On the Becoming Preferred Podcast, Michael Vickers is dedicated to helping you become the preferred vendor in the markets you serve. Join Michael and I as we covered these topics:
- Engineer out friction and bottlenecks in your business processes to improve efficiency and productivity.
- Cultivate a 10x advantage over competitors through exceptional customer experience, not just product features.
- High growth companies create a one-page strategic plan that clearly focuses on where you want to be in 3 years, 1 year, and for the current quarter.
- Dedicate focused time each day to strategic thinking as the CEO, rather than getting pulled into operational chaos.
- View everything as an experiment, stay flexible, and don’t get overly attached to outcomes.
- Reach out for help when struggling with addiction or other personal issues – the brain that got you there cannot solve the problem on its own.
Audio
Transcript
Announcer (00:00):
In 3, 2, 1.
Michael Vickers (00:11):
Welcome back to the Becoming Preferred Podcast, the show that’s dedicated to helping you become the preferred choice in your industry and in your life. Today we have a truly remarkable guest who embodies the spirit of long-term vision, profound transformation and impactful leadership. Our guest, David J. Greer, is a 40 year veteran of the entrepreneurial world. He joined a young software startup at just 22, and for two decades he helped build it into a global powerhouse. After a powerful exit, David embarked on a two year sabbatical, sailing 5,000 miles in the Mediterranean with his family, a journey that reshaped his perspective on success and life. David is a highly sought after entrepreneurial coach and facilitator. He’s a true expert on cultivating high performing cultures, empowering people, and crafting strategic plans that lead to high growth businesses. Join me now for my conversation with David Greer. Well, hi David. Welcome to the program. We’re delighted to have you.
David Greer (01:11):
Thanks, Michael. I am super excited to be here.
Michael Vickers (01:14):
Me too. I was excited to talk to coaches and your Coach David Greer. We’ll have all that information in the show notes for our listeners, but you’re an entrepreneurial coach and I’m always excited as an entrepreneur and many of our literally hundreds and thousands of our listeners are entrepreneurs. They run their own businesses, they work with an organizations, and it also works. We know from an intrapreneurial point of view too. So I know you address those issues as well. So I think this is going to be a good episode for everyone. But before we dive in, David, our listeners always like to know how you got here. So let’s go back in time. You’re in high school. I know you went to University of British Columbia, Vancouver’s home, a good old UBC and a good part of the country, beautiful part. I grew up in part of the British Columbia as well. So you’re back in school. I know you were in marketing based on your experience, you’ve had quite a career. How’d you get here?
David Greer (02:02):
Actually at UBC I was in computer science, although since I was in grade nine, I knew I wanted to take business in computers and put those together. I took every elective in Business when I was at university and through a summer job, I met a consultant who had founded a software company. And while I was still in fourth year, I joined that software company as the first employee after the founders. And as a condition of my employment, I had to submit an abstract to the HP International User Group Convention, and that was accepted. And then I had to write my first paper and I took a week off of school in fourth year, the fly to San Jose gave my first talk. I remember standing on the side of the stage and just how fricking nervous I was. I did that. It was a highly, highly technical talk and I’m 22 years old and I’m standing up on the San Jose convention floor and I’m telling a bunch of other computer geeks about this cool software and what it can do for them. And literally decades later I found out, oh, that’s the essence of marketing and selling. Here’s the problem you have. Here’s a solution for it and here’s how it works.
Michael Vickers (03:10):
I think you nailed it.
David Greer (03:11):
And I liked the place. I stayed 20 years and it was named Robelle for the two founders, Robert and Annabelle. And because it’s a made up name, it’s still Google’s pretty well today. It’s actually still around, even though it’s a computing platform we specialized in is no longer made, but they morphed. But after 20 years, Bob and I had a very major, we only had one really super disagreement in 20 years, but it was a doozy and it ended in divorce. He ended up buying me out. I’m on the street in 2001. I hadn’t noticed this thing called the dotcom meltdown. I’m busy chasing deals and trying to find the next opportunity. And someone smarter than me sat me down in her office across from her and said, David, “do you need to work right away?” And I said, “No, I got a pretty good check on my jeans. I’m not done for life, but I don’t need to work right away.” And she said, “Well, your kids will never be 11 nine and five again.” And I can still remember sitting there and having the really big AHA. And out of that, my wife and I asked a plan where we commissioned a sailboat in the south of France. We took our three kids and we homeschooled them for two years while sailing more than 5,000 miles, 10,000 kilometers in the Mediterranean. And coincidentally, it was like the perfect two years to set out the technology business.
(04:32):
I wish I could say that I planned that, but sometimes you just get lucky.
Michael Vickers (04:37):
Yeah, it’s a great education for your kids too
David Greer (04:41):
And for us, (04:43):
And we have a legacy as that, of that experience as a family. And we still draw on today. It’s unique and special. I came back and I was trying to figure out what to do next. I got involved in angel investing. I did that for three or four years. I looked at kind of a hundred deals a year, invested in one. Anything I invested in. I became a director and working for options and was three or four years of that, all my technology friends kept talking about this one page strategic plan came from a guy called Verne Harnish and a couple of books, The Rockefeller Habits and Scaling Up.
