Join Kyle Knowles and me on his Your Maker Manager Money Podcast as we talk all things for entrepreneurs. Here are the topics we covered:
- Setting goals, both personal and corporate.
- Being driven and how easy it is for entrepreneurs to become workaholics.
- If you get stuck in your business, remember your original vision and why you started your business in the first place.
- Being an entrepreneur is an emotional journey.
- My book Wind In Your Sails is a blue print for how to grow a successful business.
- Grow yourself to grow your business.
- Focus on your strengths and not your weaknesses.
- Live your dreams. Mine was to sail for two years in the Mediterranean, while home schooling our three children.
Audio
Buzzsprout: https://makermanagermoney.buzzsprout.com
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/6EU1L2l1Ey9NJQ4T6uSdbX
Transcript
Kyle Knowles (00:00):
Hello there. Welcome to the Maker Manager Money podcast, a podcast to inspire entrepreneurs to keep going and for entrepreneurs to just start. My name is Kyle Knowles, and today’s guest is David Jay Greer. David is an entrepreneurial coach with over 40 years of experience in the business world. He specializes in working with entrepreneurs to achieve high performance and growth, including entrepreneurs facing challenges with addiction. David has a background in software engineering and has built a multimillion dollar software company. He is also an author and public speaker sharing his insights in his book, wind In Your Sales Vital Strategies that Accelerate Your Entrepreneurial Growth. This book contains topics like culture, strategic planning, and team alignment. He draws on his personal experience, including sailing and recovery to help entrepreneurs navigate the challenges of business. Welcome to the show, David. Thanks, Kyle. I loved your introduction. Thank you for that. Thank you for joining me today and being so generous with your time. Where are you dialing in from?
David Greer (01:08):
I am dialing in from Vancouver, Canada.
Kyle Knowles (01:11):
I don’t think I’ve had a guest from Canada yet. I’ve got another one lined up after you, so I’m excited to have some Canadians on the show.
David Greer (01:20):
Turns out there’s a lot of entrepreneurs in Canada too.
Kyle Knowles (01:22):
A lot. There are definitely a lot of innovation going on up in Canada for sure. I want to start out just since it’s the new year, what’s your biggest goal for this year?
David Greer (01:35):
My biggest personal goal is I am dealing with some chronic back issues from being a super active person all of my life and I have some progression in one of my discs and it’s impacting. I’ve already been working on it. I’ve had it for a couple of years, but my goal is to really find some new ways to improve this in 2025. That’s my big personal goals while I coach and really encourage entrepreneurs to set goals for the business and themselves as I’m getting a little older and one of my challenges is I work too hard. For the last couple of years, I’ve actually given myself permission not to set goals and to just be more present to kind of the moment and what’s happening now. Having said that, I didn’t write it down to have a goal of being on one podcast a week last year, but I found that over time that was my goal and typical entrepreneur, I got halfway to goal, so I got 26. So some of my work with my coach is actually getting better at just actually not being so driven. That’s a long-term goal, but it turns out I’m so driven that they tend to emerge even if I hadn’t written them down.
Kyle Knowles (02:59):
The goals just come out of your pores because that’s the way you’re wire.
David Greer (03:03):
That’s the way I, yeah, exactly. I’m just super hardwired that way.
Kyle Knowles (03:08):
You’ve had a tremendous success in the business world. Failures of course, and I’ve finished your book, Wind In Your Sales, and I love the analogies with sailing. I don’t know anything about it. I’m from Utah, right? I live in Utah, no, except for the great Salt Lake.
David Greer (03:27):
I grew up in the Alberta prairies, but my parents had a summer cabin on a well-known lake in Alberta, so that’s actually where I learned to sail.
Kyle Knowles (03:37):
Okay. Just on a lake. That’s really awesome. What I’m trying to say here is that so you’re so wired and the reason you had success is because of all those, the ambition. I mean, the way I see you after finishing your book, it’s about ambition and you’re also about adventure. You’re a captain, which is very ambitious and adventurous, but you’re also a coach.
David Greer (04:05):
Yep.
Kyle Knowles (04:07):
I mean, how did you get to a point and what would you say to entrepreneurs starting out, because you’re coaching now more than your day-to-day in the grind of growing a business. What do you say to entrepreneurs about all that anxiety and fervor and ambition and how do you carve out time for yourself so that you don’t, I guess get burned out?
