Hosts Bernie Franzgrote and Wayne Pratt interview coach and author David Greer on the Knack 4 Business podcast. Key points include:
- David emphasizes the importance of strategic planning, with a focus on setting long-term goals (3-5 years) and working backwards to determine the key capabilities and thrusts needed to achieve that future vision.
- He stresses the value of being brutally honest about a company’s brutal facts, weaknesses, and biggest obstacles, using that assessment to inform strategic decisions.
- David advises entrepreneurs, especially solopreneurs, to seek outside help and perspective, whether through peer groups, mentors, or hiring experts for specific tasks like market research.
- He highlights the power of goal-setting, both for the business and for personal/life goals, and provides tips for setting effective, measurable goals.
- Overall, the episode emphasizes the need for entrepreneurs to step back from the daily grind, get clarity on their long-term vision, and put in place the strategic planning and execution to achieve that vision.
Audio
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Transcript
Announcer (00:05):
Welcome to season three of the Knack 4 Business podcast. Over 200 episodes strong. We’re here to ignite your entrepreneurial spirit with fresh insights, networking gems, and creative strategies that elevate your game. Are you ready to discover what your knack for business truly is?
Bernie Franzgrote (00:22):
Today’s topic is Know Where You Want to Go, your hosts our Bernie Franzgrote from Kreativ Insight and Wayne Pratt from Motivate You Inc. What can you expect from the Knack for Business podcast? Well, the aims to help you find your feet in the business world. Whether you’re just starting out or you’ve been at it for a while, we have something for everyone.
Our guest today is David Greer from Coach David J. Greer. David is an entrepreneurial coach, author, facilitator. He is the catalyst who gets you to fully live your dreams now. Spend one hour reading his book, Wind In Your Sails, attend a one hour talk with him or get one hour of one-to-one coaching and you will have three concrete action items that will shift and accelerate your business within 90 days. David specializes in working with entrepreneurs challenge with alcoholism and addiction. He and his wife, Karalee, are committed to each other and their three children spending time supporting them in many and varied activities that they’re involved with. They live in Vancouver, Canada and in fact, David was a guest here in June, 2024. And welcome back David. What’s your favorite quote saying, sir?
David Greer (01:28):
My favorite quote saying certainly from a business perspective and our topic today is Slow Down to Speed Up.
Bernie Franzgrote (01:36):
What’s the strategy about ’em picking a feature date three to five years out and what is the import of that for an entrepreneur?
David Greer (01:43):
When I was at university getting my computer science degree, I joined a young software startup after the two founders and I liked the place, stayed 20 years, built it into a global powerhouse, and we did strategic planning the way I think a lot of people do strategic planning, well we did last year if we did any sometimes on, not certainly did any. And if we did, it was good last year and incrementally determined be a little better next year. And with some variations on that, what I was doing, a lot of angel investing and I took one of my young CEOs to a training session by a guy Verne Harnish, has a couple books, the Rockefeller Habits and Scaling Up, he suggested something completely different, which is start by picking an end date that is three to five years out. Where do you want to or maybe even need to be in three to five years?
(02:40):
Pick that date and between now and then what are the key capabilities or thrusts that you need to achieve to get to where you want to go in that future date? And I say might need to, for example, if your market is growing at 25% a year and you are growing your top line revenue at 10% a year, you’re losing market share every year. If one of your goals is to hold market share, then you need to be growing your top line revenue at the rate that the market’s growing. But again, if you don’t take that future vision of where you’re going to go, you’re going to probably miss out on things like that. And I think if year by year you zig and you zag, but do you really end up with a future like business and situation? That’s really what you want. This fundamentally changed my thinking completely.
