I had the pleasure of being interviewed by Plan It With Nikki (Nikki Peal). Be sure to check out her web site for great blog posts on practical ways to become a high performer. It also has links to her podcast episodes.
We cover these topics:
- Overcoming challenges early in my career.
- Why have a shotgun agreement in your Shareholder’s Agreement.
- How we decided to commission a boat in the south of France and home school our children on a sailboat in the Mediterranean for two years.
- Facing the brutal facts.
- How for years I was completely unfulfilled I was in my career.
- Admitting to my coach Kevin Lawrence that I had a drinking problem and him coaching me into 12-step recovery for my alcoholism.
- Strategic planning is about creating alignment around a very small number of goals—five or less per year and per quarter.
- Why having a 5-10 year vision is great, but you have to break it down into what you will accomplish this year and what goals you will achieve this quarter.
You can listen to the podcast interview at this link:
https://open.spotify.com/episode/6Nzc9OM9fhofe2nZelWB7u?si=umgqfKEARJ-wOCiKm_r1ZA
Transcript
Nikki (00:08):
Hello, lovely listeners and welcome back to Planet with Nikki, your podcast dedicated to unlocking your full potential in productivity, strategy, execution, and personal growth, the podcast where we dive deep into intentional living. I’m Nikki, your host and guide on this transformational journey towards realizing your goals and aspirations, helping guide you on your own journey to success. Today we have a truly fascinating guest with us, someone who has not only been a successful entrepreneur for over 40 years, but also has a profound impact on the lives of others through his coaching and advocacy work. Please welcome entrepreneurial coach, David J. Greer. David, it’s a pleasure to have you on the show today.
David (00:55):
My pleasure too. I have been really looking forward to this.
Nikki (00:59):
Yeah. David, if you don’t mind, let’s start at the beginning of your journey. At the age of 22, you joined a young software startup, and please keep me honest here if I get any factual information incorrect. And over the next two decades, you played a crucial role in transforming it into a global powerhouse. Maybe can you share with us what it was like for your career journey, maybe including some of those highlights, the challenges and highlights along the way?
David (01:30):
Yeah, I had a coach, Kevin Lawrence for nine years who like to say that we are the stories that we tell, and if you want to change the experience, change the story and the story you just told is the true story. But I think that in life and in business we learn from our challenges, excuse me, and from overcoming adversity. I want to start with just a couple pieces of that. Yes, I was 22. Yes, I was going to the University of British Columbia, getting my computer science degree. I had got a part-time job with the local cable company, which turned out was the largest cable company in North America at the time. And I was working on a really critical project to rewrite their IT systems led by a consultant, Bob Green, who had just founded a company. And I decided in fourth year to leave the cable company and joined Bob’s Young company, founded with his wife Annabelle.
(02:34):
Robert and Annabelle gets you, Robelle, which was the name of the company, made up name. Google’s well and the manager at the cable system was very disappointed in me because he’d gone to bat for me with his bosses. And I had a mentor, one of my dad’s best friends who I talked to this be. My other piece of advice is it’s great if you can have someone more experience to talk to or a coach. And he said, look, he wouldn’t have paid you that money if you didn’t do good things for him, and so you earned what you had so you can go with the clear conscience. But I had some angst around that. And then as a condition of my new employment, I had to submit a paper to the international HP Computer User Group convention of 1980, which was accepted. And then I had to fly to San Jose and talk to all my professors and get a week off in fourth year to go give my first technical talk.
(03:36):
And as I was prepping for your call this morning, I was really reflecting back, standing on the edge of the stage with my new boss, Bob Green next to me. And I don’t know if I was externally shaking, but I tell you internally I was shaking like a leaf and I got out there and I got started, which has always been the case for me. I tend to have a little bit of nerves before presentation, and if I don’t, I worry because I think I don’t give a good presentation if I don’t and I have them because I care.
