Listen as coach, leader, legacy builder, and podcaster Lois Sonstegard interviews me on her Building My Legacy Podcast where we talk about these issues that impact your legacy as an entrepreneur:
- How difficult and emotional big business transitions can be.
- Moving through your fears.
- How I used alcohol to cope with fear, stress, and the challenges of running a business.
- My path through recovery from alcoholism.
- The importance of a good coach to an entrepreneur.
- There is hope no matter what you suffer from or with.
- Have empathy for anyone who is suffering from alcoholism or addiction.
Transcript
Lois Sonstegard:
Welcome everybody to today’s Building My Legacy Podcast. I have with me today, David Greer. David Greer is fascinating to, oh, you’re going to love him, because he has so much differed backgrounds perspectives. And he has done probably some things that many of us as entrepreneurs dream about, but never get around to, maybe because we don’t have the skill sets that he has, but maybe we don’t have the discipline to do it either. So David is an entrepreneurial coach. He’s an author and he’s a facilitator. He’s written a book called Wind In Your Sales. And this is an interesting book because he brings some of his experiences as a sailor. He spent two years sailing around, particularly the Mediterranean, I think.
David Greer:
That’s correct.
Lois Sonstegard:
… with his whole family. And so he uses many of those stories in his coaching. So he’s a coach, he’s a facilitator. He is also an angel investor. He was co-owner and president of Robelle. And in that position, he traveled all over the world speaking and giving presentations. He was, because of that, one of the leading providers of HP 3000 Solutions, so has a strong IT background, and that’s where he comes from. He’s also done angel investing and works with senior executives on a one to one basis, looking at helping them define their strategy.
One of the things that you talk about, David, is some of the challenges that leaders have. You get to this incredible state, you’ve gotten your game under toe, you’re moving on full steam, and then you look at your life. And many people come to that point and they have some issues that they need to deal with, whether it’s drugs or alcohol, issues with family and friends, and legacy is so dependent on our dealing with some of that. So I’d like you to just share a little bit about your journey, why you’ve come to realizing the importance of that, and some of the lessons you’ve learned.
David Greer:
Sure. Thanks Lois. Thank you everybody for listening to the podcast today. So it’s fantastic to have a chance to speak with all of you. So, I was young, 22 years old, going to the University of British Columbia getting my computer science degree where I joined this young software startup, the one that Lois mentioned, Robelle, which was named for the two founders, Robert and Annabelle. And I liked the place, I stayed 20 years and help build it into a global powerhouse. And I did a, I think a decent job of that work life balance thing, and spending time with my family during time. Had three young kids. In fact, when I bought out Annabelle in 1991, when our kids were four and two, and that was incredibly stressful. In fact, I remember leaving the accountants at the 16th floor in downtown Vancouver, and I had tears in my eyes. I had the stress of borrowing a lot of money to buy out one of the partners and become a full partner in the business.
Lois Sonstegard:
So the stress surrounded the issue of fear, fear of what?
David Greer:
Fear of not being able to pay Annabelle back because of the structure of the deal. So she loaned me the money and the deal was I had to make quarterly payments, and if I missed any quarterly payments, she could demand all of her shares back.
Lois Sonstegard:
Got it.
David Greer:
Which is a fairly typical arrangement. I later learned subsequently, Annabelle sadly is no longer with us, but I stayed friends with her for another 20 years beyond buying her out 20, 30 years, is that she implicitly trusted me and she never would’ve asked for the shares back, but I didn’t know that. And so I’ve got a young family I have to care for, and financially provide for, and I’m making this, and I’d taken a huge amount of savings to make the down payment. And the business had always done extremely well, but there’s that fear of the future, what if it doesn’t? What if something goes wrong? And so, yes. Now I mitigated the fear once I actually closed the deal by saving an entirely quarterly payment and putting it into saving instruments so that the business could go sideways for an entire quarter and not make any money for a quarter. And this was a huge cash flow positive, profitable business, and I would be able to make the payment. So, that’s how I personally mitigated the risk against that.
Lois Sonstegard:
So you managed your fear that way and could move ahead. That’s an incredible accomplishment, because especially with a young family, you also tend not to have a lot of cash at that point in your life.
