I had the privilege to be on the Dream Huge podcast with Pete Peterson, Mark Gray, and Justin Bigelow. These are the topics we covered in the podcast:
- How I didn’t know how much I had dreamed of sailing with my family until a change in career opened the door to seize that dream.
- How entrepreneurs can sometimes get in their own way of the growth of their company.
- Coaches have great questions and superb listening skills, not answers.
- Why acknowledging small successes in a new direction is so important.
- How I got sober and the ways that I help entrepreneurs with their sobriety.
- Why I wrote my book Wind In Your Sails: Vital Strategies That Accelerate Your Entrepreneurial Growth and the ten entrepreneurial stories I feature in the book.
Listen to our interview:
Are you feeling stuck in your business? Are you an entrepreneur who deals with alcohol or drug issues? I specialize in helping entrepreneurs with addiction issues. My own experience is that I had to realize that I couldn’t do it any more on my own. If that’s you, please Contact Me or call me at +1 (604) 721-5732. I’ve been there and no what it’s like to run a business fueled by substances and how to run a business in recovery. Call today.
Audio
Transcript
Pete Peterson:
What’s up everybody? Welcome to the Dream huge podcast hosted by Mark Grey. How you doing, Mark?
Mark Grey:
Good, Pete, how are you?
Pete Peterson:
Excellent buddy. Justin Bigalow, how you doing, Justin?
Justin Bigalow:
I’m doing great.
Pete Peterson:
Hey, thanks for joining us today and myself, Pete Peterson. Folks, we love to share success stories from huge dreamers, folks in the real estate business, entrepreneurs, movers, shakers, influencers, and more. Hopefully these interviews and stories will help to motivate and inspire you to dream huge. Today we welcome our very special guest, coach David J. Greer. How you doing, coach David?
David Greer:
I’m doing great. Really excited to be on the Dream Huge podcast.
Pete Peterson:
Man, excellent. Thank you for taking the time. Appreciate that. Hey folks, David works directly with entrepreneurs to coach them to their next level of success or with senior management teams to create high growth strategic results. Mr. David, tell us a little bit about yourself and what it is that you do.
David Greer:
Sure. I think it’s easiest if I just start at the beginning of my career and pick it up to where I am today and what I do today, so people can have a little more background. At the age of 22, I was completing my degree in computer science at the university here in Vancouver, BC Canada, where I’m based. I was fortunate to join a young software startup as the first employee after the founders, and I liked the place, I stayed 20 years. We built it into a global powerhouse, did that by specializing in a particular part of the computer market and information technology, building products and services that people really valued. My former partner and I had a policy, we wrote a new paper every year and traveled the world and gave presentations. You create belief in this small Vancouver based software company, you’re going to trust your whole business to.
Pete Peterson:
Wow.
David Greer:
Fast forward 20 years, most of our customers were a hundred million plus kind of companies who were using this computer to run all the practical, what to ship today, invoicing orders. A lot of healthcare providers were also customers. We did this for 20 years and we came to a point where we could see the market was changing and it was probably going to come to some sort of end. We didn’t know how fast, and my former partner and I had a major disagreement about strategy to move ahead. Both strategies I think were viable, but they didn’t complement each other at all. We solved that by him buying me out. There I am in the early 2000’s, not noticing that the.com meltdown is happening. I’m busy chasing new deals. I got a pretty decent check out of it and wasn’t done for life, but I definitely didn’t need to work right away for financial reasons.
Someone smarter than me sat me down and said, “David, do you need to work right away or could you do something different?” And she explained to me how she had had a similar career break and she’d moved to Australia, bought a VW van and toured around for a year. I literally had the light bulb moment sitting in her office. I can still picture it actually, and with that, my wife and I decided to do something completely different. I’m a lifelong sailor and we sailed with our kids since they were born and so we commissioned a sail out in the South France and we took our three kids and homeschooled them for two years while sailing more than 5,000 miles in the Mediterranean.
Pete Peterson:
Wow, that has one hell of a Mediterranean cruise right there.
Justin Bigalow:
That’s a journey.
