Business 300

Christmas isn't just a story about salvation. It's a statement about creation. God entered the material world to redeem it, not escape it. That should change everything about how you view your business. The Word became flesh. Heaven invaded earth. Your business matters. The Incarnation Impacts Industry. Merry Christmas.

Every new initiative costs more than money. It costs focus, clarity, energy. And those are finite. The math might work, but that doesn't mean you should do it. Strategy isn't just about what you pursue. It's about what you're willing to walk away from. Don't fall prey to the dilution delusion.

Strategy is choosing what you're for and what you're not for. It's defining the game you're playing and how you intend to win it. And if you can't explain it simply, you haven't done the work. One customer. One offering. One advantage. A crisp and clear strategy.

Fixed costs, variable costs, contribution margin are the mechanics of how your business actually makes money. You need to know what number you're after each month. You need to know your breakeven point.

Business owners are generally optimists. That's why they're business owners. They have hope for a better future. And, that optimism many times is naive and simple. It can keep business owners continually walking the tight rope sitting atop an elephant. They spend what they make. They operate on thin margins. They assume the good times will continue indefinitely. And when they don't - when the mark...

Data and KPIs don't make your business better. Better decisions do. And better decisions come from measuring the right things, the things you can actually act on. Stop tracking vanity. Start tracking action. Know the score, but manage the game. Measure what matters.

What gets reviewed gets done. What doesn't get reviewed gets forgotten. Systems and processes are essential. But without a review cadence, they're just documents. You need the rhythm of accountability to turn good intentions into consistent execution. Use meetings to drive results.

Tighten up your accounts receivable, and don't play games with cash. An invoice is only a promise to get paid. Promises are broken all the time. You're not done until you've collected payment. Getting paid isn't greed. It's stewardship. It's professionalism. And it's customer service.

God gave you a business to steward, not to subsidize your comfort. He called you to dominion, not to "enough." So, don't call it a lifestyle business. Unless the lifestyle you're after is, "The Hustle Lifestyle." Live and work to serve people, create value, and exercise the dominion mandate for God's glory and your own in Him. Ambition isn't the enemy. Comfort-seeking is.

When you prioritize validation over vision, you shrink people. By pointing their focus inward, their vision is set on something smaller. You trap them in their own introspection. You make the focus be about their comfort instead of their contribution. You rally people around a mission that's bigger than their Monday mood. You invite them to stop thinking about whether they feel fulfilled and start...

Your job isn't to be your employees' therapist. It's to lead them toward delivering value to customers. And sometimes the most caring thing you can do is tell them the truth they need to hear, not the comfort they want to feel. Stop letting emotions become tyranny. Start leading with truth. True love. True care. Watch out for the tyranny of empathy.  

Christian business owners carry a guilt complex. You make money, and immediately feel like you need to explain it away. "Well, we're giving 10% to missions." "We're trying to be good stewards." "It's not about the money."  But here's what you're actually saying: "Making profit feels wrong, so let me show that I'm one of the good ones." If you feel guilty about making money, then you've accept...

What areas of your business are requiring you, or another manager, to manually make happen? Which balls are being caught by tribal knowledge instead of systems and training? Get better before you get bigger. Systematize for your scale. Build for repeatability, not just reach. Bigger isn't better.

Are you the Visionary leaving wreckage behind you? Or are you the Operator killing the dream? The best businesses run on tension, but not opposition. You need both sides. Build the future, and build the systems that will get you there. You need the Visionary and the Operator.

If you hired someone tomorrow, do you know what their first 10 days would actually look like? If not, you have work to do. Do you have a clear onboarding plan, or is your plan to just throw them into the deep end and see if they can swim? One is better than the other. Hire slower. Onboard sharper. Be prepared and prepare your people. You have work to do when onboarding new hires.

The people you hire aren't you. That's why you're the one doing the hiring, and they're the ones being hired. That is to say, business owner's shouldn't expect their employees to think like them, and show the sort of initiative required to be, well, an owner. If they did, they'd be an owner. But the person you're hiring is not an owner. It's unfair to them, and unrealistic for you, to have that so...

Whatever you want to call it - 5P Strategy Framework or something else - the point is to do the work of discovering your perspective, defining your position, developing your ploy, drafting your plan, and disciplining your pattern. Don't wait for success or failure to happen to you. Instead, you craft your business strategy.

Without being led astray by the impracticalities of business textbooks, there is good benefit to being more thoughtful in your approach to winning at business. A business owner is set up to always be one step behind if he's constantly reacting to what the market and his competitors throw at him. This is a formula for failure. Hope is not a strategy. Vibes aren’t strategy. Guessing is not a g...

Here's the thing. Being discouraged is real. But l eading out of it is your job. You're not always going to be on fire, but you are responsible for the temperature in the room. If your team has to carry their workload and your emotional baggage, they’ll burn out before you bounce back.

Business managers can have the tendency to mistake documentation for discipline. Just because you have things written down, doesn't mean that you - for that matter, your team - is following the process. Founders, owners, and managers can get excited about clarity and control as they write polished SOPs, draw neat workflows, and lay out nifty diagrams. But that's the easy part. And the easy part is...

A business can be compared to a tree in that it also consumes to produce. The entire point of a business is to deliver value to others - to do good to people. And that delivery of good is to be reliable and trustworthy. Customers need a business to be able to persevere and thrive under pressure. 

Lost throughput opportunity is the silent and permanent cash killer. It's silent because it's hard to notice. You can see payroll. You can see churn. But you can’t see the products that never shipped, or the hour you can’t recover. And it's permanent because you can't ever get that cash opportunity back. A lost shipping opportunity is gone, forever. Idle time doesn’t show up...

There are some business people who have a hard time getting over their self-impressed pretense. Maybe they got their online MBA, and now think they have what it takes. Maybe they've watched too many YouTube business gurus instead of doing the work. Whatever it is, there definitely is a CEO-LARP culture.

I want to give a few pointers of how  to fire faster, and do so effectively. There are bad ways to get the job done, and then there are less bad ways. I'm for the latter. What I'm talking about here is the actual conversation. There are things you should be doing and saying leading up to the firing conversation. I've talked about that here before. But when it comes to pulling the trigger, wha...

You might tell yourself that you're being kind and patient. But keeping the wrong person because you don’t want to have a hard conversation is leadership malpractice. Your team doesn’t want a perfect boss. They want a courageous one.