David Greer:
Yes. And so it was, again, you mentioned discipline in your intro of me and that is, I think, one of the things that to be really successful, you have to learn discipline. You have to learn when to party now and spend now, and when to say, I need to put things aside for a potential rainy day. And it took a little bit, it probably took a quarter or two, we made excess profit. And then I just took all of that and made sure that it was put into savings and didn’t spend any of it.
Lois Sonstegard:
Got it.
David Greer:
So that’s how I mitigated the risk against that.
Lois Sonstegard:
So you had a careful plan, you executed it, you kept to it.
David Greer:
Yeah. And ended up being hugely successful and massively financially rewarded in that business by, we were super dedicated to looking after our customers, and if we had one really irate customer in a year, the whole company would shut down until we dealt with the customer. It’s not that people didn’t have problems, but we had a customer service organization and an ethos of dealing with those fairly and responsive, and in a fast timeframe, whereas our competitors often ignored them, or didn’t acknowledge them.
Lois Sonstegard:
Wow. And that’s becoming more and more important in today’s world. I want to come back to that in our next podcast, but I want to go on from here to looking at, when people come to the end of their career path way as they move up, there’s three things that we begin to see happen often with leaders. One is their health begins to deteriorate, or they begin to self-medicate through, whether it’s drugs or alcohol, or sometimes they begin to have other relationships, or they let their family or children fall apart, and they’ve got a lot of pieces to pick up. So you have a perspective on the self-medication portion, especially.
David Greer:
Yes. So the other way I cope with stress, even before I bought Annabelle out, was that I used alcohol, and in fact became an alcoholic. And I was a super high performing a alcoholic. So I used alcohol when things weren’t going well to lift me up, but I used it as much when things were going well to celebrate. And I definitely used it to power up and to work more, was one of my coping mechanisms. So I sold out at Robelle in 2001, and I didn’t acknowledge that I was an alcoholic until 2009. So that continued for a very, very long time. I’m talking 20 years of daily drinking, of excessive daily drinking.
Lois Sonstegard:
So for you, what do you call excessive? Because I think a lot of people, David, don’t know what alcoholism, at what point is it excessive? So how do you define that?
David Greer:
So, I have my experience, but it’s excessive when it’s excessive for you, and depending on our body type and our tolerance to alcohol, that can be, for me, it was more than a dozen drinks a day, but let me give you Health Canada’s definition of heavy drinking, which would be four drinks in a single occurrence for a woman, or five drinks in a single occurrence for a man more than one time in a month. So again, that’s not my personal experience, or that of others I know in recovery, but rather what Health Canada actually defines as heavy drinking.
And people who drink like that, and do it consistently, and Health Canada suggests it would be for a year, the National Institute of Health Alcohol and Abuse, I forget there’s another A in there, they would suggest you don’t even need to go a year. You just are dramatically at a higher risk of having alcohol use disorder, which is what the mental health text define. Alcoholism, it’s not called alcoholism, it’s called alcohol use disorder, and even that’s on a range. So I was at the extreme range. I had it in a major, major way. And for me, I had to get to a point where, the way I’d say it is, I got sick and tired of being sick and tired. I got really tired of being beholden to the alcohol.
Lois Sonstegard:
So what did that mean to you? Because what does it mean to be beholden to it?
David Greer:
I’m not in control. In the recovery program I’m in, we say alcohol, cunning, baffling, powerful. And my personal experience is that that is exactly what it is. It is unbelievably cunning, it still tries to get me in my dreams. I had a drinking dream the other day, actually, I don’t call them drinking dreams, the drinking nightmares. And it’s a powerful, powerful, powerful drug. It’s a legal drug in Canada, in the US, and most of the world. So it’s easy to not appreciate how powerful it is. And so for me, it was when I had no choice left about whether to drink or not, and really about how much. And for a long time I didn’t want to admit that I didn’t have that control.
But eventually I brought an amazing coach into my life, Kevin Lawrence, largely because I was frustrated with my career and it wasn’t going where I wanted. When you talk about the legacy, like I have a fantastic legacy of building this software company, and then I spent three years, very, very active angel investing, looking at 300 deals a year, and doing a lot of board work, and working for options. But I found it very unfulfilling work. I was working with people who weren’t anywhere near my level, the mentoring, a lot of people didn’t want to listen.
