The Cashflow Podcast interviews business leaders for their best advice in business. I had a fabulous time with the host, Clayton M. Coke, as we covered these wide range of topics:
- How I help entrepreneurs through 1-on-1 coaching and strategic facilitation.
- The importance of setting fewer rather than more goals.
- My background as an entrepreneur and someone who lives life to the full.
- How Coach Kevin Lawrence was the first person I admitted I had a drinking problem to and how he coached me to try 12-step recovery.
- As entrepreneurs, we often get in our own way.
- Understanding why you started your business and how to use this to keep you going.
- Why trust is so critical in coaching and in business.
- Making conscious choice about the business and life that you want.
- My mission is to reduce stigmatism around alcoholism and addiction while offering hope that there truly is a solution for anyone that is still suffering from alcoholism/addiction.
Listen at this link to hear my whole interview with Clayton M. Coke on the Cashflow Podcast:
https://thecashflowshowpodcast.com/episode/episode-46-david-j-greer-coach-d-j-greer
Are you feeling stuck in your business? Are you an entrepreneur who deals with alcohol or drug issues? I specialize in helping entrepreneurs with business and/or addiction issues. My own experience is that I had to realize that I couldn’t do it any more on my own. If that’s you, please Contact Me or call me at +1 (604) 721-5732. I’ve been there and no what it’s like to run a business fueled by substances and how to run a business in recovery. Call today.
Transcript
Clayton M. Coke:
Today we have another episode in our transatlantic sessions, and instead of hopping across to the USA, we go a little bit further up north this time to one of my favorite places, which is Canada. Our next guest is Coach David J. Greer, who specializes in coaching and strategic planning at Coach David J. Greer, and he also acts as a facilitator for successful entrepreneurs to enable growth via strategic planning. If like me, this is something that you’d like to know more about, then join us after the introduction.
Hello and welcome. I’m Clayton M. Coke, and I’m also the host for the Cashflow Show, the radio show that’s disguised in the shape of a podcast but with so much more. Every week we’ll be interviewing someone inspiring from the business world and finding out how they started in business, what their trials and tribulations were, and how they intend to grow their business in the future. We will also be finding out about what they do in their spare time as well as asking them to pick a book, a film, and a favorite single or album and to share their reasons for doing so. Why not join us at the Cashflow show? It’s not just a radio show, it’s a whole new way of doing business.
Announcer:
The Cashflow show coming to you from the City of London; real people, real business, real talk.
Clayton M. Coke:
Hello and welcome to the Cashflow Show, David.
David J. Greer:
Thank you for having me, Clayton. I’m really happy to be here.
Clayton M. Coke:
I’m really pleased to have you here as well, Sir, because as I said in the introduction, you are our first guest from Canada. I’ve got lots of things to say about Canada, and lots of them are very good. It’s great to have you on.
David J. Greer:
Thank you. I hope that I can share some things that your listeners will find useful.
Clayton M. Coke:
First of all, how would you describe your role at Coach DJ Greer?
David J. Greer:
I’m often asked the difference between a consultant and a coach, and I’ve been both. As a consultant, I’m expected to have the answers to bring all the expertise and to be given a project or some challenge and to just go and solve it. As a coach, I don’t have any answers. As a coach, what I have are the questions. The work and the growth happens in the entrepreneur, mostly actually between sessions. I help people to look at things from different directions. I help people to really see the wins that they’re having, which people often skip over, help them formulate what is the next right step for them in their business or their life, and I make sure every call that that’s the case. And with strategic planning, I use a framework that I think is one of the best in the world. It comes from Verne Harnish who has couple of books, the Rockefeller Habits and Scaling Up, and I work with the entrepreneur in the senior leadership team to get them aligned on the same set of small goals.
I think as entrepreneurs we usually set too many goals rather than it’s actually harder to set fewer goals, to get more focused. And as entrepreneurs we like to spread our risk by, well, let’s pursue 10 things, but you actually reduce your risk by pursuing three or four, which is counterintuitive for most people. I have a process for that strategic planning quarterly one day offsite and annually two days offsite and an agenda and a framework to really come up with the things that will really focus the senior leadership team and the CEO and hopefully the whole business.
Clayton M. Coke:
What I’d like to know is obviously you are in this position now where you’ve been in business how long is it for now?
David J. Greer:
As a coach? Seven years.
Clayton M. Coke:
And you came from a very similar coaching background or was it something completely different?
David J. Greer:
Well, I have a 40 plus year[s] experience as an entrepreneur. When I was 22 getting my computer science degree, I joined a young software startup as the first employee after the founders. I liked the place, stayed 20 years, built it into a global powerhouse. I bought out one of the founders, became partners with the other, and that really formulated a lot of my entrepreneurial journeys. That’s kind of one piece of it. And then after I sold out of that business, my wife and I did something completely different. We took our three children and commissioned a sailboat in the south of France and we sailed for two years, covering more than 5,000 miles, 10,000 kilometers in the Mediterranean while homeschooling three kids and surviving together on a 43 foot boat.
