The Business System That Never Fails Page 4
I took the list to God in prayer, and I said, “God, these characteristics represent the kind of customers that I believe I can serve with the best of my abilities using the gifts You have given me. Help me to continue to identify and serve them.”
I submitted this list to God because I believe in
doing business in partnership with God as mentioned previously. What God told me was very shocking. He said, “Benson, you have to become those characteristics yourself before you can attract those people.”
Wow! What a paradigm shift! If you want organized customers, then you have to be organized. If you want customers with good financial records, you have to ensure your own financial records are accurate and updated. If you want customers who are passionate, you have to be passionate. All of this comes through personal development.
To develop and maintain a healthy mind, you have to read books, attend seminars, learn from mentors, and learn from your peers. You must make a commitment to develop your mind consistently. When I look at biblical history, as well as currentday history, I find the leaders I admire the most are or were great readers.
Reading is both food and nourishment for a sound mind. You need a sound mind to serve your customers with excellence. God has given you the spirit of love, power and a sound mind.16 You have the mind of Christ.17 Develop and maintain it.
162 Timothy 1:7 KJV 171 Corinthians 2:16 NIV Physical Health Taking care of yourself and loving yourself physically requires you to pay attention to your physical well being if you want to stay in business for a long time. If you are not eating well or exercising, you will surely not be up to the peak performance that business success requires and may well end up in the hospital. Eating well and exercising enables you to be full of energy. So, you really have to take care of yourself spiritually, mentally and physically to be able to serve your customers. That is what I mean when I talk about loving yourself first.
You cannot give what you don’t have. So for you to be able to love your customer, you have to love God and love yourself. Do I believe it is possible to love yourself too much? I don’t think so, because the more you love yourself, the more you will want to give.
True love gives and the greatest giver is God. That is why He is the greatest lover, as well as the creator of the principles in The Business System That Never Fails. That also explains why He is the wealthiest person in heaven and on earth.
There is a definite connection then between loving yourself and loving your customer. The products and services that you are offering to your customers are the gifts coming from you to them. You will not be able to give them your best if you don’t love yourself. So the more you love yourself, the more you will be able to produce quality products and services for your customers.
Imagine the picture of water flowing between you and your customers. A selfish person wants all the benefits to flow in his or her direction. The picture that we want to establish here is a different kind of stream: a flow of resources—from God, to you and through you, to the customers. The customer then responds with a flow of resources back to you in the form of money and other benefits.
That is an accurate picture, because LOVE GIVES. A selfish person is someone who wants to take without first giving. Some business people today and they only want to take, take, take money from the customer without giving adequate value, compared to what the customer is paying.
However, when you saturate your relationship with your customer with love, then you are always thinking about giving your customer the best. You put your best efforts in the making of your products and services because you want your customer to have the best results. You want your customers to have the best solution to the problems they are having. You want your customers to have the best answers to the questions that are keeping them up late in the night. That will compel you to go the extra mile.
Compassion This kind of love for yourself and for your customers will begin to cause you to have true compassion. My definition of compassion is love mixed with passion. So the more you love yourself, the more you become passionate about your customer, so you will start serving your customer with compassion. Jesus, our standard bearer, was always moved with compassion.18
Return on Investment From a return-on-investment perspective, investing in yourself will cause you to reap a great return, in that your customer will purchase more of your products and services. The more you invest in yourself, the more your customer is going to benefit—the less you invest in yourself, the more your customer is going to suffer.
Fill Your Pitcher You are a vessel of honor19 that needs to be filled continuously. Let's use the image of a water pitcher again. You need to be filled before you can pour out your contents. As a water pitcher, if you are filling yourself up as a business person, it is for your benefit and the benefit of your customers.
18Mark 1:41 KJV
192 Timothy 2:21 When you invest in your personal development, the benefits you accrue will be poured into your customers for their enrichment. That, in turn, will bring increased benefits back to you in the form of increased revenue and profits.
This analogy is an excellent way to look at your life. See yourself as a pitcher. When you are connected to the first pillar, God, you are able to fill up your pitcher with His love, life and wisdom. You can receive a lot from God.