And so I met this coach, Kevin Lawrence, at a training event, and he made me more uncomfortable than I had been in probably five or six years. I actually had tears in the corner of my eyes. And I, as a man who, very hard to have tears in my eyes. The fact that a five minute conversation with this guy got right to my core. And eventually I ended up hiring him. And in fact, our first coaching session was on my 50th birthday. And at 50 I’m still a relative, now I’m, this is a number of years ago. I’m still a young man. I still have a lot, and even today have a lot that I want to do and achieve and bring to the world. But I couldn’t, because I couldn’t bring my full self, I should say, because of my dependence on alcohol.
And Kevin and I worked together for 18 months, and we cleared the table till nothing was left, but the elephant in the room. And on January 26th, 2009, I sent him an email saying at tomorrow’s coaching session the topic we need to talk about is my drinking. On Tuesday, January 27th, 2009, I told him I had a drinking problem. He asked me some things around that, about how much I drank. He coached me to go to 12-step recovery. And I actually went to my first meeting that night, and I’ve been going back ever since. It’s been an incredible gift that I’ve received now with more than 12 years of sobriety.
Lois Sonstegard:
So David, it was somebody asking you a question, or a series of questions, following a training session.
David Greer:
We were in the middle of a training, it was like coffee break. And it was like, go talk to these coaches at the back of the room, they’re expert in the subject we’re talking about. And I went and talked to the two coaches that were there, and this one coach literally in a five minute conversation, just asking a few great questions, got me very uncomfortable.
Lois Sonstegard:
Okay. And those questions were around your drinking, or around your business, or around …
David Greer:
Around the business.
Lois Sonstegard:
Around the business. Okay. I just want to be clear with this journey. Okay.
David Greer:
So, Kevin, I worked with Kevin for 18 months, a year and a half, and he had no inkling. Remember I’m a super uber high performing alcoholic. And plus most of the time our calls would be in the morning, and I wasn’t the kind of drinker who got up in the morning and started drinking, was always later in the day. So I never would ever have had alcohol when I had a call with him. And I still did a lot of stuff, a lot of stuff. That’s one of the challenges of dealing with employees, of working with entrepreneurs, is we are often super uber, high performing people. And then behind the scenes, this is how we cope.
Lois Sonstegard:
I think it’s very hard to turn off that juice when you’re pushing, pushing, pushing, and stretching. And so alcohol does become that go to place, and we’re suddenly, or subtly move into it without realizing that’s what we’re doing. Was that your experience or were you happy.
David Greer:
Yeah. My experience, so my experience is the progressive. So we say that alcoholism is a progressive disease. So you progress more and more into the disease as you continue to drink. Sure I have lots of friends in recovery who picked up their first drink at 13 and they knew they were alcoholics. Drink till they blackout, that started then and just continued, but that’s not my experience. And I know a lot of people who share my experience of the progressive nature. The analogy that I often use is, I don’t know when I became a pickle, I just know there became a point where the pickle couldn’t turn back into a cucumber. And so I can tell you when I was still think I was a cucumber, and I can tell you for sure when I was a pickle, I’m not sure when I went in between, I was fully pickled. And in truth, it doesn’t matter, because in the end I became an alcoholic.
Lois Sonstegard:
What is, is. So tell us, there’ll be a lot of people listening to this, David, who will say, so what did you learn? What can you share with me? What’s really important to grasp if you’re in a situation where you’re beginning to wonder, is this me?
David Greer:
My most important message for someone who suffers is there’s hope. So, I want you to know that there is a way forward. There is a way out, and there is hope for you, no matter who you are, what stage you’re at, what you’re dealing with. I just want you to know there is hope. I also want you to know that alcoholism is really and drug abuse, is unbelievably hard to try and do it alone. It’s almost impossible to do it alone. And so I really, really encourage you to talk to someone about it, to get some help. And I’m sure as part of this podcast, my contact details will be there, and you can always reach out to me and I’ll be happy to talk to you about whatever your particular issue is.
My route was through 12-step recovery, which has really worked for me. I didn’t go to treatment, I have a lot of friends who did. There are multiple paths forward. And the key is finding a support system that can support you in your sobriety. For example, I try make it a habit of talking to a recovering alcoholic every single day.
Lois Sonstegard:
Wow. And why is that?