David Greer (04:30):
Sure. I’d like to just go back in a couple things you said. I want to add one kind of idea to what you suggested, which is vision. When I was in grade eight or nine, so I grew up in Edmonton, which is the provincial capital of the province of Alberta, and I remember getting taken on a field trip to the government buildings because right, the provincial capital was there and I think we just passed by some windows from the outside I could see into this massive computer room and spinning tape drives. I still can visualize it in my head and there was that, and then my math teacher in grade eight or nine taught me octal arithmetic. We count to 10 because we have these 10 digits on our hands, but you can count to two or you can count to eight, and that’s the beauty of this system we use to keep track of numbers is this idea of zero to represent nothing.
(05:27):
Those two things, by grade nine, I had a vision I wanted to take computers and business and put them together. I really honestly don’t know where that vision came from except those two examples that I just shared and that propelled me for over 25 years. And sometimes when I worked with a new client as a coach and they’ve had a business for a while and they’re overworked or they’re not taking breaks or they’ve kind of lost sight often the question I’ll ask them is, why did you start the business? Which gets back to usually entrepreneurs start a business because well, either they hate being in a job, so the alternative is to have your own business, and that’s okay. That’s like it’s okay to have a vision of I don’t want to work for someone else tried that and it doesn’t work. But a lot of entrepreneurs also see a need in the marketplace and then invent something or create something or find a way to supply something that satisfies that need.
(06:30):
But as their business grows and they become more successful and they hire employees, they often have lost sight of the essence of, “oh, right, I love going and solving problems for people” and sometimes, so it’s really just helping them either to get back in that vision or maybe they need a new vision. It’s like they’ve satisfied that market and now they need to find what’s next and create a new vision, or maybe it’s a new vision for what the business looks like three or five years from now. And that’s a lot of my work is also when I built Robelle, which is the software company United State was with for 20 years, we did it like most entrepreneurs do it, which is, “Hey, let’s do 10% better than last year” without really any independent market knowledge or reason to think that we could do 10% better, except we just said we do 10% better and we’re high achievers, so we do 10% better. But we never sat down and said, where do we want to be in three years or five years? What does that look like? This isn’t new. It comes from a guy, Vern Harnish and his books are the Rockefeller Habits and Scaling Up, and I specialized kind of in working with his templates and his framework and ideas, and I remember the first time I went to a training course with Verne, he talked about where are you going to be in three years? And it blew my mind. I’d never thought of it that way
Kyle Knowles (07:56):
And did it blow your mind just because that seemed too far out or
David Greer (08:03):
I never thought of looking at my business from that perspective.
(08:08):
Where do I want to end up in five years and also where’s my market going to be in five years? What is it going to look like? Is it still growing? Is it shrinking? I didn’t really look at it from a market position either. For some entrepreneurs, if they’re working in a high growth market, if the market is growing 15% compound annual growth and your business is growing 5%, you’re actually losing market share because your business isn’t growing at the same rate, the market’s growing, which again, if you’re okay with that, my big thing with clients is to make conscious choice. You make whatever choice you want, but my request is make it a conscious choice. This whole idea of looking out three to five years, and especially looking at it from a market perspective, where’s the market going to be and where are you going to be in that market in three to five years time versus where you are today and what’s your vision of what that looks like?
(09:12):
That’s the piece that I think helps sustain us because we’re pulling to a bigger goal. You asked me about my goals. I have an overreaching purpose that I’m living, which is to share my experience, strength and hope in business and to share my experience, strength and hope in recovery. And that’s why I do all these podcasts is this is one of the ways that I get to share that experience, strength and hope because I think I have some important messages that could help people, and so that that’s what keeps me motivated. That’s my vision for moving forward. I’ve been very successful as an entrepreneur. I don’t need to work for money, although it’s useful. I can travel more and have nicer kinds of experiences, but honestly, I don’t have to work for money. I have been very successful, but this bigger purpose keeps me going, and then I want to be fairly compensated for my time.
(10:21):
So yeah, I do run this business, the coaching business, and I do charge people a reasonable amount of money that’s representative of what I can deliver to them. It also keeps them honest. I’ve done a lot of mentoring. When people pay you money, even if they have a lot of money, like the fact every month I’m going to send ’em an invoice and I’m going to charge the credit card. They show up for calls, they do more of the work. It’s just funny how that works. The euphemism we use, if you’ve got skin in the game, which you do, it is not someone else’s money, it’s yours. And if you don’t have enough at the end of the month, you’ll know and you can’t just go somewhere and get bailed out. You have to figure it out.
Kyle Knowles (11:09):
I guess going back to this conversation about where you are now, and this is later in your career and your coaching and you are trying to dial in that ambitious self, the goals. If you were to go back to David when he was right in the midst of it’s Robelle, you helped grow, are there things that you would tell that younger David, knowing what you know now that might help you back then maybe not be so addicted to the drug of constantly on the go?
