Shana Epps started the Controlled Chaos Podcast to help people in recovery to live their best life. It was great to share my personal journey of coming to terms with my alcoholism and seeking help. We also talked about the challenges faced by entrepreneurs who are in recovery, such as navigating social events and dealing with drinking cultures in the business world. As an entrepreneur and coach, Shana was curious about how fast entrepreneurs should expect revenue and how do you know when to give up. Shana and I remind anyone suffering from alcoholism or addiction that there is always hope. Find others who can help you on your path of recovery. Give the podcast a listen.
Audio
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/6WNrgPIDJmc2bba4tpDPS5
Transcript
Shana (00:01):
Welcome to Controlled Chaos. I’m your host Shana, and we have David here with us. Can you go ahead and tell us a little bit about yourself?
David (00:11):
Sure. I’m Coach David J. Greer and I’m a professional business coach. I’m a father, grandfather sailor, adventurer, and most importantly for our time together today, I’m an alcoholic in recovery.
Shana (00:31):
I love that. Are you on your boat now? I was going to ask you that earlier.
David (00:36):
Yes, I am out on my boat.
Shana (00:40):
I love that I can see all that behind you. That’s really cool. Alright, so you’ve been in recovery for how long?
David (00:48):
Earlier this year I celebrated 15 years of continuous sobriety.
Shana (00:53):
Oh my goodness. And what kind of led you, can you just tell us a little bit about yourself and what kind of got you there?
David (01:02):
Sure. I guess the question is how far back and how much does my story do you want me to tell? Lemme talk a little bit about coming into sobriety and the time leading up to that. I’d been a daily drinker for at least 20 years and was in absolute complete denial about my alcoholism and with a crazy alcoholic brain. Like Mondays, I would go to the local liquor store to get supplies, but Wednesday I would go to a different liquor store because if I went to the same one, maybe they’d think that I drank too much. And then Fridays, I go to a different liquor store. I’m having these behaviors where people might think something about my drinking, but at no point am I willing to turn that around and actually look at my drinking and say, well, do you think you’re drinking too much?
(02:01):
That’s how for me, my alcoholic brain just really wants me to keep drinking. I’d had this very long time of daily drinking and then a few things happened. So after 20 years with the business, after 20 years with the business that I joined when I was still in university, I ended up with my former partner buying me out and my wife and I did something completely different. We commissioned a sailboat in the south of France and we took our three kids and we homeschooled them for two years while sailing more than 5,000 miles in the Mediterranean. And the Mediterranean is a fantastic place to be an alcoholic. Wine is half the cost is in Canada, beer is only like three quarters in every place you pull into, there’s a restaurant right next to the boat serving alcohol and food, but who cares about the food?
And when I came back, I did a whole series of different things and then in 2007 I went to a training session where I was taking a young CEO that I was mentoring to learn more about this program framework. And in the back were two coaches, two professional business coaches, and I talked to both of them and one of them made me more uncomfortable than I had been in quite a few years. I had tears in this corner of my eyes and he made me realize how unfulfilled I was professionally. And Coach Kevin gave me his business card and it sat next to my telephone and probably once a week I picked it up and I thought about calling him. And that point the phone felt like it weighed 10,000 pounds and I wasn’t ready to take that step.
(04:03):
And then three weeks later he called me and said, “Hey, do you remember me?” And I said, yes. Where my brain’s going? I haven’t really thought about much else for the last three weeks. Anyways, I ended up hiring him and on my 50th birthday on August 9th, 2007, we did our first coaching session and I worked with Kevin for nine years in total. But for 18 months we worked together and reestablished my career and we cleared all the clutter off the table until January 26th, 2009. There was only one thing left on the table, which was the elephant in the room. And I drank my last beer about 10 o’clock at night. And the way I worked with Kevin was the night before a coaching call or the day before a coaching call, I’d sent him an email with the things that were working well and the topic for our call, and I sent him an email saying the topic for our call tomorrow is my drinking.
(05:05):
And I pressed send. And that was the moment because I had built enough trust with Kevin that I knew he was never going to let me off the hook once I talked to him about it. And the next day, Tuesday, January 27th, 2009, I had a coaching call. I told Kevin I had a drinking problem and I wasn’t ready to call myself an alcoholic or anything deeper. But anyways, Kevin asked me a few questions about how much I drank and so on. And then he coached me to go to 12 step recovery and that was a Tuesday afternoon. And I committed to him that I would go to a meeting by that Friday. So being the overachiever that I am that afternoon, I knew I had an event downtown that afternoon that went to eight o’clock. It was a networking technology event in Vancouver. And I looked online and lo and behold, there would be a 12 step meeting, a quarter of a block off of the main road. I’d be driving on my way home at eight 30. And I went to that meeting, it was a big meeting, there was about 80 people there, and I hid in the back. At the start, two young women came out and really welcomed me. I still remember them doing that. And I sat on the edge of one row, but towards the middle, not in the back. I at least got a little bit in the middle.