(03:35):
It was like a light bulb moment to think about strategic planning by picking this end date and what’s your revenue going to be, then how big you’re going to be, what markets are you going to be serving? So maybe today you’re serving Canada in three years time, you want to serve the United States too. That’s a key thrust is to expand your market from Canada to the US everything then all your other decisions, what’s your goals are going to be for this year, what’s your goals are going to be for this quarter are made within the umbrella of this broader vision of where you want to end up. I have clients that sometimes picked three years. I have some that have picked five to six depending on their situation and kind of the flow of their business. But we actually write December 30 or we’re the end of 24, we’re coming near to the end of 24. We’re looking at three years. That’ll be 25, 26, 27 you say on December 31st, 2027, this is where we’re going to be. And it also makes it more concrete I find for entrepreneurs and their teams when we write the date down, pick that date and actually put it in black and white. It helps crystallize it. It’s not just, oh yeah, maybe when, oh shit, we’re making a commitment to actually do this by then.
Bernie Franzgrote (04:55):
It’s strange. I’ve heard a marketing consultant recently and he was talking to a company and they’re needing help startup phase, they need help with marketing product. And he says, where do you want to be in five years and the number of products you want to sell? And everybody and the crew is going, does that matter? I need help now. Yes, but you work back from there and so it’s good. Yeah, it’s nice to hear it being echoed.
David Greer (05:26):
Yeah, and that’s again, I challenge entrepreneurs when I facilitate around this, about what markets are you going to be serving? What products like will your existing products still have legs? Once you start looking out like three to five years, you realize, oh, I am not certain our product has good potential in that timeframe, but I’m not certain how much potential have beyond that. Yeah, in that timeframe we have to come up with another product.
Wayne Pratt (05:55):
As you’re doing your planning, how do you list and lay out with brutal honesty your and your key team’s capabilities?
David Greer (06:06):
The way I start planning sessions is I always start with what’s working. I start with some positive psychology and some successes because my experience is that all high performing people are right into the next challenge and they skip over the major achievements that they just have done. But if you’re going to go attack new, if you’re going to go climb a new mountain, it might be higher than the last one. But it’s very useful to remind yourself, you just finished climbing the biggest mountain you’ve ever climbed. Now when you go to go for the bigger one, it’s at least in a content you remind yourself, oh, right, we just climbed the one that was bigger than ever. We have this potential. And then what I do is I do about an hour and a half where I really get people to do, one of the things Wayne, I think is really important is to face the brutal facts.
(06:57):
What I say to entrepreneurs is, if you can get the brutal fact on the table, in my experience, you can always find some solution. It may be very uncomfortable, it may be an undesirable from your point of view, but you will come up with a solution to that brutal fact. The problem is businesses will and potentially have failed because you didn’t face up to the brutal fact like your market’s cut in half and your revenue’s going to be half next year. And that’s the brutal fact. Well, if you face up to it and do what’s needed to survive and get through that, you will. But if you pretend the market’s going to be just like it, it can be disastrous. So it’s like the things I try and really challenge people is what’s the biggest obstacle in front of the company right now? What’s the biggest brutal fact that’s facing the company right now?
(07:48):
And what’s the biggest opportunity? Because my experience, if we look at an obstacle, if we kind of take that coin and flip it over, it’s often your biggest opportunity. It may be very, very challenging, but it may be real potential opportunity. We brainstorm, and I’ve had sessions with larger teams, maybe seven or eight people in total senior leadership team and the CEO, we might have 50 ideas, we might have 50 things down in an annual planning session. Then I give everybody five votes and we see what bubbles to the top with that. We use that to inform. That’s again, kind of a snapshot of everyone’s feelings today. We use that to inform these bigger questions. Some of the bigger strategic directions may be driven by investors or your board or by what’s happening in your market. You have to take some of these other facts that you have and marry it to …
(08:47):
And that may have come up in the biggest obstacle and opportunity and brutal factor. It may not. I can take those together with how you last year and how well you’re executing on your plan from last year. And we take all of that as information. Let us focus on that question you asked Wayne, which is, so what is the key capability that we’re missing? I think until you get some consensus around the room of what the biggest obstacle or brutal fact is in front of the company at this time, then it’s hard to come up with that. Some of it is brainstorming and future planning like key thrusts, especially around markets and product. And I’ve had some very, very vigorous debates in planning sessions about whether the product roadmap is right and whether they can make the money they think they’re going to make, especially if it’s an unreleased product.
