Last year, I had the chance to speak at the 2012 Entrepreneurs Conference. This conference was a great honor and opportunity to share my message with other business owners. We all know the past five to six years have been a trying time for businesses in every industry, so I thought a message with the theme of weathering the storm was quite appropriate.
Here are my top three take home messages from my speech about weathering the storm:
- Survival - Whether you think of survival in terms meeting of basic needs (300 million children will go hungry today and 92 percent of the world is without clean drinking water) or a home building company (half of the home builders in the country have gone out of business during the recession), we have to take challenging situations and turn them into positive ones. Here's a look at what we have done at Keystone Custom Homes to survive:1. Built an incredibly strong and effective leadership team2. Provided more value without raising costs and reduce costs without reducing value3. Developed our own risk/reward continuum4. Reinvented areas of our business5. Made decisions using Jim Collins' triangle of fanatic discipline, empirical creativity and productive paranoia6. Created a strong work culture7. Communicated transparently8. Trusted God and understood he is in control9. Remained humbleMany of these same tactics can be applied to businesses in other industries. Consider how you can implement these actions to make your business more effective and successful.
- Success - Instead of focusing on ourselves, focus on others and the small successes you can create.
- Significance - Focus on the true purpose behind what you are doing. Each one of us has a purpose in our life, and at the end of the day, our businesses are not really ours, they are God's. Always remember that you are serving for and working for a greater purpose.
I hope you will watch my speech in its entirety, so that you too can hear the message of weathering God's storm.
Until next time,