David Greer:
Well, a whole bunch of reasons, one is to give me hope for the day. Two is, my brain, so I have a mental health disease, so my brain wants me to forget that I’m an alcoholic so that I’ll pick up a drink. And so I think it’s really important that I consciously remind myself that this is who I am. So I don’t. So that’s also part of why I do that. And just to share laughs with another person who can really relate to whatever’s going on for you and we can share, we tell pretty ugly, well, we tell interesting war stories in 12-step recovery that most non-alcoholics would find appalling, or incomprehensible, or how could you possibly laugh at that? But it’s who we are. It’s what we do. And we relate to each other and we never want to repeat it. And we can laugh at our foibles, at our character defects, and we can appreciate each other, not despite of, or maybe because of we have this shared experience that we’re not perfect, that we struggle with certain things.
Lois Sonstegard:
And I think that is something that overachievers, people who own their business tend to be overachievers, have this need to be perfect. Think of themselves as perfect. And yet none of us are, and yet there’s that false assumption that if we just have the right formula, do the right things, everything will move along perfectly.
David Greer:
Yeah, I like to tell people I have a character defect of perfectionism, but that’s not true. I love being perfect. I have tremendous difficulty with the whole idea of being imperfect, making mistakes, not knowing at all, all of those things, man, are they challenging. So a lot of my recovery and growth, when you come into recovery, you put aside the drink, but then you have to learn how to live life without your number one coping mechanism, whether it’s alcohol or drugs, or sex, or food, or whatever it is that you’ve used. And recovery is all about learning how to live life on life’s terms without having to resort to some outside thing to change your feelings. So a lot of the work is actually recognizing these parts of ourselves that we really struggle with. And it’s like, I don’t think I will ever get a hundred percent comfortable with being imperfect, but compared to 10 years ago, I’m a lot more comfortable. And in fact, we have a saying in recovery progress, not perfection.
Lois Sonstegard:
Got it. So we’re talking about things that you learned, hope, the importance of hope, there’s hope for everyone.
David Greer:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Lois Sonstegard:
And, but you can’t do it alone. What else have you learned?
David Greer:
If you keep work working at it, this is true in life as well as in recovery, but it really, really is true in recovery. If you keep just chipping away and working at it, you’ll be amazed, again, as we say in my recovery program, you’d be amazed before you’re halfway through. In fact, oftentimes people will see changes in you before you can see them in yourself, because you’re just at the rock chipping away and trying to improve yourself and make yourself more self aware of how you respond to things, and what goes on for you. And so you don’t notice that you’ve actually made a lot of subtle adjustments in how you behave, in how you respond to people, and how you respond to situations. And where before you flew off the handle and you got angry, even if you hadn’t been drinking, but that was how you showed up in life. And you work away at that and people will start to notice. You can be in tense, difficult situations, but not have to show up with a lot of anger.
Lois Sonstegard:
I want to talk about that just for a moment, because we’ve talked about alcohol’s impact on you. Let’s talk a little bit about its impact on the people around you.
David Greer:
So for me, because I was so high performing, it was actually a real surprise to some of the people around me. I would say I’m not typical in that particular case. Oftentimes spouses, children like others, other partners, have seen it long before the alcohol season, and has even maybe brought it to their attention. And what our literature talks about is that this process I’m talking about, any personal growth process takes time. So there’s no turn off the alcohol, flip the switch. In fact, it might get worse for a while because you don’t have your coping mechanisms. So you might even fly off the handle more, or you might show up with other behaviors that are undesirable, but can you start a trend line that starts moving in the right direction upwards?
That’s why treatment is very effective for a lot of people, to take 60 or 90 days, also treatment centers give you a lot more background of the neuroscience, the information about the disease, whether it’s alcohol or whether it’s drugs, and take you out of your normal day-to-day living environment, which is often necessary for you to be able to recover. And then, after 90 days in treatment, you probably will show up quite a bit differently to those around you, although most of us recommend you don’t hang out with the same friends. You and I have previously talked about the social imperative in business to go and socialize after work and how going for drink, or especially in high level sales, we’re taking potential prospects out, or even existing clients for dinner, and you have a couple drinks before dinner and you have a bottle of wine each, which is my experience. That would be fairly typical in high end sales. Well, two drinks, a bottle of wine, is seven drinks. So when I said five drinks for a man would be in one occurrence, more than once a month would be heavy drinking.