David Greer:
People get writing us and saying, “Hope you’re having a nice holiday.” I’m like, “This ain’t like any holiday you’ve ever been on.”
Pete Peterson:
Two years cruising the Mediterranean. What awesome memories, experiences you must have had and the ability to be able to do that, that is just awesome.
David Greer:
I meet a lot of people who dream, but very few who are willing to live their dreams. One of the things I really appreciate, I didn’t really realize how much I had dreamed. I’d read about long-term family cruising in books and articles for decades, but I didn’t realize how much it was my own dream until this person caused me to pause and stop and, “Oh yeah, we could do this.” Yeah, it’s a legacy that our family still draws from today. We went 18 months without being in an English speaking country.
Pete Peterson:
That’s amazing.
David Greer:
What exactly impact does it have on my kids? I don’t know, and it doesn’t really matter. I just know that we’re all different because of the experience.
Pete Peterson:
You must have an amazing family as well because you left with your wife and the three children and you returned with your wife and the three children, correct?
David Greer:
Yes, and in April of this year, my wife and I celebrated our 40th anniversary.
Pete Peterson:
Excellent. You didn’t drive each other crazy on the boat, in other words.
David Greer:
Yes. The rule of thumb in long-term cruising is if you survived their first year, then your relationship will probably last forever.
If you can last together sailing together and sail through storms together, let alone the whole homeschooling piece.
Pete Peterson:
Right? Oh yeah.
Justin Bigalow:
Man.
David Greer:
Yeah. It’s just an incredible experience.
Pete Peterson:
Very cool.
David Greer:
Career wise, I came back to Canada. I then spent three, four years angel investing, looking at a hundred deals a year, investing in one, working as a board of director, working on special projects for options. But I really found it just was not fulfilling given my experience that I’d had in building the software company.
I hadn’t really realized how uncomfortable I was until I was at an event. I used Verne Harnish’s stuff, the Rockefeller Habits, his book Scaling Up 2.0. I used that framework in my work facilitating strategic planning. Anyways, I was with one of my young CEOs of one of these startup companies at a Verne Harnish event in 2007. There were a couple coaches in the back of the room, and one of them made me more uncomfortable than I had been in a number of years. I actually had tears in the corner of my eyes, but it really highlighted was how unfulfilled I was in my work. His card sat next to my phone for three weeks, and that phone must have weighed at least 10,000 pounds. I kept looking at the card, but I couldn’t pick up the phone. Thankfully for me, Kevin called me and he said, “You remember who I am?” And I’m like, “Oh yeah, I remember who you are.” And he said, “I thought there was a real spark in our conversation that day. What do you think?” And I hired him as my coach.
Pete Peterson:
Got you.
David Greer:
On my 50th birthday, August 9th, 2007, we did our first coaching session together. For Kevin, if you become a client of his, or at that time, if you became a client of his, your opening coaching was two eight hour days back to back. But I’m the kind of entrepreneur, I’m all in or all up. That’s why the angel investing didn’t work. It wasn’t all in. But with Kevin, I was all in and we reestablished my career.
Then eight 18 months after we worked together, I admitted to Kevin that I had a drinking problem and I did have a drinking problem. I’m an alcoholic. Kevin, thankfully his summer place down in Washington state, he’d sat around the campfire for many summers with a guy with many decades in AA. He coached me to go to AA, and that was a Tuesday. I committed to him to go to a meeting by that Friday, being all in, all out overachiever that I am, that afternoon, I looked up online and lo and behold, I was at a networking event downtown until 20:00. But there was a meeting at 20:30 that was literally on the road I was going to drive home on.
Pete Peterson:
Like it was meant to be, almost.
David Greer:
Totally. And in fact, the universe put Kevin in my path to get sober, that’s what I deeply believe. I went to my first meeting and I was there last night actually at the same meeting. I made it what we call an AA, your home group, which is basically a group you commit to going to every week and being part of. I recently celebrated my 5000th day of sobriety.
Pete Peterson:
Man. Excellent, congrats.
