Who are your Gods?!?!

Over the next few weeks we talked about our meeting with Susan and Larry. We weighed the pros and cons . . . under what conditions would we be willing to sell . . . was Kris ready to let go of her baby . . . oh yeah and then there is the ever-present: what are we going to be when we grow up?!?! Translation, how will we earn a living if we do sell the business? We found these last two issues to be the biggest stumbling blocks to our selling or not selling. Let me explore each of those with you.

The issue of what will we be when we grow up really boils down to a lot more than just how will we earn a living. That is certainly central to the discussion but also a very large component of this was the issue of whether or not we were allowing the business . . . the income and lifestyle that it provides to be a god to us. Wow, that was huge! The business generated a heck of a cash flow and allowed us to live a very comfortable and indulgent lifestyle. Oh, we had to watch our money like everyone else, but we were in the category of not having to worry about our next meal or house payment. So, the real question was, are we willing to step out in faith that God is going to provide for us and sell the business foregoing the monthly cash flow we were so used to? Now, I don’t want to sound like a goofy religious fanatic here and imply that waiting for God to provide for us means that we sell the business and go to Tahiti and wait for him to have someone e-mail of fax us with a lucrative offer to earn oodles and gobs of money. To me, this is what it means; God is obviously very involved in this transaction . . . he brought Susan and Larry to us, gave us the presence of mind to know when the timing and the terms were not right and then He helped them to restructure the deal so that it worked better for all of us and . . . brought them back to us! Not bad huh? But then He is God! So, given that God has involved himself in this transaction so far, one could surmise that He has a purpose in all of it. Our perspective was (and still is) to explore and see just what that purpose is. That means seeing what God might have in store for us after we sell the business. It doesn’t make sense to me that God would be involved in the transaction and then be off on His merry way after the deal closes with a sort “OK Pat and Kris . . . I got you through that, you’re on your own now!” attitude.

It took a lot of prayer and a lot of discussion with each other and the experts that I believe God placed in our paths like: our CPA friends, our friend who was (in his previous life) a business acquisitions guy, spiritual mentors and counselors and books like “Walking With God” by John Eldridge and Beth Moore Bible studies. All of these played into getting us better aligned with what God had in mind for us. Finally, from the financial perspective, we gave up on our desire (or need) to be in control of the situation. We decided that God had made us into some pretty resourceful people and that if we stayed in line with Him, we would see what He wanted us to do. Now, this doesn’t mean that we believe necessarily that God is going to find us something to help us earn more money or the same for that matter. It could also very well be that He will help us to simplify our lives to being satisfied with a slower and simpler lifestyle which would require less to live on.

Next we will talk about the issue of the business being Kris’ baby and how God worked that obstacle.

The Next Meeting

Back to our story . . . when we last left our heroes, Susan and Larry had asked us to meet them for coffee. Our attitude was pretty much, “Oh great, they just won’t give up and they still probably want us to “tote the note”!” We put hem off for several days and after a lot of prayer and talking about it, I called Larry back and we set a time and place to meet.

When the day for our meeting came, Kris and I had to meet there in separate cars as she would be coming from meetings with owners outside of the office. It was unusual for her to be able to find an hour in the middle of the day to have coffee. It was a typically gorgeous southern California day; about 70 degrees and sunny with no thought of rain for another 6 months. I arrived first and got my coffee and secured us a table outside where we could have a bit more privacy. One by one Kris, Susan and then Larry all got there within about 5 minutes of each other. After we had all gotten our drinks and put the small talk behind us Larry started:”We are still interested in buying the business, if you are still interested in selling.” I wanted to launch into how I didn’t want to carry a note but bit my lip. Larry continued, “we have hooked up with our CPA, you remember Tim? Anyway, Tim is very strong financially and so we are going to partner with him and we have also been talking with the SBA (Small Business Administration) about a loan to cash you out.” I thanked God for helping me to keep my mouth shut. He asked how much business we had lost since we last talked about it due to the bad economy. Kris was proud to report that our revenues were up by 10% from a year ago. Larry seemed surprised . . . . and I think a little disappointed that the price might be a bit higher than last year. He asked us to consider what he had said and if we were interested in pursuing it further for us to send him some updated financials.

We really weren’t sure what we wanted to do and were going to have to talk a lot about this. This was going to be a touchy subject with Kris as she is so invested in the business, friends with her clients and so on.

We told them we would think about it and get back to them.

Restructuring our Lives Through Seeking God

OK I just realized that I need to back waay up for you and fill you in on some of the stuff that had been going on with us prior to the offers on the business. Kris is a very artsy craftsy person, she loves to sew and make Christmas ornaments, and entertain and all that kind of thing. I can remember shortly after we moved here, Kris and her girlfriends all getting together rather routinely at each other’s homes. Not to sip tea and talk about the ills of our society but to sew. They would each bring their sewing machines and set them up at the kitchen table and “whir – whir, yak, yak, yak, whir, whir, whir, yak, yak, yak” while they made everything from quilted jackets to purses.