Michael Vickers (05:20):
Yeah, great book. Verne does a good job.
David Greer (05:22):
And I now specialize in that particular framework and facilitate around that framework, but I didn’t know a lot about it. I took one of my young CEOs in one of these angel startup angel backed startups to go to a class by Verne Harnish himself and to learn what this was all about. And at the back of the room were two coaches and I talked to both of them, but one of them, Kevin Lawrence, made me more uncomfortable than I had been in probably half a dozen years. I had tears in the corner of my eyes and it really highlighted to me how unfulfilled I was in my career. And I took his card.
(05:58):
And I had it next to my phone on my desk and probably once a week I thought of calling Kevin. And every time I thought of calling him the phone weighed 10,000. Oh, maybe 20,000 pounds. I was just scared of what that was going to look like. And after three weeks, Kevin called me and he said, “Hey, do you remember me from the Verne Harnish event?” And I said, “Yeah, I do.” I hadn’t thought about much else in the last three weeks. I ended up hiring him, and that was in May. He was super busy. We couldn’t get together until August 9th, 2007 on my 50th birthday. It was our first coaching session. Kevin is my kind of guy. I’m all in or all out, no in-between. The opening coaching session with Kevin at that time was two eight hour days. We went eight hours, then we met again the next day for another eight hours. And I worked with Kevin for nine years, but after 18 months I hired him for my career.
(06:53):
And we got myself going, got me into an executive gig with a couple other CEOs who were trying to restart this interesting company. And on January 26th, 2009, the way I worked with Kevin is the night or the day before, I sent him an email with the successes from the last week and the topic for our coaching call the next day. And I told him the topic was my drinking. And on Tuesday, January 27th, 2009 after lunch, we had our coaching call and he was the first person in the world that I admitted I had a drinking problem too because I have a real drinking problem. I’m an alcoholic, and I’d been a daily drinker for at least 20 years. And I had been in denial about my drinking for about as long. And Kevin built a strong enough trust relationship with me that I was willing to admit to him my deepest, biggest secret.
(07:44):
And it turned out that at his summer place over a number of years, there was an individual there who had over 20 years in 12 step recovery. And Kevin’s a curious guy. He doesn’t have a drinking problem, but he was curious. He sat around the fire and talked a fair number of conversations with this individual. When I showed up, Kevin knew what to do, which is he coached me to go to 12 step recovery, which I had a lot of aversion about. I still don’t know why, but I did. He coached me through that. And that was a Tuesday. I committed to going to a meeting by that Friday and later in the afternoon I knew I had a networking event, downtown technology group and talk there was going to end at eight o’clock. And I went online and I looked up and lo and behold, there was going to be a meeting, a quarter of a block off the road I was going to drive down to go home. And this started at 8:30. I went to that meeting and that meeting happened to be an a legion and legions have bars. I walk into this building, I’m not 24 hours sober, I just put down my last beer like 10:30 the previous night and I’m like a deer in the headlights and some other people who are going to the meeting, they have that sixth sense of people in recovery. And they looked at me and they said, “Hey, are you looking for the meeting? Go down the hall and up the stairs.”
Michael Vickers (08:57):
Or something cold. Yeah.
David Greer (08:58):
I did and later I learned those were 12 steps actually in those stairs, coincidentally. And a couple young women came out and greeted me and I sat kind of on the edge of a row, but in the middle. And at that time, at that group, about three quarters of the way through, they asked, “Is there anyone new to the program who wants to stand and introduce themselves?” And I sat on my hands and I sat on my hands. And then finally after 15 or 20 seconds, I stood up and I said, I’m David. I’m an alcoholic. I think in a lot of ways I didn’t actually know what I was admitting to at least not for a number of months and years, but I was actually admitting my truth. It turns out. And a month or later, I made that what we call a home group, which is a group we commit to going to every week, a group we commit to being of service to. And not too long ago, I took my 16 year cake at that same group. It’s been that same group for my entire sobriety. And when I took my cake, there were three people in the room who were there the night that I walked in.
(09:57):
And have been witness to my stepping day by day one day at a time. And coach Kevin was there too. He was able to come and be there. He has been able to make every cake, but every few years he manages to arrange his schedule he can come.
Michael Vickers (10:13):
That’s true.
David Greer (10:13):
Since then I’ve been down a path of recovery and then working with Kevin, I did a couple other executive gigs, usually senior marketing and sales leadership roles. And behind the scenes I was always working with, it was always for an entrepreneur friend of mine. And then behind the scenes I was helping work on that bigger strategy for the company. And I came out of my last gig, which was VP of marketing of a telematics company. That’s a company that sells devices bolted to cars and trucks to track where you are in real time and then software to see where you were. This simplest form you can see on a map where everybody is. And I came out of three years of that and I realized I’d worked as hard in my mid fifties as I had worked time in my career. And I decided I did not need to prove to anyone that I can work.