David Greer:
Which for someone like me, is a miracle. I did a few executive gigs, usually senior sales and marketing roles. I’m usually working hand in hand with an entrepreneurial friend of mine and behind the scenes helping to work on strategy. I came out of my last gig, which was a senior role as the VP of marketing for a telematics company here in Vancouver. Publicly traded, doing 35 million a year. I decided I’d had enough of being senior executive and working that hard. I made a decision working with Kevin to become an entrepreneurial coach and facilitator. Really my reason why is pretty simple, I want to help other entrepreneurs the way Kevin has helped me. For the last seven years, I have a thriving one-on-one coaching practice where I work directly with entrepreneurs. Then the other big part of my business is I facilitate strategic planning using Rockefeller habits templates and toolkit with the entrepreneurs and their senior leadership team.
There’s a pulse and a rhythm to doing that, which is we do clients that want to work with me on facilitation, have to agree to one day a quarter offsite for three quarters of the year and then two days offsite to do the annual plan for the next year or the first quarter. I’m moving into that stage of my calendar where I’m doing a lot of that over the next four or five weeks. What I decided two years ago was that I would in particular focus on entrepreneurs that are challenged with alcoholism and addiction, whether they’re still actively out there or when you get into recovery as an entrepreneur, it has its own special challenges, which I understand because I’m an entrepreneur and I’m in recovery. That’s everything from, there’s a real culture in our society in high-end sales that like you close sales by going out for dinner with the prospects and drinking a lot of booze.
If you run the kind of company where you as the entrepreneur are expected to be at those dinners in the final stages of closing, what the hell do you do? How do you show up for those situations? It’s everything around that. It’s just again, because I’ve been there, it’s an area that I specialize in. If you’re listening today and you’re in recovery, but you’re still struggling, how do you merge that with your business? I’m happy to talk and I know you’re just struggling with alcoholism and addiction, happy to talk about that. For any of your listeners, whether you have those challenges or not, I’m always prepared to do a one hour no charge coaching call.
Pete Peterson:
Sure. Love it. It sounds like you definitely found a niche there, and it may be a huge niche. Many folks deal with addiction, let alone entrepreneurs, folks that are dealing with added stress of being an entrepreneur and sometimes they can lean on addiction, substance abuse. I’d be curious to see what percentage of entrepreneurs are alcoholics? What’s the actual number there?
David Greer:
I’ve spent a lot of time trying to get the answer to that question, and it seems unanswerable currently. Primally because part of why I’m public about my recovery is that there’s still so much stigma attached to alcoholism. If you break your leg, people understand, you wear a cast, you go to the doctor, you take time off. If you’re an alcoholic, there’s still a lot of people think it’s moral failing, Really, it’s a mental health disease. When I go ask people who are researchers and do surveys and collect data on this, they’re like, “Well, but no one wants to self admit they’re an entrepreneur and an alcoholic. Because of that, we don’t have any data.”
Pete Peterson:
It’s like, yeah, how many actually have a problem? How many are willing to admit they have a problem and when is it actually considered a problem? These are conversations that many folks are having with themselves, correct?
David Greer:
More people died in 2020 from the direct result of alcoholism than did from COVID.
Pete Peterson:
Wow.
David Greer:
In the United States.
Justin Bigalow:
That was the real damage.
Pete Peterson:
That’s why Biggie does not drink.
Justin Bigalow:
Yes. I never drank.
Pete Peterson:
Justin, by the way, just to get a little perspectives of the hosts here, Justin has never drank and he did four years in the Navy.
Justin Bigalow:
Yes, four and a half years in Navy and I never drank.
Pete Peterson:
Military guy.
Justin Bigalow:
It’s not a lie.
Mark Grey:
He’s 31.
Pete Peterson:
Me on the other hand, I probably overdo it at times, but yeah, I know when to reel it in. Mark, what about you?
Mark Grey:
I’ve had my share.
Pete Peterson:
Yep. But man, no, that’s tremendous that you’re helping folks that have problem out there and there’s many that do.