(04:12):
And so anyways, that was a couple pieces of that initial journey, which is even for me is really, I’ve now given hundreds of presentations. Bob and I had a strategy where we wrote a new technical or managerial paper every year and travel the planet giving presentations to create belief in this obscure Canada based company that you’d never heard of, that you were going to trust your whole business to. And that strategy worked. It was very effective actually. And again, in that journey, if we go forward like 10 years in I, we’d started an R&D company, which I owned half of and was running kind of the R&D arm. Then Annabelle wanted to retire and I had an opportunity to buy her part of the business. And at this point, I’m about 32, I’ve got a 4-year-old and a 2-year-old, and I went downtown as part of this process and met with the accountants, and I had to take every bit of cash I had to pay as a down payment, had to pay it back over three years. If I missed a single payment, Annabelle could demand her shares back. And I left that meeting outstanding outside the elevator with tears going down my eyes.
It was fricking scary.
Nikki (05:33):
Yeah, what did you just do?
David (05:36):
I hadn’t signed the papers yet, but this is just contemplating it. And I did buy her out and I immediately put one quarter’s worth of payments. Well, we had a really good quarter, and I managed to put a quarter payment to Annabelle in the bank and just put it in a term investment so that if the unthinkable happened and we had a quarter where we didn’t make any money, I still had a whole payment for Annabelle. And years later when I talked to Annabelle, she said, David, I trusted you. I know you. I never would’ve called on the shares even if you’d missed a payment, but I didn’t know that until long after the fact. In fact, long after I being out of Robelle.
Nikki (06:20):
Not everyone might’ve been so generous.
David (06:23):
No. And she still had that potential that was in the agreement. It’s what I agreed to, and it was papered with lawyers and all the rest. Yeah. I mean, it was a very scary time and it all turned out well. And we continued to build the business until 2000 when, so we were experts in a particular computing platform made by Hewlett Packard, which one they started was like the 46th largest computer manufacturer in the United States. And that its Prime was probably in the top three or five. We rode the coattails. We’re an independent software vendor, but we rode the coattails of HP success. But we could see that this platform had some end of life. It was the longest lived minicomputer platform in history, but it had some end. And Bob and I got into a major disagreement about what the future of the company was.
(07:21):
I wanted to, we built an incredible team. We did amazing things that no other company did, and we’d had multiple touch points to tell us that from customers and partners and distributors. I wanted to take this skillset and apply it some new direction, put a little more money and a little more risk and build it in new direction. And Bob wanted to milk the market until the last customer left infer of delights. I think they both were very viable strategies. They just were not complimentary strategies. I only had one disagreement with Bob in 20 years, but it was a hell of a doozy. And it was emotionally very, very him accusing me by email of stealing money and all these things that weren’t the slightest bit true.
(08:09):
It was very acrimonious at the end, and we ended up solving it by him buying me out, which was the result of more good advice when we started the R&D company in the eighties, when I was in my mid twenties, mid late twenties, I’d got legal advice for shareholders’ agreement, and there was a clause called a shotgun clause where if you come to a disagreement, one shareholder can say to the other shareholder, I offer to you, X dollars a share for all of your shares. And the other person either says, okay, David, I will sell you my shares at X dollars a share or turns around and says, no, I will buy all of your shares for X dollars a share. And there’s like 30 days to decide. And I remember asking the lawyer at the time, I get along so well with these people, and the lawyer said, well, there may come a day when you don’t see eye to eye, and you don’t and are at loggerheads with each other. We put this clause in as a way to solve that, thank God. And then that actual clause had moved forward for our various corporate entities and had been preserved largely as we originally wrote it. And that was how we solved. I made him a very good offer. And this company, he never had children. This was his baby. He turned around five days later and said he’d buy me out.
Nikki (09:38):
There you go. That’s a very strong piece of advice I think for anyone who’s looking to go into business with friends or even someone they don’t know from the outset.
