comes to you then and they’re a client, what are the biggest struggles that then stop them from making quarterly plans or coming up with goals or whatever else? Because I think they’ve taken a big step by making a commitment. They’re not paying, they’re going to an outside advisor and yet there are still hurdles, there are competing priorities, time, money, natural behavior. What do your clients still tend to struggle with even as you’re trying to coach them?
David Greer (00:52:03):
Some, it’s like this level of detail and process is too complicated for stage status of the business. Maybe you dial it back to twice a year instead of every quarter. That can be an issue sometimes too. Remember as a coach, I mostly show up with questions. I try not to show up. I mean, I share my experience, strength and hope in business and in recovery. Like I said, you don’t have to drive in all the potholes, but at the end of the day, it’s your life and it’s your business. It’s like, okay, you don’t have to have a plan and here’s the likely consequences of not having a plan, given what you’ve told me and where you want to go, what do you want to do? Coach Kevin, when I first hired him, he was really good. I remember our conversation in the back of the room at the Verne Harnish events where he made me super uncomfortable.
(00:52:56):
He said, look, “David, I’m going to be there for you and I am going to point out sometimes a pretty rocky road you might be going down based on my experience. And at the end of the day, it’s completely your choice. You can go left or go right? I just point out from my experience what left and might happen down the left or the right. And if you choose the left road, which was the really bumpy one and you crash and burn, I’ll be there to pick up the pieces with you.” What being a coach means, it means I’m not going to judge you for that choice. I’m not going to say I told you [so] I’m just going to be there. Okay, here we are. You made that choice. Here’s where we are. Where do we go from here? What do you want to do? I mean, part of my coaching agreement with at the very last paragraph they need to agree to is it’s your business, it’s your life. This contract is intended to get you what you want. And at the end of the day, that’s mostly up to you.
Eric Pratum (00:54:09):
You said, I believe that your book is more targeted towards founders that are still with their first business, I think it was. And do you have a similar sort of focus, even if the bounds of it might be different or the characterization for your coaching, do you specialize in certain types of situations or industries or certain types of people?
David Greer (00:54:40):
Not yet. People. I look for entrepreneurs, principally owner, founders who’ve grown their business to at least a million a year, have at least 10 to 250 employees. A lot of what I bring to the table I think are the people, culture, performance of people. I do a lot of coaching around having difficult conversations, which I didn’t know if I have any. I’ve only have one or two solopreneurs because I think the value I bring is much more to entrepreneurs who’ve got teams, people today we’ve talked a lot about the entrepreneur herself or himself and kind of issues that come up for them. We haven’t talked much about the organizational issues that come up, but that’s where I often do a lot of work and a lot of help is around those kinds of issues.
(00:55:46):
And also for me, you need to be a pretty much high energy, high performing kind of individual. I mean, I can coach people who don’t fit that mold, but I can’t be my most natural self and people who are struggling and are beat down, I can lower my energy and I can meet them where they’re at. But it’s just that’s not every call. I’m more high energy people who want to torque with me and I want to torque with them to go achieve great things in business and in life. I only get hired because of the business side, but inevitably some aspect of the life or the self part shows up. The one thing I don’t talk about much in the book, but my former coach, Kevin Lawrence talks about in his book, which is your oxygen mask first, which is to really think about your life in three core areas, which is your career, business, finances. We think of that as a bundle and then your life relationships, your significant other, your children, your close friends. And what counter I find with high performing people is that we’re super, super passionate. And we’re usually super passionate about the business, super passionate about our life and these relationships and where we fall down as we squeeze ourselves out in the middle. The third bucket is self. What do you do that is purely for you? Does that jump out of an airplane? For me it’s go sailing.