Look at the New Testament book of Romans, Chapter 5:5. The love of God has been poured out into our hearts by the Holy Spirit. So when you connect spiritually with the first pillar, God, you’ll receive spiritual filling, emotional filling, and you will even receive physical filling. Now you have a pitcher that is full so that you can pour it into your customers.
If you don’t take care of yourself and love yourself, then you have a love pitcher that is empty. When you try to pour from an empty pitcher into your customers, no love flows.
When your customers discover that you are not pouring into them, when they discover you no longer care, they are going to look for someone else who is able to pour into them and serve them with love. Someone else who is capable of providing more value with love will gain the business from your customers.
There is no reason why someone who really loves people should not fill his or her pitcher and take care of his or her customers. You need to satisfy your customers with the truth instead of allowing him to switch to a competitor who may be filling them with lies.
That is the fundamental difference between loving your customers and operating out of selfishness, because love will always tell the truth. It is the truth that sets people free.20 So people who are not operating in love are actually operating in lies.
You see, there are only two ways you can operate in business. You can operate in love or you can operate in fear, as previously mentioned. You can either operate in truth or in lies. That is what you see in the business world today: there are a lot of people who are telling lies.
When you read some writings, you will discover that some content contained in them is not true. Why? Some of these authors just want to manipulate their customers and get some money. However, anyone who is operating in love would tell the truth, because that person knows that the truth will set people free. God, the Master of business, has clearly stated that when people know the truth, they begin to experience true freedom.21
20John 8:32 NIV The image of filling yourself up so you can pour into your customers is Jesus exemplified. When He was on the earth, one of the things He did regularly in the mornings was to invest time with the Father in order to fill up His heart and mind for the day.
“Very early in the morning, while it was still dark, Jesus got up, left the house and went off to a solitary place, where He prayed.” – Mark 1:35 NIV
In the verse above, we see that Jesus left His disciples early in the morning and went to a solitary place to pray alone. What was He doing? He was filling Himself, and then He would come back and start ministering to both His disciples and the crowd...who were His audience and customers. Jesus did that eve
ry single day. What an amazing example for every business professional to follow!
At the end of His major seminars, when He had drained Himself from all that speaking and serving, He would depart to the mountain22 and invest time with the Father to fill Himself up. He did this so that He would be able to continue to serve His customers the following day. You will discover that people who are not filled up often provide
21 Ibid
22Matthew 14:23 NIV
questionable services to their customers.
Take care of your family We talked about filling YOURSELF up. What about families? Most business people have some type of immediate family. How should you take care of them? How do you get the balance between taking care of your business and taking care of your family?
Here is a key principle: when you focus on taking care of your family, your business will flourish. Your family is your core support system. You need to manage your household well and maintain a happy home.
Let me give an example to illustrate this point. There is a man who was one of my most revered mentors. He mentored me through his books and materials. His name is Zig Ziglar, one of the most successful and exemplary business legends in history. I was praying to meet him before he died, and thank God that prayer was answered.
I had the opportunity to talk with him and ask him some questions when I met him in 2009. My meeting with Mr. Ziglar shifted my thinking about family and transformed my life forever. When I met Mr. Ziglar, I asked him several questions. One of them was, “Mr. Ziglar, your name is like gold in the business world. What is it that has made you to be so successful and outstanding?”
Now just before I tell you the answer he gave me, what do you think he could have said? What would most business professionals expect Zig Ziglar to say in response to such a question? Most business professionals would expect him to say; his ability to communicate well, or his ability to persuade people to buy.
Zig Ziglar was known as a man who could sell you anything. I was also expecting him to say his ability to persuade people to buy, or the way he trained his voice, but that was not the case. The secret of his success was far from those anticipated answers.
In my mind, I could not have imagined Zig Ziglar giving me the answer that he gave. He threw me off with his answer, but upon reflection, I understood that his answer was coming from a core biblical principal. This is the answer he gave me:
He said, “Benson, maintain a 'home court advantage'.” [Home court advantage is a sports term, where a sports team playing at their home arena, surrounded by loyal local fans and supporters, has an advantage over the visiting team, who are playing without such support]. When I heard his response, I was perplexed, and I said, “Mr. Ziglar, what is 'home court advantage' in the context of business?”