David (09:48):
Yeah, how are you going to solve disagreements? Because believe me, disagreements will come up. I do a lot of coaching around that,
(10:02):
But it was, and I was reading some of your recent blog posts, you had one about passion, another about grit. What’s the difference between an entrepreneur and an ordinary person? I think it’s just perseverance, it’s grit, it’s not giving up. And why were we so successful at Robelle as we really, really were passionate about the customer? We had two home run product lines, and one was this development environment that led programmers or operators in this computing environment be incredibly productive. And then I was the chief architect of the highest speed database solution. People built data stores, database stores way too big for the hardware, and so they couldn’t get information out fast enough so they couldn’t get their overnight reports out in the morning before people had to log in. And this caused untold grief, and we had a software solution that helped solve that and let people run their business. But also we were passionate about helping people get information out of these really large data stores that was critical to running their business. And even being able to do it during the day, WestJet, one of the founding CEOs of WestJet, used our solution even though he was not a programmer, not a techie, but he needed critical information and he learned how to use this piece of software to extract out of WestJet’s database critical information he needed to run the airline.
(11:38):
WestJet, your listeners might not know, but WestJet is one of the larger, Canadian was started as a low cost carrier to compete with Air Canada and it’s still in business today.
Nikki (11:55):
Wow.
David (11:57):
[Westjet] doesn’t use that computing platform and doesn’t use that software anymore. It moved on. But we were very, very passionate about this and I think it showed up a lot in the presentations we did. And the presentations we did were not sales presentations. They were things that we were learned from the school of hard knocks that we went out and this is what we learned, this is what you might want to think about or they were deeply technical papers on. If you’re trying to solve work with this technical problem, here’s what we found out and maybe this will help you.
Nikki (12:33):
Yeah, I love it. I love it and I love how you really put the passion behind it. I’m a firm believer, and if it’s something that you’re truly passionate about, it’s going to come across in everything. And that in and of itself can be the potential selling point or even just the belief that needs to be put out there to help someone else feel it.
David (12:58):
And I’ve met entrepreneurs, but the opposite is true. They’re not deeply, deeply passionate enough about ’em or they don’t believe in it enough. And yeah, it’s like you don’t want to invest in them. They’re just not believable enough. I think there’s two sides to that coin, and plus only 10% of the population ever become entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs running a business. One of the hardest things you’re ever going to do in your life, so have something you really care about because that’ll, when you’re in a muck and the mud and up to your neck and feel like you can’t even tread water, sustain you, is that vision, the why you’re doing it, why you’re getting up in the morning to put another day in.
Nikki (13:59):
I love it. I absolutely love it. So David, maybe you can share a little bit about what you decided to do after you sold your part of the company.
David (14:13):
It’s early 2001, and I’ve sold a business and I barely noticed that the dotcom meltdown has happened. I’m busy trying to chase technical opportunities in the Vancouver area. And again, I did a lot of networking, at least I’m outgoing, gregarious, so it’s not too hard for me to network. That’s never been a challenge. Too much of a challenge for me. Through kind of introduced one person introduced another, introduced me to this woman who helped senior, had a firm who was hired when senior executives were let go to help them find their way and find a new place. And we went out to lunch together and then we went back to her office and I remember we were sitting in chairs in front of her desk facing each other and Margaret Livingston was her name, and she looked at me and she said, when I had a career change like yours, I went to Australia and I bought a VW van and I drove around for a year and took a break.
Nikki (15:18):
That’s amazing.
David (15:21):
If you can just picture since we’re just voice here today, picture the most cartoonish light bulb going off over my head picture that you can. And she said to me, this was probably the kicker, she said, David, your kids will never be 11, nine, and five again.
(15:41):
I was pretty good about balancing my life and doing a lot of things, and I’ve been a sailor all my life and we’d had a sailboat and spent at least three weeks on the sailboat with the kids every summer and skied with them in the winter. But the business still took away a lot of time. My wife and I hatched this plan where we would commission a sailboat in the south of France and take our three kids and homeschool them for two years while sailing more than 5,000 miles, about 10,000 kilometers in the Mediterranean.