David Greer (11:46):
Yeah, I tell my younger self, Hey, it’s all going to work out.
(11:52):
I think we’re so driven to a certain outcome and we try and control so much that is really not controllable. I think it is important to have written down goals and especially for your business and from a personal and from a team perspective. So everyone’s pulling in the same direction. That really increases the odds that you’re going to have it, but at some point you have to realize that you have these ambitious goals and really good management teams are really good at predicting the goals they’re going to achieve and achieving them. And there’s a lot that’s out of your control. And so a lot of my growth, especially since coming into recovery is getting much clearer about what I can control and what I can’t and what I want to influence and what I want to let go of.
Kyle Knowles (12:39):
I want to talk a little bit about addiction and recovery. I know there’s addiction with substances, but do you find that entrepreneurs, because talked to a lot of them, they’re addicted to the work and in fact, I had one entrepreneur on my podcast that basically wanted to apologize to his family because he was so addicted to the work that he was neglecting his family. So do you want to talk about the differences between maybe substance abuse kind of addictions and being addicted to being an entrepreneur?
David Greer (13:11):
Yeah, I’m not expert on that because mine, my addiction is alcoholism, which is what we would call an ingestion addiction. That’s like a drug. You poke a needle in your body or you take something up your nose or alcohol, you ingest it or food again, you ingest it. And then we have process addictions, which is what, so that would be workaholism would be gambling, would be sex addiction, and the addictions are all the same in that, or at least this is my belief, we’re trying to avoid or alter how we feel in workaholism. It could be that we don’t feel worthy enough and so we work and work and work how we feel worthy or it’s literally like I am on the edge of workaholism. I mean, I’ve done enough personal work. I have this amazing task master spirit, which has been with me probably since I was three or four years old and shit, does it know how to get stuff done?
(14:18):
But it also, it’s a coping mechanism. It’s like that’s how I had a narcissist father and I was always trying to get his attention, and this was one of the ways that I cope was being able to get a lot done and achieve things. I’ve had to look at that and for me it’s very subtle because my task master sometimes it’s like I’m already out the door and going for a walk and it’s like, how did I get here? Oh, well, because my task master spirit decided I needed to be in action. So again, we get back to trying to be more in conscious choice. There is no work-life balance. There’s work-life choices. And so we may choose at times to be very hyper-focused on our business and be really all in on that in 15 hour days. But again, you want to do it with conscious choice where you’re telling your spouse, you’re telling your kids this is this period, and then you want to do your best to honor that.
(15:13):
If it’s a 15 day sprint because you’ve got a massive trade show and it’s going to hugely impact the business, then if you booked a week off for when that finishes, which usually you don’t because you’re so excited about all the leads that you got at the trade show, now you’re feeling anxious if you don’t process those leads and get ’em into the CRM and start following up with them. And I’ve been there, done that. And then so you’re back into work, work, work, work, work. No matter how hard you work, you are worthy whether you work or not. But that takes understanding those things and doing the personal work and the personal growth work to realize why you’re working so hard. I got sick and tired of being sick and tired, and I admitted to an amazing coach that I had a drinking problem and he coached me to go to 12 step recovery, but it took me 20 years to get to that point.
(16:10):
We all have some trigger in alcoholism. We often talk about it as a bottom, we bottomed out. But I think for pretty well all addictions, there has to be that trigger event where suddenly it’s not working anymore or we’ve lost everything or my wife’s divorced me because I work too much. And for some people that’s not enough. It’s okay, I’m going to keep working. I’m going to solve the pain of my divorce by working harder. Or it’s like the threat of separation is enough to be a wake up call. And again, it’s different for every individual,
Kyle Knowles (16:51):
And I don’t think that there’s enough talk about these kinds of situations for entrepreneurs. They are, I’ve found entrepreneurs to be very wired in a similar way to you, accomplishment and very action oriented, massive action and lots of hours. And I think these things that you talk about, whether the anxiety or relationships or addiction go along with maybe this personality type,
David Greer (17:27):
Oh, don’t get me wrong. I love adrenaline.
Kyle Knowles (17:30):
Yeah, yeah. Do you feel like there’s enough talk about maybe the negative side effects of entrepreneurship?