(11:00):
I took some time and reflected and I worked with Kaden and eventually decided that I would become an entrepreneurial coach like him, and I wanted to give back to entrepreneurs the gifts that Kevin had given to me. That was like 10 years ago. And I wrote my book, Wind In Your Sails: Vital Strategies that Accelerate Your Entrepreneurial Growth during that transition and became an entrepreneurial coach. And then Kevin stopped doing one-on-one coaching. I got a new coach, Nan O’Connor out of Atlanta, who’s another fabulous entrepreneurial coach and business leader. And Nan kept reflecting back to me on coaching call how pure my energy was when I talked about my recovery. After about three or four years of her just gently nudging me, I decided to go public about my recovery and recorded some videos about it and written blog posts and it’s on my website. And now I specialize in helping entrepreneurs that are challenged by alcoholism or addiction.
Michael Vickers (11:53):
Which even being an entrepreneur, sometimes chasing shiny objects and being addicted to those that can be all part of that,
David Greer (11:59):
There are many kinds of addictions. Yes. And I do not have a single client who does not from time to time chase shiny red balls. Oh yeah. That gets to my last 40 or years.
Michael Vickers (12:10):
Yeah. I go back, we’re going to go back to that startup when you were 22 and worked for 20 years. But I wanted to ask you just on the recovery side of it, because you obviously were a driven personality, you were always driven, and people achieve certain outcomes because of what they’re drinking. Was it just escaping? What was it? What was your
David Greer (12:28):
Payoff? Simplest answer is I’m an alcoholic. That’s why I drank.
(12:33):
At the end of the day, that’s just really what it boils down to. But I drank because it was rocket fuel. I could do more. I drank to make the lows not low. I drank to make the highs higher. At the end of the day, I drank for the reason that almost everyone drinks, which is I want to change what I’m feeling, right? And I want to moderate some aspect of my feeling, not at a conscious level, but more an unconscious level. I mean some people do it more consciously in order to work more. I’m drinking just to overcome the tiredness, or I shouldn’t be working or whatever story it is. Again, it’s always changing some kind of feeling and using alcohol to do that.
Michael Vickers (13:14):
And there’s other substances can do that as well that people use and abuse. And or work.
David Greer (13:19):
Alcoholism or other isms are, if you work, then you don’t have to work on your relationship. You don’t have any time to work on your relationship because working.
Michael Vickers (13:30):
Yeah, yeah. No, I get that. I understand that as entrepreneurs and I love working and I’m fortunate, I get to work with my wife. So for 30 years we work together. And so I get to see her at work and engage with her at work, talk to her work. So at nighttime we try not to talk about work and try and do something, but you’re right. And when you love it, you love it. There’s a nice payoff that comes to it. Well, thanks for sharing that. I’m sure there’s lots of people who find insights from that and having the courage to actually talk about it and it goes to what we do, you have to have the wisdom, the insights, the experience. If you’re going to coach those types of people, it’s better that you’ve been there and are there. So you’re going through. So I get it, let’s go back to 22, some good lessons in here and I want to bring those out.
(14:11):
We’re talking about, for 20 years you helped build this global powerhouse. What was the single most critical insight or decision during those early growth years or in the 20 years you were with the organization that you believe put you on the path to become a global powerhouse? And how can our listeners apply that lesson to their own scaling business? Because you scaled it from we did. What was the big lesson, if you’re going to narrow it down to one or two things that came out of that from an insight point of view, anything pop up?
David Greer (14:37):
Yeah, a couple things. One was we were incredibly customer focused, incredible about, we captured every enhancement requests that people asked of us. We didn’t do ’em all.
(14:49):
In a really good year. I might be able to do 5%. Part of the art is picking the right 5% that satisfies the most, both existing and future prospects. That was one of the really key components. The other was from, the same month that Bob Green and Annabelle hired me, Bob hired me, well, I mean both did, Annabelle hired an administrative assistant, Kerry Lathwell, The four of us ran and grew that business at about 20% annual increase in revenue for five years without adding any more employees, a lot of work. Annabelle and Kerry got very good at systemizing the administrative side. Bob and I, we really liked to develop software. We didn’t really love answering tech support calls. We did it and it was a very important part of our customer service. What we did in those five years and continued really for the entire lengths of the company was we actually engineered customer support calls out of the product. We’d listen to people and then we’d recognize the patterns. Oh, people keep calling because of this particular issue. Could we redesign the product it never happen Or if they started down that path, the software just told them, you should, instead of going left, you should go right in this case. Right?
Michael Vickers (16:08):
Yeah.
David Greer (16:09):
And we did. And all of them were mostly small, incremental. They weren’t rewrite the whole thing from scratch kind of problems. Most of them were actually fairly simple to implement, but just you need to really listen and think through them and be listening for those patterns in your tech support calls. And that was how kept a lot of time available for Bob and I to do development was because we reduced our technical support calls by improving documentation. And when we sent out, this was the time when you got physical media, we had to send a tape to someone for them to install.
(16:45):
We found out there were five really common things that people had problems with them when they went to install our software. We just broke much better documentation. When they opened the package, like the five most common things that were going to go wrong, they were just described like, please do it in this order for some ignored the instructions.