Nikki (16:18):
What an incredible experience. I just have to say, I need to figure out a way to make that happen in my life.
David (16:29):
Well, and it’s funny, your brand is Plan It with Nikki, and we decided that at the end of February in 2001, and we left June 26th. And it is a good thing. I’m a planner and I’m an excellent project manager because I tell you, I probably was working a lot of 50, 60 hour weeks to pull it all off. And just in the level of detail, I mean we didn’t have a boat. First thing is we need to go buy a new boat and one that’s in the Med. So that alone was quite a process and figuring out the homeschooling and on and on, but we did it and we have this amazing legacy as a family that we still draw on. And then people say, well, what do your children say about it? I rarely ask them directly. I’ve asked them one or two events and things, but it’s like, what’s the impact on your kids of going 18 months without being in an English speaking country?
(17:39):
Every bus stop is in a foreign language. What’s being on watch with your parents in the middle of the night? What is that experience? I mean, one of the most magical experiences I often talk about is our second overnight passage. My son Kevin, did watches with me and our daughter, Jocelyn did watches with Karalee. Kevin and I were on watch at three o’clock in the morning in the western Mediterranean Sea, and we were actually motoring because there was a big high pressure system, but the high pressure system gave clear skies and overhead as far as we could see was the Milky Way. And it was so bright that the stars in the horizon, we kept mistaking for other ships, but I said to Kevin, Hey Kevin, you have better eyesight than me. You take the port side, the left side of the boat and keep a lookout, and I’ll keep a lookout on the starboard side. So now he’s 32, what does it mean to him to think back and at 10 years old know your Dad trusts you with half the horizon in the middle of the night?
Nikki (18:48):
That gives me goosebumps, David, just talking about the legacy and the experience that you built with your family and pulling all of that together, just it really puts things into perspective,
David (19:03):
I think. Yes, totally. And one of many different experiences that we had in my book, Wind In Your Sails, Vital Strategies that Accelerate Your Entrepreneurial Growth. It’s a book for business owners, principally for founders are still kind of on their first business, haven’t done multiple businesses, but I start each story, each chapter with a story about sailing. And I opened the book with actually another story with Kevin, which is we were on a three day passage from north of Sicily around the toe and then the heel of Italy, and we were on our way north to Dubrovnik in Croatia, and in the middle of the night a thunderstorm showed up that was about 75 miles wide. Karalee had woke me up and said, which way, where to leave the storm? And I said, well head off to the right starboard side. And then we came on, watched Kevin and I at 2:00 AM for an hour.
(20:03):
It felt like the storm was getting closer. Finally, I said to Kevin, we’re going to heave too, which is the maneuver in the boat where you turn it into the wind and kind of park it so it doesn’t move, it just sits there. It also put the back of the boat facing the storm and Kevin and I for an hour, we just literally watched the storm and we eventually figured out it was moving from right to left. So if we’d kept going to the right, we would’ve driven right into the middle of it, but now armed with new knowledge, we could turn the boat and go slightly the other way and avoid the middle of the storm. And Kevin’s heard me tell that story quite a few times, and he likes both those stories. Actually, I share the one above the stars quite a bit as part of recovery.
(20:50):
Yeah, so that’s my opening story in the book, which is really one of the things that I coach around and talk about is you need to pause, then go forward. I like pause, figure things out and then move forward [Slow Down to Speed Up]. Another piece that I work with a lot with entrepreneurs is what I call facing the brutal facts. In my experience, about half the battle is to face the brutal facts. Like, oh, you’re losing money on every sale. Okay, well now at least we know it and we can do something about it. I’ve actually met entrepreneurs who were losing money on every sale, and my experience is half the battle is acknowledging the elephant in the room or the brutal fact because you can almost always find a way through once you’ve acknowledged what the true, real issue is difficult and hard and brutal as it is, at least when you now are facing it and not hiding from it, then you have a chance of really solving it. And as I say, I don’t know of any case in my work where we didn’t find the solution may have been very painful. You may have to downsize, you may have to do things you don’t want to do,
(22:06):
But you do what you have to do so you can continue.