David Greer:
Yeah, so in the United States, the National Institute of Alcoholism and Addiction, it’s NIAAA, I forget the last A [Abuse]. Their guidelines are that if you have four drinks a week on a regular basis, then you are at supremely high risk of alcohol use disorder.
Pete Peterson:
Wow, four a week?
David Greer:
Four in a row.
Pete Peterson:
Four in a row.
David Greer:
Either you have four in a week, but once a week you’re having four drinks, one after another.
Pete Peterson:
Four in a row
David Greer:
With not taking a break and having a glass of water or a non-alcoholic drink in between.
Pete Peterson:
Yeah, see, that’s my problem. I think I heard similar advice to that where you could have two a day safely. Well, I would just save those all up for Saturday night and I would have 14 on Saturday night.
David Greer:
Well, the thing is, it’s really about your relationship to alcohol. It’s not whether you’re a daily drinker, we would call what you do is binge drinking. It’s more how you feel afterwards. It’s more what were your behaviors when you did that?
Pete Peterson:
Sure.
David Greer:
Were you sending text messages at two o’clock in the morning that were completely inappropriate? Are you completely embarrassed by the behavior that you had?
Pete Peterson:
Sure, do you wake up and wonder what you did or what you said? Absolutely, yes.
David Greer:
Yeah, blackout drinking, which is what you just described, where you wake up and you literally cannot remember, but you still were awake when it happened. That’s another precursor, or at least sign that you quite possibly have alcohol use disorder. I remember in the nineties, so I would’ve been in my thirties, I went in the doctor’s office and they had one of these self-assessment about drinking and asked you 20 questions. I think I answered 17 with yes, and the key at the end said, if you answered more than four questions, yes, you should talk to your doctor. My response was, “Oh, these fucking idiots. They don’t know what they’re talking about.”
Pete Peterson:
Right, sure. Denial. Yes, absolutely.
David Greer:
It’s like, “Well, all my friends, they drink like this.” So yeah, this is just crap.
Pete Peterson:
Just perfectly normal.
David Greer:
And of course, being a good alcoholic, I surrounded myself with people who drank like me.
And wealthy, high performing people, I’m a wealthy, high performing alcoholic. There are a lot of us, and we do get a lot of shit done in life, pardon my language here.
Pete Peterson:
Yeah, no, let it fly.
David Greer:
Yes, there is a lot of drinking. No one thinks anything, going out to dinner and having two or three drinks before the dinner and the bottle of wine each. That’s seven or eight drinks in one sitting.
Pete Peterson:
No, yeah, it definitely makes you put things in perspective and rethink things, that’s for sure.
David Greer:
But to go back to business though. Your Dream Huge is the title of your podcast.
Pete Peterson:
Yes.
David Greer:
Part of what my work is as a coach and a facilitator is to help people to actually first dream big. Often we get in our own way, we actually have the potential to go someplace really big, but then we get stuck on, “Well, I don’t know how to get there,” or, “I don’t believe that I can actually do that.” So some of what I work on in strategic planning, one of the things that Verne Harnish taught me that was a radical thought. I’m with the software company for 20 years, and basically strategic planning was do a little better than last year and incrementally improve it. There’s nothing wrong with that. We made a lot of money with that approach because we had a very niche market, which was very high value. But Verne’s thing is where do you want to be in three to five years? What’s your vision for what that looks like? Figure that out and then work backwards to what you need to do this year and then work backwards to what do you need to do in the next quarter? That’s not a natural process for a lot of entrepreneurs.
Pete Peterson:
Sure. Yeah, I’m guilty of the first. Let’s do a little bit more than last year. That’s me all day long. But yeah, you’re saying we need to step back, we need to look further out and we need to set plans for three to five years and then reverse engineer that.
David Greer:
Yes. Are you really living to your full potential by just incrementally improving where you are?
Pete Peterson:
Absolutely not.
David Greer:
Maybe you are and maybe you’re totally happy with where you are. Again, I’m perfectly okay with that. My work is the coach, my number one ask for clients is make a conscious choice. If that works for you, fantastic. Just make a conscious choice about it. But if you feel like you have more to offer to the world, that you can have bigger impact, you can bring more change or you have a bigger vision, then why don’t we talk about where do you want to be in three to five years and let’s come up with a plan that’ll set you down that road.