(00:57:32):
And what do you do to build your own resiliency? I have a pretty good developed habit around exercising. I was at F45 Fitness at 7:30 this morning, did a workout that’s part of that self and making sure I’m looking after myself because if I don’t look and I go to 12 step meetings three times a week because make sure I don’t want to, if I pick up a drink, then I will not be there for any other aspect of my life. That’s part of looking after self. And a lot of people, especially high performing people tend to think this is selfish. And I’m like, you can be selfless. But if you go to the extreme, if you think of a pendulum swinging back and forth, if you go to the extreme of selfless, you will completely burn out. If you go to the extreme of a hundred percent selfish, you’ll have no friends and it’s a pendulum. It swings back and forth. And sometimes if you’ve gone through a very intense period, you often have to, again, this conscious choice, you need to consciously check out and do things that other people may say, Hey, you’re being really selfish. And I might say to them, yeah, I am and this is what I need right now. In planning and goal setting, I really encourage people to look at each of those areas.
Eric Pratum (00:58:55):
I had some folks tell me not long ago that a lot of people with young children in particular that they just don’t find the time to exercise. And it was interesting because this was all men. And I say that because it would be easy, I think to stereotype depending on who you think is saying this, the dominant sentiment I guess in the group or statement was that they knew that they needed to do some form of exercise, but that they felt guilty like they were taking something away from their children or their families. And I’m not saying that they’re wrong, but what I would say is I would perhaps start by describing exercising for yourself or taking five minutes when you need it to just have some time of peace or having your coffee in the morning or whatever it is that you do for you.
(01:00:05):
And you probably need to do things for you in multiple areas, but let’s just make it really simple. Say it’s exercise. I would probably start by saying it’s a part of a whole and you are a part of a whole and that you have to make some minimum investment in yourself if being physically fit wakes you up more, if it makes you more alert, if it makes you feel more positive, makes you live longer, whatever it is, and not doing those things also has positive and negative impacts. It’s all a part of the greater experience for your children or your business or your experience in life. And it honestly just, this is not much my philosophy or how I would advocate, this was my experience in the moment. It just felt weird to me to hear this frankly, because this is probably more about personality traits and all of that.
(01:01:12):
I don’t understand feeling like I’m being selfish because selfish, of course I’m selfish sometimes. There are plenty of times when I do things and I will rationalize it as well. This is for the greater good sort of thing. I know I do that, but I think generally I balance well enough, well enough to get by is what I’m going to say though. I feel more confident in myself than that, but I think I balance things well enough that I would say, how could I feel selfish if what I think that I’m doing is I’m doing at least enough for myself and part of doing at least a minimum amount for myself is that I become a better colleague, a better father, whatever. Exactly. You were reminding me a little of that. It’s like it all is a part, as I said, of a hold. It all works together and as you said, you push a little bit too hard there or not hard enough. Things are going to swing or push back or fill space. It doesn’t matter that you feel selfish. It still has an impact.
David Greer (01:02:27):
And sometimes I have to coach around that. I mean around people’s belief or the feelings that are showing up. And some of it is some just from family of origin and what they were taught. Some of it is societal because there is just a lot of Hollywood media, social, what a man’s role is, what a woman’s role is. Some of these things like looking after ourselves, it’s almost like there’s a societal, oh, you’re being selfish. I think there’s a certain story around that that we’re not even conscious of that we’re exposed to. And this starts showing up when we start to do some of these things. The other thing I remind people is work-life balance bs, it’s never in balance. Again, it’s this pendulum. If sometimes if you have a new product release coming out and it’s coming out in time for a trade show and you’re going to go to the trade show and it’s going to be a really important part of your business for the year here, you may be pulling 60 hour weeks for two, three weeks.
(01:03:39):
And that’s okay as long as you do. Again, I ask you to do it with conscious intention. And also are you letting your family know that this is what’s going on and this is what you will be doing, and are you asking them to help you or are you finding other ways for them to get help to do the parts you won’t be able to do. Again, rather than just because the default is as a high performing entrepreneur, you just get excited about the trade show. You get excited about the new product release, you get excited about how many new customers you’re going to get. You have these new features and you just let yourself get sucked into it rather than, yeah, I’m going to be excited. I am going to get sucked into it, but let me do it with intention. Right? And are you going to schedule three days off after the trade show?