(09:42):
When I coach people around these sessions, I remind them that you’ve got the smartest, highest paid people in the room. You’re not here to say yes to each other. This is the place and the forum to have disagreements, to have vigorous discussions. Now I also coach, there’s bad ideas, there is not bad people. You can say, I completely disagree. I think that’s a terrible idea. I can’t say you’re a horrible person for having that idea. And so you can’t make it personal. It’s about the idea and whether we agree with it or not, but we can be pretty vigorous in our disagreement.
(10:25):
And then the thing I look for at the end of a strategic planning session is that my model is to do two days offsite for annual planning and one day a quarter for quarterly planning. And in the annual planning, we will have established the first quarter’s goals as well. I remind people we meet every 13 weeks. It’s 13 weeks in a quarter. When we leave the room, we have to all as a group, be committed to those goals that we agreed to, even if during the day you didn’t agree with them. But for 13 weeks you have to buy in and be part of the team and strive towards those goals. And in 13 weeks we’ll go back together and we can have the disagreement all over again and maybe more of us will have changed our mind in that time period.
Wayne Pratt (11:08):
I’d like to go into the weeds for a second. You’re an author and I find that everybody on the street thinks they should and go in and write a book and 90% of the people don’t and 30% of people wrote to something on full step for a half a day and then quit. I’m interested about the process, how exciting it was, how hard it was your journey.
David Greer (11:34):
Over a period of a number of years, I had written, not quite weekly, but monthly or so blog posts. I, so I had some material to start with. I decided when I became a coach that I wanted to write a book to share my experience. I also felt like this was in 2014 and I felt like coming out of a senior executive gig for three years with a 35 million a year company as a VP of Marketing and Sales, that the landscape was changing and how people got their information, how they were buying was changing. I interviewed over 45 entrepreneurs, angel investors, senior marketing and sales execs. I had these blog posts, I have these interviews with these people, and then I hired a good friend of mine for a half a day and we brainstormed the outline of my book and basically it was all there, but I couldn’t get it out on my own.
(12:38):
Isabelle just helped me. We basically got all the chapter heads, which were really what I call the 10 strategies or the 10 parts of a business. And then we got all of the major subheads and then we got a few of the sub subheads and we just brainstormed, wrote ’em all down. And then I afterwards typed them up into an outline, and then I basically started taking content. I’d just find blog posts and I would post them into where I had this framework and I would take some of the interviews and I would do that. And that really sometimes I take a blog post that was 500 words. And when all was said and done, maybe eight words survived. But the fact I didn’t have to write 500 words to start, I could copy paste them. And it seemed roughly something to do with the subheading that I was working on that really helped.
(13:33):
And I also gave myself a deadline. I gave myself a weekly goal of how much to write, which is when I have coached people around writing books, I really say, you need to make a commitment to a word count a day or a word count a week, and then you need to sit down and put in the time to make that happen. And if you can make that word count happen in an hour, great, but some weeks it might take you 10 to get 300 words out. I mean, that’s just sometimes the way it goes. And as the book developed, I picked 10 of the people I’d interviewed and re-interviewed some of them to produce case studies. So every chapter of my book ends with a case study of an entrepreneur friend of mine who I thought was very good at that particular part of business, like marketing, product management.
(14:23):
A third of the book ended up being other people’s work, but I mean it was still directed from my questions and my final editing, and I wrote them up and I gave them back to the entrepreneur. Asking very specific permission to use these words in my book, using your words. And even then it probably took eight or nine months to produce about 50,000 words, which I think is what the end, and then more by the time I produced a detailed index and more in doing all the things to get it published. But that was the creative process started with ideas I had from these blog posts. And those were developed by my experience of Robelle, the company that I was with for 20 years. But then as I did other executive positions and I noticed things, it was like I’d bring, or things showed up for me, I would turn ’em into blog posts. That’s my process. I don’t know what other people’s process is, but that’s the one that worked for me.
Bernie Franzgrote (15:24):
It is interesting to reflect on as you described that process and what we just talked about earlier about setting goals, right?
David Greer (15:32):
Yes.