(06:41):
And three quarters of the way through the meeting at that point, at that meeting, they said, is there anyone new to the program who’d like to stand up and introduce themselves? And the chairperson waited and waited and I was sitting on my hands. And finally at the last second I stood up and said, I’m David, I’m an alcoholic. I think that was really, that group of events, which was all over about a 24 hour period was really the start of my journey of coming out of denial. I got to a point where I was sick and tired of being sick and tired. I hadn’t suffered a lot of external consequences. In fact, if you looked at my outside in my life then, and you looked at my outside in my life now they would look quite similar. But the person inside the David on the inside is a completely different person from the one that stood up in that meeting 15 years ago. And about two weeks later, I made a home group, which in 12 steps and doing service positions for, and I was there last Tuesday. That is still my home group 15 years and four and some odd months later.
Shana (08:01):
So when you started your journey with recovery, had your wife or the people in your life mentioned it at all? I know you said you didn’t have a lot of external showing.
David (08:15):
I’m an example of a really high performing alcoholic and my kind of perfectionist control parts of my personality would consider it a failure if I drank so much that I passed out or I slurred or that I stumbled. I’d get to a certain point of inebriation and then kind of maintain that through the whole evening. And so no, I didn’t, most people when I came out as an alcoholic were very, very surprised.
Shana (08:56):
So even the people who were close to you?
David (08:58):
Including the people closest to me.
Shana (09:00):
Wow.
David (09:02):
Okay. Now in my spouse’s case, there also was some underlying, she still doesn’t admit I’m an alcoholic today. We’ve come to a point with marriage counseling and work together where she agrees that I believe I’m an alcoholic and that I need to do what I feel is right for me as a recovering alcoholic. But for my spouse, I’m not a truck driver. I’m not a logger. I didn’t go to bars and get in fights and I could hold my liquor.
Shana (09:38):
So you didn’t have the usual signs like being out all the time, right?
David (09:41):
Yeah. So for her, those were her definitions. And also when she was a very young, when she was a teenager, she promised herself she’d never marry an alcoholic and then she’s never figured out how to square that promise to herself and who she ended up with.
Shana (10:02):
Understandable. I think we all have those boundaries that we’re not wanting to cross. Right.
David (10:10):
And I think it’s important for your listeners to understand that the loggers, truck driver, the people that go to bars and get in fights or the stereotypical trench coat and brown paper bag drinking from those are maybe 1% or half of 1%. It’s much more likely an alcoholic looks like me.
Shana (10:31):
And I have been learning a lot recently, even myself, about how different, because I always worked in recovery. So when I’ve seen people, people were bad like me. And in this day and age, I’m working from home and I do a lot on Instagram and I see so many women and men that were functioning alcoholics. And it is a real thing. And I think it’s important that people do see that it comes in so many different packages. You don’t have to be this certain way to stop drinking or to feel like, hey, maybe it’s gone a little bit too far.
David (11:10):
And again, I was completely beholden to the alcohol every day. I spent a lot of my time figuring out how to get booze into the house and how to get the empties out. In fact, I like to remind people getting the empties out was a lot harder. They make a lot more noise when they’re e empty and when the wine bottles clink together, I’m a master at hiding it. I can go back. Why do I know that it’s been 20 years that I being a daily drinker is because I am sure it was longer than that. But when my wife got pregnant with our first child, Jocelyn, she committed to not drinking during the pregnancy, and I committed to supporting her by not drinking. And that lasted one day. And you know what? I still don’t know how I squared that with Karalee. Somehow I made it. Okay. I know that by then fully I had been pickled. We say a cucumber can be a cucumber, but once it’s a pickle, it can never go back to being a cucumber. And I think by that point, I could never go back to being a regular drinker.
Shana (12:36):
So you said there’s been a lot of changes in the inside. Can you tell us what you mean by that? What do you feel has changed in your life in recovery?
David (12:48):
When I came into recovery, or maybe I didn’t do it right away, but I did at some point commit to being fully committed to my personal growth and trying to do something every year for my personal growth. So for example, I’ve done the 12 steps, the granddaddy program way at least seven or eight times. And I always do it in a small working group with other men and with a person who’s facilitating it. I’m also part of another 12 step program, which is the Adult Children of Alcoholics (ACA). And I’ve done the steps that way. I’ve done five years of therapy work by coming into the program, triggered a bunch of things between my spouse and I. We ended up doing eight years of relationship counseling with four different counselors.