Michael Vickers (16:59):
That’s good advice. Not just for software, but for any service or product that we’re offering is where are the bottlenecks, where’s the friction, and how do we engineer out the friction? So I love that. That’s a good insight.
David Greer (17:09):
Exactly.
Michael Vickers (17:10):
Engineer the friction out of your life and I get it.
David Greer (17:12):
And you think about that, we probably more than doubled revenue in those five years without increasing staff count.
Michael Vickers (17:19):
That’s excellent.
David Greer (17:20):
And in a business where staff count is your number one expense. I wasn’t privy at that time to the profitability, but probably became pretty close to doubling profitability in that time as well.
Michael Vickers (17:32):
Excellent. After a couple of decades of that intense entrepreneurial activity, you took the break and you talked about it to sail the Mediterranean with your family, which I think that just having the courage to go do that and break that, what was the biggest personal realization or shift in perspective that occurred during that year sabbatical, if you will, and how did it influence your approach to business and life moving forward?
David Greer (17:54):
One for sure is, I live in Canada and next to the United States, and even with the media in Canada, and I read a lot of Canadian media and I read some American media, but it’s really easy to think the world revolves around the United States.
(18:10):
And the biggest change in two years of living in the med and only maybe reading a newspaper once a week and getting it from a European perspective. I was not reading any Canadian or American media. I was only reading like UK media. They don’t give a shit a lot of times about, sorry for the language. They have much bigger issues that are much closer to home. And I realized there are a lot of issues going on in the world that don’t revolve around the United States. And to come back and try and keep that perspective, which is now very difficult, that I’m back living in Canada and most of the media that I see.
Michael Vickers (18:45):
Hard to block it out. Yeah, it’s hard to block.
David Greer (18:46):
It’s hard to block it out. But I sometimes go back and I read the BBC news to give me some perspective and read sometimes some of the sections that are more like the business section, which will then talk about more UK European centric view of business. And that just gives me some very different perspectives from what I get versus just the Canadian American centric view.
Michael Vickers (19:13):
Yeah, it’s amazing. If you watch American Thanksgiving, Christmas, whatever, nothing happens on those days ever. Like all the news people, the main anchors tick the day off for a couple of days. Nothing happens like zero. There could be something really bad going on, but it never gets reported. It just doesn’t happen because they got the be team in there and take care of it. Well, I love, there was somewhere I read that you talked about the reconnection and learned to be truly present with your family and with yourself. And you talk about success isn’t just about accumulation, it’s about experience, connection, and wellbeing. So it gave you that deeper appreciation for balance, I think, which I think at that time in your life was probably critical. I mean it put you on that path, maybe
David Greer (19:50):
It put me on the path. And it also gave me some experiences where I think the universe was trying to open me up to some possibilities without alcohol. For example, in the two years we did over 20 overnight passages where you go 24 hours, 36 hours, 48 hours nonstop sailing. And every time we did that, I had no problem not drinking. When the life of my family was at stake, I didn’t even think about it. I didn’t even think about picking up a drink. And the last thing I wanted to be fully present and fully available. And then on our second passage, we were in the middle of the Western Mediterranean Sea. We were couple hundred miles from any shore, no light spill. And my son and I were on watch at three o’clock in the morning and as we looked up, as far as we could see was the Milky Way. And in fact we kept thinking we saw boats on the horizon and what they actually were stars that were bright, we mistook them as the stern light of a ship. And we just sat there and took that in. And I really think that experience was the universe trying to tell me that there was something out there much bigger than me and there was something out there I could really appreciate and be part of without alcohol because I was sober because I was on passage. I hadn’t had anything to drink. I didn’t realize that for a number of years or didn’t really realize it until I got sober.
Michael Vickers (21:19):
But
David Greer (21:19):
I think it was one of those experiences where the universe was showing me that there was another way.
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Michael Vickers (22:44):
And now back to my conversation with David Greer, you’re an expert on culture, people strategic planning. If you had to pick one of those three areas as the most underestimated or overlooked by entrepreneurs today, which would it be and why? What’s one actionable step they can take this week to improve in that area? we’ve got people, culture and strategic, would you mind?
David Greer (23:04):
Well, let’s start with strategic planning. I go to this Verne Harnish event that I explained earlier in our conversation. The one page plan guide, he describes a process where what he says is go out three to five years and pick a future date. What is your business going to look like on that date? And then what do you need to build? What key capabilities or what key people do you need to build in order to get to that 3 years from now? And then once you’re really clear on the four or five things you need to build, is it a new product line? Is it to go into a new geography? Is it you’re going to need a senior SVP of marketing and sales and over the next two, three years, you’re going to have to figure out how to attract that person. Whatever it is, write those down. And then from that work out, what do you need to do in the next year to move you to that vision? And then what do you need to do this quarter to move you to your goals for the year?
Michael Vickers (23:59):
Yeah, excellent.