Bernie Franzgrote (15:32):
One of the elements that I found fascinating is that you talk with somebody else, either as a team, you talk to people that you source information. You had another person expertise in building a book or content masterminds talking about leadership, and you mentioned it earlier, this is the time to have a vigorous debate. And I like the use of the word vigorous. That means the passions are roiling, et cetera. And the end result is that you’re not looking for yays sayers, you’re looking for best outcome. The devil’s advocate per se moment coming in and have that kind of give you a distilled version of life. My question now is if you’re a solopreneur or you’re maybe a one or two man group and I use one or two person group versus what I’ve got shareholders or people that have stake in there, how do you manage to get that to come together? A one or two person or a solo person, you can be mad at yourself but should have a dialogue with somebody else. But how do you get a larger group of people to get that consensus to roll through and then kind of come out and everybody’s still smiling at the end of the [day].
David Greer (16:50):
I think there’s several ways in most cases, and I think probably there’s virtually, I just haven’t gone looking for it, is a peer group of other entrepreneurs which are not too far advanced from you and not too far behind where you are and getting involved with those. And typically it’s some sort of networking like having breakfast once a month, and it takes about a year to establish those relationships and build enough trust to where you can really start, you’ll get value out of it along the way. But my experience after about a year, it goes a lot deeper, especially if the core group meets very consistently. Peer group networking on a consistent basis is one way having a mentor, so someone who can advise you who’s been there, done that can look over your plans, give you some feedback. The problem with mentorship is it tends to be ad hoc.
(17:44):
And because you’re not paying for it, oftentimes you don’t pay as much attention. Whereas being a coach, one of the things I find is for some people, my fees are not, in their big scheme of things, they’re not a big deal, but because they paid me, they pay a lot of attention. It’s just this, you paid someone and you want to get value from it so that they pay much closer attention. And part of my role of as a one-on-one coach with entrepreneurs is do you have a plan? Do you intend to make one? And if you don’t want to, it’s your business, it’s your life. I go with whatever you want to do. I may point out some of the downsides of not having a plan and some of the upsides of having one, and I’m not too pedantic. I have two or three.
(18:35):
I have this template I use for strategic facilitation, and I do ask my clients if they’re going to hire me, that’s the template they need to use. But on my one-on-one clients, I have two or three different templates of varying levels of complexity, and I kind of offer them up if they’re just getting started, I offer, there’s a guy out of Atlanta, David Cummings, who’s writing I really like. He’s more in the software as a service, but he’s really just a fantastic entrepreneur and he’s taken Vern Harnish’s one page strategic plan and made it even simpler. I have the David Cummings one page strategic planner. If you Google that, you could actually get to his blog post, you don’t need me. If you want to just find a template now, if you need some help to actually fill in the parts of the plan, you might want me, but that’s up to you and you don’t hiring expertise when you need it.
(19:25):
If you’re not super expert at market or market research, then find the people who are to do some of those things for you so that you have much better data to work from. And you’d be surprised. One of the things that I know is true in Canada, I don’t know if your listeners outside of Canada, but public libraries in Calgary, in Vancouver, and probably a couple of other public libraries, they have research divisions. In Vancouver it’s called Info Action and Calgary it’s called Research Plus. You hire these people on an hourly basis, and I’ve hired them to do all sorts of interesting things. I hired Research Plus in Calgary to find my birth father, which was not a business related, but was a very interesting experience. In fact, they wrote about it on their website and created a blog post about that. I’ve hired Info Action in Vancouver to do market research for me to do competitive analysis.
(20:18):
For me, they’re not that expensive. I don’t know what the current rates are. It’s probably under $200 an hour. And I usually give them a task. I’m trying to get an answer to this question or I’m trying to understand this thing better, and would you put four hours into it and then tell me how far you got? And then we will decide whether to do more. So say roughly with GST and everything, a thousand bucks, even as solopreneur, that’s a pretty good investment if you are trying to figure some stuff out about your business, about your competitors, even if you are a retailer in a local market and helping to get better insight on who your online competitors are. And again, these people, this is what they’re trained to do, so they’re really, really good at it. They’re 10 times better at it than I could ever be, and they have access to databases and resources. That’s like the Vancouver Public Library subscribes to that. I don’t have access to that. I would have to pay additional fees to gain access to Info Action, sometimes charges for access to those databases, but they get it at the library rate. It’s usually a really small incremental cost. Those are some of the ways that I have used to not do it alone and to get outside help in building my business plan and building my business even as a single individual. I mean as a coach, I’m a solopreneur
Wayne Pratt (21:51):
Goal setting is often talked about more than done Well, what do you find the biggest ditches, the biggest roadblocks to good goal setting is what are the mistakes?