David Greer (17:38):
Well, and even if we kind of go beyond just the negative, I think the emotional component of being an entrepreneur is not talked about partly because we live in a society we’re talking about emotions is not something that’s particularly rewarded. It’s more judged and put down. This is part of why I come on podcasts is I talk about my feelings and I talk about some of the difficulty around this because I agree it’s not socially acceptable to a large extent. People that are entrepreneurs and start their own business get very scared when they think about being vulnerable with their employees. And there is a line there. You don’t want to be so vulnerable. Your employees are scared for the future of the company and their jobs, but also you’re a human being and you have fears too, just like they do. And appropriately sharing it I think is important.
(18:38):
And yes, it’s not. I think the other piece, I have one of my clients who’s looking like a very, I’m going to knock on wood here. He’s been wanting to sell his business for a couple years and it looks like that’s probably going to happen this month. But some of my work with him is like, who are you going to be if you don’t have that business? Our ego inevitably gets wrapped up a lot in what we build and what we create and also in the relationships that we create. And so once you step away from that, so how will you replace that? How will you let go of that piece? And there is a very big emotional component to it. And some entrepreneurs say, well, I’ll just sell my business. I’ll start another one. Well, it’s a lot easier to keep an existing business going than to go find or start another one.
(19:29):
I think people are really surprised at how difficult that is, even though you’ve been very successful and done it once. It often times for me, a lot of it was vision, but also, and being open to opportunities, but also being in the right place at the right time and an opportunity that good has not shown up yet in my life since. And of course, I didn’t know it at the time, just how good it was going to be in no way that I could. But now looking back over a 40 year career, I have a deeper appreciation and I’m still glad I sold in 2001 because it gave me opportunities to do things that I hadn’t even realized how deeply I’d dreamed them until the opportunity was there.
Kyle Knowles (20:10):
Yeah, I think we’re lucky to have one great opportunity in our careers and very lucky to have more than one.
David Greer (20:19):
Yeah. Well, I want your listeners still have optimism. I still think, but I mean the Robelle opportunity was like a 10 X a 100 X. I’ve had great opportunities and I have taken advantage of them, but it’s just not at the scale of what we achieved there. Right.
Kyle Knowles (20:40):
No, you can have a success everywhere you go for sure. I’m just saying usually there’s one big success compared to the others for sure.
I want to talk about your book a little bit, the strategies that are literally chapters within your book. And let me just list these chapters and strategies for the listeners. Entrepreneurial, corporate innovation, marketing, sales, product, people, operational, financial and exit strategies are what you talk about in the book. And I was very surprised and pleased because when I just read the title not knowing anything about the book, I didn’t know exactly what you were going to talk about. And then what I found in the book is basically everything you know about business that you’ve learned the past, I don’t know when you wrote the book, but the past 35, 40 years, whatever it is that you put all of that in there. It’s literally a blueprint and that at the end of each chapter there specific tasks that you request people to do so they can move their business forward. I wanted to ask you, out of those 10 strategic areas, what’s your number one skill? Which one of those is your number one?
David Greer (21:59):
I’ll answer it and not answer it. I think for most entrepreneurs, owner, founders of their own business, and this certainly was true for me, of those 10, usually you’re really good at three or four and then okay, at three or four more and two you’ve never heard of
Kyle Knowles (22:19):
Or you’re really bad at, I don’t know,
David Greer (22:21):
Or either or.
Kyle Knowles (22:23):
What are the three or four for you then that you’re,
David Greer (22:25):
The three or four for me was certainly innovation, marketing, product, and people, I later on got better I think at corporate, corporate planning and the stuff that we talked about at the start of our conversation. Looking three years out, having a very small set of goals. Entrepreneurs either have no goals or too many goals in my experience. And then the entrepreneurial growth journey, which is really my first chapter, I didn’t really appreciate or understand. I mean, I think Bob and I did a good job of growing ourselves, but we did it unconsciously as opposed to more consciously. And my belief is the single biggest limiting factor for any business is the entrepreneur herself or himself.
Kyle Knowles (23:11):
And what does that mean? They limit the business because of,
David Greer (23:15):
Yes, they limit the business because either they have internal belief systems that don’t believe it could be as big as it potentially could. I mean there’s any number of reasons. Classic is entrepreneurs who Bob and I, were pretty disciplined guys. I got to give us that. I work with a lot of entrepreneurs where they start the year and we’re going off to the left and then six weeks in, oh, we’re going to deek to the right. Oh look, there’s a shiny red ball over there, the horizon, we’re going to go chase that down. And it drives staff crazy and it really kills momentum. And so some of the becoming a really good entrepreneur I believe, is to having the discipline to say, we’re going to set a set of goals for the year and the quarter and we’re going to stick to them and unless some new brutal fact or something really new shows up, at least for the quarter, we’re going to really stick with what we said. And often times even with some of my clients we’re halfway through the quarter and they’re like veering off just a sec. You said this is what’s important to you. You said this is the goals to achieve in order to get to what’s important to you. Oh yeah, but well, what do you want? Do you want that shiny thing that looks exciting right now just because new and different or you’re going to get back to the discipline and the grind and some of it is sometimes in business you just got to grind stuff out.