Nikki (22:10):
Yeah, that’s amazing. David, your entrepreneurial journey is truly inspiring and your dedication to helping others is remarkable. One aspect of your work that really stands out, and you just mentioned recovery, right? Is your focus on supporting entrepreneurs who struggle with alcoholism and addiction. Would you be comfortable speaking to us about that?
David (22:37):
Sure, I would. Let’s continue kind of the career story a little bit. I come back from this amazing adventure in the Mediterranean. I do three years of angel investing and board work and working for options. I look at about a hundred deals, invest in one. At the end of that three years, I didn’t realize it was just completely unfulfilling work, working with CEOs and entrepreneurs that are so many rungs down the ladder. Those are rungs that I went over when I was 25, and I’m finding it takes me a year to get them up one rung of the ladder. So completely unfulfilling. And then I went to an education event with one of my young CEOs that I was invested in a guy Verne Harnish book, Scaling Up and the Rockefeller Habits. And the back of the room were two coaches, and I talked to both of them, and one of those coaches made me more uncomfortable than I had been in years. In fact, I had tears in the corner of my eyes,
Nikki (23:43):
Oh no,
David (23:45):
Which is not a bad thing. He asked a few questions that made me understand just how deeply unfulfilled I was and unhappy I was. And he gave me his card and his card sat next to my telephone for about three weeks. And I thought about calling Kevin half a dozen times. And every time I thought about it, the phone weighed at least 10,000 pounds. Thankfully, Kevin remembered me and I’d given him my card, and after about three weeks, he called me. Wow. And he said, do you remember me? I’m like, and the word is yes. It’s like, yeah, for three weeks, Kevin, you’re about all I’ve thought about. But I didn’t say that. I hired him on my 50th birthday. Kevin’s at that time, how he worked with the new entrepreneurs. You did 16 hours of coaching together to eight hour days. Kevin is like me all in or all out. There’s no room for anything in between.
(24:51):
But we worked together for 18 months and then I emailed Kevin a topic for our coaching meeting the next day. It’s another case where here’s the brutal fact. I cleared all the clutter off the table and the elephant in the room was my drinking. And I told him the topic for our conversation, our coaching call is my drinking. It was a Tuesday, January 27th, 2009, and it was a coaching call in the morning. It’s very vivid day, I can remember it. And he coached me to go to 12 step recovery, which I had a huge aversion to, which I don’t even know where that comes from. I think probably a lot of it’s just the stigma of alcoholism.
(25:35):
And I committed to going to a meeting by that Friday and then being the overachiever that I am that afternoon, I looked online at meetings that I was at a technology event downtown until eight o’clock. And lo and behold, literally my drive home, a quarter of a block off of the main street I’d be driving down was a 12 step meeting starting at 8:30. And I went to that meeting. It turns out that it was at a legion and downstairs is a bar. I walked in the door, I’m not even 24 hours sober, and there’s the doors to the bar are open and there’s beers on the table, and I’m like a deer in the headlights. A couple of people go into the meeting, they have this good sixth sense, and they looked at me and they said, Hey, are you looking for a meeting [go] down the hall and up the stairs?
(26:30):
And I turned right and went down the hall and up the stairs and a couple of weeks later, and at that meeting I stood up and said, I’m David. I’m an alcoholic. And that was the brutal fact. And recovering from alcoholism is the single biggest achievement of my life, but it’s an achievement. I have to remember every morning to get up and I have to achieve it again. I don’t get to rest on yesterday’s laurels when it comes to my alcoholism. And I still have some really intense drinking nightmares, which reminds me, the alcoholic part of my mind is still alive and well.