David Greer (22:03):
I think there’s two really, really big ones. The first is setting too many goals. I think that if you have four or five goals in a quarter and you achieve them all, you’re doing super well. And I think if I remember, I created a strategic plan at Robelle one year with 12 goals. Well, I mean my employees were completely confused. What did they go focus on? How do they choose between goal number two and goal number 11? So short set of goals, actually I’m going to say there’s more than two things. Short set of goals. One of those goals has to be the number one thing. The most difficult thing we have as entrepreneurs is making the number one thing be the number one thing. So on your goal setting, you got to make sure you know what the number one thing is. A separate problem is making sure you focus on the number one thing, but that’s a different issue. We’re talking about the goal setting process right now. Then the other thing that is really common and which I do a lot of work in facilitation around is unclear finish lines. You have to have a goal where you go say, in the next 13 weeks, we’re going to achieve this goal, goal A. I say to people, okay, we get together in 13 weeks and we’ve forgotten 90% of the conversation that we’ve had today.
(23:24):
When I put this in front of you, how will you know that you got there? How will we know that goal A is complete? And that often breaks down right away, like, oh, well maybe this or what’ll happen is five people in the room and three of them will be telling me how they know that they achieved a, none of which is complimentary. They’re all orthogonal to each other. One of the examples is a goal. Some group will agree that improving customer support is the goal. Well, it’s not a goal, it’s an intention. It’s maybe a wish. I’ll say, well, how do you measure customer satisfaction right now? Oh, we don’t. Well, okay, so you have no data to know whether it’s bad or good even, and you certainly don’t have any data to know if it’s improving. So maybe a reasonable goal for the quarter is to put a system in place where all new customers are surveyed within three days are given an opportunity to answer a survey within three days of them closing the deal. You get to the end of the quarter, and that’s a clear finish line. Either every new customer is getting a survey within three days or they’re not. Then the next quarter, the goal might be to collect data for a quarter and see how the survey is.
(24:52):
Is anyone actually taking it? Is anyone giving you responses? Then build a process to collect and collate the responses. And then at the end of that quarter as part of the planning session, I’d usually have them actually bring the collated data and we would spend an hour discussing it and looking at it and figuring out its importance, and then decide to either pursue with the current methodology that got invented in which case then the goal would be, okay, we need to take these responses from this level to this level one to level two. That would be the third quarter goal. That’s like three quarters of goals, each one of which is measurable, but the opening wish we have to improve customer service, not a goal. So short set of goals, number one thing is the number one thing and goals that have very clear finish lines that you got across them in the timeframe that you set
Bernie Franzgrote (25:53):
Your book, Wind In Your Sails. Yeah, you have concrete actions in there. I do. What’s one transformative action that an entrepreneur can take that rocket them forward.
David Greer (26:07):
If you don’t know where you’re going, how do you know if you’re successful or not? That’s why I suggested know where you’re going. As I think I suggested as the title for this podcast, I do think that is one of the most valuable. It’s interesting how resistant people are to planning and some people just won’t do it, and that’s fine. It’s not for me to say your method is your method. And I also coach entrepreneurs to try and plan beyond their business and to look at, I usually ask them to look at their self, what are the goals you have for yourself? What is it that you do that really renews you and refreshes you and builds your resiliency? And what have you got for the next order that you’re going to do? Is it like go to the racetrack and race cars?