Now, fast forward a few years to 2003 when we bought the business; not long after that, I noticed Kris’ stress level increasing. Oh, it just goes with the territory; it makes sense that you take on the ownership of any business, your stress level is going to go up. As the business grew, her stress level got higher and higher and higher, time spent with girlfriends eroded and boundaries became more and more blurry . . . Ok, many of them just evaporated. I began to notice a lot of physical ills that I believe were tied to here high stress level. A big (and happy) part of Kris was gone. She worked and went to church; we went on trips but . . . with a cell phone pasted to her ear. I started praying for her and what God had in store for us and the next chapter of our lives. We both knew that God has a purpose on this earth for us, not that we weren’t fulfilling part of it with the business. But, we both felt like God has given us so many gifts and at this season of our lives we simply weren’t using many of them. We just had this innate, inner feeling that there is more . . . just simply more to life than what we were doing. I am convinced that as a result of the prayer we came closer and closer to hearing God and what his will was for us. We truly spent a lot of time, seeking God and His direction for the next chapter of our lives. As we prayed and grew closer to Him and more able to hear His voice we began to understand more and more of His plan for us. We prayed to let God know the desires of our hearts but also that those desires would be in alignment with his will for our lives. Does this mean that by praying this way that we are able to change what God may have had in mind for us? Perhaps, I think that what has really been going on is that through this process of listening to God, the desires of our hearts changed and morphed into something that is more what He has in mind for us.

Restructuring with the Sale of the Family Business

There is another element of transitioning that I haven’t been able to talk about until now, and that is the sale of our family business. We bought the business six years ago and closed on the sale of it in December 2009.

To give you some background on the business; Kris (my wife) went to work for the company when we first moved to California in 1990. As time passed, she took on more and more responsibility and eventually wound up running it for the last five years before we made the purchase. At the end of three years of owning the business, revenues had doubled. The dynamic of it was nearly out of control growth.

God has a fascinating way of working in our lives. I was quickly becoming disinterested in continuing in the corporate world. The whole gymnastic of managers jockeying for position within the organization and smiling to your face while implementing their secret agenda to manipulate you into their self-serving plans was becoming very tiring for me. I finally left the corporate world and pursued my own way in consulting. Meanwhile, back at the ranch, Kris’ business was bursting at the seams and her stress level was getting higher and higher. As we talked about it, it became evident that she was just experiencing growing pains from the growth of the business and not enough processes. This was place where all my time spent in the corporate world paid off. I knew management systems, how to crunch numbers 9 ways to Sunday (sorry, I think that may be a Texas saying!) and I knew how to manage people. I know that is a bit off story, but with all my talk about getting out of the corporate world, I had to also share some of the benefits of having been there. Finally, Kris asked me to leave my start-up consulting business to help her. I started working at the company just a few days a week . . . then four days . . . then 5 days. You see where this is going. Pretty soon, I was nearly as immersed in the all engulfing business as Kris was.

We both saw our lifestyle and social lives spiraling out of control. We had the income to travel, enjoy nice dinners with friends, enjoy expensive wine . . . but we didn’t have the time. When we did carve the time out of our insane schedules, much o it was spend with cell phones up to our ears, stepping away from whatever we were doing to solve one crises or another. We knew there was more to life than what we were doing through all of our faith-based learning and studies like “Seven Habits of Highly Effective People” by Stephen Covey and books like “Half time” by Bob Buford. We were enjoying making a great living, the adrenaline rush of doing the deals and just being entrepreneurs, but were we really doing what God put us here to do? We had always had a dream of running a bed and breakfast and so started investigating that more.

We found one in Shelby Texas which captivated our imaginations and creativity. We put in an over to buy the place and thankfully it was rejected. But the fruit of that offer was that it helped us to realize that we really wanted something more from our lives. So the start of our long and exciting and painful adventure of transitioning out of our roles as property mangers to freer spirits seeking God’s direction in our lives.

While I was doing my consulting work, I worked together with a lady, Susan who, when I met her I learned her husband was a realtor/property manager. Later, Susan and Larry eventually joined our small group bible study. One day Susan called me and asked if Kris and I could meet her and Larry for lunch. I didn’t think much about it and so we met. After some small talk, Larry expressed their interest to buy our property management business. He was not forceful, but rather just on a fact finding mission exploring if this was something we would consider. We told him we would have to pray and think on it and get back to them. We decided that God had put this opportunity to sell in our laps and so we owed it to him to explore it a bit further. We got busy consulting our CPA, or friends in business and our attorney just to figure out stuff like, how do you value a service business like ours, what are the tax implications if we sell it out right or carrying back a note, is the timing right . . . and on and on and on. We met again and Kris and I laid out the conditions under which we would consider selling . . . since we weren’t really sure we were ready to sell: We met with Larry and his accountant, Tim and went over the preliminaries. We explained that in order for us to realize our dream, they would have to cash us out and was also quoted them the price we thought we would be willing to accept for the business.

