Today, I want to talk about business – your business.

I don’t mean your personal business. Many of us have small entrepreneurial type businesses which provide for ourselves and family’s needs. As we go along the path in our business, changes need to be made here and there. I want to encourage you to make sure these changes are truly for the betterment of your product and serving your customer…that you’re not cutting corners and shaving a little bit here and there so you have a bigger profit margin at the expense of your quality.

Don’t we wish we could tell this to big companies who have bought up small, good quality companies and then changed them all around to enhance their bottom line, but at the expense of the original quality for the customer who was attracted to the product in the first place. Ultimately we the customer have paid for this.

How have we paid for it? Many of these products are more cheaply made. The product doesn’t last as long, doesn’t offer the same value causing an inferior result, and we have to buy again. Everyone wants to have a piece of your pie (product) by selling some small portion of their product as a necessary new ingredient to yours, thereby getting a portion of your profit. Think of all the unnecessary food additives and chemicals added to your food. Think of ‘mandated’ fluoridation of your drinking water. Check out some of this on your own and think about it. Is it really making a better product or merely acquiescing to the craftiness of other businesses trying to invade yours.

This is all part of our free market, honesty and dishonesty, truth and sleight of hand, but fortunately we can vote with our dollars.

I encourage you small business owners again. Use the best ingredients you can find. There are people who will gladly pay for your creating a quality product they know will meet their needs. Keep innovating, keep improving your goods and services, whether it be in the pasture raised chicken and beef you provide, the stellar automotive services you render, the furniture your build, even the paint you use.

Continue on! Don’t give up! This world, (us) need your contribution…your very own artisanal, well made, true product!

Let’s get busy 🙂

This message is to anyone who is 18 and beyond. Welcome to adulthood!

You are old enough to vote and we hope you will. You are old enough that all your medical records are withheld from your parents without your consent. You have reached the age of maturity!

This does not mean you know everything yet, but you are on the path. I want to personally encourage you to be strong and begin to make your own decisions. You may seek advice, but you do not need to have permission. It is your life, and part of the wonderful responsibility of adulthood is just that – responsibility. You get to take accountability for your decisions and you live with the result of those decisions. If you don’t like the results you got, make a new decision. One decision builds upon another. We each need a good knowledge base to make decisions, developed by continually asking questions from wise people, reading book about the lives of people who went before us. Observe others and what has happened to them because of their decisions. We can blame no one-even though other people may have been involved. We are now fully capable and need to learn how to make the adult decisions necessary for our best.

This gives us greater concern for our actions, and for our life, because we alone are responsible for how we turn out and how we treat others.

Do not turn your responsibility over to someone else out of fear of making a wrong decision. You have good judgment, use it, study the matter and don’t let other people try and tell you what they think you should or shouldn’t do. That is not their place.

Don’t let daily fears of growing up prevent you from looking ahead. Your attitude and things will change as you continue to grow older and acquire more wisdom.

Emotions can seem so fickle and we can feel so insecure. Don’t be afraid when your path seems narrow or dark. God will help you. He will give you enough light to see the next step. He will bring you to what is best for you. He made you to grow up and make good decisions

There are many distractions, daily distractions, trying to steer us off the path, getting us to look away from our objectives,  plans, purposes we had set our mind and heart to initially. (Might have just been your morning plans not your year end goal)

Building takes time, concentration, and effort. When our thoughts are divided, constantly looking out for ourselves or noticing or listening to what’s happening in the world we lose out. Our productivity goes down and sometimes we just come to a halt! I have been there.

But I decided, why should I devote myself to discussing every bad thing, every downfall in product, people or nations when God (there’s that name again!) wants me to live the life He gave me and make it flourish so my life can help other people.

Worrying,  fearing and stopping to think about every thing coming my way does not help other people, it does not help me. It simply causes us to stay in a quagmire of uncertainty and immobility.

We want to climb out of that and keep building.

What quagmires should I avoid today?