(26:56):
My former coach, Kevin Lawrence, that’s one of his passions. And I’ve got, one of my clients just bought a high performance car and he was going to take it a couple of weekends to go out to a race car and it’s hang out with people that really like that and that’s just for him. And then so your business is one category, yourself is another category, and then your life and relationships. And I think the process of actually writing down goals for each of those areas is very, very powerful. It causes you to, and here’s what we know from a coaching perspective. If you sit down and you write down your goals, you’re 50% more likely to achieve them even if you never ever look at your goal list again. Now, if you pull it out on a regular basis and actually evaluate your progress against your goals, you get about another 25% boost in the probability you’re going to achieve them.
(27:50):
The actual process of setting goals is very, very powerful. Actually, pen to paper or keyboard into spreadsheet, however you’d like to do it is in of itself a very powerful exercise. And I think to answer, I forget which of you asked me that question, but to make Bernie, you were asking me for my book. But that planning piece I think can have, it’s a huge lever piece. It really can lever a lot of other things to happen. And then even more so if you are a bigger business and you’re the CEO and you have a leadership team, right? Because my thesis, well, it’s not mine. I’ve got this from several other people, but is it strategy, AKA, your plan, or is it execution? How well you do your plan? Which one is more important? And my response is neither because it’s all about alignment.
(28:47):
Are you and your senior leadership team aligned in where you’re going and what has to happen? Are all the people who report to your senior leadership team are they clear on where the company is going and what has to happen? And it’s the alignment that is the most important piece. And when I’ve worked for companies where the C-suite is not really clear on the goals and to the people that are reporting to them, in which case then we’re unclear to what the goals are to the people who work for us. And so there’s just a lot of hand waving, and I’m a keen sailor, so I use a boat analogy, which is we’re all in a boat and we’re pulling on the oars and we’re pulling on the oars really, really, really hard, but we’re not aligned. We’re splashing a lot of water and we’re making a lot of noise, but the rowboats just going around in circles.
(29:41):
We don’t have clear direction and we’re not making sure that we’re aligned to pull it in the same direction that we’ve agreed where we want to go in. I’ve certainly lived through some of those experiences and having a clear vision of where you want to go back to this, where do you want to be in two or three years, what do you need to achieve this year so you can get to where you want to be in three or five years? And then what do you need to do this quarter to get to the goals that you have for the year? Those are very, very powerful. A process that keeps looking at them, evaluating how well you’re doing and refreshes is what really makes it work. It’s not a static process. It’s not plan once throw away and forget,
Wayne Pratt (30:21):
I look great on a coffee cup.
David Greer (30:23):
Yeah, I’ll have to think about that.
Wayne Pratt (30:26):
I was raised with visionaries and entrepreneurs and then I also met grinders sometimes in the same people, sometimes they’re not. How do you find visionary through the daily grind and not get overwhelmed?
David Greer (30:42):
That’s interesting. I’ve had it suggested to me, and I’ve never done research to see if it’s true. There’s two kinds of entrepreneurs, there’s visionary entrepreneurs and there’s operational entrepreneurs. I would say in Robelle, the company I was with for 20 years, Bob was much more the visionary and I was more the operational practical guy. But we both had quite strong elements of that in ourselves. And I’m one of the strange entrepreneurs that has very visionary and very operational. The way I recommend people find their way through that is to compliment find a partner or if not a partner, then find senior leaders. Or is your support network if you’re going to be a solopreneur, who backfill a part of you that doesn’t. If you’re not the operational piece, you’re the visionary, someone still needs to get stuff done, but it probably shouldn’t be you because that’s not your strength.
(31:43):
How do you hire a GM or how can you afford to hire a GM? Sometimes that’s the question, how can you get to the business to be big enough? You can afford to hire the GM or can you find a way to hire an office manager one day a week? There are a lot of office managers that actually like working for multiple companies. They get bored. If they were full-time with one company, they’d kind of get bored. They like the challenge of working with different companies. Those people do exist and you can find them. And I think in general, that’s a study done in the early 2000’s by a friend of mine for the National Research Council of Canada looked at 45 startups in Canada and studied that were successful. And in every single case, one of two things happened, the founder CEO either grew brand new skills and filled in what they didn’t have or they hired.
