If we’re growing, we’re always going to be out of our comfort zone.
—John Maxwell
I’m often questioned about what led to my decision to relocate my ministry and company from West Virginia to Texas. While many variables shaped that decision, one stands out that might be helpful to you as you confront the unique challenges that frequently accompany the growth of a new venture. Because you must realize that what got your plane off the ground is not necessarily what will sustain it in flight to your ultimate destination.
I had grown what started out as a very meager ministry from seven members to a body with about a thousand members and seven hundred in regular attendance. My company had started producing its own plays, and we were about to launch a tour. With a few bestselling books under my belt, I watched my literary career take off. For the area where I lived, and in the mind-set of those around me, I had done very well. I had a nice home, a beautiful family, a thriving business, and a growing church.
But from the pit of my stomach this feeling nagged at me, asserting that I had not maxed out my potential, that I had more in me than my current environment could accommodate. I wanted to start a ministry to the homeless and to those in prison and eventually launch an international outreach as well. Most of my comrades, bound as they were by traditional thinking about what a church could do and what a minister’s role should be, were not thinking about such ancillary ministries at the time.
Perhaps their perspectives held merit, but my purpose refused to be incarcerated by others’ perceptions. I knew my journey would be unique. If you can relate to this feeling, then I must warn you that uniqueness is seldom understood in real time. Little by little, I had to develop the courage to break outside the norms and commit to my convictions rather than my conditions. My vision had outgrown its environment, and a change was destined to take me from my homeland to my destined purpose. And as I soon learned, that purpose motivated my decisions in powerful ways.
Mind Your Metrics
Most organizations are fueled by profit, purpose, power, or by some potent combination of them in varying ratios. Most businesses run on a principle of profit, while ministries and charitable organizations operate on a priority of purpose. Political institutions and elected officials, on the other hand, are often driven by the pursuit of power.
While each of these three key motivators has a core ethic, all have traces of the others within them. If a nonprofit organization is consistently not profitable, then it cannot be sustainable. It’s naïve to think you can focus solely on purpose without attending diligently to the facts and finances surrounding the goal that’s been prioritized.
If a CEO’s leadership consistently results in profitability for her company, then she will garner considerable power along the way. To ignore such power and its effect on future growth is to squander an opportunity for accelerating success. If an elected official exercises political power in ways that are not beneficial to their constituents, they will undermine their source of power. They must balance their role’s power against the results attained for those they seek to serve.
Purpose, power, and profit each play a role in accomplishing what I like to call impact. When you consider impact, you’re basically determining the level of results your efforts have on your department, company, community, city, and society. If impact is a quantifiable method of evaluating relevance, one cannot measure accomplishment without getting immersed in the metrics of success. Just as a short-distance runner needs a stopwatch to determine his ability to meet his goal in the 400-yard dash, one must be prepared to consider the specific metrics used to determine success.
Business success isn’t measured by longevity alone. The fact that a business is sustained over a particular time period doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s profitable. Nonprofits cannot be measured by adherence to purpose alone because in order to remain functional they must make their payroll. Impact must be determined by a comparison of quantifiable metrics: How many people did we feed? How much did it cost us? How long can we operate this way? How does this fit with our projected budget for this month, this quarter, this year? Such questions require metrics to provide answers about an organization’s impact.
If you want to continue to maximize your God-given potential, then you must evaluate your ultimate impact and the cost of growing forward. It’s not enough simply to reach a certain altitude and settle for a plateau of status quo. Sustained growth requires minding your metrics.
Lifesavers
When I was a child, my parents always took us for road trips to visit our grandmothers, no quick journey when you consider it often took up to seventeen hours each way. The problem was that my dad didn’t have much time off, and most it was spent getting there. Though I’m sure it was much more affordable to go by car, it wasn’t just about the money, because the trade-off was that while we saved money we also lost the precious time.
There was also the issue of the old man’s exhaustion and the possibility of him falling asleep at the wheel since he had been working right up until the time we left. His return on investment might have been high because he saved money, but his effort-to-impact ration (E2I) was quite low. From an E2I perspective, it was much better when we took a plane. Flying to Grandma’s house didn’t save money but it did save time. From an E2I perspective, making the decision to drive was a failure that resulted in two short overnight stays in Mississippi or Alabama and a quick trip back in time for my parents’ return to work.
I have come to look at both my return on investment (ROI) and my E2I ratio when evaluating most major decisions. I ask myself, “Considering all that I will invest in this direction, will the return be commensurate with the energy I expend? Or should I put my efforts elsewhere and reconsider the value of my time and my energy for what will be returned?”