(24:53):
I still think it’s fun, but it’s like there’s fun in all caps
(24:58):
And there’s kind of fun in lowercase nine point font and sometimes we’re in the lowercase nine point font. We think, oh, this isn’t worth it. Well, it will be because you’re going to get to someplace you want to go. And so sometimes it’s just having that, not sometimes I think almost all the time, the leader, the entrepreneur needs to stay disciplined on that. Or you need to step back and become chairman of the board of your business and hire a really good manager who will stick with it. And then you can help set strategy and help set the direction of the company and understand the market. I think those are the most valuable things. And then maybe you become chairman of five other businesses. You don’t run any of them, but you take that strategic vision and I help people to understand what it is that they love to do the most and what they’re best at and then help ’em to go find more of that or to eliminate people so they don’t do the parts of the job that doesn’t motivate them and doesn’t keep them excited.
Kyle Knowles (26:03):
What are some of the tools that you use to help them understand what they’re good at?
David Greer (26:07):
I use Strength Finders 2.0.
(26:10):
You can buy the book, you can probably just go online and sign up. I give every new client a copy of the book, which comes with a coupon. So for the readers or the listeners that don’t know, StrengthFinders is just the basic idea of it is we have in the world, there’s kind of 42, I forget the exact numbers, 42, 43 strengths, and almost all of us exhibit five of those 42 are our personal strengths. And you go, you buy the book, there’s a coupon in it, use the coupon to go take their self-assessment and out of that self-assessment pops out your five strengths. And my belief system and my coaching practice is that we should focus on our strengths. We can take something we’re weak at and we can move it from a say four out of 10 to a five out of 10 that probably takes a year, probably takes a lot of intense work.
(27:14):
And in the big scheme of things, if you’re a business, we haven’t moved the needle, we can take one of your strengths that it’s 95% and we can move it to 95 and a half. It’ll probably have a massive impact on your business. I always start to get them to do StrengthFinders. Often times for my clients at least one of the strengths is a big surprise. Some of my clients are open to looking at those strengths in detail. Some aren’t the ones that are, if I usually do at least an hour session, we go through ’em. And the other problem with our strengths is when we are too strongly in our strengths. I would say a third of my clients, the number one strength is competitiveness. It’s a great strength to have and you can get a lot of stuff done. You compete against your competitors. But then I say, how’s it working out to compete with your spouse? How is it working out to compete with your children? And usually they are completely unconsciously competing all the time with these people constantly and they usually realize, oh yeah, maybe that’s not how I want to live my life. Or again, I just ask that I make conscious choice. If you and your wife are super competitive and that works for you, go for it.
(28:32):
But just know that you’re both being super competitive and don’t do it unconsciously, which is probably how you’ve been operating for some time. That’s one of the things to help entrepreneurs. Get back into their strengths. As I mentioned earlier on our interview, you start the business, are you doing those things in the business that you really love? Some entrepreneurs, they love the startup phase. They love the figuring out the market in that early product or service design and figuring that out. And then they become super successful and now they’ve got a hundred customers and now they have 50 employees. Unlike managing all the employees and figuring out version five of the product, it doesn’t get ’em out of bed in the morning because what they love is the startup phase and new. And so I help them, maybe they can do it within their own business, maybe they need to go do it with another business. I don’t know what the solution will look like, but first what we’re trying to ID is the problem. The problem is you’re bored because it’s just operating the business and making it better. And that’s not what really gets you excited. For me, I’m that kind of entrepreneur. If I have a really well running business, I’ll probably break something so I have something to fix. So you’d be much better getting me out of there.
(29:59):
And here’s the deal. For everything you hate doing, there’s someone that loves to do it. With my first coach, Kevin Lawrence that I worked with for nine years, that was one of the things he’d keep reminding me, you don’t like administration. There’s some person who loves administration. It’s their bread and butter. They love getting out of bed and doing that. So go find someone like that and stop doing the stuff you don’t like.
Kyle Knowles (30:23):
But do you find a lot of entrepreneurs just want that control over so many things?
David Greer (30:28):
Absolutely.
Kyle Knowles (30:29):
Even if they’re not good at it.