But when I came back, I did a lot of angel investing, kind of a hundred deals a year and investing in one and mentoring and being on the board of directors. But after a few years I didn’t realize how unfulfilling that was for me, and I met an amazing coach at an event who made me more uncomfortable than I had been in a number of years in about a two minute conversation. And that was Coach Kevin Lawrence. On my 50th birthday, August 9th, 2007, I had my first session with Kevin. And when you work with Kevin, it’s an all in or all out proposition because your first coaching session with him is two days, 16 hours back to back.
Clayton M. Coke:
Whoa.
David J. Greer:
You’re all in. And 18 months after I worked with Kevin, we cleared away all the clutter that was in my life, and all that was left was the elephant in the room. He was the first person that I admitted I had a drinking problem to. Fortunately he had a summer place south of BC in Washington State at the kind of group campfire where he had his place there. There were lots of other people, and one of them was a longtime member of AA who told Kevin over a bunch of summers his experience, strength and hope in AA. So when I admitted to Kevin I had a drinking problem, he knew what to do, and he got me to go to my first meeting, and more than 5,000 days of sobriety later, it’s an incredible gift. In 2015, when I came out of my last executive gig, I decided I wanted to give to other entrepreneurs the amazing gifts that Kevin has given to me, and that’s really the motivation for becoming an entrepreneurial coach.
Clayton M. Coke:
Well, first of all, congratulations on your 5,000 plus days. I understand that never necessarily been in that position myself the tenacity and the strength that it takes in order to confront those situations.
David J. Greer:
I tell people and I really in my heart believe this is true it’s the single biggest achievement of my life, and every morning I have to get up and I have to achieve it again. Now I only have to achieve it for today, but I need to keep it front and center because the alcoholic part of my brain is always, even with a lot of sobriety, it’s still there. It doesn’t show up very much anymore, but it still sometimes goes by, and you see a bunch of people Christmastime and having a party and a lot of drinks and you think, oh, boy, yeah, that’d be really good to go have some drinks with them. Unfortunately, I have learned to say no, no, that would be a really bad idea, really bad. I catch it. But I really actively participate in my 12 step program because my alcoholic part of my brain wants me to forget, and I participate because that’s how I remember as well as giving back, which is the core of a 12 step program. I get to keep it by giving it away.
Clayton M. Coke:
Your coaching sessions with Kevin was a way of unlocking a lot of things that had been packed away would I be right in saying, Sir?
David J. Greer:
The coaching sessions with Kevin got a lot of me out of the way of me. I was the one who was holding myself back.
Clayton M. Coke:
Do you find that happens a lot with a lot of the people that you work with?
David J. Greer:
Absolutely. Almost totally. We are our own worst enemy, and once we can do some personal work and it comes in all sorts of ways in shapes and forms, some of it is just personal belief. I’m worth going after this business goal. It’s funny because a lot of us actually are more scared of the success deep down. We’re not aware that this is the case, but we’re often more scared of the success than we are of the failure.
Clayton M. Coke:
Yes. And I can believe that to be true because sometimes we get drawn into, as you said, getting in our own way, shooting ourselves in the foot, seeing opportunities come along, and we look at it and we know it’s an opportunity and we just walk in the complete opposite direction.
David J. Greer:
Or I have more of the opposite problem, which is what I call the shiny red ball syndrome. Entrepreneurs love. They have very short attention. I’ll say I have a very short attention span as an entrepreneur. So to build a business it takes a lot of discipline and focus, and It’s really easy to get distracted by the next shiny red ball that we think will be easy or softer. There’s like a flip side, like, yes, there are new opportunities and is that a distraction or an addition? And that’s part of where I try and help is by challenging entrepreneurs. Pursuing that now given the other things you’ve told me about where your business is and the things that you want, the plans that you have to improve it and move it to the next level, is this going to be additive or negative? Again, as a coach, I really work hard to not be prescriptive. I, from my experience, might be pretty certain it’s going to distract you and take away from your business.
However, that’s not my call to make. I just can show you the consequences of that choice, and then I leave it up to the entrepreneur. What do you want to do? Do you want to stick with the core business and do that or do you want to pursue this? Coach Kevin told me in our very first conversation you point out the potholes in the road to your clients as best you know them from your own experience. And if they decide that they want to go charge ahead into a bunch of potholes, then you’re there to help clean them up after the fact. But, again, it’s not for me to say, it’s for me to offer the choice and then say, “Ms. or Mr. Client, what would you like to do?”
Clayton M. Coke:
You mentioned that towards the start of your career it was a computer science degree or computer science qualification that got you involved in things. So really this is at the onset of the internet. And what I’ve been intrigued to ask you is that in terms of being an entrepreneur, is the internet really lots of shiny red balls that’s designed to distract you from your business?
