Rob Anspach interviews Coach David Greer on getting unstuck and the culture of driving high performance entrepreneurs.

Here’s part 2 of the transcript. (You can read part 1 here) 

Rob Anspach:
I had a lot of jobs.

Coach David J. Greer:
Yeah. Exactly. But here’s the deal. So for that, you want to go back and look for the behaviors that were consistent through all of those jobs. If you ask open-ended questions about those experiences for people, you will discover that. And then in the last couple jobs that they’ve had, ask for their references and ask the interviewee, what will your boss say about you? And then the third part is you have to call those people and actually ask them.

Rob Anspach:
Right. I know for me, it was from 1985 to 1995, I probably had about 20 jobs. You’re like 20 jobs in 10 years? Yeah. But in 1995, when I became an entrepreneur, I started my first business. I took a lot of the experiences I had into this business. I still didn’t know marketing. I had to study marketing. I had to do all this stuff. It wasn’t until about the year 2000 that I had enough experience running this business that I could start coaching others and doing stuff. But then it was another 10 years until I started writing books. So, my progression as an entrepreneur is different than somebody else’s. But I used a lot of those experiences to shape who I am. I’m very sarcastic at what I do. I don’t think I’d hire somebody like me because we would be like, I don’t know, instant fire.

Coach David J. Greer:
I don’t think you should hire people like you. I think that’s a real mistake. Again, there’s a difference between the values, cultural values, which to me are behaviors. You’re a hard worker. Do you say what you’re going to do? Are you a person of integrity? I still think there needs to be differences, like you talked about Facebook moving to cultural differences. So you take someone from Germany and someone from India and someone from Pennsylvania, and they’re going to have very different views of the world and things. I think that that’s healthy, especially if you are like Facebook trying to build a global brand. But the underlying, like what’s important to you, do you show up to meetings on time, do you try and add value to the other people in the room? These are all things that are values that are important to me and what I would be hiring people for. And then of course, for entrepreneurs like you and like me, smart entrepreneurs just never hire us. They hire us to help them as a service. They shouldn’t hire us as employees.

Rob Anspach:
No because that doesn’t work either.

Coach David J. Greer:
Right. But most entrepreneurs know that or, well, they only make that mistake once or twice.

Rob Anspach:
No. I had made a mistake a couple years ago and I’m not saying it’s a bad mistake. It was just one of those lateral things that you do. I took on a client that although they paid me well, they treated me like an employee and I wasn’t an employee. I was a contractor just like I am now, but what they really wanted was a yes person. I would question everything that they were doing because to me it was wrong. They would never tell me, they were never clear about their vision. I’m always saying, what about this? What about this? What about… Stop questioning me, Rob. Finally, after two years, they got rid of me and hired in-staff people that were all yes people and then their marketing tanked.

Coach David J. Greer:
Well, there you go. So if I could come back…

Rob Anspach:
Yeah, go ahead.

Coach David J. Greer:
Sorry. I just want to come back to Brad Smart because so I took Brad Smart’s Topgrading course about a dozen years ago. And he was actually the teacher, which that was a privilege, but so his thesis and he’s done a massive amount of research so I have a lot of reason to believe this is true, so three out of four hires don’t last beyond year one. He’s got a lot of analysis in his book and which he presents when he gives a workshop. That’s basically $1 million is what it really costs. And he has reasons why he lays it all out that way. It’s not just for big businesses. So it’s $1 million per mis-hire and three out of four hires are mis-hires.

Coach David J. Greer:
So talk about an area where we really could up our game as entrepreneurs. I think that really is an area. And again, I’d go back to, so the book I’ve really found useful and I’ve recommended several of my clients is Who. It’s just W-H-O by Geoff Smart. I think it’s a very practical lay it out. Here’s specific questions you could ask. They also give a very specific way to do the process of filtering from advertising to the first interview to the second interview. They lay it out really nicely and give their reasoning behind it. So for entrepreneurs, I highly recommend that as a resource. We’re in a time when a lot of people, so if your business has the opportunity to grow right now, it is a great time to hire people because I think a lot of fantastic talent is out there, but you probably need to upgrade your ability to interview and work through a hiring process so that you can actually get those really top performers.