My parents’ decision to drive instead of fly weighted the money they saved more than the time spent to get there. Flying would have cost considerably more money but would have saved time and effort. The trip by car took almost thirty-five hours just coming and going versus the five to six hours if we had flown.
While my parents made the decision based on what seemed most important to them at the time, in order to sustain growth you will reach a critical point where time and effort mean more than the money you save. How much is twenty-four hours of your life worth at this point? In business just as in life, time is our most precious commodity—irreplaceable and irretrievable.
Inspecting Your Impact
Over my adult life, I’ve often had a recurring dream in which I’m fighting some unknown and ominous foe. The really frightening thing, however, is that in my dream my punches feel powerless. No matter how hard or fast I throw my punch, my fist never fully connects with my target. The impact doesn’t reflect the intensity of the effort with which my punch is thrown.
Many times we who work hard in real life experience a similar dilemma. It appears that no matter how much effort we expend, we don’t seem to see any impact, whether on the business, the marriage, the ministry, or wherever we’ve aimed our punch. I’m not sure what the solution to the problem is in my dream state (except to wake up), but in life we can correct the problem by no longer expending our greatest effort in the wrong places. Misplaced priorities can cause your E2I ratio to be as powerless as an impotent swing at the monster in your dreams. Instead you must aim your efforts at the places within your target where you can have the greatest impact.
In a purpose-based nonprofit, you have to look at energy and income to perceive if you have truly had an impact that fulfills your purpose even when it doesn’t appear so on your bottom line. To be sure, you can’t ignore either, but to be truly successful as a charitable organization, purpose isn’t the only metric that guides your decisions. Similarly, more and more corporations are finding that though they are in business to make money, they are seeing the benefit of the greater good, including purpose and community impact, as an objective beyond margins, debt ratios, and income viability.
Impact looks at the results of the energy, emotions, and effort expended to accomplish the work. But it goes deeper than simply how much was expended; it goes to the very different metric of how much was accomplished. This is why I find the E2I ratio, effort as compared to impact, such a crucial catalyst for making decisions that will sustain growth and propel me closer to my ultimate destination. For the amount of effort expended, you must identify the impact returned for your time and energy.
Most businesses focus primarily on ROI, return on investment, when evaluating their past growth and projecting their future expansion. ROI usually involves playing a numerical game that focuses exclusively on the financial return on the financial investment. But such an evaluation often ignores another consideration: the return on the energy expended (ROE). When one considers the ROE, we acknowledge that there’s more invested in a dream’s fulfillment than just dollars and shares. ROE forces us to consider the impact achieved in light of the time and effort required.
This principle plays out in our efforts in the gym. When we run on a treadmill or train on an elliptical machine, we typically get an electronic reading of the calories burned for the time spent exercising on that machine—basically, how much impact you had on calories burned for energy (time and effort) expended. One quickly learns that not all fat-burning exercises are created equal!
Similarly, the automobile’s metrics often come down to engine efficiency for the horsepower delivered. This measurement is simply a way for the consumer to understand and compare one engine’s ability with another. Without such quantifiable metrics, one would be left to compare vehicles solely on appearance but not on effectiveness.
Most people are happy to live their lives based on the superficial glimpses and cosmetic glances of success. As long as they appear successful, they don’t have to consider that the engine of their business may not be efficient. The outside of their venture sparkles and gleams, but the venture can’t sustain flight once it’s off the ground.
The problem with operating your life without looking at the metrics is simple: you can’t effectively evaluate which, out of the many initiatives you’re pursuing, are working for you and which are working on you! Is your energy having impact or is it merely expended without a significant return? Impact determines success. How else will you feel accomplished if your only measurement is survival based or reliant only on appearances?
Talent Show
Whether it’s stockholders, investors, partners, or even God Almighty wanting to see your metrics, you will always need accountability. Often when we’re actually busy in the trenches doing the work, we don’t devote enough time to wondering if our E2I is tracking correctly. Without accountability, there is no path to forward growth and profitability.
We often see this truth illustrated in the Bible. In fact, this principle is the subject of one of Jesus’ most famous parables. In the Gospels of Matthew (25:14–30) and Luke (19:12–28), Jesus uses the parable of the talents to teach us what it means to invest our gifts for a greater purpose. In the parable, a business owner puts three of his servants in charge of his goods, giving each of them responsibilities according to their abilities while he’s away on a trip. He makes it clear through his words that the servants’ focus should be on investing the talents and not on when he will be returning.
When he finally returns home, the owner calls in the servants and assesses their performance and stewardship over what he had given to them. After meeting with the first two, the master is pleased. He judges the two servants as faithful because they invested their talents and returned profits. They put the talents to work, invested them, and doubled what the master had given to each of them.