David J. Greer:
Or is it a place to go make good money and to enhance your business would be how I’d like to extend your question.
Clayton M. Coke:
Okay, I like that.
David J. Greer:
And my answer is yes and yes.
Clayton M. Coke:
I take your point, yes.
David J. Greer:
To put it in context, I was granted my computer science degree in 1980 in the same year that IBM released the personal computer. That’s almost two decades before the internet or 15 years at least before the internet as we first kind of know it as the worldwide web really started taking off. In my previous company I’d learned about this project called the web and got our company connected to the internet through a slow 9,600 baud modem. We were the 80 thousandth registered website with CERN, which was kind of one of the two principal areas where web servers came from, but that was in June. By Christmas there was a quarter of million. Who knows how many hundreds of millions of websites there are today. But it was right on the cusp of that which has been somewhat my experience. I’ve always tended to be very close to the bleeding edge of technological innovation and new things.
I don’t like to try them when it’s still kind of duct tape and bailing wire to hold it all together. But once it’s kind of past that stage, I’m often trying new things. I was in the first 750,000 people on LinkedIn, which again doesn’t sound like much, but given the population of LinkedIn today, that was pretty early.
Clayton M. Coke:
It was very early. I came to LinkedIn quite late. No, I wouldn’t say late. I came to LinkedIn about 12 years ago. But even then exponentially, they’ve literally got on their database I should say every professional person in the world near enough.
David J. Greer:
I may qualify that with the western world, but, yeah.
Clayton M. Coke:
True. Good point.
David J. Greer:
But you’re right, it’s quite amazing. And how to still exploit that beyond just recruitment, which is where LinkedIn seems to point most of its energy. I haven’t looked at your LinkedIn profile to tell you the truth, but that’s because your company site has a really great background on you, I felt like I got to get to know you more through your website.
Clayton M. Coke:
And to a certain extent, I think sometimes it is a duplication of these things. I think with LinkedIn it does have a tendency to concentrate on the individual as a means of basically if somebody were trying to just get your name, the first thing that they’d come up with is your LinkedIn profile, which is quite interesting.
David J. Greer:
It has the milestones and the major kind of roles that I’ve had. But when I read your about story, I got to read about your origin story, which to me is way more interesting.
Clayton M. Coke:
Well, thank you. I think that origin stories are incredibly important, and the fact is obviously when you are being a coach and a mentor to people who come to you for those services, the origin story is a powerful way of communicating with the person that you are trying to help. You come across as a very open man. And I think the feeling is that if somebody feels that they can be open with you, they’re more likely to get the full benefit of your coaching and mentoring skills.
David J. Greer:
In fact, in coaching as in sales, my belief is you move forward at the pace of trust, so you can only move forward as much as the trust has got developed between the two of you. I do a bunch of things on my intake to try and help build some of that early trust. I want to go back to the origin stories though, because this is something I do quite a bit of work with entrepreneurs is they rarely come to me because everything is smooth running. They might not be in total crisis mode, but there’s some aspect of the business that’s not running the way they want or they’re not getting what they want out of the business. And it’s very often they’ve lost sight of the why. I’ll often go back, why did you start this business? What got you out of bed in the morning to start from ground zero? Let’s face it, to start a business I think is a radical act.
Clayton M. Coke:
Oh, yes.
David J. Greer:
Because it’s brutally difficult. It has massive challenges. That’s part of what makes us entrepreneurs go is that we’re willing to do that, but you only do that if there is some why. For my book, one of the people I interviewed, he finished his diploma program, and he didn’t have a job, and he had a wife and two kids. And so his why is he needed to provide for them, but it was a very, very compelling why. He was massively motivated to make it work from the go. Other people want to bring a certain change to an aspect of the world that they know a lot about, and more power to them. I love helping people understand their why, and sometimes the why changes and that’s okay too.
Clayton M. Coke:
I think there is an importance to the why. Once upon a time, the why was never mentioned. It’s just how or what. The why seem to be parked somewhere and left.
David J. Greer:
And the truth is you don’t get out of bed and start a business every day unless there’s a deeper why, I mean, to prove your dad. There’s a deeper emotional piece that drives you. A lot of books and things focus on the mechanics, as you say, the how. Hey, let’s be honest, you’ve got to figure out the how.
Clayton M. Coke:
Yes.
David J. Greer:
But in my work, the framework I work with, one of the things we actually start in the framework with corporate culture, your core values, which you believe in. The second thing we work on is what Jim Collins talks about in Good to Great is your purpose. And can you articulate that relatively succinctly in a way that motivates people to keep moving forward?
Clayton M. Coke:
So now obviously you’ve done your computer science, you’ve gone away and you’ve done the entrepreneurial thing, been involved, sold up, but you’ve now decided that you want to start a business. How did that business evolve?
David J. Greer:
So the coaching business or the original software business I started?
Clayton M. Coke:
Your coaching business, how that started. Yes.