David Greer (23:59):
The big difference when we grew Robelle, we did it the classic entrepreneurial way kind of planning. Once a year we’ll make it 10% better. They are 5% better than last year. It worked really well. But I really wonder if we had taken more discipline in the Verne Harnish approach, what we really could have built. And I really, and then we didn’t do that kind of quarterly pulsing. I like quarters, it’s 13 weeks, it’s enough time to get a lot of stuff done.
Michael Vickers (24:25):
Your homework.
David Greer (24:25):
That short enough time that if you’re totally off base or some brutal new fact shows up, you can still course correct, you won’t kill the business. This whole notion from the Verne Harnish stuff is these pulsing points three to five years in the future, one year crystal clear, no more than four to five key goals for the year and quarter, no more than four to five key goals for the quarter. And they need to be measurable smart goals. You need to know when you get there, you need to know you got cross them. That’s kind of the core of Verne stuff is people, strategy, execution and cash. And it’s impossible to say in any business at any one point in time, which of those four are going to be the most important, but they’re like the foundation of your house. If one of them is really weak, the whole house is going to tilt in the direction of let’s say it’s cash,
Michael Vickers (25:14):
Where it’s failing,
David Greer (25:15):
Where it’s failing.
(25:17):
And then the other piece that I’ve really come to deeply believe in, we built a really, really strong culture at Robelle. I just didn’t realize that. And that really attracted good people. It really retained good people. And part of it is that really customer first focus. That was one of our core cultural values. I mean, we only had one or two really bad tech support, customer support issues in the course of a year. Yeah, we’d have issues come and go. We’d say one really bad one and literally the whole company would stop until we got it solved. That was, we didn’t have to tell anyone that we just, maybe it was just we were all people pleasers and we just hated having people not liking us. But it worked.
Michael Vickers (25:57):
It’s interesting what you were saying, even on the strategic planning, I’ve always been goal oriented and focused, but this year we actually thought we need to hire somebody who can hold us accountable. And that’s the best part of having a coach like yourself is someone I have to report to and do homework. So we actually hired someone in January and the things that I thought were going to take a year or two already, we basically almost doubled our production in a four or five month window that I never think would be even possible. And I can now see the framework by which it can keep going and scaling, but it requires, I was the bottleneck as the entrepreneur. So nobody does it as good as me. And what I’ve learned is there’s people, 70, 80% is good and some people are better than you, hire the better ones. And it’s always tough when you’ve got to hire somebody and pay out of your pocket. Sometimes you’re not getting the paycheck when you have a company. And I’ve been in situations, in this case we were ahead of the curve. We brought in somebody, which they were expensive and awesome and good at what they do and they held us accountable and we’re getting things done. Therefore it’s like, oh, and now it creates more budget to do even more and take.
David Greer (26:56):
Was it for you? Was it hard to let go?
Michael Vickers (26:58):
Yeah, still is sort of, I look at things and I go, now what I did, the best way to do it is I look at, well, what’s my hourly? For instance, if I want to, and let’s just use a hundred thousand as the number, if I want to make a hundred thousand dollars a year, that’s roughly 2000 hours a year. That’s 50 bucks an hour. If I wanted to make a hundred thousand for me it would be, if I can find someone to do it under 50 bucks an hour, I’m better off to let them do it. Or if I want to make a quarter of a million a year or half a million or a million a year. If I want to do a thousand dollars an hour and we’re talking anything less than a thousand hour, it’s out the door and it’s going, which sounds obscene when you look at numbers, when we look at, but then it allows you to add value and do the voodoo you do and work on your unique ability and what you do best.
(27:40):
I schedule everything at this point as an entrepreneur, all my to-dos, it’s just they’re scheduled. I don’t write a to-do list. I already know the day it’s going to be bigger and longer and after, of course. I calendar it. If it’s calendar, I do it.
David Greer (28:06):
I think those of us who really get to a certain level of performance realize it’s the calendar or nothing todo list don’t matter because it going to fit in the calendar,
Michael Vickers (28:17):
Right? And then …
David Greer (28:18):
It’s honoring the calendar, which can sometimes really hard. It’s like a task that you really don’t want to do and it’s boring and you got the hour allocated, but it’s like actually building the discipline to say, I put it in my calendar, now is the time. Get it over with, get it done. And you’ll be happy when it’s over and the business will move much quicker, faster because …
Michael Vickers (28:39):
You did it and looking after yourself at the same time. I’ve now booked off Fridays, I still work a little bit in the morning since Saturday, Saturday, but I don’t do client work. On our business weekends we might work on a couple things, projects that are fun to work on, but only for part of the day. And then we’re out having fun somewhere hanging out with our kids or grandkids. And it’s really about saying no, I work for several of Warren Buffett’s companies and he says it best, he goes, number one word for our entrepreneurs is learn the word no mess with the period. Complete, yes saying no to things, but Friday is my oxygen mask coming down and it gives me a three day weekend. We can accomplish it because I know this as a coach, work always expands to the time we allow for it. If you got to get your, I end up doing my homework for the first three months with our project manager and our strategic planner. I’m doing my homework the night before or hours before our meeting I have something to report to her on because I have a scheduled meeting with her. I’m being healthy.