(32:37):
If they weren’t good at marketing, they hired a really, really super marketing person. It was much smarter and much better than them at that. Or the founders went back to becoming the chief technology officer. Most of these were all technical tech startup kind of companies and they brought in a CEO who could do all the other pieces. I want to just segue slightly. I have a coaching belief, a belief about people that is we should always play to our strengths. We can take our weaknesses, and if I have a weakness and in a year I can move it from two to three on a scale of 10, that’s probably a huge amount of work and it doesn’t move the needle. Whereas I can take a strength that’s at 96.5% and I can help you move it to 97%. That probably has massive impact. I really work with, one of the very first things I do when people become one-on-one clients with me is I give them this book, Strengths Finders 2.0 and it has a little survey in it and the book suggests there’s, I think it’s around 42 different strengths.
(33:50):
And what it does is you take the survey and it identifies your top five. And then what I do is I help people focus on their top three. And again, if you just go with me for just another minute or so here. The other thing when clients are new to me, and I go through this with them, is our strengths get us a long ways, but we often operate in our strengths unconsciously, and sometimes they don’t serve us. I’d say a third of my clients, their number one strength is competitiveness. That can be very, very powerful, can help you build a great business, can help you really compete. But I ask them, how’s that working with your spouse? And they didn’t even realize most of the time they’re actually competing with their spouse because it’s so deeply hardwired into them. They don’t even realize they’re operating that way. And I say, and how’s it going? Competing with your kids. And we do this sometimes as parents and we’re like trying to outcompete math problems with our kids and that’s probably not healthy for us and it’s definitely not healthy for our children. Yes, operate in your strengths and understand when being in your strengths may actually be detrimental to what it is that you want to be in life.
Bernie Franzgrote (35:11):
Probably explains why I shouldn’t wallpaper with my wife or why I don’t like wallpaper with my spouse. Why?
David Greer (35:20):
Because you’re both trying to compete to see who’s best at it.
Bernie Franzgrote (35:22):
No, we’re both trying to do the, she does project work and so sometimes it’s like having two captains on a boat
David Greer (35:32):
Not good.
Bernie Franzgrote (35:33):
Well, you’re stepping over each other. There’s no win out of that.
David Greer (35:38):
Yeah, absolutely.
Wayne Pratt (35:41):
One thing that you need to do when you take on a new client is agree with what the metrics are that if they get there, you did a good job. What are the numbers you pick? Hopefully what their input to say these are what we will be striving on.
David Greer (35:58):
I do nothing except I give the clients an intake form and I ask them to set goals for six months, 12 months, and 18 months, and I encourage them to do it. Along the lines I suggested earlier, which comes from my former coach, Kevin Lawrence, in his book, your Oxygen Mask First, which is in six months what’s one goal for your business? What’s one goal for just yourself, something that you’re going to do that’s just for you? And what’s one goal that’s for your life, relationships, family, whatever’s important to you, and same one each in 12 months and 18 months. Some new clients get stuck on that. And I sometimes coach, like I say, let’s have another coaching call. I won’t charge you for it to just help you get clearer on what those might look like and what they might be. And then I ask questions like, what do you want in a coach? What do you not want in a coach? Six months from now, i you’re looking back, how will that investing in me was a good investment for you?
Wayne Pratt (37:01):
That was my question.
David Greer (37:02):
Yeah, so again, those are all on my intake form so that, I mean, I’ll help anyone who’s struggling with any of those questions if they need it, but I find those last set, the goals I sometimes need to help with often don’t, but the last set, I never do. People know what they want in a coach, what they don’t want, and they’re usually pretty clear if they’ve got to the point, they’ve reached out to me and we’ve had initial coaching call and they have a pretty good idea of what they’re hoping to get out of the coaching relationship. Again, I let them define it.
Bernie Franzgrote (37:35):
David, just kind of hone us in on the home run here. At the end of the day, what points do you want our listeners to focus on? They’re in a startup phase or they’re, they’ve kind of moved forward and they’re churning and a bit lost. What are the key things you want to highlight for them?