Though they ended with different levels of accomplishment, both were successful, with a 100 percent increase from where they started. I’ve always found it noteworthy that success for them was not competitive but was based on the level of return for the initial amount each was given to invest. This remains vitally important for us today. We must understand that our success isn’t a measurement to be compared to the success of others. Though not as profitable, the steward with four talents was just as successful as the one who was given ten.
It was a different story, however, for the third servant. He’d been given a single talent, but he did nothing with it. He was the one with the least to risk, which usually makes a person more willing to step out in faith, and yet he buried it. Explaining his rationale, this servant tells the master that he’d been afraid and didn’t want to lose the master’s money, so he buried his one talent for safekeeping. The master is furious, calling the servant evil and lazy. The servant had wasted the talent he’d been given, doing nothing and yielding no results. The master takes that one talent away and gives it to the servant who now has ten talents.
In this parable, Jesus reveals exactly what he wants us to do with the gifts and talents that God has given us. We are to be responsible for the gifts and the talents he has placed inside each of us, investing them for maximum return. It’s important for us as entrepreneurs to understand this parable and see how it relates to our lives. We have all been given gifts and talents.
Seeds have been planted inside each and every one of us, though they have been given in different measures. All the seeds must be watered, all the seeds must be used, and all can potentially bear fruit. We cannot be like the third servant, just burying our gifts and talents because we’re too afraid or too lazy or too uninformed to do with them what God wants us to do. Similar to what we see in this parable, God expects us to be faithful with what he’s given us. He wants us to be responsible and to make sure the seeds we sow and the talents we invest yield profitable returns.
The parable of the talents reminds us that risk is necessary for growth to occur. Building a business with the seeds that have been planted inside of us, with the gifts and talents we’ve been given, enables us to fulfill our purpose in life and to enjoy contentment from doing what we were created to do. With the freedom that being an entrepreneur allows, we can help others maximize their own gifts and talents. We’re able to do all of the things that God asks us to do and calls us to do because as entrepreneurs we are not bound to someone else’s time, money, vision, or passion.
You don’t have to sell Bibles or choir robes to invest your talents wisely for God’s kingdom. In Luke 19:13, God tells us to “do business till I come” (NKJV). The order is clear. We’re not to sit around, we’re not to wait. He wants us to take action now. We have to occupy the world with businesses that are needed. We have to build businesses that are the answers to someone’s prayers. We are to provide for and advance his kingdom.
And it doesn’t matter what product or service you provide; it is the way that you do business that will make a difference. By having a business, by being in front of customers, you’ll be able to share the message of the Gospel just by your actions. You will represent God in the way you operate, in the way you treat your customers and your employees. How you interact will be your message; how you communicate will show who you serve.
God wants you to use what he’s given you in order to give you more. Being faithful in the small things and remaining diligent will generate winds of opportunity when you may least expect them. And when those winds come, you want to make sure your plane is ready to fly higher than before!
Always on the Move
No matter how much you achieve or how quickly or slowly your new venture takes off, you should always view growth as both a process and a part of your destination. You must always be looking ahead even while you’re keenly aware of where you are with your business. Wherever your entrepreneurial pursuits take you, once you’ve established and sustained your initial flight pattern you’re ready to consider your next horizon. You can then propel yourself to new dimensions and project yourself to a place of new opportunities beyond your current altitude.
You may be able to remain physically where you are but come up with innovative products, enhanced services, and new ways of increasing production. You may have to adjust mentally and emotionally to different conditions than when you began so as to discover and catch up to where your market currently resides.
Or you may have to do what I did and physically move to a new location. Depending on the kind of business, its size and location, you may be able to continue your present business as is and duplicate it in another location or through another channel. This can be tricky because you do not want to cannibalize business from your first endeavor in order to nourish your second or third wave. You want to keep your core business healthy and thriving so that if conditions change and it’s not the right time for growth you don’t lose the momentum you had.
Whether you have to move away from where you are physically or move away from where you are mentally, it will be an exercise in faith as you go after the dreams and desires that God has placed inside of you. You’ll have to take risks and then take some more and then get comfortable with the way risks and growth go hand in hand. Risks are inevitable and necessary because the greatest rewards are the result of the greatest risks.
Doing something new and different means that you will have to step out of that box; you’ll have to move away from how you’ve defined yourself, but especially away from how others have defined you. Some of the greatest people I’ve met are people who were willing to do something different, willing to propel themselves forward and move away from how they’d been defined in the past. They refused to remain in the box where everyone expected them to be and everyone expected them to stay.