(13:48):
What does all the self-examination and personal growth get me? It gets me a lot more peace. It gets me a lot deeper understanding of who I am and especially where I came from and the behaviors that I have. In 12 step parlance, we talk about character defects. That’s behaviors that we have that are not necessarily so positive. And my belief is they’re always going to be there with me. I’m always to some extent going to be a perfectionist, but through all of this work, I’ve been able to file off the sharpest edges of my perfectionism, so I don’t cut me quite so deep or others. And I am much more likely to be aware of when I’m in my perfectionist defect. And then of course I understand more really that is from something we call false pride, which is either I’m 10 times better than you or 10 times worse than you.
Shana (14:56):
Right?
David (14:58):
And the truth is now I believe that. the biggest shift is all of my belief systems, understanding where my belief systems are and trying to do some things to shift ’em. Like I believe that every human being in any given moment is doing the best that they can. And no human being is better or worse than anyone else. Their behaviors may be very destructive and maybe something that we don’t agree with. And there’s always a reason why they do what they do and we may never understand it. And we have choices we can choose not to associate with those people. And my belief also, I used to be very controlling, which as an entrepreneur, as a business owner, this is a good thing. I can get a lot of stuff done. I can direct a lot of people, I can lead people, get teams moving in a lot of direction. But that also implies a large level of control, which is I think false. I think we have a lot less control. I think we can motivate people, I think can move people to common goals. But the actual control piece I think is much less than we have. And I’ve come to a point where I believe maybe I control 1% of what’s around me. If that, and really all I have control over are two things, which is my response to some event or thing that happens hopefully instead of a reaction and the next right step I want to take,
Shana (16:48):
I love that.
David (16:48):
In the next moment, not in 10 hours, not tomorrow, not in two weeks. I do have goals and I have visions, and I am a coach, so I work to help people to have something that they’re aiming for and a direction they’re want to go to. But again, a lot of my work as a coach is really what’s the next thing you’re going to do to move where it is that you want to go? Because if you don’t take action, nothing ever happens, whether that’s in business or in life, we actually have to take concrete actions to create change or create the life that we want. thinking about it, journaling about it, visioning about it, they’re all good things. They help set us up, but at the end, we’ll never get any of those things unless we actually take an action that moves us there.
Shana (17:39):
You got to do it. So something that you said reminded me of something, and it was that you believe that all people are just doing the best they can. And ever since our first chat, something that’s kind of stuck with me is you had talked about your mother and your experience with her as I believe an alcoholic. And it was something that really, really touched me in the way that you had kind of forgiven her and how things went. Can you kind of tell our audience about that experience and how it was from the other side?
David (18:21):
Sure. I’ll have to tell a longer story, right? I have two mothers, so I got to talk about each of them, and so your listeners won’t know, but I was adopted at birth, so I was the result of a teenage pregnancy and I was immediately relinquished at birth and adopted into a very nice upper middle class family in Edmonton, which is my family. That is my mom. My mom is 96, she’s still alive. I’m hoping to get to see her late this month or early next month. I haven’t been up to Edmonton since September. I talked to her on a regular basis, but I try and get to see her at least once every six months because even at 96, who knows, she might last to 106, but I not count.
Shana (19:17):
How cool is that, that your parent is almost a hundred years old? Not a lot of people can say that. That’s really awesome.
David (19:25):
It is really amazing. But when I turned 60, 60 years of life and nine years of recovery, I like to say I decided. For many, many decades, I was totally against looking into my birth families. And part of this personal growth that you asked me about, I came, so codependency is one of my other isms. I’ve done a lot of work on that. And I finally got to a point where I realized that my mom is an adult and I was not looking into my birth family journey because I was worried that it would hurt her or what her response would be. And I just had to get to a point where I was, okay, whatever her response is, is her response, right?
Shana (20:13):
And I mean, that is a real, I would imagine it’s a real fear, right? Because she’s raised you your whole life and you don’t want to hurt her feelings, but you do want to heal a portion of you, right?
David (20:26):
Yes. I’m involved with the support group for birth mothers and adoptees, or birth parents I should say, although mostly it’s birth moms. And through that I’ve learned this. Probably the single biggest reason adoptees don’t go find their birth families is because of some kind of fear about hurting their adoptive parents. It is a very common fear. And also it’s layered on other stories. I was the chosen one, which in some ways I was. And so I don’t want to upset the apple cart when I’m the chosen one. It’s a lot of stuff to work through. But at the end of the day, I went on this journey. I asked for my file from Alberta Adoption Registration Services, and I got my file. And even though my birth mother had put a veto on sharing her information, I was eventually able to figure out who my birth mother was.