We executed confidentiality agreements and they sent me a request for documents . . . financial statements, client lists and tax returns to just name a few. After a few weeks I forwarded them a book with all of the documents they had asked for. We had another breakfast meeting with Susan and Larry and this time they brought Tim, their CPA. Tim went into an extensive and educational explanation of how service businesses are valued and how the price we were asking was way too much. We sparred a bit After some clarifications and a week or so, we received a letter of intent: the price was 70% of our asking price (sort of gave me perspective on the offer we had made on The Shelby B & B in Texas!). and they were willing to put down 20% of that and asked us to carry the note for 15 years (may as well have been 100!). I forget the other terms of their offer . . . in fact I am not sure that I ever got to them after reading the first two items!
The following weekend, I went on a men’s retreat and Kris stayed home . . . working. Some of the guys in my men’s bible study are pretty heavyweight entrepreneurs and businessmen and this weekend they zeroed in on me and really took me to task as to the reasons for wanting to sell the business and the way we were going about it. Normally, I would have been defensive and avoided them but I felt strongly that God was using these Godly men to get my attention and help keep me from making a terrible mistake.

After the weekend was over, I drove home (about 2 hours) by myself and prayed about what I had heard over the weekend. The idea of selling right now just became out of the question . . . it simply did not seem right . . . the timing, the deal . . . none of it!
When I got home, Kris met me at the door said she needed to talk. We sat down in the living room and she said the she hadn’t worked much over the weekend but spent a lot of the time in prayer and thinking about the sale of the business. She continued saying that it just didn’t seem right, the timing wasn’t right and in order for us to do what we needed to do we needed to be cashed out. My jaw dropped at the amazing way God was working in this. Here we had not spoken all weekend but God was speaking to each of us . . . giving us the same message!
I called Larry and thanked him for their offer and told him that the timing right now was just not going to work. Larry expressed his disappointment but was also gracious in accepting our declination to sell.

We continued in small group with Susan and Larry for another year and a half during which Larry stayed in touch with us about where we were with selling the business and so on. Finally, instead of e-mailing me, Larry called and asked if Kris and I would meet him and Susan for coffee . . .

Keep Your Seeds in the Gound!

In my bible study time this morning I read today’s message in “Our Daily Bread”. Today’s message had a great fable. The fable ties in well with what we have been talking about so here it is:

“There was once a man who was browsing in a store when he made the shocking discovery that God was behind a sales counter. So the man walked over and asked, “What are you selling?” God replied, “What does your heart desire?” The man said “I want happiness, peace of mind, and freedom from fear . . . for me and the whole world.” God smiled and said, “I don’t sell fruit here. Only seeds.”

It all ties back the law of the harvest, if we hang out and play all through the spring planting (sowing) season and don’t get our seeds in the ground . . . we will not enjoy any harvest. Stephen Covey talks about this in his book; “The 7 Habits of Highly effective People” . . . remember “cramming” in college? We would play between tests and then when the test came we would cram the information into our brains. We retained enough data to hopefully pass the test . . . but we learned very little. A farmer can’t cram when it comes to sowing and reaping . . . if he didn’t sow seeds at planting time in the spring . . . .no fruit or harvest in the fall!

That is, to a large degree what I wrote about yesterday about the discipline. It doesn’t matter what detours we have to navigate around in our journey to following our passion and doing what God intended for us. We have to stay on the track of working and developing our knowledge and skills in the area of our passion. I know this sounds very elementary to you . . . especially all of my left-brained friends out there you are probably saying . . . . “Yeah – Duh!”. But it goes even deeper than that. What it gets down to, at least for me, is disciplining myself to do the things that are difficult for me. I have pretty much made my way in the world by thinking mostly analytically. But, I have a very strong element of creativity in me and unlocking that and not going to my learned default of left-brained thinking takes focus and practice. The more I do it the easier it flows and the more natural it becomes. My creativity is the fruit of my sowing, which is my blogging, writing and shooting photographs. When I allow my schedule to take me away for the rudimentary exercises . . . my creativity suffers.

What about you? What is your passion that you want to follow? What do you need to be doing (sowing) for you to eventually realize your dream (produce fruit). If I can do it, then I know that you can. We are all in different seasons of life and our schedules are more or less demanding than one another. But when you envision the fruit you want to harvest . . . . it will help you to stay focused on planting your seeds!

