Business 300

We're not in the mess because we don't know what to do. We're in the mess because we know how much work it's going to take, and would rather not have to do it. We're hoping that if we wait long enough, it'll somehow get easier or someone else will handle it. At some point, we have to stop kidding ourselves. The mess is your work.

There's a persistent anxiety among Christian business owners that revolves around an unease about profit. There's a need to justify their work by tacking on something more "spiritual." As if business itself weren't enough. As if serving customers profitably required moral laundering to be acceptable before God. That anxiety reveals a theology problem. And until we fix the theology, we'll keep misunderstanding what Christian excellence in business actually means.

You've embodied the culture. Your team sees you living the values, producing results, proving it works. That's good. And, embodiment alone won't scale. At some point, you need structure in order to build culture. You need a deliberate process for cultivating culture across the organization.

Every business owner and their mom talks about culture - values statements, team-building events, speeches about what the company stands for. But culture isn't built by what you say. It's built by who you are. Before you can build the business culture you want, you must embody it.

Sometimes quitting isn't failure. Sometimes it's wisdom. The question is knowing the difference. So, this one's a little different. It's about knowing when to quit. When should you quit?

There's a comfort in tracking results. They tell you whether you won or lost. But results are history. By the time you're seeing them, the decisions that produced them are weeks or months old. You can't manage results. But you can manage what drives them.

When customers shop on price alone, most business owners assume that's the nature of their market. But commoditization isn't inevitable. It's what happens when you fail to give customers a reason to choose you beyond simply cost. Commodity-type pricing isn't a market condition you're stuck with. It's a result of your lack of value-differentiation.

When a prospect asks you for a discount, what do you do? Most salespeople negotiate. They justify the price, explain the value, maybe split the difference. What's actually happening is that the customer doesn't see or appreciate the value you're offering. And that's not a pricing problem. That's a qualification problem.

Leaders cast vision, explain strategy, lay out plans. But not every leader is successful at rallying people to a better future. Yes, much of it has to do with the leader's character and presence, for sure. But his ability to communicate the vision in a way that is clear and enticing is fundamental to his leadership. You must give people something to rally toward.

Most business owners set goals forward but don't plan backward. They know where they want to end up in December, but don't know what has to be true in March to make that possible. They then miss their targets because they never figured out what would have to be true - operationally, financially, structurally - to make it happen. Goals without a sequence are just hopes and wishes. Set your goal, and build your plan.