Pete Peterson:
Sure. It sounds excellent to me, and being a coach and having a coach, you’re going to push them along. You’re also going to hold them accountable is what I would think and hope. Mark and I were talking before the pod actually, or we heard it somewhere where some super successful individual had a coach for many aspects of their lives. In other words, they had a health and nutrition coach, they had a fitness coach, they had a public speaking coach, they had an entrepreneurial coach. I think there’s definitely value there and it will push you beyond your comfort zone and it’ll push you to new growth. I think that’s a tremendous thing that you offer. Now, curious, so when you bring on clients, are you seeing more failing entrepreneurs that really need help, or are you seeing more entrepreneurs that are doing well but just need to do more?
David Greer:
I would say more of the latter. They’re stuck on something, either they’ve had a recent crisis that’s really scared them or they’re in crisis. That’s another reason why they end up coming to me. Some of them are like, “There’s more here. I don’t know exactly what it is and I want some help to figure it out.” I have very strong word of mouth referral, so that really helps that people can share with others in a meaningful way what they’ve got out of their work with me. It’s hard, it sounds really soft to begin with. Although I do a lot of those things that you said, as an entrepreneur, no one keeps you accountable as a general rule of thumb, unless you have a board, if you have outside investors and a board, then there’s probably some seat to the fire. But if you’re an owner founder and grew it from scratch and a decent cash flow, there’s no one really holding you accountable.
Pete Peterson:
That’s a great point.
David Greer:
Also the skill that let you start a business and grow it to a certain stage are not the same skills that let you run a business successfully.
Pete Peterson:
The E-myth, a great book.
David Greer:
Which myth?
Pete Peterson:
A great book called the E-myth explains that point exactly,
David Greer:
Yes, and so few, at least first time entrepreneurs have enough self-awareness to realize, it took me a long time to realize that even though I’m a very confident manager, you don’t really want me to manage a well oiled running machine because I get my excitement in fixing things and overcoming challenges. It’s like I’ll throw a wrench in it so it breaks apart so I get something to fix. Not consciously, but it’s what I end up doing because I’m just bored. It’s like this is not interesting enough.
Pete Peterson:
I understand.
David Greer:
Then entrepreneurs often will come to me because they’re like, “Well, I keep telling people to do things, they don’t do it.” Then you start digging around like, well it’s because you keep snatching back the steering wheel, you tell them that they have control and they can do it their way and figure it out. But then when you don’t like what’s happening, you wrench control back and step back in. Everyone around you learns, “Well, you don’t really mean it. So why stick my neck up? Why take the risk?”
Pete Peterson:
Yes.
David Greer:
Someone had a question, go for it.
Pete Peterson:
Oh no, I think Justin just had a comment.
Justin Bigalow:
I was just saying that, and my analogy for what you said is a dog, they’re walking, they get to know you and then they bite back and then they’re nice again and they bite back. It’s like, do you trust me or not?
Pete Peterson:
They keep yanking that wheel back. They give them the wheel, but then they yank it back.
Justin Bigalow:
Do you like me or not?
Pete Peterson:
Okay. Now your coaching services specifically, what does that cost to get started? How does that look?
David Greer:
How it starts is that we have a coaching call because we need to figure out whether we can work together. Then out of that conversation, some people in the first three months would like me once a week.
Pete Peterson:
Sure.
David Greer:
That’s structured differently. My base is a fixed monthly fee for two one hour calls a month, and I don’t put it on podcasts and stuff because these live for years.
Pete Peterson:
Sure. Yeah, absolutely.
David Greer:
My practices do change over time.
Pete Peterson:
The thing is, like you said, just call and let’s have a conversation and let’s go from there.
David Greer:
Exactly. Because I tell you, I’ll be honest, sometimes I have a conversation with people and in the end, I’m like, “I don’t think we can work together.”
Pete Peterson:
Right.
Justin Bigalow:
Yeah, interview process.