David J. Greer:
It evolved in a couple different ways. One, was I had come out of a very intense executive gig where I was VP of marketing for a 35 million a year publicly traded company where I was helping an entrepreneurial friend who was CEO and behind the scenes helping to work on strategy and bigger picture things. But I realized that I was in my mid 50s, and I realized I’d worked as hard as I had ever worked in my entire career. And one of the commitments to myself was I wasn’t going to work that hard again. So that’s part of my why. Part of my why is I want to give back to entrepreneurs what Kevin gave to me. And part of my why is I don’t want to have to work as hard as I have in the past. That actually turns out to be very hard. My default mode is work hard, I actually have to work hard on not working hard.
If you’re like me, you have my sympathies. I also as a three year stint as a VP of marketing, realized that the whole landscape of marketing and the combination of offline and online really was changing how we market and sell. And I embarked, I was going to write a white paper about it, and I interviewed 45 CEOs, entrepreneurs and sales and marketing leaders, and that turned into a book. So that’s my book, Wind in Your Sails, Vital Strategies That Accelerate Your Entrepreneurial Growth, which is a book for owner founders. It’s an intermediate level book. If you’re a serial entrepreneur and you’re on the third business, you probably don’t need my book. And my experience, especially owner founders, I have 10 what I call strategies or functional areas of your business if you like. I break it down with a little bit of theory and then my experience, and then every chapter ends with a case study of an entrepreneur friend of mine.
A third of the book is other people’s experiences. I took time to wrap all that up and then did the things you do to start a new business, create a website. I hired a brilliant friend of mine to help me actually with the outline of the book. She is a total marketing, amazing person. She helped create my website, really worked on my content and the message that I wanted to bring, and then nothing happened as it always does.
Clayton M. Coke:
It’s you as well. I thought it was just me.
David J. Greer:
No, no, I think it’s the world. Then I got a referral from my financial advisor to someone who hired me for facilitation who referred me to someone else. And so actually it was the facilitation part of my business that took off originally. My very first client that I had in April of 2015, I’m going to facilitate their annual plan in the first week of January. Seven years on, and they’re still a client of mine and they’ve done spectacularly well when I look back to where we were seven years ago and the plan that we were creating versus the plan that they’re just finishing executing on in 2022. And that led to some other facilitation clients. My one on one coaching business just took a very long time. I just kept working at it and then eventually started getting a couple of clients. They referred me to a number of other clients.
Coaching is principally a word of mouth, although I will say that I got a special client last year through a podcast around sobriety and as someone who is in the same fellowship as I am. I’ve had a couple changes, people just move on or only one once a month instead of twice, and I’ve got some capacity for new clients. I want to be on podcasts for a number of reasons. I want to share my experience, strength and hope in recovery. Two years ago this month I decided to focus, not exclusively, but really to focus on entrepreneurs who struggle with alcoholism or addiction. And there’s, as far as I can tell, very few, vanishingly few, I found one or two coaches who specialize in that particular niche. And yet 10% of the population are alcoholics. So at least 10% of entrepreneurs, and I think you could argue the stress of the role could quite easily be higher. There’s no data that tells us one way or another.
Clayton M. Coke:
I think you probably find that a lot of entrepreneurs are probably highly functioning alcoholics.
David J. Greer:
Yes, which is me. Almost no one knew that I was an alcoholic. I hadn’t suffered a lot of consequences. When I started my coaching business, I’d been a very successful entrepreneur, I wasn’t driven by financial motive, which is good and bad. When you’re not driven by that, you don’t push as hard and network as much. And plus the goal was not to work as hard.
Clayton M. Coke:
Indeed. That’s interesting.
David J. Greer:
I just had to be okay with, I wasn’t going to have as many clients, and it was just going to be a long, slow, steady slog, which is what it’s been. I still did have these facilitation clients, which is very intense work once a quarter with a couple calls in between, a fair amount of white space. And now as there’s enough white space, I can go and be on podcasts like yours.
Announcer:
Real people, real business, real talk.
Clayton M. Coke:
For people to get a flavor of what you do as a coach, mentor, and strategist, they have to give themselves, I think. But they also know that you are a person that is going to, we don’t use the expression over here, but go out to bat for them. Really, you are going to be that person who’s as committed to that situation as they are.
David J. Greer:
I think hiring a coach is maybe one of the most selfish things you can do because literally most of us don’t have a person who is a hundred percent on our side and completely has their back, and as a coach I do. That doesn’t mean I won’t make you uncomfortable. I will. That’s part of my job. There’s a difference between having someone’s back. Having someone’s back is to really challenge them to really say, are you being the best you can be?
Clayton M. Coke:
Yes.
David J. Greer:
Are you building the best business that you really can build for what you want and to fill your why? I’m not afraid to ask those really tough questions, which your best friends probably will never challenge you to that extent even though I’d argue they would be better friends if they did and you challenged them because it’s not about staying in your comfort zone.
