A Builder of People | Nick Greer, Co-Founder of Built Bar

What do you think people will say about you when you die?

What do you hope they’ll say? What would you like your loved ones, children, or grandchildren to remember most about you?

For Nick Greer, Co-founder of BUILT, the answer might be a little different than you’d expect. (Or exactly what you’d expect, if you know him well enough.)

“If anything is ever said about what I’m doing today — he’s a dumb chocolate guy, or he built a CPG brand, or BUILT is brought up — then I absolutely failed,” Greer told Desert Founders.

“What I hope they would say is that he was a builder of people. He liked to build people. He liked to inspire people.”

People seemed to be a recurring theme in our interview with Nick. And it’s clear that people are a recurring theme in his everyday life.

In fact, the art of learning people is essentially what entrepreneurship boils down to. And, for Nick, that learning started when he was just a kid.

Learning People

Like many successful entrepreneurs, Nick hustled in his youth. He made money however he could.

“For me as a little boy, as I was learning what I didn’t know was entrepreneurship but was just opportunities, I was being taught at a very early age about how to recognize opportunities…. So for me as a little boy growing up, it was buying baseball cards and then selling them. It was buying fireworks illegally — I’m sorry — in Utah and then going back to Arizona and selling them to the kids down the street who couldn’t get their hands on them.”

Nick says that particular business didn’t last long, due to one of those kids accidentally setting a neighbor’s backyard on fire, and almost inflaming her home. With police involved, young Nick felt that business had run its course.

But the flame of entrepreneurship was still burning bright.

“It was painting houses and realizing how to paint houses and how to make money off it to landscaping jobs and everything else. It was the hustle. It was understanding what the hustle is all about. But it was also understanding how people work.”

There’s that word again.

“And for me, when you start understanding how people work, you start understanding how you need to work with them and really start understanding what their basic needs are. And so at a young age, I started recognizing where there are needs, where there were opportunities, and then seizing those opportunities at every moment I could.”

Nick’s ability to recognize opportunity improved as he focused on observing others. He learned this profound entrepreneurial concept while selling fireworks and mowing lawns. That wisdom was given further weight by academia decades later in a study by Saddam Khalid and Tomoki Sekiguchi in the Journal of Business Venturing Insights.

The study utilized scenario-based experiments with undergraduate business students in Japan and Pakistan. The findings showed that two distinct factors led to improved opportunity recognition.

What were the two factors? Perspective taking and empathic concern. In other words, placing yourself in someone else’s shoes, and actually caring about what it feels like.

Perspective taking and empathic concern are much easier when your philosophy on business and life doesn’t revolve around you.

When you have something greater than yourself behind the wheel of your ambition, your gaze naturally tends to be away from yourself.

And Nick was quick to let us know who he really feels is in charge of his companies.

The Chairman of the Board

“I would tell you first and foremost,” Nick told Desert Founders, “I’m a firm believer that there is a loving God above who loves us, cares for us, and wants to guide us every single step of the way.”

“What I’ve noticed is that He has guided me and my wife and our family and employees and team members. I don’t care what religion you are, but when you start recognizing His hand involved in it, then you start realizing, Well, I gotta get Him involved a lot more, and let Him be the chairman of the board…”

For Nick Greer, God’s role doesn’t begin and end in the pews on Sunday. He can help you know who to hire, counsel you on a major business initiative, inspire your employees and team when you need an answer, and more.

And because Nick has had experiences like these so often, he’s pretty well simplified his job description as it relates to his companies.

“I just want to be that good Chief Executive Officer or execution officer to execute exactly what He’s telling me to do every single step of the way.”

Let The Money Follow

Another principle of success for Nick was to let the money follow, never let it lead.

“Early on when you’re grinding it out, you’re building for money, you’re building for wealth, you’re building to climb that ladder,” he told Desert Founders.

“And you start realizing — wait a minute, what am I chasing?”

“When I started realizing early on in my career that I can never let money lead, I need to let it follow — holy cow. Those patterns, those habits, those routines started changing,” he said. “They became more purpose-driven. And then, oh, guess what followed? The money, the opportunities, the wealth. And I was so grateful for that better understanding and clarity.”

Clarity really sums it up. Every entrepreneur, seasoned or inexperienced, could benefit from an added measure of clarity in their lives and business. And Nick is suggesting that as you put first things first, clarity follows.

Nick went on to discuss how realizing that money follows doing the right thing, and putting the right things first, allowed him to shift his focus to really refining his system and process of making sure he is doing what he’s supposed to be doing, and listening to promptings he gets on things he ought to do. Putting the right things first has become the most important business principle he’s adopted.

“The money just follows,” Nick emphasized. “I can’t explain it. And people think it sounds wild, but it just follows. It does. It really does.”

The Takeaway

Nick's story is the story of entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship isn't about having a startup to brag about or being the talk of whatever circle you're in. It doesn't make you any better than anyone else. True entrepreneurship is simply serving others, and finding better and better ways to do it. It's about being there for people and building people, as Nick would put it. It's making lives better through something you brought into the world. So back to the beginning. We asked Nick what he wanted his lasting impression to be at the end of his life, and he paused for a minute to think about it, as we all should every so often. If not every day.

“I’m a builder of people to bring them unto Christ. I love my Savior, Jesus Christ. I love Him. And I want everyone to know how much I love Him... [At the end of my life,] I would hope that that’s what they go to. That’s the most important thing for me.”

What do you want your lasting impression to be at the end of your life? What would you like it to be at the end of today? As the proverb goes, tend to the days and the years tend to themselves. Whatever impression your typical days leave behind is an indicator of what your life will leave behind.

Whatever your answer may be, that's what you’re really chasing. Discover what you want people to remember about you, and chase it daily. Live a life that excites you, serves and lifts others, and leaves people better than you found them.