(21:27):
And in February of 2018, my birth mother was the first of the constellation of birth family people that I reached out to. And I eventually got her on the telephone and we had a very short conversation. The conversation was, I told her why I was calling, and then she said, “I have no idea what you’re talking about.” And then I explained, I got my file from Alberta Adoption Registry and a couple other things, and she said, “Those damn people, they never should have shared anything.” Her first response was denial. Her second response was blame about the thing that she just told me she knew nothing about. And then she said,” I want nothing to do with you.” And yeah, it’s a rejection, which others later reminded me that my birth mother doesn’t even know who I am from a hole in the wall. So how can she reject you? She doesn’t even know who you are. She’s rejecting, which is all true, but is not emotionally how I initially it didn’t
Shana (22:31):
Feel any better at the time.
David (22:32):
Yeah, at the time. But it was a beautiful February day. I went for a walk. I called my coach, I called my sponsor, I interacted with nature, which is how I stay in touch with something bigger than me. An hour and a half later, my wife called me and she said, are you ready? Do you want me to come join you? And I said, well, maybe in a half an hour. I said, meet me at the Sylvia Hotel, which is a beautiful hotel on the beach in Vancouver. And by then I was ready to be with someone else and talk to her about it. And we sat down and she had a glass of wine and I had a cup of tea and we talked through it. that’s all in a few hours. If I hadn’t had nine years of recovery and all this personal work, there’s no way I could have worked through that in that kind of time.
(23:25):
And I did tell my birth mother I was going to reach out to, she ended up marrying someone else and having three children. And I told her that I was going to reach out to her eldest from that family, and she said she didn’t want me to. And I said, yeah, I understand, but I’m going to let you know if you think you’re keeping the secret, it’s not going to be a secret anymore. And my belief is birth mothers and birth fathers don’t actually have that, right? We as adults have to own our sexual behavior and even more so when there’s a baby involved. That’s my take on it.
(24:05):
And I did reach out to Wendy and I did form a relationship with her and my other sister and my aunt and uncle. And then eventually I reached out to my birth father and I’ve got to know him, and I’ve got to know my three paternal brothers all of are significantly bigger than me. And I’m a big dude. I’m 6’ 2”, 245 pounds. And these guys, they’re significantly bigger and I know where it comes from. But the things I’ve learned on my maternal side is my birth mother was an alcoholic. And my brother Gary, I never got to meet because in 2015, he died of cirrhosis of the liver as a direct result of his alcoholism.
(24:58):
And it turns out on my paternal side, there is some alcoholism as well. I don’t think my mom and dad who adopted me, I don’t think they were daily drinkers, but I don’t think they were alcoholics. I think that they modeled for me, it was acceptable to drink daily. But it’s like dad would come home from work and he’d pour a scotch and soda for him and a gin and tonic for mom, and they’d have one drink and talk about the day, and they’d have some pretty good parties and we’re definitely binge drinkers. But it wasn’t every weekend. It was few and far between, right? So last year, so I never ended up having any relationship with my birth mother. And there’s some very sweet moments like my uncle who was only seven when I was born, he didn’t actually know his sister was pregnant, didn’t know anything about me.
(25:55):
We become friends and he’s been an incredible advocate for me. So he’s actually the closest person to my birth mother, Terry. And he’d say to me, “David, I keep telling Terry if she just get to know you, she’d really like you.” And the first time he told me that I had tears in my eyes. To have someone who didn’t know me have this story show up and get to know me and then be such an advocate for me is just really special. And last year in April, I got a call from my sister Wendy, saying that my birth mother, Terry had just been admitted to the hospital with a brain tumor and she had a very short time to live. And that was like a Saturday. I talked again to them on Sunday, on Monday. This is in Calgary. I was conceived in Calgary, born in Edmonton.
(26:47):
My mother was sent to a home for unwed moms. And anyways, I flew out the Monday afternoon, Tuesday morning, my uncle called me and said, we’re all in the hospital room with Terry and we all want you to be here. And so I went to the hospital room and my aunt and uncle were there, my two sisters, my nephew, my uncle’s daughter, so that makes her my cousin and her little baby, her third child. And so we were all there. And at that point, my birth mother was unconscious, so she couldn’t object to my presence.
(27:28):
And we all just were visiting and a couple hours later, and the doctors didn’t know whether it was a day a week, could be a month that Terry was going to live. And as it happens, two hours later, she took her last breath and passed away. And we all cried for quite a while. And then I happened to be, we’d all changed around the room and hugged each other. And in the end, I ended up standing next to Terry in the bed next to the bed, and my uncle Jim said, “David, do you want a picture?” And my brain went No f&*#g way.
(28:13):
And then my [internal] loving parent said to me, “David, you’ll never have a picture with your birth mother if you don’t get one right now.” I handed my phone to Uncle Jim and said, yes, and I kneeled down, and he took a picture of the two of us, and maybe not the happiest picture I’ve ever been in, but then it’s not exactly a happy moment. And then I leaned over and kissed her on the cheek and wished her well. And the day after my uncle Jim and my two sisters went to Terry’s place to start cleaning it out. And there was an open bottle of rye in the kitchen, and there was a case 12 in the closet, and I pretty much assumed she was an alcoholic right up until the very, very end.