Clayton M. Coke:
No, and to be honest with you, I’ve had to learn that. I’ve had to learn that. I normally would be a person that would be, oh, we’re doing okay here, everything’s fine, blah blah blah. No, let’s just chug along. This is nice, it’s comfortable. But I’ve learned especially over the last few years, that comfort is nice to visit, but you don’t want to live there.
David J. Greer:
Well said. And as we say in recovery, this too shall pass.
Clayton M. Coke:
Yeah.
David J. Greer:
Whether you’re sad, but also when you’re on the highs like this too shall pass. I believe the highs are higher when the lows are lower. Not that I ever want anyone to experience that, but the regular life has a flow and an up and a down. That’s life. And some of my personal growth has been not trying to run away so fast from the low just to be with it, and it’s just where I am right now and that’s okay.
Clayton M. Coke:
Yeah. I think that’s what we need to learn, sometimes it’s okay.
David J. Greer:
I’m not going to die. The world’s not going to come to an end, and I can be sad that I don’t have more clients right now. That’s okay.
Clayton M. Coke:
But then again, something else happens and then you are suddenly inundated.
David J. Greer:
Totally. It comes in waves because I have quite a process to onboard someone because I want to really make sure they’re committed and that we get to know each other. It’s quite a bit of extra work to onboard a new client. So, of course, I always get three in the same month. Right?
Clayton M. Coke:
Because that’s what happens. You sit there, and it’s all very quiet, and you’re thinking, yeah, I’m in my comfort zone. And then you get people ringing you up like crazy and you’re thinking what happened? Somebody just threw a switch.
David J. Greer:
And often for absolutely no apparent reason. It’s just the universe doing what the universe does best.
Clayton M. Coke:
But I’m going to put something to you as an argument, and this is, isn’t it that to a certain extent the reason why that happens, it’s like a universal slot machine. Have you ever seen those slot machines or go to Vegas or Atlantic City or casinos, and there are certain people that will put money in, put money in, put money in, and then ultimately it will pay out? Or there are certain people that give up, walk away and the next person that comes along gets the pay out.
David J. Greer:
And that, again, is just kind of the wheels of the universe working away. My former coach, Kevin Lawrence, he used to say, the universe works with mathematical precision, and, David, you don’t need to understand the math. For an over analytical computer trained guy, that is a really hard struggle. It’s like why? Why is this happening to me? You don’t really need to know why. It’s just showing up. You just need to deal with it. You need to decide how you want to respond. A lot of my personal growth since getting into recovery is really making a lot of conscious choices about no longer reacting to things and softening my reactions, understanding where I’ve come from and family of origin issues and so the reactions internally are softer, but alI can pause for three seconds before I open my mouth, which is often a very good thing and I can come up with an appropriate response.
And, again, in recovery we talk about the next right thing. I actually bring that into my coaching work. A lot of what I help entrepreneurs get focused on is, okay, you’ve got the next 10 things you’re looking on and this and that and you’ve got catastrophe around this. And it’s like, okay, but what do you need to do today? And who do you need to talk to tomorrow? And let’s just focus on that and what those things really need to be and let the rest take care of itself.
Speaker 2:
The Cashflow Show.
Clayton M. Coke:
You mentioned earlier about onboarding clients and the time that it takes. What would you describe as an ideal client for you?
David J. Greer:
An ideal client is an entrepreneur who is prepared to make some sort of change in themselves, but that’s not how they would articulate it. They don’t realize that that’s the case. So an ideal client is someone who has a challenge, is at least open to getting some help. I meet many, many entrepreneurs that need help. Very, very few are open to getting help.
Clayton M. Coke:
Yes.
David J. Greer:
There’s no point with me working with the client who isn’t open to the help. If they’re not going to listen, if they’re not going to try some of the things I suggest, there’s no point. It’s a waste of their time. It’s a waste of my time. And so some of that, I always start with, I do a free one hour coaching call. I ask the prospective client to come with some issue that’s really keeping them awake at night or is really challenging them. And we go and we dig into that issue and make whatever progress could be made in an hour, which usually is still pretty substantial. I actually go 55 minutes and then leave five minutes to figure out what’s next for the two of us.
A number of times I just say, did you get what you want? Do you know which direction you need to go in? Great. Have a nice day. And you’ll notice in that there is no offer for me to coach them. Some people I just come out of that call, and I’m like, I don’t think I can work with this person. I don’t necessarily tell the person that. I just don’t really take the conversation forward unless they really insist, and then I make an evaluation. Whereas if I think there was some resonance, I’ll say something like, I think we could possibly work together, what do you think? And would you like to move forward? So not everyone after an hour gets the offer.
Clayton M. Coke:
You’re absolutely right because it’s not for everyone. There are certain people that you know you can definitely help. And there are certain other people that doesn’t matter what you do, if they don’t resonate with you and you don’t resonate with them, it’s just not going to work.
