913. His Greatest Talent Is Getting Things Done

David Greer

“I was kind of my own person. My parents would get so frustrated because at three or four years old I would open the door to the basement, go downstairs, climb up on dad’s bench and get a screw driver. Then I would come upstairs and I take off all the face plates on the wall plugs. When I was five, my parents had friends over and they didn’t notice that I had gotten behind the TV, taken off the back of the TV and was pulling out the tubes, which cost them about half the price of the TV to get repaired. And I could have electrocuted myself.”

David J. Greer is an entrepreneurial coach, author, and professional speaker. He is the catalyst who gets you to fully live your dreams now. Spend one hour reading his book “Wind In Your Sails,” attend a one hour talk with him, or get one hour of 1-to-1 coaching and you will have 3 concrete action items that will shift and accelerate your business within 90 days. David and his wife Karalee are committed to each other and their three children, spending time supporting them in the many and varied activities in which they are involved in Vancouver, Canada.

The Most Impactful Turning Point?

“Through a series of introductions, I met and worked with Bob Green, a management information systems person whom I soon went to work for as his and his wife’s first employee in their software company. Bob had a strategy of thought leadership in this brand new area of computers, something that HP had just started making and selling a couple of years before. The big picture summary is that I liked the place and stayed 20 years, and I helped build it into a global powerhouse.”

The Most Powerful Lessons and Experiences?

1. “My first role models were my mom and dad. My dad was a second-generation entrepreneur. My grandfather started a hardware business in downtown Edmonton in 1923, and he then changed it into a wholesale sanitary supply business. My father took that over after the Second World War. And my brother runs it today. If he makes it three more years (to 2023), which I’m confident he will, they’ll be in business a hundred years.”

2. “I got a vision for what I wanted to do with my life and my career in grade eight or nine. We had a field trip to the government buildings in Edmonton. I remember looking through glass windows at a computer room and seeing computer equipment spread out in front of me and the tape drives spinning in the background. I thought that was the coolest thing in the world.”

3. “About the same time, I learned Octal arithmetic with blow-my-mind-away kind of concepts. And literally at that point, I had a vision to take business and computers and combine them.”

4. “I was one of the few in Edmonton that had a data processing teacher. We had a way we could use key punches and do programs and then send them to the Edmonton School Board where it was run through their IBM computer. I was writing computer programs by grade 10 or 11. I got my student account at the University of Alberta in grade 11, and I’d go over there and create programs, too.”

5. “I met a woman through networking, who specializes in helping really senior executives who were laid off, transition to what’s next. That was her business. When we went out to lunch, she asked, ‘David, do you need to work right away?” And I said,” Nope, I got a pretty good sized check. I’m not done for life, but I don’t have to work right away. She told me that in one of her career transitions, she’d gone to Australia, bought a VW van and just drove around for a year. You see in the cartoons the literal light bulb moment. Well, that was mine! My wife and I hatched a plan to commission a sailboat in the South of France, rent our house in Vancouver and to go sail the Mediterranean while we homeschooled our three kids. We did that for two years. People pointed out to me that in those two years we spent more time with our children than most parents spend with their children in their lifetime.”

6. “When we returned, I ended up like a lot of entrepreneurs who exit out of something. I ended up becoming what’s called an angel investor. I looked at an average of a hundred deals a year. I invested in four and one angel fund. And I did a lot of work, like on a Board of Directors working for stock options.”

7. “My belief is you’ll learn more from your failures than you do from your wins. And every challenge you’ve had in your life has set you up perfectly for wherever you are right now.”