(27:08):
And that meeting became my home group and is still my home group. And two days ago, we’re recording this on a Monday and on Saturday morning I took my 15 year cake, which is I literally brought a cake to a meeting and was asked to share about my experience, strength, and hope of recovery and about. I decided to become a coach because of the gifts that coach Kevin had given me, which I was really focused more on the life and business part of it. But then about three or four years ago, I decided that talking to my own coach, and she’s sharing with me how I show up anytime I talk about recovery, the pureness of what I talk about and just what I’ve gone through to recover. So anyways, I made the decision to become very public about my recovery, and I have two primary purposes with that.
(28:08):
One is to reduce the stigma of alcoholism. Anyone can be an alcoholic. Alcohol’s the most potent drug on the planet. If you drink enough of it, you will become addicted. That’s just the bottom line. And I want to offer hope. I want to offer hope that if someone like me who is a daily drinker for 20 years, even while running a very successful business, well using it to help power up through the highs and through the lows that you too can get sober and it’s worth it. You’re worth it. And so, I came out, to speak publicly and have been doing podcasts like this and many others, and I think as an entrepreneur is just how alcohol is involved in business. I have a lot of high-end entrepreneurs with high-end sales where the entrepreneur needs to fly down and meet the senior executives on a really big sale. And the expectation is you go out to dinner, and you have a couple drinks before and you have a bottle of wine each. And it’s like, what do I do in that situation and what do I do with staff? What do I do at networking events and just how do I navigate this? I’ve had clients come to me who’ve been sober for a few years and it just informs part of our discussion about how they can live a sober life and have the business they want.
(29:41):
I bring that to the table. My experience is I have this experience of being an entrepreneur and being an alcoholic and now 15 years of recovery.
Nikki (29:52):
David, first and foremost, congratulations.
David (29:55):
I thank you so much. Thank you. Really appreciate.
Nikki (29:58):
That for you and yeah, words can’t explain how I don’t know you personally that well, but I’m proud of you.
David (30:09):
Thank you.
Nikki (30:10):
It’s amazing. It always makes me happy to hear these stories and these successes and I love that you’re so willing to, I think it’s brave and it’s remarkable that you’re willing to put yourself out there too, to help give others hope and to coach them and to guide them. Because I know in my day job, I work as a corporate strategist, and you’re right, you go to these big events and there’s these executives or even Christmas parties and it’s full of brews, it’s full of the social aspect, and it’s hard. It’s really difficult. And whenever you’re in a certain situation, yeah, it’s amazing. So thank you for putting yourself out there and for taking this niche part of your coaching to that level. It’s needed and I’m not sure that there’s enough of it out there.
David (31:05):
I’ve actually really struggled to find other [business coaches], there’s recovery coaches who are people who, especially early in recovery, are there to help coach people through their after treatment, but they’re very focused just on the alcohol piece. But I’ve not yet met another business coach who is open about their recovery and seems to be doing what I’m doing. I’m sure there are some. And if there are and you’re out there, I would love to hear from you. I’m sure we could compare notes and show up even better for people, but I found it really hard to find largely because people don’t want to be open, even if they’re in recovery. There is still a lot of stigma associated with being an alcoholic and a lot of belief that if you just pulled yourself up by your boots, straps, bootstraps, everything would be better. It’s a mental health disease, right? Alcohol use disorder, substance use disorder. You can’t recover from a disease by pulling up on your bootstraps.
Nikki (32:11):
Wouldn’t it be nice if life was that easy?
David (32:14):
It sure would, but not with the potent chemicals that we put in our bodies.
Nikki (32:20):
No, no. Thank you so much for sharing that. David, I do want to switch gears just a little bit as we kind of get towards wrapping up momentarily. But as an entrepreneurial coach and facilitator, thinking more from the day-to-day, how do you translate developing effective strategic plans just within someone’s own ventures or where might one look when they’re just getting started if they’re interested in pursuing entrepreneurship?