David J. Greer:
I also tell prospects sometimes that people will approach me and they’ll say I’m looking at three or four different coaches, and I say fantastic. I say, let’s do a coaching session together. I’ll even say at the end, I think we can work together, and I want you to have who you feel is the very best coach for you. And if that’s me, fantastic. If that’s someone else, fantastic. I’m not here and I’m not desperate to get clients. I want to have the right clients and I want for sure to make sure that every prospective client gets looked after well, which means they pick the coach that they feel they have the most resonance and trust and relatability to. I encourage people, hey, go try a couple different coaches and then pick the one that you really feel works best for you. That’s what I want for you.
Clayton M. Coke:
And that is what people actually appreciate very much. That’s what people appreciate. I wanted to ask one more question before we flipped over to another section. And that question is, what is the most common situations you encounter as a coach, just one or two?
David J. Greer:
I would say the most common situation is some form of self-belief that is putting up blinders for you or holding you back or creating fear probably at an unconscious or at least a low conscious level.
Clayton M. Coke:
That’s great. That’s really important because I think for me, I want to be able to share that with our audience so that they can understand that these are the things that they need to then recognize and maybe hopefully then seek out a coach such as yourself in order to make that happen.
David J. Greer:
It’s that and recognizing progress. I was coaching a client this week. I’ve been coaching them in a certain direction to try certain tools, and this individual doesn’t totally believe that the tools are going to help. He made a decision to reach out and try the tools even though he didn’t totally believe in them, and they worked. Now, he only did it a tiny, tiny little bit, and he wanted to skip over that as a win. I wouldn’t let him do that because that behavior change is so huge for him that I circled back to it a couple times to just really acknowledge this individual is on a path that he sees as say a mile long, and yet he’s only taken the first two steps, but he’s taken the first two steps on a path that he’s never ever even considered before.
Clayton M. Coke:
Exactly.
David J. Greer:
It’s actually a massive change. The next hundred are probably going to be 10 times easier. And It’s just really helping the individual to see, oh, I’m actually considering something new. I’m actually considering going down a different path, and I actually did make some progress down it because it’s so easy to skip over that early success, especially when you’re trying the new tools, and you know, probably have overly high expectations of how much they’ll help you initially because the benefit usually comes with repeated the use. You always get benefit right away. So anyways, it’s another area where I really do a lot of reinforcement and really reflect back to the individual who I’m coaching, what they’ve actually done, maybe in a way that they’re not able to see for themselves.
Clayton M. Coke:
Now, we are going to move swiftly onto the section that we called, “What are you like?” Which is our way of finding a bit more about you as an individual and as a person. And we are going to start off with your favorite book. I don’t know if you remember, but you’ve chosen anything by Dick Francis.
David J. Greer:
Yes. And considering I’m in UK. When I say that in Canada and the US I often get blank stares, especially since Dick Francis passed away a number of years ago. But hopefully for the UK audience they recognize, I mean, he was the jockey in the fifties and then wrote a book a year for 30-35 years. I think I’ve read every one.
Clayton M. Coke:
He had an incredible career as a writer, an incredible. When I was growing up, every year you saw a Dick Francis book. He just was churning these books out. He was almost like the Stephen King of the whole space thriller.
David J. Greer:
I always loved he only has two or three characters he really develops. He always has really interesting plot lines and sometimes pretty suspenseful, and they’re not too long. I’ve lost a lot of sleep reading Dick Francis, let’s just put it that way. I still have them on my bookshelf. I’ve cleaned up my bookshelves two or three times, but I still have all my Dick Francis. And at least once or twice a year I go back and pull one, and I look at it. If I read the back and I can’t remember the plot line or just not ringing a bell, I reread it, and I enjoy it like a second or third time as much as I think I did the first.
Clayton M. Coke:
Some of the younger people might not know who Dick Francis is but the people who are slightly older, that’s just myself, we know who Dick Francis is, so that’s an excellent choice. You’ve also got something that’s important to you, which is the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous.
David J. Greer:
Yes.
Clayton M. Coke:
That doesn’t have an author, but I think anybody who wants to find that when they look at the show notes will be able to see that. So obviously your sobriety is incredibly important to you.
David J. Greer:
Yes.
Clayton M. Coke:
And obviously this is great significance to you too.
David J. Greer:
Absolutely, and has been an incredible important part of my sobriety and my journey in sobriety.
Clayton M. Coke:
Thank you. So now we’re going to move on to your business book because you’ve got Scaling Up 2.0 by Verne Harness and Your Oxygen Mask First by Kevin N. Lawrence. And you’ve mentioned these two names earlier on, so they do have significance to you.