(01:04:29):
That’s the other one that I find most entrepreneurs don’t do is they come back and they got a list of business cards that are as tall as I am and I’m six foot two, and I get it. And you want to follow up and you don’t want to lose momentum. But if you literally work 60 hour weeks for three weeks through up to and including the trade show, you just need two days where your email says out of office and you don’t go into the office and you just stay home and you spend time with the kids and you just build your resiliency and be re-engaged with that other aspect of your life. And then, yeah, come in knowing that you’re going to have this extra body of work, which hopefully you plan with your team. It wasn’t like you couldn’t anticipate that work. Oh, we got a lot of leads at a trade show and now we need to process them. Surprise, surprise. Just a sec. That’s the whole reason we did all of this. Need to resource it appropriately knowing that that’s going to be the case.
Eric Pratum (01:05:38):
You mentioned a few minutes ago organizational challenges, and I know that given the time window we have today, we won’t be able to go deeply into them, but it sounded to me like maybe there are some similarities. Sure. But that’s kind of a different aspect of your business or it’s another aspect of your business. And frankly because some people are listening to this, it feels to me like something that’s worth at least touching on that someone who listens to this has an idea of, oh, that’s another reason that I might call or look up. David,
David Greer (01:06:24):
You asked me what am I going to tell an entrepreneur the three things they should do? And one of the things I said is write down their goals. There there’s a question in management, is it strategy, which is your plan or is it execution? Your ability to actually make the plan come true? Which of those is more important? And the answer is, it’s a trick question because the answer is neither. Because what really is required is alignment. If people are not aligned to moving in the same direction, because a boater, it’s like being in a rowboat. Everybody has their own ore, they’re all pulling super hard. There’s a lot of water splashing up in the air from all of the action and the boat’s going around in a circle because you’re not pulling together and pulling towards a common goal. And that’s why the facilitation I do is with the entrepreneur and their senior leadership team.
(01:07:25):
It’s not in isolation. I think you have to co-create those goals. And sure, you might come out of a quarterly planning session and you don’t agree with the goal, but you have to agree for the next 13 weeks, those are the goals and you have to behave in a way that’s consistent with that. Then you can go argue in 13 weeks when we meet again, you can start over. We can argue whether that’s the most important thing or not. And that sometimes happens, and it sometimes happens for multiple sessions. But organizationally making sure that everyone is aligned on the same thing. And then as we cascaded down into the organization, say your CEO, and everybody reports to you as the VP just for argument’s sake. You meet, you, come up with this plan, have a set of five goals for the quarter.
(01:08:18):
You have accountability for who’s responsible for each of those, or at least the accountability piece for each of those. Then if you’re a VP of sales and marketing, you need to share those goals with your team. But then you also need to come up with what are the five things your team needs to achieve this quarter? And then you need to be able to show for every person on your team, no matter how low they go in the organization, how their work relates to those goals, which sometimes it’s quite indirect or you need to really help them see a bigger picture. You in shipping are going to be sending things out on time people can have it because we can’t count revenue until people have actually received it. And this is our revenue goal. This is how many units we want to ship in the quarter.
(01:09:05):
You are an important piece in making this happen, and I want you to know that. And where people get lost is they can’t relate to the goals. That’s as you move down and cascade down through the organization, having these goals written down is the first thing’s incredibly important. But then you also need cascading goals by department. And then you need to be able for any individual, when a Rockefeller stuff is done really well, you also move to key productivity indicators to measures for every aspect of the business. And if you do it super well, every individual in the business knows at the end of the day whether they had a good day or a bad day by a number that’s measured, not by anecdotal, but I needed to build five things today. I built five things today, I had a good day. And that level of discipline is very, very hard to come by, but produces incredibly high performing organizations and really profitable organizations.