Coach David J. Greer:
Then the final piece is if A’s hire B’s, they hire C’s. And pretty soon all you have is Z’s. I think A’s want to hire double A’s and double A’s want to hire triple A’s. I know as an entrepreneur, it took me a long time to get to that place where I was comfortable hiring people that were smarter, quicker, faster than me. It can feel very threatening, but that’s actually what you want to do because your skill is to bring all those people together. Your skill as an entrepreneur, I believe, is to have the vision of the market, where the market’s going, what the market’s going to need, and then helping people to both invent the products and services to satisfy those pain points and then the operational people to supply it all. And for that, I think you want people that are way better than you.

Rob Anspach:
In my first venture, I didn’t want to hire people that were smarter than me only because I didn’t want to train them on how to do everything and then have them leave and start their own business. Basically I was training them to be my competitor. I didn’t want that, but then I realized that, especially in this business that I’m in, I need to hire people that are smarter than me. Bill Gates. He’s a brilliant guy, but most of the people that work for him are smarter than him and he knows that. Elon Musk, he’s a very bright guy, but he hires people that again, smarter than him because he’s building rockets, building these cars, doing this. I think it’s critical that you hire people that can do things beyond your own ability.

Coach David J. Greer:
And there’s two entrepreneurs with massive visions. Gates in the 80s had the vision of a computer on every desktop. Crisp, clean, and Musk is trying to change the world in two places, space exploration and electric cars. Nothing like being ambitious. But back to talk about visionaries. Both of them are hugely visionary people.

Rob Anspach:
And they’re both billionaires so they can afford to hire people. But the problem is when they first started out, they couldn’t afford anybody. But as they grew, they started to realize they have to hire these smart people. Otherwise, their business wouldn’t go the way they wanted.

Coach David J. Greer:
I know an entrepreneur in Edmonton, the province over from where I live, who’s in the food business. When she was starting out, she knew that she needed a lot deeper retail experience of people in the food distribution chain. So she hired a fifth of people’s brains to start with. She did it very proactively and did it in a way that she hoped as the business grew and she could afford to pay them more and give them more work, they would eventually come into the fold and be part of the senior leadership team. And for a number of those individuals, that’s exactly what happened. That was the way that she got that super smart people, even though she couldn’t afford it at that stage of the business, but she also has just this massive vision of what it is that they’re trying to build.

Coach David J. Greer:
And these people were very attracted to her vision. There are ways of doing it. Again, being an entrepreneur, it is being creative in all parts of your business. I trained as a computer scientist and ran a software business for 20 years. I had to be innovative all the time to survive, but I believe entrepreneurs can be incredibly innovative in all aspects of their business and in ways that how you sell can be very innovative and can be industry-changing, in fact.

Rob Anspach:
So how do people reach out to you? Where do they go?

Coach David J. Greer:
The easiest way is my website, which is coachdjgreer.com. So it’s the initials of my name, David James. And on every page of my website is my phone number and my email address. So, I like to make it easy and I offer any entrepreneur that’s feeling stuck, just doesn’t know what to do next, a free one hour coaching call.

Rob Anspach:
Wow.

Coach David J. Greer:
I promise at the end of that, you will have better direction of where it is that you need to go for yourself and your business. My promise to entrepreneurs, if you spend an hour with me, you’ll have three ideas to accelerate your business in the next 90 days.

Rob Anspach:
Can’t beat that.

Coach David J. Greer:
So, yeah. Please, listeners, take me up on that because I really would love to help.

Rob Anspach:
I think you could. I just looked at your website a little bit ago. Great stuff. And what I’ve learned from you just in the 25 minutes now is just incredible. You have experience, you have the knowledge and you understand that cultural shift that people are going through and who they need to hire and why they need to hire to level up.

Coach David J. Greer:
You got it.

Rob Anspach:
I think every business experiences those plateaus and when you do, contact David and he’s going to be patient with you. He has to be because he spent 25 minutes on this podcast with me. But for all the listeners, seriously, go to David’s website, coachdjgreer.com and follow him on the various social channels, email him, and get to know him because I think it’s going to benefit you and your business. And next time, check us out on the next episode. Hey, adios.