David J. Greer:
I have. They do indeed. Verne’s book is the template for how to use his one page strategic plan. Verne invented, I mean, he took a lot of ideas from other people and I think have combined them in a way and used some of his own ideas clearly. But business plans that are a hundred pages long ago in a binder and sit in a shelf are useless. Verne’s basic premise is if you can get it all into one page, and I’ll let you know, you can’t print it like a four letter size, you got to print it on a big piece of paper, It’s a big page. But if you can get it all laid out and that’s your core values, your purpose, how you live, your core values and purpose, your brand promised to your clients, your three to five year plan, your one year plan, your quarterly plan, when you can get all that down on a single sheet of paper, it really helps to get alignment, especially among the senior leadership teams.
And there’s a lot of other tools in scaling up. And then Kevin, a few years ago, so Kevin was the coach I worked with for nine years and the guy who helped me to get sober. Your Oxygen Mask First is his 25 years of experience with entrepreneurs. And he interviewed, I forget how many entrepreneurs, and Kevin’s worked with owner founders with five million a year businesses to entrepreneurs in the Middle East who were doing multi-billions of dollars a year. And he pulled out the commonalities. As the title suggests, the plane’s going down. Before you help anyone else, you’ve got to help yourself. And that’s one of the most common issues I like. As entrepreneurs, we’re super passionate. I find entrepreneurs put tons of energy into their business, often tons of energy into their relationship, their marriage, their children, and they often squeeze themselves out in the middle. They don’t do enough to look after themselves. And because of that, they end up giving too much on both sides and squeezing themselves out in the middle. And so that’s the core premise of Kevin’s book.
Clayton M. Coke:
Excellent. Thank you very much for that. So you’ve got some favorite records here, which I approve of. These are two Canadian artists.
David J. Greer:
They are.
Clayton M. Coke:
Diana Krall, The Look of Love. Love this, love it, love it.
David J. Greer:
I’ll add to that. Yesterday I was putting up the Christmas lights in our house, and I had my phone and my earphones on and I was listening to Diana Krall’s Christmas album, which at Christmastime trumps Look of Love. I love her Jingle Bells. It’s just an amazing arrangement. But, yeah, I really, really enjoy Diana Krall.
Clayton M. Coke:
She is an amazing singer, amazing pianist, just great. Just sheer, sheer class. Everything that she does is absolutely brilliant. She’s for the trivia fans married to Elvis Costello. So you’ve got two titans of music in one home.
David J. Greer:
And they have two sons. I’ve heard Diana Krall on stage when I’ve gone to her concert talk about the three boys she has to look after, which I find quite amusing and could relate to.
Clayton M. Coke:
I could well imagine. I can well imagine. So we’ve got Look of Love by Diana Krall, but we’ve also got the Canadiana Suite by Oscar Peterson, jazz pianist.
David J. Greer:
Jazz pianist extraordinaire. My parents listened to Oscar Peterson, I have probably had his songs in my unconscious brain as well as my conscious brain from probably when I was really, really little. It’s really hard to pick a recording from Oscar. I picked Canadiana Suite because he didn’t write a lot of music. Canadiana Suite is all Oscar Peterson written and is a tribute to Canada. It works its way east to west. I’m also a lapsed pianist. I haven’t played a lot in the last few years. I’ve definitely played Place St. Henri. There’s another one that I know quite well, but I just can’t remember the name of. And then a single song I still think, and I still listen to Hymm to Freedom a lot, although I really love Oliver Jones, who’s another Canadian pianist from Montreal.
I actually like the way he arranged and plays Hymm to Freedom the most. He plays it as a gospel number, and it’s deeply moving to me. And for those that don’t know Hymm to Freedom was a song that Oscar Peterson wrote as a tribute to Nelson Mandela when he was in jail and looked like he would never see the light of day.
Clayton M. Coke:
Because my relationship with Oscar Peterson goes back many years when I was a kid. This is in the UK in the seventies. In the UK in the seventies we had three TV stations, that was it. So we were pretty short on programming, not like nowadays, but, however, what happened was we used to import programs from Canadian television, and we imported Paint Along with Nancy by Nancy Kominsky, the Galloping Gaugin.
David J. Greer:
I remember the Galloping Gormet.
Clayton M. Coke:
And we alI imported programs with Oscar Peterson playing jazz piano.
David J. Greer:
Nice.
Clayton M. Coke:
I became obsessed with those three programs. But alI then got into music and obviously have always admired Oscar Peterson. My piano played isn’t as good as that. It’s what I aspire to. And so as soon as you mentioned, it brought those two things together, and so hence that we were seeing all these Canadian programs because as we haven’t really touched on the relationship between Canada and the UK is still a strong one.
David J. Greer:
It is very much.
Clayton M. Coke:
Also, we’re going to move on to your film, TV and box set. You’ve chosen James Bond.
David J. Greer:
Yeah. I’m kind of a sucker for the action hero kind of genre.
Clayton M. Coke:
So who would you say is your favorite Bond?