David Greer (30:31):
You have to also look at the path for most entrepreneurs. If you’re an owner, founder of a business, you started probably by yourself or maybe with a co-founder and you did everything and then you grew it by the seed of your, at
Kyle Knowles (30:47):
One point you were doing all of it,
David Greer (30:50):
And by the way, you figured it all out which is why you’re still in business.
(30:56):
So it’s very hard for a lot of those entrepreneurs to bring someone else in and let go. Again, it’s kind of the letting go of control, which I alluded to earlier in terms of outcome, but it’s also the letting go of control and managing people because they might have a completely different way of doing it than you do. Maybe it’s 10 times better, but it’s not your way. And you know that your way worked to get you where you are in the business, but here’s the secret that way probably won’t get you to the next level of your business. Sometimes people hire me, they have really struggles with their senior leadership team. Well, yeah, because they assign things to the senior leadership team and then the person goes off and tries doing it for a week, and then immediately the entrepreneur grasps the steering wheel back and tells ’em they’re useless and they’re not getting anything done and tells ’em exactly how to do it. This does not make for happy people. This does not make for great leaders. And my personal belief that leadership is about making the people you lead be successful and your job is to get impediments out of their way, get resources for them to be successful, and then help coach them and help them to grow to be the best they can be. Now, most entrepreneurs did not grow their business acting that way. They were control freaks.
(32:29):
So really it’s a big shift and I don’t want to lessen it. And usually with clients, we work at it for a year or two to just help to get the white knuckled grip of the steering wheel. First of all, they let it go enough that the knuckles aren’t white, and then I get maybe one finger to come off the steering wheel. It’s a process.
Kyle Knowles (32:55):
And I guess that’s part of founder syndrome where it’s holding on so tightly to the business still
David Greer (33:02):
Either that or you have to take that part of the business that you’re no longer good at and you have to grow yourself to become a marketing wizard. Marketing, you figured stuff out, but you’re not really a strategic marketer. You haven’t trained in that. You haven’t grown your career in that. I’ve helped entrepreneurs to become strategic marketers, but they have to understand that that’s a weakness and that that’s something that they want to fill in either by hiring someone or by growing their own skillset to be able to see it that way. And especially because I have a variety of clients in all industries now, but because my background’s tech, obviously I attract a certain amount of technology people because in tech people, it’s like always the answer is more technology. Well, maybe it’s not more technology. Maybe you need to think about it strategically from a marketing point of view.
(33:58):
Because sometimes, and I talk about it in Wind In Your Sails a little bit, sometimes a trivial change to a product can dramatically improve its acceptance in the marketplace. But as a computer scientist engineer, it’s like, well, that wasn’t hard. So people only value things that are really hard technical problems that I solve. Well, turns out that’s not true. That’s just what you feel, right? Because that’s what you train for and that’s what you are super good at. But it could be that something you spend five minutes on in the code is actually tens of millions of dollars of value to the marketplace. And so some of it is with technical people, is helping them understand that overcoming technical difficulty while that has its place and probably gives you great competitive advantage. It’s not all,
Kyle Knowles (34:52):
Yeah, I’m just amazed because you have this software engineering background and then when you list out, obviously innovation and product are part of that. When you list out sort of your strengths in these 10 strategic areas, but you also list marketing and people, which isn’t always attached to someone in software engineering.
David Greer (35:17):
I’m a very weird software engineer who can walk and chew gum at the same time. There aren’t a lot of us.
Kyle Knowles (35:24):
For sure. Podcast is called Maker Manager money. And the reason it is, is because I’ve just come to figure out over 35 years of working in business and reading self-development books and all this other stuff, you basically have to make something and then you can’t just make something and then there’s money on the other side of that. You have to manage what you made either through manufacturing, marketing, sales, all those kinds of things. And the combination of the two, making something that’s product, market fit, whatever, and then managing it on the other side of that is money. And
(36:08):
When I look at you and your background and finish your book, I’m like, this guy is a maker, right? That’s what your main interest was. And that’s the problem why you went into software engineering in the first place is to make things. And then some of your stories that you tell about just a weekend writing some kind of email program for business and then ending up selling that as well to customers that you were just using internally. I’m just like maker, maker, maker. If you’re dealing with all these entrepreneurs, do you find most of them are makers or most of them sort of the managers,
David Greer (36:50):
Way more makers. Again, again, they’re makers and they’ve achieved a certain market piece. But I also find that oftentimes some technology, like more engineering oriented entrepreneurs I work with, really struggle with seeing their own worth of what they’ve created. They don’t, it’s very hard for them to see the value in what they’ve created. And I talked to them for a while and then I remind ’em, look, you told me this and this and this. So your customers must be feeling this about you, like that you’re uber reliable, that you show up, that your products actually work in the field and you may not appreciate just how valuable that is in a sea of technical products that more often than not fail in the field. So you’ve created something very special and it’s a much higher value. Now, some of this you would’ve read in my book when in your sales and for your listeners, I joined this young software startup at 22.