Shana (29:09):
Hi, my name is Shana and I’m the CEO and founder of Controlled Chaos Consulting. Here at Controlled Chaos Consulting we believe in reframing your thinking without shame. We believe in growing from setbacks and building a life you really enjoy. We will help you to find a sobriety path that works for you because sobriety is different for every single person, and we have an amazing group of women that will support you in your journey. So if you’re ready to get sober, please contact me. You can contact me, my website, www.controlledchaoscoaching.com, or also on Instagram at Control Chaos Coaching. All right, I love you Mocho.
Shana (29:53):
Right?
David (29:54):
Right. And she never got therapy. She never got a program. She carried the toxicity of her resentment over having me for 65 years. I can’t imagine how corrosive that would be. I mean, it’s sad we never had any relationship, but I think it’s even sadder that she never had a chance at what I’ve been able to get, which is some sobriety.
Shana (30:30):
And I think when I heard that story, what stuck out to me was, well, I don’t know. Maybe you were like this before the 12 steps. Maybe you’re just that good of a person. But for me, it really was a testament to what working the steps does for a person, because it really does give you the vision to see things differently through somebody else’s eyes. Like most of us, and maybe even me, and I’ve been through the 12 steps many times would’ve been like F that I’m not going, she didn’t care about me. Why should I care about her? I mean, I can hear the things I would be saying, but going there, being with your family, wishing her well, taking a photo and really realizing that when she had you, it wasn’t the best of circumstances for her, and she really never was able to move on, ever get sober, ever get maybe mentally healthy and just kind of seeing it for what it was and not making it about you is something that most of us struggle with. Even most of us who aren’t alcoholics, right, is like resentment. It’s hard.
David (31:43):
Yes. Yeah, so hard. It’s hard. And remember that there’s five years of building relationships with this family. I’ve really worked hard at building relationships and spending time going to Alberta and being with my sisters and letting them share their stories with me about growing up. And so that there’s, when I first went to the hospital room, it wasn’t for Terry, it was for all the rest of my Ridley family. It was to be there to support them. And that wasn’t hard at all because they have all been really welcoming and accepting other than my birth mother, literally the whole constellation of both families completely accepting of me. I only have this one kind of exception, so that makes it easier. I know others who’ve had much more rejection or denial. And it helped my aunt, who was four years older than my birth mother, when my younger sister, Nancy called her and said, was there a baby? Marvy said, yes, the truth. And later Marvi told my wife and I, we were at where she lives in Alberta, and she took us out to dinner and she told us that. And she said later, “Terry met up with me and Terry was really pissed off at me and I said, Terry, I wasn’t going to lie for you.” Not a bald faced lie to a straightforward question.
(33:28):
So kudos to Aunt Marvey. She didn’t get wrapped up in the whole family drama. And I’m pretty certain from what my sisters have said, grandma Pearl, probably never let my birth mother Terry ever forget her big mistake. She probably never said it explicitly the big secret, but implicitly she probably let her know. And Aunt Marvey, they paid for her to go to university, whereas my birth mother, they paid for her to go to secretarial school like punish, punish, punish for your big mistake. Right?
Shana (34:10):
Okay, so moving on to someone happier, fun stuff. You are a coach and you’re a successful businessman. First of all, you kind of started out with telling us about how things went for you when you got a coach. The first question I want to ask is most people, you kind of already said that you were in a good place. I mean you were sailing around France or something, so you were in a good place when you got your first coach. Most people who are looking in to starting their dream business or starting whatever they want to do in life, they’re probably not in a great financial situation. So how do you suggest people start businesses or maybe get a coach or do that type of thing when they don’t have necessarily the funds to hire someone to explain to them what to do or that type of thing? Where does a person start?
David (35:16):
I think there’s all sorts of places. Most community colleges offer good courses in how to start a business and we’ll walk you through the major aspects of a business so you can at least have awareness of what there is. My wife did that before she opened her physio clinic after graduating from university, and she eventually built that into the largest physio practice in the west side of Vancouver. So we have two entrepreneurs in our family. We’re not busy enough.
(36:03):
There are a lot of entrepreneurs who are willing to mentor younger entrepreneurs. So you have to network and go find these people. You have to make a conscious effort to go do that. And then there are peer support groups where you work with other entrepreneurs. So you’re trying to find some group of entrepreneurs who are at least one step ahead of you, and those groups typically meet once a month for breakfast or dinner, and it takes about a year of doing that really consistently with the same people till you build enough trust till you can really start going deeper. Like most entrepreneurs, like most of us in recovery, are not good about sharing feelings, are not good about sharing the negative things. Part of in business, in business you have to keep this positive front to prospects and to customers and to employees, and I mean you need to keep the belief in the business going.