Pete Peterson:
Sure, absolutely.
David Greer:
Only hire a coach who you really relate to. If I don’t respect you and you don’t respect me, then it’s just not going to work. I don’t want you to hire me just to hire me. Do you know what I mean? If you want to coach, I want you to have the best coach for you. That might not be me, and I’m okay with that. I would much rather that you had the best coach for you.
Pete Peterson:
Will you dive into their business segment and help them figure out where the opportunities are or what does that look like?
David Greer:
I do, because I’ve done really senior leadership roles in marketing and I have a decade in marketing and sales. Plus, we were pretty good at marketing in the software company. I bring a certain amount of expertise in that area. But again, it’s like I am not going to be expert in any vertical. All I can come with is some really good questions and I can listen to what you are telling me and suggest maybe you don’t understand your market as well as you think you do. Or perhaps you should go think about these questions about your market that maybe you’ve never thought of before.
Pete Peterson:
Sure. Sometimes it’s great just to have an outsider’s perspective, an objective point of view to open your eyes. Right?
Justin Bigalow:
Yeah.
David Greer:
Yeah, and as a coach, for the most part, I don’t really have the answers. What I have is really great questions.
Pete Peterson:
That’s a great point. The answers are with the client.
Justin Bigalow:
Thought provoking questions.
David Greer:
Correct.
Pete Peterson:
The client has the answers, you’re just bringing the answers out of them.
David Greer:
I have really good listening skills and I listen more than just the words. Before this call, I had a call with a longtime client and I was listening to the emotional content of where he was at and checked in with him a couple times on that because it was quite an emotional call. It wasn’t necessarily in the words, it was in the silences.
Pete Peterson:
Sure.
Justin Bigalow:
It was how he was saying it, the tone.
David Greer:
Yeah, so that’s part of my skillset is, consciously and through formal coach training in other ways, built some really strong listening. Asking good questions and being able to really listen deeply for what the answers are and use that to inform what the next question is. At the end of the day, if I have suggestions, in my experience, it’s door number one or door number two, or door number three. Would you like to explore any of those doors? The client says, “No, I don’t really like any of those.” “Okay, no problem. What do you know relate to? What do you think would be the next right thing for you to do?”
Pete Peterson:
Get them to open up, they might answer themselves.
David Greer:
And as coach Kevin told me in our very first conversation, he might probably know the best path of action for me, but he’ll just point it out or suggest it, leave it up to me. If I go down the rabbit hole and create a big mess, then he’s there for me afterwards to clean it up. Seriously.
It’s not for me to say, you shouldn’t go have that experience, even though I got some pretty serious scar tissue that says what it’s probably going to be like. Because the most important thing for you may be to go through that experience and earn that scar tissue, and I can’t know that.
Pete Peterson:
Man. Yeah, it sounds like you can really get deep and help folks out at the root problem and just move forward and get it out there and get past it and continue to focus on growth and helping others. I love it.
David Greer:
Also, just I’ll add one more thing. The other thing I think as a coach is really seeing growth in people and being able to let them know that when they’re not able to, the growth is really small baby steps, but as a coach, I can really see they’ve come, maybe it’s two yards down the path, but it’s like two yards that they’ve been trying most of their life to go down with zero movement and I can reflect back to them, “Wow, are you making a lot of progress.” And help them to see the two yards they’ve gone down the path, which can be incredibly empowering for people. It’s like, “Oh yeah, I’m doing this. I am making progress.”
Especially changing the way that they behave in the world or look at things, this is hard stuff. This doesn’t come easy to any of us. Having someone who can actually reflect fairly the progress that you’ve made, that is I think one of the other big skills I bring to the table as a coach.
Pete Peterson:
Love it.
Justin Bigalow:
I agree.
Pete Peterson:
Not only checking in, but showing them and reminding them of their progress along the way.
Justin Bigalow:
You get lost. You’re running down the path and you get lost in, well, all the things you did on the way there.