David (32:54):
Sure. Half of my work is one-on-one coaching, and then half of my work is actually facilitating strategic planning. I mentioned earlier that I met coach Kevin at this event with the guy Vern Harnish, who has something called the one page plan, which come out of his books, the Rockefeller Habits and Scaling Up, and I think it’s probably one of the best templates for high growth companies. So that’s a place to start scaling up one page plan. There’s a simplified version of that. There’s a lot of moving parts to it. It’s hard to do it on your own. There’s an entrepreneur from Atlanta I really like called David Cummings, and there’s the David Cummings one page plan, which is modeled on Vern’s plan, but simpler. And I often get people started with that and it’s literally in one page. But let’s talk a little bit about process because whether it’s David Cummings or whether it’s Vern Harnish or David Greer. There’re a couple things. I like to ask entrepreneurs, is it strategy that is the plan or is it execution actually operating the plan?
(34:08):
And it’s a trick question because I believe it’s neither. It’s about alignment. You need everybody to be aligned. If we take back the maritime, if everyone’s in the boat rowing in the same direction and you’ve all agreed that that’s the island you’re going for, you’ll make a lot of progress. But if you’re not aligned, you can make, there’d be a lot of splashing and a lot of movement of oars and it can look like everybody is super busy and you’re just going in circles. It’s about alignment, and I think you can only align on a very small set of goals. All of these templates and processes, I’d say five key initiatives per year should be the maximum and for quarter, no more than five key things to get done in a quarter. I believe in quarterly planning processes, especially if you’re high growth, but even if you’re just an average growth company, my belief is 13 weeks is enough time to get a lot of shit done and enough time to realize where you need to course correct, put your pedal to the metal, get stuff done.
(35:16):
I take people, the process I use is for quarterly planning. I take teams and the entrepreneurs, the senior executive teams offsite for a whole day and we come up with the next quarter plan and then for annual planning, we go offsite for two days and we actually look out three, five years, where are you going? Then we work backwards to, that was the biggest insight I got from Vern Harnish from that day, other than coach Kevin making me really uncomfortable was this whole idea that we built Robelle by just incrementally looking at the next year and doing a little better than previous year, and it served us well, Hey, I did extremely well, made a lot of money, but I think we could have done better with Vern’s process, which is where do you want to be in three to five years and to get there, what do you need to do this year? You can get there in three to five, and then what do you need to do this quarter is you can get to where you want to go this year. So that’s the core of strategic planning, and again, I find entrepreneurs tend to choose too many goals or they don’t choose any goals. Entrepreneurs, I work a lot with entrepreneurs that have my problem, shiny red ball syndrome,
(36:33):
And it’s like verbal doesn’t count. You need it written down on a piece of paper and a piece of paper you share with others. It’s amazing how effective that is when you do that because it’s very hard to backtrack and at least, and if you’re going to backtrack, at least could you do it consciously? Could you remove one of the goals you had before you put the new one on? Whereas most entrepreneurs, oh, we’ll do those five things and we’ll do the six and we’ll do the seventh. Well, I tell you, organizations just can’t do that. They won’t perform. I just don’t think people are capable of focusing on more than five things.
Nikki (37:14):
Yeah, that’s some really powerful advice there David, and thank you for that. I think that can also translate even if you’re not an entrepreneur, even just in our daily listeners, just making a goal or putting some small steps in place to achieve that, and not to your point, it’s either one extreme or the other. Someone writing out a list of 500 things they want to try to accomplish or I think I was watching a reel the other day somewhere and it was talking about a vision board and how they said someone puts up a vision board and they’ve got this multimillion dollar home and the sailboat and all of that sort of stuff, but they’re sitting in their mom and dad’s basement in a corner working at a desk and just have these lofty goals in mind, but not actually thinking about what they can actually achieve in a step-by-step basis and that kind of, yeah,
David (38:15):
So good. The vision board is like your three to five years or maybe 10. Or longer, but great. I think it’s great to have that vision, but it’s like, so what do you need to do this year to get you towards where you want to go there and what’s your next step? The other thing I take from my work with coach Kevin Lawrence and he actually publicly publishes his template for planning is what he calls his master plan, and if anyone wants to email me, I’d be glad to point them towards it, but Kevin’s model, he breaks life down into three parts, career/investments/finances, then life, which is you and your relationships and the people and your family and the people that really mean to you, and then this other one in the middle called Self, and I noticed you did a blog post on resiliency.