That is the key—never allow the crowd to define you or confine you. People get used to seeing us in certain roles and only exercising certain capacities. In my situation, many people probably saw me only as a small-town pastor, and I could have easily given credence to anyone who questioned me about leaving West Virginia. Then, after being questioned, I could have been left with my own doubts. I could have started questioning my own goals and asking myself: Why would I leave a place that was so comfortable? Why would I venture out to the unknown? Why leave home for something so different from what I’ve known?
Once you start questioning yourself, more doubts will set in, and very soon you will find yourself stagnant, doing the same thing, remaining in the same place because you allowed the crowd to define you. It would have been easy for me to stay where I was and let the crowd and my situation become my jail cell. Again, not because that’s how I viewed where I lived, but it would have become my prison because I would never have broken out to pursue those things I knew I was meant to achieve. I could have stayed locked up, never going beyond what everyone else thought I should do.
Instead I stepped out and moved to another part of the country. For you, it may be something like redefining yourself as you embark on your new venture. But whatever it is, growth will always require you to risk your comfort. To succeed in today’s times, you have to move, continuously shifting how you see yourself, and be the one to define who you want to be and where you want to go.
Continue to imagine, continue to dream, continue to create. Even once you’ve achieved, continue to reimagine, dream new dreams, and create new opportunities, expanding on whatever you have built for yourself. The key to your launching pad is understanding that you and only you must define yourself because that will set your goals, your future, and your success in motion. And even though you alone are responsible, growth will eventually require you to enlist professional help.
This Calls for a Professional
If you want to grow your business, get the best professional help you can afford. Why? Because you can’t afford not to! One of the reasons you may not be growing as rapidly as expected is because you have not enlisted the professionals you need in order to grow your business. It might be because you’re trying to save money and learn new systems yourself, or it might be because you’re still stuck in a mind-set that views your business as too small or insignificant to enlist the services of attorneys, accountants, bookkeepers, and others.
Shifting into a higher altitude often requires creating consistent operating systems for optimum functional growth. Boundaries may have been blurred as you’ve poured everything back into your business with no real salary for yourself. The more you get in the habit of blurring the line between your personal finances and your business finances, the more difficult it will be to unravel them later.
It might be something you can do yourself if you have an aptitude for numbers and accounting, with a little help from the many online resources available. You can utilize financial software, and a quick search on the Internet could lead you to the software you need. Software systems exist to track almost every aspect of a business: inventory, warehouse management, accounts payable and accounts receivable, your customers, budgeting, payroll, human resources, on and on. Any kind of report that you need or any tracking that you should do, you’ll be able to find the software for it, yet another advantage of our digital age.
You may find, however, that you have neither the time nor the patience to learn everything you should do for the financial ins and outs of your business. Unless your business is itself related to finance (you’re a financial planner, an accountant, or a bookkeeper), this area may not be your strength. That is why many entrepreneurs hire professionals: a bookkeeper, tax attorney, or a certified public accountant (CPA), whatever your business needs. Most of these experts will likely have experience dealing with entrepreneurs who own their own businesses.
These professionals can lead you in the right direction and save you a lot of time. If finances are not your forte, having a professional guide you through this part of your business is a wise investment. Professionals can often help you come up with workable operating systems that allow you to pay yourself. They can assist you in drafting and sticking to a budget for the optimum health of your business.
You might be surprised how much energy you free up when you have someone else, a professional whom you trust, handling areas you know nothing about, such as state and federal taxes, Social Security, insurance, pensions, and reserve accounts. Don’t wait until you feel like you’re on an island alone, waiting for a financial tsunami to overtake you. Getting professional financial help is often a catalyst for new growth and can assist you in making sure the financial side of your business is healthy and strong.
Follow the Money
While it is always smart to bring into your business professionals who can complement your strengths, when it comes to the money never turn over all financial responsibilities to any one person—especially when it comes to writing the checks. This is your business and you must have the ultimate control over it all, especially your finances. Your eyes have to remain on the books, even if this isn’t something you want to do, even if you don’t enjoy doing it, even if you feel that it will take up too much of your time—you have to be the one to maintain control. So much growth comes back to simple, obvious practices like sticking to your budget and investing some of your profits back into your business.
If you do allow someone else to sign the checks, I recommend having two signatures, and even with that you must review your books on a very regular basis. There are a multitude of horror stories of people who would have had successful businesses but instead had to close their doors because someone stole their money.
Issues such as embezzlement and theft often occur when the owner turns her back to the financial side of the business, but not all losses are related to dishonest practices. As the owner, when you’re signing the checks, you will quickly see issues that arise. Why is the cost of goods going up? Why are our expenses so high this month? You will be able to handle problems as soon as you see such issues arise in your various accounts. Any successful person will tell you to sign your own checks, and when you’re doing that everyone else will realize that you’re minding your business.
And ultimately that’s what growth is all about—minding your own business!