David Greer (37:57):
The first thing I want to highlight is, do you need to do it alone? Is there someone else you can get help with? And in your corner, all of us get our nose pressed up into the tree bark and we cannot notice that we’re actually in a forest. And sometimes we just cannot solve the problem until someone helps us pull back and see the forest, or at least pulls us back enough that we can see what the hell bark we’re pushing our nose into. Sometimes it’s just could we get 12 inches of perspective? Sometimes that’s all it needs. So is getting some outside help, however that looks like, whether it’s a mentor, whether it’s a coach, whatever works for you. The other thing is we all get caught up working in our business. The next phone call, the next email, the next crisis, the next fire, the next this, the next that.
(38:54):
And the true value creation comes from working on your business, pulling back who’s sometimes new clients who’ve been in business for a while, the business has been really successful and they’ve got totally sucked into the operation. And I start with them and I say, “Hey, eight years ago, why did you start this business?” And then they don’t stop talking for 20 minutes, but the things they’re doing day to day don’t relate back to why they started the business. And they need to rediscover that passion and often need to reorganize the business, hire someone, delegate so that they can get back to that why. So getting out of the being in the business to step back and look at why do I have this business? What do I want out of it? Where do I want it to go? And it doesn’t have to be arduous. You can do this in a couple hours, maybe a half a day. You can do it on your own. I think it’s better if you can involve someone else. There are lots of templates that don’t have to be complicated. In fact, I encourage you to find simple ones. Simple is good, and I think you’ll just dramatically increase both the performance, but more importantly, your enjoyment of your business. If you take the time out to do this,
Wayne Pratt (40:22):
David, this certainly resonated with me, but if it resonated with our audience, how do we get ahold of you?
David Greer (40:29):
Thanks, Wayne. First of all, I want your listeners to know that I offer free one hour coaching to anyone that wants it. If you’re stuck on something in business or in life, reach out to me and we’ll schedule a call and I’ll do my best to give you some progress on that. In fact, my commitment to you is if you spend one hour with me, you’ll have three ideas to accelerate your business in the next 90 days. Now, to reach out to me, if you just go to my website, coachdjgreer.com, that’s Coach D as in David, J as in James Greer.com. On the top left corner of every page of my website is my phone number and my email address. There’s a contact form too. Whatever’s easiest for you, use that to reach out to me and take me up on my offer.
Bernie Franzgrote (41:18):
Thank you, David Greer to my co-host, Wayne Pratt and you, the knack for business listeners. If you’re starting your journey in business launching, reach out to David, use your man and he’ll offer great advice. And if you have an addiction issue, you also work in that space too. That refers back to our first podcast that we did to reach us at info@kreativinsight.com. It’s INFO at K-R-E-A-T-I-V-I-N-S-I-G-H-T.com or website is kreativinsight.com. How can folks reach you, sir?
Wayne Pratt (41:52):
Best way is my website motive8u.ca, MOT-I-VAT-8-U dot ca and my email is Wayne at motive8u dot ca.
Announcer (42:04):
If you would like to be a guest on this podcast and share your knowledge, let us know. We would also appreciate your feedback on the content or format. Check the show notes for more details for these podcasts. We like to acknowledge the support and thanks to the following people. Carl Richards from Podcast Solutions Made Simple, a renowned podcast expert Fred Crouch, who is the Property Wizard podcaster, where Bernie is a co-host, Jovan Streaker from at high, a co-working space that is more than just a space. Then Melanie Weber Bernie’s invaluable business partner and Wayne Pratt from Motivate U Inc. Who serves as both a coach and co-host of these podcasts. Disclaimer, please note that the Knack for Business podcast episodes are meant solely for educational and general informational purposes. The information and opinions contained within are not intended to be professional advice on any subject matter.
(43:05):
The thoughts, views, and opinions expressed by the participants are their own personal beliefs and do not represent the views of the podcast hosts or any affiliated organizations. It is important to note that this podcast is not a replacement for consulting with certified experts in your area who possess knowledge of your unique situation. The hosts of the podcast, along with any participants or affiliated groups do not take responsibility for any actions taken or not taken based on the information presented in this episode. It is highly recommended that individuals seek guidance from their own personal advisors in fields such as accounting law or other pertinent areas prior to undertaking any actions or making decisions that may impact their financial, legal, or other aspects of life.