(37:10):
That’s part of the challenge of being an entrepreneur. It is a very lonely role because there are very few people who, A, understand what you’re going through and B, who can hold space for you to honestly share about the challenges and the difficulties. So you have almost no space to talk about those. Now I think if you get to a point where you’ve got good cashflow and you can afford a professional coach, I do think a professional coach is different than a mentor because when you pay someone else, my experience is you become more accountable. I’ve mentored people and I’ve professionally coached people, and I would just say the relationship is different because mentoring, if you blow a meeting off with someone, a coffee with your mentor, but I mean if you do it with your coach, if you blow off a couple in a row with me, then you’re not my client anymore.
Shana (38:06):
And also that when you invest in something, there is a level of I paid for it so I have to do it. I don’t want to waste my money
David (38:15):
A hundred percent.
Shana (38:17):
I found that with sobriety coaching, even though I have helped a lot of people that didn’t have the money or things like that, and it kind of ends up in that way a lot of times where it would be blown off or they’re not quite ready, but the people that have paid something really do invest a little bit more. I definitely understand that. But just as far as getting, I guess groundwork when you’re not sure where to go and don’t really have the funds, I think that’s really cool that there’s things out there that you can do to get started. But I do agree, and actually the first coaching session I did with somebody, they kind of talked me into, if you have skin in the game, you’re going to get more out of it, but sometimes you just don’t have that
David (39:11):
Agreed, and that’s why I suggested those other, there are other resources you need to go put your head down and go look for them. They’re definitely out there, and it’s also an investment. As I coach and talk to a lot of business owners, you get very caught up in the day-to-day and the next thing and the next thing and the next thing. And there’s a very huge difference, I believe, between working in the business and working on the business. When you work on the business, you step away from the day-to-day, like fires and everything that’s happening, and you think more strategically, where am I trying to take this business? Who’s my market? Who am I trying to serve? Those big picture questions totally get lost when you just get totally wrapped up into the next thing, the next project, the next call, the next fire, the next, and you can end up just walking around in circles and not actually moving your business significantly in any direction. When you do that, I liken it to looking down at the path in front of you and maybe you manage to avoid the next rock on the path, but you don’t even notice that the path, you’ve kind of gone off the path you’re meant to be on, and now you’re in one that’s just going in a circle because you have to actually look up and look around and say, where am I? And was this where I intended to be?
Shana (40:42):
I love that. That’s really good advice because I think as a business owner, you do get caught up in the like, what’s going on right now? And you get wrapped up in that forever and then you’re like, where was I even at? What am I even doing?
David (40:55):
Why did I start? Sometimes when I get a new client, the simplest thing to do is why did you start your business in the first place? Sometimes they’ve got so far away from that they need to remind themselves, oh, I did it to go solve this really big problem and to look after people who are in this pain and have something that really helps them.
Shana (41:22):
What do you think is the most important thing that you can give somebody as a business coach?
David (41:30):
Most important, I think perspective, there’s probably a few things. I don’t know if I can say one. One is perspective. I’m not emotionally involved in it directly. I mean, once I have a client for a long time, I’m emotionally invested, but not to the extent that the individual is. I always have a cleaner perspective. The other thing is I’ve been a consultant and I’ve been a coach as a consultant, I’m hired for my expertise. I’m supposed to be the expert. I’m supposed to have all the answers. I come in, I solve something, I leave.
As a coach, I try and not have any answers. I don’t have answers. All I have is questions, hopefully really good questions. My belief is you have the answers for what you need to do with your business. I just need to help you figure out, ask you the right questions to help you figure that out or ask you great questions that help, this is where my gap is, this is where I need to go take action to fill in the gap.
Shana (42:38):
Right. So as a new business owner, if you were starting out a new business, what do you think is a timeframe where you should be seeing revenue coming in? What is a good, because I know in the beginning you’re going to be working, working maybe spending money, but what should it look like to get return again?
David (43:02):
So part of when I came back from the Mediterranean, I did three years of angel investing where I look at young startups and consider investing in them. I looked at a hundred business plans a year for three years and invested about one each. And I can tell you that time to revenue was days to years, and there’s no direct answer to that. You have to understand your market. You have to understand, here’s the way I liken it, is you have a good business opportunity if I identified a pain that people are in something that’s very painful for them, and you have identified some kind of product or service that will put them out of their pain, and the bigger the pain and the better your pain pill, your product or service is at solving that the more value you create.