David Greer (29:35):
Exactly.
Michael Vickers (29:36):
But now, and in school, I was doing the homework the night before or phoning up that girl in my class who could help me out or whatever it was. Learning to stay ahead of it and be proactive and be, what I find is I think about it, I procrastinate. And of course this is an issue for lots of entrepreneurs. When I actually do the thing, it doesn’t take that long. And I go, why did I work on that thing?
David Greer (29:56):
Why it took you longer to procrastinate it than it did Way more.
Michael Vickers (29:59):
Yeah, yeah. No, we could stop right now. I think there’s some value in there.
David Greer (30:05)
Can I go back just to one thing you said. One of the things that Verne Harnish coach about and talks about having this one page strategic plan, one of the real benefits you hopefully get out of this clarity is that a lot more people in the company know when to say yes and when to say no. And also they can push back to senior management. Just a sec. You have this written down as the number 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 priorities for the quarter and now you’re often left field asking me to do this. Tell me how this relates to what you said were the goals. And that makes senior leaders start to be accountable.
Michael Vickers (30:40):
That’s good
David Greer (30:40):
To the goals and over time, hopefully let’s more employees say no to those things that don’t matter because they’re not moving the company to the goals that it got set.
Michael Vickers (30:50):
Empower them to say no.
David Greer (30:52):
Yes. And that is actually the outcome of really good strategic planning is a lot more people can say, no,
Michael Vickers (30:58):
That’s excellent
David Greer (30:59):
And they know what to say yes to,.
Michael Vickers (31:02):
Right? And it works. We call it the internal constitution. If it’s in the constitution, yeah, we can do it or our battle plan, Hey, that works for our listeners who are aspiring to become preferred in their marketplace or in the verticals or niche they work in. What’s a common mistake that you see entrepreneurs make when trying to differentiate themselves in a crowded marketplace and what’s your alternative approach?
David Greer (31:23):
I believe if you really want to differentiate, you got to be 10 X in something like not two X, not five X, it’s got to be 10 X.
Michael Vickers (31:30):
Love it.
David Greer (31:31):
X, and what are you 10 X compared to your competitors?
(31:35):
And then I think also we get hyperfocused on our particular service or our particular product, our brains get very stuck and I got to make the product 10 times better. And I’m saying no, you look at the customer experience from lead generation into the funnel to how they experience to onboarding to integration. If it’s a software piece or any business process, it doesn’t have to be software. And then to ongoing service and support and any one or any accumulation of those can be 10 times better. If your product feature set in some vertical has a lot less features than the big competitor, but you are 10 times better at actually solving the actual business problem that delivers value to the client, it doesn’t matter. Your feature set is less. You just need to be able to demonstrate to the client that you will actually be way better than the competitors at delivering the value that they want because everyone talks a good story and you need to be able to show them that through their testimonials or talking to other customers or in some way or in a trial implementation that gets them some of the value benefit and they can actually see it in operation.
(32:49):
That’s where the creativity comes in. Like at Robelle, we said, “Hey, you can try our product for free for a month,” and we’d send them the product. It would have an expiry date of a month and especially for a database product, they would start to use it, it would get embedded in their system and then it would stop working and we’d get the phone call, you’ve got to give us an extension code, we’re already using a production, we has to have this. And we’re like, okay, well
Michael Vickers (33:14):
No, it’s good. It’s enough for three trials. Yeah,
David Greer (33:16):
I’ll give you a week extension and that’ll give you enough time to get it through purchasing and then we’ll send you an open version once we get the PO. And that drove a lot of behavior and we had a software product that was 10 times faster than any other solution at extracting data out of these big databases.
Michael Vickers (33:37):
Go 10 x where you can go 10 x and where it can offer it and go
David Greer (33:40):
Be very creative.
Michael Vickers (33:41):
How do we be better at that? You’ve been quoting a few other authors and other books, and I’m sure they probably quote you in your book, Wind In Your Sails, and I’ll let you elaborate on that. Can you share some of counterintuitive piece of advice from the book that might challenge our listeners current thinking about long-term entrepreneurial success?
David Greer (33:58):
Yeah, I had someone, I had another podcaster recently who was very surprised at the depth and breadth I went into in the people chapter and looking after your people and culture and developing culture. Also back to this 10 x piece I feature in the sales chapter, a company Clevest that was in workforce automation. For hydro clients they’d have a portable device where the work order would come and they’d fill it out. Their innovation was they built it on the most modern platform and the VP of sales was able to go to trade shows and have a version of the server running on his laptop in the trade show. He was the only vendor in the trade show that could hand out one of these portable things to someone who was interested, send it a work order, have them complete it, and then go to a different laptop and say, this is what your field organization will be able to see was happening in the field in real time and be able to, in real time in the booth, show the whole experience. And that was game changing because no one else could do that. Again, it’s this thinking about what can make you really fundamentally different in how you show up versus your competitors.
Michael Vickers (35:10):
And there’s lots of room there. There are lots of places to do. That’s actually a great one.