(39:05):
We as entrepreneurs, high performing individuals, we tend to be very passionate about our families and our life and very passionate about our business, and we are very good at squeezing ourselves out of the middle. When I actually look at these three areas and make conscious choice about what I’m going to do in each of those and do some things for myself that are just for me, just because whatever those, and each of us have those things that renew us, refresh us, won’t be a big surprise probably to you Nikki and your listeners that I like to go sailing and sometimes in November I just went for a couple of weeks solo over to Victoria and Karalee just joined me at the very end and we had a little bit of time on the boat and then sailed it back to Vancouver together. But I had, I dunno, probably close to two weeks I think, on my own. I was still working, but I was just working from my sailboat in a different city in a beautiful harbor and it was very renewing and it was really important to me that I did that.
Nikki (40:12):
I love that. I love that so much. That really resonates.
David (40:19):
Good.
Nikki (40:20):
David, as we wrap up, what key takeaway or piece of advice would you like to share with our listeners?
David (40:30):
Well, I go back to recovery. My most important message, right? That if you have a problem with alcohol or drugs or any other workaholism, shopaholism, sex addiction, just know there’s help. There is a solution. And the other thing is we can’t recover alone is my deep belief. It’s just impossible. The mind that got us into this is not the mind capable of getting out of this. We need other people to help us and to help show our way and help show where our thinking is not helping us.
Nikki (41:15):
Love it, love it, love it, love it. Thank you so much, David. Friends, what an incredible journey. It has been unraveling this inspiring story of Coach David Greer today. We hope you found this conversation as enlightening and motivating as we did. David, where can our audience connect with you after listening to this episode? Or how can fans and listeners support your current endeavors and where can folks get their hands on your book Wind and Your Sails.
David (41:44):
Easiest to get ahold of me? Well, you can just Google David Greer coach. Good chance I’ll be right at the top of the list there. But my website is coach d j greer dot com. That’s Coach D as in David, J as in James Greer dot com and my email address and my phone number are on the top of every single page. And my book, wind In Your Sails is available on all the major book platforms including Amazon. It’s available in a print form in Kindle or Nook form, and it’s available as an audible book so you can get it any of those ways.
Nikki (42:28):
That’s great. Thank you so much. Before we part ways, I have a quick request for our amazing listeners. If you enjoyed today’s episode and found value in David’s insights, please consider leaving us a glowing five star review on both Spotify and Apple Podcast. Your reviews not only make our day, but also help others discover the incredible stories that we share. And if you haven’t already, be sure to hit that follow or subscribe button. It’s the best way to stay updated on future episodes featuring more captivating guests and stories. Please connect with me on social media. I love hearing your thoughts, feedback, and suggestions for future episodes. You can find me at planet with Nikki, that’s N-I-K-K-I podcast, all one word on Instagram. I also have a private Facebook community, holistic harbor that I would love for you to be a part of, and I will link everything in the show notes below, including how you can reach out to David Greer if you so wish to do so, and also some locations where you can find his book. Thank you once again for being invaluable part of this community. Until next time, stay inspired, stay curious, and whatever you do, keep chasing your dreams. Thank you, and with love from your host, Nikki. David, thank you so much for joining us today. We look forward to staying in touch.
David (43:49):
Thanks, Nikki. It’s been awesome. Really appreciate it.
Nikki (43:52):
Speak to you soon.