(44:05):
I mean, the biggest mistake I see is young entrepreneurs who see something that’s really just a want. It’s not really painful. It’s not something that people really need. It’s just something that they want, and that’s a lot harder, just it’s not that you can’t sell into that, but it’s a lot harder. And the bigger the pain and the better your product or service and the more farther along develop your product or services, the more revenue, the higher the price and the more revenue you can generate. I know of business plans where potential customers have invested a hundred thousand dollars in the product off of the PowerPoint description of what the product’s going to do. It’s not very common, but that’s someone who deeply understands the market, deeply understands the pain point and is building something quite significant. Obviously if you need 10 customers with a hundred grand each, this is a significant product, but you also have to create belief in these potential, these prospects that you are capable of building that product,
Shana (45:16):
Right?
David (45:17):
This most often happens that someone comes out of an industry that has 15, 20 years experience in an industry and understands deeply some aspect of it that’s very painful for everyone in the industry, and they’ve figured out a path to how they’re going to solve this problem.
Shana (45:34):
So you don’t think that there’s a jumping off point for business owners? If you say you’ve been doing something for five years and you’re not seeing it go anywhere, should you just give up or do you think that maybe you should try a different avenue or …?
David (45:51):
Maybe I’d say a different avenue for sure. I mean, a single thing that differentiates successful entrepreneurs and entrepreneurs in general is tenacity. It’s that not giving up. there’s a very fine line between you’re bashing your head against a brick wall and you really should just stop versus you’re just around the corner from succeeding. There is no simple answer to that. Again, I ask a lot of questions around that. I would challenge anyone who’s spent five years and is not making good coin, why keep doing this? What motivates you to keep doing it if all your employees are making good money and you aren’t, what’s going on? And that’s very common because people are somewhat altruistic or they have a bigger vision, they’re trying to create something. Or I know a friend of mine who is committed to only hiring female employees and their clients are both men and women, but she is part of her thing is to support women,
Shana (47:01):
Right?
David (47:03):
And to the point where she went for a long time without really taking a proper salary herself, she was being so supportive of everyone else. That’s a choice you can make. That is not a right or a wrong. I just would challenge you, is that the choice you want to keep making? And I had this conversation recently just this last week with two young entrepreneurs I’m working with. They were having trouble explaining to, they had been opening to their employees about the profit that they make, and they were feeling bad about sharing what at the end of the day they make as the owners. And I said, you should never have shame about making money as an entrepreneur. I really encourage you to work through that because you take all the risk. See, the entrepreneur takes the risk, and so they take the risk. They take so many risks, most risks that many people never understand what they’re taking on. I mean, most employees never understand the risk that the owners are taking, and the owner should be compensated for that, and they’re compensated for that by the profit that they get in the company.
Shana (48:27):
Do you really think that an owner has to reveal or tell what their salary is in the company? Is that part?
David (48:36):
No, no. Just these particular partners decided that as part of how they wanted to grow as entrepreneurs and how they wanted to grow the business, there’s a certain, most employees think you make two to 10 times more than you do,
Shana (48:53):
Right? Yeah. I mean, even in you feel that way, your supervisors like Rich,
David (49:03):
And there’s a movement around open books where entrepreneurs are completely open about all the financials of the company, and that has pluses and minuses too. No, this was a case where the entrepreneurs felt like a lot of their staff felt they just wanted to be more open with their staff, and they also wanted their staff to know that they’re not keeping, because the last couple of years they’ve been getting all staff to be more focused on the top line revenue, helping to increase the top line revenue. A lot of employees were assuming, well, if you have that much at the top line, but
Shana (49:42):
How much is not going to them?
David (49:45):
They did a simple model where they put a hundred pennies on a PowerPoint and then they broke down this many pennies, goes to this many pennies goes to that, this many pennies. There’s only five left.
Shana (49:59):
Right? So you talked about tenacity, and I think that’s a good point because I feel like maybe it’s just me who thinks this, but I feel like addicts and alcoholics really do have that when they get sober, they have that survivor go getter mentality. We worked really hard at drinking and hiding and doing all this stuff. So when we find our passion and we’re sober, I really do feel like have that tenacity. We can really do some amazing things. And I think I’ve seen that you really specialize in working with addicts and alcoholics. Is that true?
David (50:38):
That’s true.
Shana (50:40):
And why did you choose that? Is that the reason,
David (50:45):
Not that one in particular? I think your assessment is correct. Also, I think most alcoholics are smart.
(50:53):
So we’re smart driven people, and part of the way we coped was for some of us, at least me, was drinking because being smart and driven is good, but it also created negative feelings that I didn’t want to feel, right? I’m public about helping people that are alcoholics and addicts and entrepreneurs because I think there’s very few coaches that specialize in that. And I think that there are some things that as entrepreneurs we experience that are just extra challenging. I mean, there are things that are common to recovery, but it’s just, I think we experience it at a different level. So for example, if you’re really successful entrepreneur and you do a lot of charitable giving, then you’ll be at a lot of charity gala events. You’ll be at a lot of networking events, and there’ll be a lot of booze. And again, as entrepreneurs, anytime there’s events around entrepreneurs, somebody wants to sponsor the bar because they want to get access to you.