David Greer (35:14):
Tons. Again, I think we can be creative in this. It’s not just creative in the product development or in the service creation. It’s all this aspect of our business from, again, first contact from a lead to post sale, implementation, maintenance service. How can we be really creative about engaging the customer and creating this amazing customer experience? At the end of the day, the customer experience is about what do they
Michael Vickers (35:45):
Feel?
David Greer (35:46):
Branding is not a logo, it’s not your name. Branding is what do people feel about you and what do they say about you when you are not in the room? And that comes from deep experiences that they have of you and your services and your products and your people is what creates that brand experience and what they’ll say about you when you’re not in the room.
Michael Vickers (36:11):
It’s interesting you say it that way because light bulbs are going off. For me, during the pandemic of course speaking things canceled and we helped work and develop some solution around software and all around lead generation. And then we created another program, a coaching program that was kind of that on steroids. We created the product, it has a price, it’s pricey and its category. If you think of it, it’s like there’s cheaper solutions, but what gets us there is our coaching. When you buy the software, to your point, we’ve engineered a coaching solution that goes along with it, and most of ’em take that as soon as they say it, they go, it guarantees the success where we couldn’t choose exactly for the software, we couldn’t. There’s no way we could get that for Microsoft Word if we’re selling word exactly with what we show you and add to the software night and day, and that’s what they pay for. And it’s expensive
David Greer (37:03):
What delivers the value for the client.
Michael Vickers (37:05):
Yeah, yeah. No,
David Greer (37:06):
Because they’re trying to solve a business problem and when you package it all up together that way you actually solve their business problem a lot better.
Michael Vickers (37:13):
Yeah, no, it makes sense. What’s a common misconception about strategic planning that you often encounter with your coaching clients and how do you help them reframe their approach to make it more effective and less daunting?
David Greer (37:24):
That strategic planning is a hundred page binder that sits on a shelf and no one ever looks at it.
Michael Vickers (37:29):
Yeah, right.
David Greer (37:30):
Seriously,
Michael Vickers (37:30):
The one page …
David Greer (37:31):
The deal with the one page fine is that as CEO, as the entrepreneur, this should be taped to your monitor or the side of your desk. You should look at this every day.
If you don’t spend, I would say I do a lot of coaching around this, the CEO should be spending a couple hours a day on the number one thing for the quarter, or at least their goal, or at least the strategy for the company. Because inevitably as the leader, we get sucked into the fires, we get sucked into the emails, we get sucked into the problem solving. But your biggest value is in the strategic thinking, is in the thinking bigger picture. And if you don’t dedicate some time every day to doing that, you’ll just get sucked back into the chaos.
Michael Vickers (38:14):
Yeah, chaos. It’s a
David Greer (38:15):
Chaos.
Michael Vickers (38:15):
Constant wrestle. Experience it. You bet.
David Greer (38:19):
You need to put boundaries and actually honor them. I usually recommend to entrepreneurs, they take the best one to two hours of their day, like wherever their bio rhythm, wherever end their business.
Michael Vickers (38:30):
For me it’s morning,
David Greer (38:31):
Early morning for me. Yeah, some people, it’s early morning, some people it’s like late in the day, everyone goes home at four and actually from four to six is actually really productive. Again, no judgment about where it is, but pick that best time and focus on the number one thing that needs to get done or focus on strategy, which in a Verne Harnish world strategy equals marketing. Where’s your next market? What do you need to do to be better in the market you’re in. All of that strategic thinking needs to come from the CEO or maybe with help from other people, but at the end of the day, that’s the entrepreneur’s got to have that vision. The entrepreneur’s got to see that market fit for what they’re doing. I tell people if we think strategically, if you’re in a market and you say, have 15% market share, and that market is growing 20% compound annual, and you don’t grow 20% compound annual, you’re not maintaining 15% market share, your market share is going down and you can think, well, I’m still doing really well and you still can have a lot of revenue, but as your market share shrinks and shrinks and shrinks, you may come to a crisis place
Michael Vickers (39:39):
And going over again or stop, start.
David Greer (39:42):
That’s this bigger picture, strategic thinking, that’s the CEO’s job. And again, as we grow a business, the business gets bigger, especially owner founder businesses, we just get sucked into the operation.
Michael Vickers (39:56):
Along those lines, and I think you’ve addressed it in the spirit of becoming preferred, what’s the one non-obvious habit or daily practice that you’ve cultivated over the 40 years as an entrepreneur that’s consistently contributed to your personal and professional growth? And it may be what you just finished speaking about where you’re taking that one to two hours and you’re going for a high level thinking. You’re not working on the execution of things. You’re planning, prepping, thinking about it, or is there something else that’s not maybe non, I
David Greer (40:24):
Think the power is in meeting rhythm. It’s like doing some annual planning, then it’s doing that quarterly planning. Then I’m really strong on weekly meetings with my team even when I wasn’t like the CEO when I was VP of marketing weekly, meet with the team and create an actionable who what when list, okay, who’s going to get what done by when and review that every week. And then the final meeting rhythm piece is what’s that time every day when you’re going to focus on the strategic piece. I think if you just think about that habit of these rhythm, that is some of the most powerful ways you can really, you need to sustain it over
Michael Vickers (41:07):
Time.