David J. Greer:
Probably Daniel Craig. I mean, he has such an edginess to his portrayal of the character. Each person who played James Bond brings their own take if you like. I was so enthralled. I think I was only in grade three or four, and I talked my dad into taking me to Thunderball, which would’ve been today like PG.
Clayton M. Coke:
Yes.
David J. Greer:
Decades later when I saw it again, it’s like I remembered some of those scenes. It was really formative. I remember going to Mary Poppins, and I remember going to Thunderball.
Clayton M. Coke:
That’s a combination.
David J. Greer:
That’s quite a combination. Can we say polar opposites?
Clayton M. Coke:
Indeed, indeed. So you’ve got your last choice here, which is the Star Wars, the original trilogy.
David J. Greer:
Partly it was when I had gone back to university because I’d taken a 18 month break while and I left home in Edmonton where I grew up and came to Vancouver. It was that fall that I asked my wife out on our first date, which is 45 years ago, and we just celebrated our 40th anniversary earlier this year.
Clayton M. Coke:
Congratulations.
David J. Greer:
Yeah, it’s 45 years ago this week I asked Karalee out on our first state after a chemistry lab at the University of British Columbia. And I remember standing in line with Karalee at the Stanley Theater here in Vancouver to go to the original Star Wars. We were both big science fiction readers, and we were part of the BC Science Fiction Club at that time. Also, a lot of just really fond memories of the start of that relationship of us going out, university, our connection to science fiction and the science fiction club. And they just were great movies, and they’re other action adventure movies.
Clayton M. Coke:
Excellent. Well, we’re coming to the end of our conversation here on the Cashflow Show, David. So what are your plans for the business going forward?
David J. Greer:
My plans are to continue to help entrepreneurs. I turned 65 this year, and I made a conscious choice that I’m going to do this for another five years unless there’s some big issue with my health, which there is nothing that I’m aware of. This work is too important to me, and I want to continue it. My primary mission to be on podcasts and networking and some of the writing that I’m doing is to reduce astigmatism around alcoholism especially for entrepreneurs and offer hope that you don’t have to still suffer, there is a solution. That’s my primary mission. Then I have quite strong boundaries on how much I’m willing to work and how much time off that I’m going to take a year, and so that produces parameters to how many clients I can take. I could maybe take one more facilitation client, and I have capacity at the moment for two, maybe three more one-on-one clients.
I haven’t quite got to maximum capacity, and I haven’t quite figured out what I’ll do when I get there. But as I mentioned earlier in our conversation, I focus on the next right step, which is to get the next one or two clients.
Clayton M. Coke:
Fantastic. In light of all of that, if people have heard you and listen to a lot of the wisdom that you’ve shared, which has been fantastic, may I be so bold as to say, where can people find you on the internet, on socials, et cetera, et cetera?
David J. Greer:
The easiest is to find my website. Often you just need to type my name, David Greer Coach into a search engine and you’ll find me. But you can also just visit my website, which is coachdjgreer.com. It’s coach D as in David, J as in James, greer.com, so coachdjgreer.com. My phone number’s on the homepage there, links to all my socials. I think my email is on the homepage or if not, there’s a contact form you can fill out to reach out to me. So that’s probably the easiest way to do it. And if you are in the UK, I’m based in Vancouver, Canada, which is eight time zones behind you. If you send me a message first thing in the morning, it might be eight hours until I respond.
Clayton M. Coke:
That’s always good to let people know. Always good to let people know. All of those will be in the show notes so people will be able to access them from their podcast players when they’re listening.
David J. Greer:
Thank you.
Clayton M. Coke:
David, it’s been absolutely fantastic having you on. I’ve really enjoyed this conversation. I’ve learned a lot. I just wanted to say thank you for taking the time to share your thoughts and your feelings and being so open and vulnerable about your life and what you’ve achieved so far and what you are still looking to achieve in the future.
David J. Greer:
Thank you, Clayton. I really appreciated being here today, and thank you for all that you do for entrepreneurs and businesses.
Clayton M. Coke:
You’re most welcome. I hope that my why is to make sure that all entrepreneurs can have maybe the possibility of some sort of platform to share what they do. You don’t have to be the most popular or the most famous, you can just be somebody who does a great job and provides great services for good people.
David J. Greer:
Well said. Very well said.
Clayton M. Coke:
Thank you very much, David. Have a wonderful day.
David J. Greer:
You too. Thanks again.
Clayton M. Coke:
You’re most welcome. We’ve come to the end of the Cashflow Show for today, but I would like to say thank you to our guests for taking the time to share their knowledge, wisdom, and insight. If you loved what you’ve heard on this week’s episode, please head over to Apple Podcast or Spotify podcast and leave a five star review and feedback as it really does help. Whilst you’re there, listen to some of our other episodes which you are bound to enjoy. We want to make this the go-to podcast for entrepreneurs wherever they are in the world, and spreading the world really is the best way to grow our show and our community to achieve greater things. Be sure to join us next time for real people, real business, real talk.