(37:54):
I was the first employee after the founders basically started, it’d been in business for two years. And a condition of my employment was I had to present a paper at the Hewlett Packard International User Group convention when I was 22, which I ended up doing. I still remember how scared I was going on stage for the first time, but I’m 22 standing up in the San Jose convention floor selling software, and I have no fricking clue that’s what I’m doing. Or I’m really marketing software. I’m telling a bunch of computer geeks about this cool stuff and what it could do for them, which later I learned was kind of the essence of marketing and sales. And within two years, three years, I probably was giving 80% of the demos at trade shows because, and this part gets back to why I think I’m good at people skills.
(38:39):
Someone come up to us in the booth, I would ask them about how they develop software, what their environment was like, how many people were on the team. And I would listen for five minutes and then I would take one of our product offerings and I would show them only 5% of the product, but I would show them the exact 5% that applied to their environment, how they develop software, how they worked. And that is really the essence of marketing where you can communicate to someone about their problems and then show them the pain that they’re in with those problems, and then show them your pain pill, which was our product and how it’s going to really solve their pain, which to me, that’s the essence of really great marketing, understanding the pain in the marketplace. The bigger the pain, the better your pain pill, the more value there is. And so I just tell people to see that because oftentimes they can’t see it as much as I can, being independent and being away from it. I’ve got distance and experience.
Kyle Knowles (39:47):
I love the section on marketing kind of my background. And I really enjoyed the way how you talked about, you should be talking about the customer and the market, not about yourself. I used to have the saying that it’s about them, it’s not about us, it’s about them. And what you see a lot of times is you go on LinkedIn and you see company pages or other things, and you see these posts. And if you’re looking at it from them perspective, it’s about us. It’s like, look how great we are.
David Greer (40:17):
Yeah, even a LinkedIn profile, it’s all about me, me, me, I did this, I did that. I’m wonderful. I have all these skills. Whereas I think a much better profile is when working with this company, I took it from X to Y by bringing these skills to the organization.
Kyle Knowles (40:38):
That’s good advice. Yeah,
David Greer (40:39):
It’s showing people how if they hired you, what would they get? What would they get for their business? And by showing that, I think you create a lot more belief in you as the individual and the career person because you are much more clearly articulating the value you’re going to bring rather than just talking about what you do. I’m not as interested in what you do. I’m more interested in what in your doing, how do you change my organization to achieve my goals?
Kyle Knowles (41:10):
We’re running out of time, David, so I wanted to get to just a couple of questions, but first of all, I just wanted you to tell just quickly when you left the company and sold it, you took two years off to sail. And just talk about why you made that decision and what you did.
David Greer (41:30):
Okay, so back it up slightly. I mentioned on our talk today that I joined this younger software startup at 22. I stayed 20 years, liked the place, grew it into a global powerhouse. And my first, my boss, the co-founder, Robert Bob, 10 years, then I became his partner. And in our 20 year relationship, we only had one major disagreement, but it was a doozy and it ended in divorce and it wasn’t, I would say expected. It wasn’t something I was trying to make happen. It was something that happened. So in early 2001, I’m out on the street. We’ve had a major disagreement about the strategic direction of the company. We had two strategies, which I think both were sound strategies, but they were not complimentary. And we solved it by him buying me out. I’m on the street, I got a pretty good size check on my jeans and I’m busy.
(42:30):
This is in 2001, it’s something called the dotcom meltdown has happened. I haven’t even really noticed it because I’ve been living in my own little kind of insulated space, a business space and chasing deals, which weren’t going that well. Someone smarter than me sat me down and said, “David, your kids will never be 11 nine and five again. Do you need to work right away?” And I’m like, no, I am doing okay. I’m not done for life, but I don’t need to work right away. And then she said that when she had a career transition, she went to Australia and bought a VW van, and she spent a year torn around Australia in her van. And if your listeners can imagine the most cheesy, cartoonish, light bulb going off over my head, that is literally what happened sitting in the chair across from her that day, like it was poof.