Stuck?!?

Have you ever been in a situation that you just knew you needed to get out of . . . and felt pretty adamant about it? I sure have. I can remember being in a relatively new job and learning several less than cool things about the company and feeling like, I HAVE to get out of here . . . and NOW! Fortunately or unfortunately, I didn’t have a financially independent status at the time and so, had to wait until I could find somewhere else to go that was a fit for me. You know, it was during that time that I grew a lot. First, I had to learn to work within the situation I found myself in. This is opposed to just learning I didn’t like something and bugging out. Second, the situation really caused me to rely on God to show me why He had me there. Now, just because I was not in an optimum place, did that mean that God put me there? I don’t believe so. I believe that because I made a series of decisions, I was there. I also believe that God doesn’t waste any situations. The reason for my reliance on God in this situation was a.) To help me move to a more palatable situation and b.) to show me what God wanted me to do while I was there . . . what was the purpose I could serve while in this situation.

The third thing I learned from this situation was patience. You know I have always heard that if you pray for patience, God will give you lots of frustrating situations to deal with in order to develop your patience. Well, I don’t think that is all bad . . . long term. Sure the frustration, short term is not fun. But just think of what it would be like to just have it in your being to look at a situation with patience and a Godly perspective . . . something to continually work toward. Anyway, just like we talked about yesterday with making a change in your vocation, I just methodically put my feelers out and worked my networks until I was able to make the change.

I ended up being at the company a couple of years longer than I would have liked. In the end though, I am glad that I was there as long as I was. It helped to develop my character by learning how to flourish in a less than optimum situation. It also helped to build my faith in God. Knowing that He had just the right situation out there for me but had me in that situation for a reason. I came away from there sort of like a TV series I remember; the guy was a time traveler and he could not return to the present until he had fulfilled his purpose in the past. I felt that way where I was; until I fulfilled God’s purpose for me at that place, I didn’t feel right about the other possibilities that came along. We never know how we have touched and influenced other people’s lives with our own.

How’s that for some woo- woo? The thing is that it really isn’t. I believe that God has a purpose for us on this earth and the sooner we can discover what it is and start fulfilling that purpose, the sooner we will start to be more fulfilled and feel like we are making a difference in this life . . . rather than just living it for ourselves.

Is your Boat Ready for the Great Flood?

I have been doing a lot of blogging about leaving the corporate world . . . what life after corporate is like . . . . how to escape the corporate world. Let’s say that my last entry comes to pass; I get a great offer to sell my business or to leave my current job. I have been developing my exit plan and my new business in the area I am passionate in, but I am not there yet . . . I’m not quite ready to send out the press release and launch my new endeavor. It’s like I have been building this boat for a long time now, I am not ready to christen it just yet and send it out to sea but, the great flood is coming. I guess the question is, is your boat sea-worthy or not? You may not have all the deck chairs bought yet, but is the hull waterproof. If it is not, you better get it ready . . . fast. How does that little analogy translate? If you have been developing your plans for your new business and it is just what you want to do but you are not as ready as you would like to be to kick it off, what do you do? To keep the analogy alive; do you risk it in your boat or jump back on someone else’s boat? If we take the situation down to the bare basics, the root issue is that you not drown. If you can make it in your own boat, I would recommend that but if your boat is not yet sea-worthy, then you should get into someone else’s boat for now, to keep from drowning.

So, if the big picture is for you to be following your passion, and begin doing something that you truly love and . . . get paid for it, you may have to take some detours along the way. You may have to take a part time or abbreviated job in the corporate world. It is not the anti-Christ such that you should avoid the corporate scene at all costs. However, my inclination is this; I could easily get comfortable with the income and the lack of pushing myself if I were in the corporate world. It would be very easy for me to just spend another year there until the years turned into many and my passion was once again buried under the easier life.

If you get down to that and you decide to take the offer for early retirement or to sell the family business, you may have to take a job just to make the finances work. Remember my blog the other day about sacrifice? You may have to do that. If you have been working on awakening your passion within, and have finally gotten a glimpse of it or in some of your cases; a full on vision of it, keep going chasing. If you have to work for someone else, then discipline yourself to exercise your passion. For me, my passion is writing and sharing my experiences and life lessons with others. Right now I am helping my wife run a very large residential property management business and that takes a large chunk of my time every day. But, I have developed a regimen of writing. This blog is part of that regimen. Though, I spend 6 – 8 hours a day in the office, I write every day for at least 30 minutes, just to keep the creative channels open.

What do you need to do to keep your passion alive? Write, build widgets, take some classes or take someone in your field to lunch to learn more about making a living at your passion? If I can figure out a way to keep the juices flowing then, I am confident that you will be able to also!

Congratulations on your plan to keep you passion alive regardless of the detours that life may throw your way!