David Greer:
Yeah, or I always start calls with asking clients, share three or four wins from the last day or the last week. It’s amazing how often, oh yeah, I did this and this. You’re telling me that if you uncovered your entire financial model was broke and that you figured out how to fix it, again, they just lay it out there as this little tiny thing when I’m like, “Wow, we should be singing from the rafters at the progress that you’ve made. This is something to celebrate.”
Justin Bigalow:
I agree.
Pete Peterson:
Most people may be too modest, maybe?
Justin Bigalow:
I resonate with that. Yeah. I think it’s because I’m hard on myself, so then I don’t necessarily celebrate myself.
Pete Peterson:
“Oh, that’s no big deal.” But really it was.
Justin Bigalow:
Yeah. I have a lender who’s the same way. He’s like, “Dude, look how far you’ve come in just two years,” and I don’t even realize it until he starts telling me that.
David Greer:
Yes, exactly.
Pete Peterson:
Love it. All right, Mr. Coach, David J. Greer, appreciate you so far man. Thank you for taking the time. Before we let you go though, I want to discuss your book, Wind In Your Sails, and 10 Strategies That Will Help Entrepreneurs Succeed, if you wouldn’t mind discussing that with us a little bit.
David Greer:
Sure. This book is oriented towards newer or owner founders who’ve only ever had one business, not so much like serial entrepreneurs or really experienced entrepreneurs, just so people know where I’m targeting it. My belief is there’s 10 functional areas in a business and that’s the 10 strategies. My experience is for the kind of people relatively new or owner founders have grown their own, they’ll have three or four they’re super good at, three or four that they’re aware of and still okay with, and probably two they maybe never have heard of. Some of it is just raising awareness around all of that. Then it’s a little bit of theory about each of those areas and then a lot of practical stories, how you actually can implement it and do something about it. It’s designed to be an action book. You can read a cover to cover and have a lot more insight and knowledge about your business, or you can just be stuck with a problem, go look up the right chapter for that problem and have a couple ideas for what to do next.
To create the book. I interviewed over 45 entrepreneurs and sales and marketing leaders, and a lot of their feedback is actually in the book. A third of the book is other people’s content. You not only get all the scar tissue and lessons that I’ve learned in 40 years of business, and every chapter ends in a case study featuring an entrepreneur that I felt was really good in the particular strategy that I was talking about in that chapter. You have a really concrete case study ending every chapter with their experience, strength, and hope.
Pete Peterson:
Man, excellent.
David Greer:
Then of course, because I’m a sailor, every chapter opens with a sailing story. It’s a metaphor for what I’m trying to get across for the chapter.
Justin Bigalow:
I know that feeling.
Pete Peterson:
Very cool. I cannot wait to check out this book, man. It sounds very good. We are all big readers here. We’ve got the unofficial Dream Huge book club, so you’re definitely in. We’re going to put you on the list. Yeah, I can’t wait to read that. Is it on Audible by chance? Amazon Audible?
David Greer:
Yes, it is.
Pete Peterson:
Oh baby, we’re definitely going to listen to it now. We’re definitely going to read it now. Now are you narrating or did you have someone narrate or read it I should say?
David Greer:
I did have someone narrate, although it’s someone I chose whose voice is very close to mine.
Pete Peterson:
Okay. Man, excited for that. I’m going to put that on the list and that is called Wind In Your Sails, coach David J. Greer. We’re excited for that. Okay, well thank you for joining us today. Anything else you wanted to touch on before we let you get going with your busy day, sir?
David Greer:
Nope, just my website is coachdjgreer.com. It’s D as in David, J as in James, coachdjgreer.com. My phone number and my email’s right there on the homepage. Like I say, my offer’s there. If you’re an entrepreneur, you’re feeling stuck and you got a challenge you really would like to talk to someone else about, let’s set something up.
Pete Peterson:
Excellent. There he is, coach David J. Greer. Awesome job. Thank you for coming on the Dream Huge podcast and thank you listeners. Thank you for listening to the Dream Huge podcast with Mark Gray, Justin Bigalow and myself, Pete Peterson. Please remember to review, subscribe, and share, and as always, remember the rules, work hard, never give up and dream huge.