David Greer (41:08):
You don’t get all the benefit. You get a lot of benefit initially, but the big benefit comes by sustaining this over time.
Michael Vickers (41:16):
And I know you maintain, you can accelerate your growth in a 90 day window in a quarter. You can get some amazing that it goes there. Let me ask you, looking back at your journey and everything you’ve learned, what’s the one piece of advice you could give someone or you wish someone had given you when you were just starting out at two embarking on your first little entrepreneurial journey there?
David Greer (41:36):
Oh, well, it’s probably a few. You don’t have to be serious that one. I’m still stop being attached to outcomes. Everything is an experiment and this one is still a work in progress for me. Coach Kevin really worked with me over nine years to work on this is everything in life and in business is an experiment.
Michael Vickers (41:57):
Some work, some don’t.
David Greer (41:59):
Yeah, exactly. You want to have goals and you want to be trying to go somewhere, but don’t get overly attached to them. Start working on the path to get you there and then use that as informed learning to figure out whether you should go left or right or do more, do less.
Michael Vickers (42:14):
As a sailor, you’ve got to put a runner on your boat and otherwise you get blown wherever the winds are taking you. And sometimes you’re going from A to B. It’s like we talked about, I do piloting for airplane. Sometimes you get into destination isn’t going to work and you need an alternate or you’re going to, something else comes up and plan for your alternates, plan for your plan B’s and plan C’s and be okay with it. Don’t be attached to outcome. It’s more. And sometimes
David Greer (42:36):
Even if you don’t have a plan B, if the wind is howling from the wrong direction, don’t keep bashing your brains to destination A in the middle. You can still figure out a plan B in a different destination that’s more in the direction of where the wind’s telling you to go.
Michael Vickers (42:51):
Yeah, no, it makes sense. Hey, well last question. You’ve got 15, 16 years of continuous sobriety and now focus on helping entrepreneurs who struggle with alcoholism and or addiction of some sort. And it could be work, it doesn’t have to be substance abuse. We all have a number of addictions, and it doesn’t have to be addictions. They don’t have to be struggling because the principles work, but you have that understanding and you have some processes probably to help them. This is vital and often overlooked area. But what’s one piece of advice that you’d offer to an entrepreneur who is realizing they might have a problem with addiction, and what resources would you recommend they explore first? What’s the starting point? I mean, they could probably come give you a call, talk to you and put you on a path. You talked about 12 step in recovery they might be aware of that might be scared of that, fearful of that, but is there a starting point that
David Greer (43:36):
Yeah, I have a couple of things that I really want to share with people, and one of the reasons I come on podcasts like yours, and that’s first of all, I want you to know in business, in life, if you’re struggling with an ism of some kind, I want you to know there is always light at the end of the tunnel.
(43:53):
No matter how dark it seems. And sometimes I’ve been through some really, really dark periods. I want you to know there is always hope.
(44:02):
And the second thing I want to really encourage people or share with people is the brain that got me to be an alcoholic is not the brain that can solve that for me. Reach out for help. Again, if it’s in business, maybe it’s to get a business coach or maybe it’s to join entrepreneur peer group, or maybe it’s just to find a mentor. If you struggle with alcoholism or addiction, find someone that you can reach out to and in business or dealing with alcoholism or addiction or any other ism, I have a free offer. I’ll spend an hour with anyone who is struggling. No obligation, no strings, you just visit my website. Top left corner is my phone number and my email address. Just reach out to me and we’ll set something up and I’ll find something to suggest for you to go take the next step to get help. And depending on just whatever your issue is,
Michael Vickers (44:57):
Generous offer David, and you’re generous on your website. Got lots of good resources, lots of things to help, and I encourage entrepreneurs that are looking to help go to the next level, want to scale their businesses to reach out to you or are struggling with any issues to reach out to you even if they’re not an entrepreneur. Very generous of you, it’s Coach David Greer, the website’s coachdjgreer.com. We’ll have all that in the show notes. David, thanks much. This was insightful, lots of great insights. Thanks for being our guest today.
David Greer (45:23):
Thanks, Michael. It was really nice to share time with you today.
Michael Vickers (45:27):
As you’re listening to this episode, what is one idea that you’ve heard that has caught your attention and why does it matter much to you and who is one person? You can share that with either sharing this episode or just sharing that insight that occurred to you while you’re listening, perhaps it is learning how to make space for your subconscious to process or decision fatigue or creating the discipline to prioritize space for thinking and being, which is crucial for long-term clarity and performance. Thank you for listening, for learning, and for investing in yourself that you become the best version of you. If you found value in this episode, please write a review on Apple Podcasts. If you haven’t subscribed yet, please do you can get a new episode and start your week off right every Monday. Until next time, this podcast is created and associated with Summit Media. My executive producer is Beth Smith and director of Research, Tori Smith. The fee for the show is that you share it with friends when you find something useful or interesting. This podcast is subject to copyright by Summit Media.