(43:28):
I’d been sailing since I was 12, so obviously had a lot of sailing experience. I had been reading about long-term cruisers and families who went offshore for by that point, probably close to 20 years. And I did not realize how big a dream that was till the potential for the dream was suddenly there. And it was a gift that I came out of Robelle because I don’t think I ever would’ve done it if I’d stayed within the company. When Margaret Livingston made that statement to me, Karalee and I hatched this plan. We looked at three different plans, but the one we settled on was to commission a boat in the south of France and to homeschool our kids. Of course, it’s typical entrepreneur. The goal was to homeschool our kids for a year and see the whole Mediterranean while it took two years. So it took twice as long as we thought. So yes, we spent two years living on a sailboat and sailing more than 5,000 miles, 10,000 kilometers in the Mediterranean basin, and had one of the most important experiences of our life and a legacy that we still have as a family today and makes me look like a genius as an entrepreneur because it was the best two years to set out the technology industry out of the last probably 70. I wish I could say that I did that consciously. I didn’t. But it worked out.
Kyle Knowles (44:54):
It was good timing, good timing.
David Greer (44:56):
The timing was impeccable and was, yeah. And like I say, I didn’t realize how big a dream it was until the dream suddenly became possible.
Kyle Knowles (45:08):
Yeah, it’s a fantastic story. I love that story. Well, I just have a few personal questions for you, a lightning round of questions. And I’ve so enjoyed our conversation. We could talk about so many things and so many different areas, but I would encourage listeners to check out your book, Wind In Your Sails, and we’ll put links to the book in the show notes and things like that. So here’s the lightning round of questions. These are very softball easy questions for you. David, your favorite candy bar,
David Greer (45:37):
Coffee Crisp,
Kyle Knowles (45:39):
Favorite music artist?
David Greer (45:43):
That one varies a lot. Long-term has been Oscar Peterson, the amazing Canadian jazz pianist,
Kyle Knowles (45:52):
Favorite cereal
David Greer (45:55):
Raisin bran.
Kyle Knowles (45:56):
Mac or PC
David Greer (45:59):
Longtime Windows guy. And for the last dozen years, completely committed Met Guy and loving it.
Kyle Knowles (46:08):
Google or Microsoft,
David Greer (46:11):
Kyle Knowles (46:13):
Dogs or cats?
Dogs,
Phantom or Les Mis.
Les Mis.
Alright, so the last two questions for you, David. What’s the worst thing about being an entrepreneur and then what’s the best thing about being an entrepreneur?
David Greer (46:34):
Worst thing I think is the loneliness. Trying to do it all yourself. I really encourage entrepreneurs to not do that, although for most entrepreneurs, it’s really hard to ask for help. The best thing is you control your destiny. You get to get up every morning and decide, I mean, it might not feel like it some days, but you really do get to get up every morning and decide what to work on, what to do, where to go. You get to lead an organization and there’s probably nothing more fulfilling for people that are wired like you and me.
Kyle Knowles (47:11):
I love it. I love those answers. The last question, only because we had an intro call and we talked briefly about this. How much did being adopted fuel your ambition and possibly your success?
David Greer (47:27):
I think an unanswerable question, so listeners won’t know, but I was adopted at birth and then when I turned 60 and with nine years of sobriety, I decided to pursue my birth families. And I ended up finding them. And I’ve done a lot of work around this some, and I think there’s some truth that when you’re adopted, there is that initial piece of abandonment. For example, I was adopted in 1957 and my birth mother never wanted to talk to me. I have no factual basis for this, but I’ve read enough books, it’s inconceivable that my birth mother held me after I was born. I would’ve been taken away how it was done. What impact does that have? I’m not sure. I mean, there’s certainly a story from my parents who, the parents that adopted me or their mom, their dad, and I’ve always known about being adopted, but there was a story about being the chosen one. They went to the hospital and chose me out of a lineup kind of thing. I later learned that’s not true. And so I think that there’s some of that drive comes from wanting to please my parents because I’m the chosen one.
Kyle Knowles (48:40):
That makes sense. That makes a lot of sense. Thanks for answering that question, David.
David Greer (48:45):
And before we close just a minute or two ago, I said, don’t do it all alone. And I do have an offer for your listeners, which is if I offer one hour of free coaching to anyone that wants it, and if you go to my website, which will be in the show notes, but it’s coachdjgreer.com, you just Google my name, you’ll find it. And in the top left corner, every page is my phone number and my email address. Just reach out to me and we’ll book a time and we’ll spend an hour on something that you’re really stuck on. And I promise you, you’ll have three ideas to get unstuck before we’re all done. That is an offer to all of your listeners.
Kyle Knowles (49:29):
That is awesome. That’s an amazing offer. I hope some people take advantage of that. David, again, thank you so much for being on the show today. I hope you have a lovely rest of the week.
David Greer (49:40):
Super. Thanks so much, Kyle. It was just a lovely treat to be on the show today.
