It's Tuesday at 2:00pm! (PST Time: I live and work from Southern California)

CHECK YOURSELF

We've been talking about steps in the "Start-Up Process" and simply being reminded of the value of each of these stages of development. You can see the past 6 or 7 posts about this HERE.

Before we move further into the execution phase I wanted to add this one today.

"Check Yourself Before You Wreck Yourself"

Even though Ice Cube coined this phrase back in 1992, I'm going to quote my friend Ryan Daffron who challenged leaders with this thought in this video HERE.

I was facilitating a LifePlan this week, and one of the tools we process is simply called "The Replenishment Cycle". I've become a follower of this train of thought from Peter Drucker when he said: "Great leaders learn to lead themselves really well."

It's Tuesday at 2:00pm! (PST Time: I live and work from Southern California)

PLAN.

We're talking about steps in the process of a Start-Up. You can find the past topics over the past 5 weeks of posts HERE.

This quote is all over the place and I'm not sure who originally said it, but if people like Margaret Thatcher, Dave Ramsey, Napoleon Hill and Tom Paterson are all saying it, there must be something there. The quote is:

"Plan your work. Work your plan"

It's a pretty simple idea, but one that is often forgotten.

I had another business that my friend Johnny and I started in 9th grade. We were going to raise rabbits and sell them. It was a rather impulsive idea, but we came home with 2 rabbits, named them Bonnie and Clyde. We then needed to build a cage for them, so they lived in a cardboard box for a while, which they ate out of a number of times. We then put them in the cage, and we waited for the magic to happen and we would be rolling in bunnies and money! This was going to be a great business.

It's Tuesday at 2:00pm! (PST Time: I live and work from Southern California)

PARTNERSHIP.

We're having a conversation about the questions and themes that move around the launch or the growth of an organization. We've talked about RISK, FAILURE, COLLABORATION, and the first mention was around STARTING.

Today I want to talk about the value of PARTNERSHIP.

Gina and I were a part of starting a ministry years ago in Ecuador called Extreme Response International. We came alongside our friends and "partners", Jerry and Dawn Carnill, and Extreme Response was born.

In the book Building Strategic Relationships by Daniel Rickett, a partnership is defined as: "a complimentary relationship driven by a common purpose and sustained by a willingness to learn and grow together in obedience to God."

It's Tuesday at 2:00pm! (PST Time: I live and work from Southern California)

RISK.

There is risk in everything we do. Sometimes that risk can be managed, and sometimes the risk is completely out of our control.

I remember years ago when our family was facing a major move, I went through a risk assessment. This was more personal, because we were going to start a work, so the primary risk was in our own lives, not so much the work.

When I assess risk, I ask myself these questions:

• WHAT IS AT STAKE? I want to identify what am I putting at risk, and what could I lose?

• WHAT IS THE WORST CASE SCENARIO? I want to evaluate what would happen if everything fell apart.

• WHAT IS THE BEST CASE SCENARIO? What happens if we succeed?

• WHAT AM I CALLED TO DO? What is God asking me to do?

• ARE WE ON THE SAME PAGE? If others are involved in the decision, it's important to know if my spouse is on the same page with me or if team leaders are on the same page with me.

Once I ask these questions and answer them, I can make a clearer decision.

It's Tuesday at 2:00pm! (PST Time: I live and work from Southern California)

ASK THE QUESTION.

We're often afraid of what the answer will be, so we don't ASK THE QUESTION.

I was talking with a young college graduate recently who was sharing his idea about starting a new organization. I asked him a couple of questions, because I could name 3 other organizations that were already doing exactly what he wanted to do. I challenged him to reach out to those organizations and learn from them and identify a need that perhaps they weren't meeting.

He didn't do that. Instead he launched a new organization, which is now struggling to raise funds to operate, and he's having a hard time getting any traction on his growth and messaging.

You can avoid that by asking a couple of simple questions:

It's Tuesday at 2:00pm! (PST Time: I live and work from Southern California)

FAILURE.

There's no way we can talk about START-UPS without talking about failure. General stats say that between 80 and 90 percent of all start-ups fail. The reasons they fail range from poor market research to finance problems to legal issues. There are so many possible variables with any new venture, and sometimes we launch something without ever thinking about failure.

I have 2 great failure stories... There are many, but I'll share 2.

The first one wasn't a "failure", but because I didn't do the work ahead of time, the business never launched.

I had an idea to start a coffee shop. I found the coffee. I liked coffee. I created a brand. I liked coffee. I signed a lease on a storefront. I was excited about this because I like coffee. Here was the problem: I had a full-time job. I didn't have the time to run this shop, and I didn't know what I was getting into until my wife said to me, "Are you crazy?" When she said that, I knew she was right. I failed to account for the needs of this new business. I had done some of the work, but not all of the work. Mundo Coffees never made it, but I learned some great lessons from that, the greatest of which is that my wife is almost always right!

It's Tuesday at 2:00pm! (PST Time: I live and work from Southern California)

START-UPS.

Thanks for your comments from last week as I talked about what an "Entrepreneur" is, and I shared the quote that talked about how everyone has ideas, but some people do something with that idea: THEY START. I'll share a couple of your comments later...

Here's my first START-UP story. This entrepreneurial flame began to burn in my life as a kid, and I was always thinking about what I could do to make money.

When I was 13 years-old, I was living in South America. I couldn't "legally" work in the country because of my visa status (and the fact that I was 13!), so I knew if I was going to make any money to support my food and snacks habit, I would need to create something.

I remember visiting a print shop, and seeing a bin full of leftover paper that was being thrown out. I don't know how I got the idea, but in talking with the printer, Javier (who I still know to this day), I asked him about the paper, and what they did with it, and he told me they burned it. I asked him if I could have some of it, and began thinking about selling it. He suggested I glue some together, and offered to make me some note pads with the scraps. I took those pads out to the street, along with my friend Keith, and we began selling them to cars a they drove by. For those of you who know Quito, we were selling at the "Y", long before the steady stream of vendors that are there now.

We sold out of our pads.

It's Tuesday at 2:00pm! (PST Time: I live and work from Southern California)

ENTREPRENEUR.

This week while on a walk I was listening to a podcast, and Mark Randolph, the co-founder of Netflix, was being interviewed. They were talking about all kinds of things, then Randolph said something like this:

"Everyone has ideas. The difference between someone who has an idea and someone who does something with it is simply this: THEY START."

I stopped my walk, took a note on that, then just thought about that for a while.

THEY START.

My first job, as a budding entrepreneur, was mowing a couple of lawns in my neighborhood. My dad had a lawnmower, and he paid me $5 to mow our lawn. Why wouldn't my neighbors pay me as well?

I started my first lawn business at the ripe age of about 9 years old. I didn't mow a lot of lawns, but enough to keep me supplied in candy.