(52:00):
The bars are always open free. And what do you do in those? So some of the coaching is just always have a drink in your hand, even if it’s water. If someone asks you why you’re not drinking, just say you choose not to drink for your health. You don’t have to a reason. these are all things that are common to recovery, but it’s just when you’re kind of a high powered entrepreneur, these things can come up more often. And then if you’re in high-end kind of products and services that require multiple people in an organization to buy in to buy your product or service, then in the sales process, it’s fairly common as you’re getting down towards closing a deal that the CEO has to fly down to the prospect and be part of presentations. And then there’s usually a big dinner, and there’s usually very heavy drinking. I had a client of mine who is not an alcoholic, and he came back to me and he said, we had a dinner after this big event, which was around closing a sale. And he said, everybody had two drinks before dinner and we had a bottle of wine per person.
(53:18):
And he says, “Is that alcoholic?” And I said, well, I can’t answer whether anyone is an alcoholic. I can say that is alcoholic drinking because that is seven drinks in a row without a break for everyone at the table. But that kind of behavior and drinking is really, really common. And I’ve also coached some people in super big organizations that tend to have very male dominated, potentially heavy drinking cultures, where they’ve been at, again, a major event celebrating kind of a major sale, and they’re sitting across from their boss’s boss of a billion dollar company, and the boss’s boss keeps trying to fill their wine gloss, even though they’ve said over and over that they don’t want to drink wine that night.
Shana (54:16):
I didn’t know it was that. I do know that drinking is very accepted and almost glamorized a lot of places, so it doesn’t surprise me, but I didn’t realize it was so intertwined. that’s kind of, Yeah.
David (54:30):
Anyways, I’ve been an entrepreneur, and then if you were an alcoholic, you might’ve built a drinking culture at your company and now you’re sober. So now what do you do? So it’s just really being able to talk to someone, one-on-one about any of these issues. And then for those, I have a few clients who are also in 12 step recovery. So sometimes it’s just very helpful to say we’re working on a business problem. But I mean, it’s like I can just say, what would your higher power say you should do about this? Right? Or doesn’t that sound like step three? Or doesn’t that sound like step this? And they get it right away on the problem, and as soon as I bring that up, it brings them out and it’s like, oh, right. I can see the bigger picture. I can see where I’m over controlling because we have this shared language and this shared experience of working the steps, I can bring it into the actual coaching practice when appropriate because it’s shared. It’s something that’s shared between us.
Shana (55:47):
Yeah. Okay. Well, our time is kind of winding down a little bit, so I want to ask you, what is something, if anything, that you want to leave the viewers with as far as business and recovery? Anything?
David (56:05):
Sure. Well, one of my big missions in coming on podcasts like this, and I think the work you do, I listened to some of your other podcasts before we got together this morning, is really reducing the stigma of alcoholism. It’s a mental health disease. No amount of pulling yourself up by the bootstraps, it’s going to cure your alcoholism. I just would like to remind your listeners of that. The two big things that I try and always leave, and I heard it from some of your other guests, but nonetheless, most important is there’s always hope no matter where you are on your journey, whether you’re sober or not, whether you’re still addicted or clean, there is hope.
(56:52):
And the other thing I want to leave is you can’t do this alone. The mind that gets you to be an alcoholic or addict is not the mind that can free you from it. And you need other people’s help, whether it’s a coach like you, whether it’s a 12 step program, whether it’s treatment, whether it’s, there’s lots of online stuff. Again, 12 Step has been my solutions worked really well for me, but I don’t pretend it’s the only one, but find other people who can help you on your journey, because I don’t think we can get clean and sober alone.
Shana (57:33):
Yeah, definitely agree with that. And on that note, we are going to be holding a sobriety success seminar on May 26th. So if you’ve been trying to get sober, you want to try it for a while. If you’re trying to get sober for good, it doesn’t matter. But get ahold of me so we can sign you up. It is free May 26th. And can you tell our viewers also where they can find you if they want business coaching, if they just want to follow you, how can they get ahold of you?
David (58:04):
Sure. The easiest way is through my website, which is coachdjgreer.com. That’s coach D as in David, J as in james greer.com. Top of every webpage on the left is my email and my phone number and on the right of the top of every page are all my social media accounts. You can follow me in any of those that work for you, and that’s definitely the easiest way to get ahold of me.
Shana (58:33):
All right. Well, I thank you so much for coming on today and talking to us. It’s been fun.