So you need to have coping… I’m not answering your question directly, because I think it’s more about the person and how they respond and other people around them being as supportive as they can be, which for sometimes for the people around them, that’s very difficult. You may have partners who themselves are alcoholic, or you may have partners who are just heavy drinkers, but for them it’s so much a part of the social that they’re very uncomfortable when you go out with them after work and you don’t drink. And what I’ve discovered is that, or you might have family members sometimes in family situations, maybe not in the immediate family, but it may be in your family of origin, or your extended family. Your not drinking really is threatening, is very, very threatening because what does it mean for them? What I’ve discovered is when someone else is super uncomfortable about my recovery and the fact I don’t drink, it’s usually a good indication they have some issue with alcohol.
Lois Sonstegard:
Interesting.
David Greer:
That discomfort’s coming from somewhere. So redefining that dynamic in your family, like having wine every night with dinner was part of our family, that’s what we did. That’s part of how I got enough alcohol. And obviously I couldn’t do that. And one of the things was I, after I got sober, I told my wife, I will not open a bottle of wine or pour a glass for you. And that was really, really hard for her, because that act to her was a really, she’s not an alcoholic, she’s just a normal drinker. But that act of getting the wine out, taking the cork out, pouring it in the glass, was something that was very special to her. And so she had to actually grieve that loss, because I just said, I’m not going to do it. And I also said, another boundary I had from day one was I’ve never been in a liquor store since I got sober, not once.
So I got no problem with, and all our kids drink some of the time, and that’s fine. You can bring alcohol in the house, but I’m not getting that for you. If you’re out of time and you don’t have time to go to the liquor store, well, you’ll have to go without, because I’m not going to go there. So these things can be very, these are big changes sometimes for people around you, and that’s part of navigating your sobriety, is figuring out how to deal with these situations, and how to have boundaries around them, and how to be okay with having boundaries around them, even though people might be guilting you, or you might feel shame, or guilt around some of these, but if you want to stay sober, these are issues you work through.
Lois Sonstegard:
So often it’s a piece we don’t talk about much, is it? And it’s a discussion we need to start having more in businesses with our employees, because we put people in vulnerable situations without realizing that they’re becoming vulnerable. And without boundaries, it is easy to step into that problem area.
David Greer:
Yes. And alcohol, people say things when they’re drunk that they would never say when they’re sober. And in a business situation, those could be the things that are really, really inappropriate. And lost count of the number of stories of business Christmas parties where either leaders or employees were completely, completely inappropriate to the point of having to let people go.
Lois Sonstegard:
Yeah. David, our time is almost up. What have we left out that the audience should know about, that lessons you’ve learned, something that you really want them to know that we’ve missed?
David Greer:
Alcoholism sneaks up on you. And if you’re having some doubts, then get some help, because there’s probably a reason for those doubts. And know that help is there. There is always someone who’s willing to reach out a hand and to be of help, and who will share their experience, strength and hope that you can learn from, and know that no matter how tough it seems, how deep the problems, there will be a path forward.
Lois Sonstegard:
There will be a path forward. That’s huge hope. And seeking out somebody with experience who has some knowledge, I think is also so important. Anything else that you want to leave with the audience before we have to end for the session?
David Greer:
No, I guess it’s just a reminder that, alcoholism impacts about 10% of the population. So, if you’re in a company with a hundred employees, there’s probably 10 alcoholics. And it crosses race, gender, age, women can be alcoholic almost as frequently as men. And again, I think I still had this picture of the wrong side of the tracks, a man with a trench coat and a brown paper bag. And that was an alcoholic. And so I really want your audience to think your alcoholic is your parent, your child, your adult child, your spouse, your friend, we’re everywhere because it’s a pervasive, pervasive disease, and hold space for those individuals, and compassion and empathy.
Lois Sonstegard:
Hold space, compassion, empathy, and hope. I love that. David, thank you so much for being with us, on Building My Legacy today. And for those of you who are listening, we will have information about David in the show notes, we will have contact information about him also for you. So if you just are needing that listening ear, somebody to sort, or to point you in a direction where you can get some help, we encourage you to at least connect with David and he will have knowledge of resources where you should perhaps go. Thank you so much for being with us today, and David, thank you to you.
David Greer:
Well, thank you so much for the chance to talk about something that’s really important to me and I think really important to our society.
Lois Sonstegard:
Thank you.