(01:10:09):
There’s kind of super high level some of the work that I do. It’s this goal setting, this alignment, this publishing the goals, holding everybody accountable to it, having a town hall once a month, letting people ask you questions, getting uncomfortable because you’re not achieving the goals that you set. All of that. And then this movement also too, culture, I believe you grow culture by storytelling and business. You grow by the data. Otherwise what happens is we hear the last story we heard, and we think that’s what’s true about the business. We are CEO, we talked to a salesperson, he said, I lost the deal because we don’t have X, Y, Z feature. Which then that’s in your mind and right, and maybe that story is true, maybe it isn’t, but it’s like what is it for all the salespeople? What is the measure that will let you know that sales is still succeeding? And yes, you may lose a sale because you don’t have a feature. That is the reason why we lose sales, but that’s not necessarily the trend. It’s just a story. Run the business on the data, build the culture of stories.
Eric Pratum (01:11:29):
Yeah. You’re reminding me of, I forget the exact phrase, but it’s something like, or the meaning behind this statement is something like even things that are not real are real in their consequences. And this is said about if someone wants to be critical of religion, for example, you could say that your God or that God or whatever doesn’t exist or not. But the thing is, if people act in such a way that they believe that their God exists, then their God is real in its consequences because they’re acting in a certain way. And with the storytelling aspect of this, it’s harder often to have an impact on someone just with numbers. But the story we tell ourselves about the numbers, for example, and maybe the story that we tell ourselves independent of the numbers, even if it’s not real, the facts of the story to speak, are not facts. It is real and it’s consequences. And it sounds to me like you, though I don’t think you said it, it sounds to me like you are aware of and perhaps quite sensitive to what is it that your people are hearing? How are they receiving this information Exactly. Because it’s that their feelings about our sales performance, for example, will be real in its consequences. In their consequences.
David Greer (01:13:14):
Absolutely. That’s why town halls getting feedback from people, making sure your management part of your management is by walking around and you figure how to do that if you’re a virtual company so that people can give you feedback. And some of the coaching I do with entrepreneurs is helping them to be more open to feedback, especially when it’s not good
Eric Pratum (01:13:40):
Feedback. There’s so much to be said. I feel like we’re just open a door to a lot more things to expound upon. However, I do know that we have a limited amount of time today. Should someone wish to not just connect with you, but maybe they’re not ready to connect with you per se, they just want to learn more. I think you said before we started recording that you have a newsletter. I know you have social media, but where do we direct people if they want to learn more or otherwise?
David Greer (01:14:17):
Easiest way is by website coachdjgreer.com, it’s keep coach D as in David, J as in James Greer.com, and the top left corner of every webpage on my site has my phone number and has my email address. And if you are an entrepreneur stuck on a problem, I’m willing to invest an hour with you on a coaching call to solve it. And my promise to you is if we spend an hour together, you’ll have three ideas that accelerate your business within the next 90 days. That’s my brand promise. And far that has been true for 10 years. I really encourage your listeners to take advantage of that. And there’s no commitment, but let me help you get unstuck on something you’re really stuck with.
Eric Pratum (01:15:13):
That’s awesome. It’s a great offer as well. I hope that whether it’s people listening now or just generally the people take you up on that because an hour is not a big commitment and to have the potential of a big return, which I know that you can have from engagements like these. I hope that that is bringing people to you, but knowing again that we are just about to run out of time. I will say, David, thank you for joining me. I really appreciate it. I hope that you’re able to go out sailing pretty soon. We talked a little bit about sailing, but
David Greer (01:15:56):
Not, I just came back from three weeks, I’m okay for a week or two.
Eric Pratum (01:16:00):
Well, that sounds very nice. Again, thank you for joining me. I appreciate it.
David Greer (01:16:05):
Thank you much, Eric. It’s really been a pleasure to be on the podcast and be with you today.
Eric Pratum (01:16:11):
Thank you very much. Hey, thank you for listening. I hope you got a lot out of today’s conversation. If you enjoyed the episode, please take a moment to rate, review and subscribe, and please share it with someone who’d appreciate this kind of information. If you want to bring this kind of thinking to your own business, check out mine at inboundandagile.com. We specialize in helping leaders with challenges around marketing, communications and leadership so they can inspire real action in their people and audiences. Thanks again for listening, and I hope you’ll come back for future episodes.