He said, “I’m glad you asked. The intelligence of your wife and your intelligence are different. However, if you bring them together, they can be explosive in their positive impact.”
Ziglar continued, “If you really want to succeed in business, maintain a happy home. When you have a happy home, you carry extra confidence with you when you are out there doing business. When you leave your home in the morning, and your wife kisses you signifying her support, it makes a BIG difference. Furthermore, you are happy to return to a peaceful home after business hours.”
He said, “There are things that money can buy, and there are things that money cannot buy—one of those things that money cannot buy is a peaceful home and good sleep. If you have the things that money cannot buy, you will gain the things that money can buy. So if you have a peaceful home you will be able to run a very successful business.”
What a paradigm shift! I realized that his answer was based on a biblical principle. In the book of 1Timothy, Paul was talking to the church about leadership. He taught them that if a man wants to be a leader; he should be able to take care of his own household first, before he can take care of the household of God.23
In the context of business, before you are able to take care of business, you should be able to run your own home well. Think about it. If you can’t manage your spouse and your own children, how will you manage a business?
231 Timothy 3:1-13 NIV So, making sure that your home is in peace and that everyone is properly taken care of will give you the emotional, spiritual and physical boost you need to take care of your customers. Thank God I was able to learn this lesson from Zig Ziglar.
Parental Blessings
How does taking care of parents factor into the business equation? Let me put it this way. Honoring your parents brings honor to God. Why? This is because you did not choose your parents--God did. Nobody chooses his father and mother. It is God’s decision, and so when you honor your mother and father, you are honoring God who arranged the family unit. The only commandment amongst the Ten Commandments with a promise is: “honor your father and our mother, so that it will be well with you and you will be able to live long.”24 Parental blessings are blessings that you cannot get from anywhere else. God will bless you and your business as you respect and take care of your parents.
Let me use an example of parental blessing to illustrate this point, a blessing that prospered one of the most successful business men in the Bible. Abraham was a business man, and there were traditions and rituals that were observed in his time.
He had a son called Isaac. Isaac in turn was a very successful business man. He started a business and prospered wildly within a year, in the midst of a recession when others were failing.25 He followed the footsteps of his father Abraham who did business in partnership with God.
Now Isaac had a son called Jacob, and Jacob was an amazing business man. When Isaac was old and was about to die, he needed to bless his children and also to pass on his business legacy. He called his first son Esau, who had the right to inherit the bulk of the business, being the firstborn son of Isaac. He
24 Ephesians 6:2-3 NIV
25Genesis 26:1-14 NIV
asked Esau to go out and hunt for some meat and present it to him so he could eat and bless Esau. Now Esau had previously sold his birthright [his privilege of being the firstborn son] to Jacob. While Esau was away hunting to bring meat to his father, Jacob’s mother called Jacob and had him take the meat she prepared to Isaac, so that the blessing and business would come to Jacob. Jacob went on to prosper widely in business because of the parental blessing from his father Isaac.26
Jacob prospered in such a way that even his fatherin-law could not cheat him repeatedly.27 That is the power of parental blessings.
For 14 years, Jacob’s father-in-law, Laban, tried to cheat him repeatedly. However, because of the parental blessing that was upon Jacob, God showed him a simple idea to multiply his assets.28 What Laban intended to do to cheat Jacob did not succeed. Jacob ended up being far wealthier. That, my friends, is what parental blessings can bring to anyone in business who honors parents.
26 Genesis 27 NIV
27Genesis 30:25-43 NIV
28Ibid Benson, are you saying that if I honor my father and mother, whether they have been wonderful parents or horrible parents, it is going to have a positive impact on my business? Yes.
If your parents were not as good to you as you expected them to be, ask God to give you the grace to forgive them. So, if your parents did not take care of you well, you need to forgive them and continue to honor them, so that it is going to be well with your soul.
Think about how God forgave you, despite all the mistakes you have made. Any business person who wants to build The Business System That Never Fails should repeatedly implement the principle of honoring his or her parents.
This brings us back to that principle of return on investment. Investing in taking care of your parents will certainly yield a good return on your investment. Remember that, at some point, your own children will take care of you.
Make a commitment today to start honoring your parents in a new way. Loving your parents will enable you build The Business System That Never Fails.
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Now, let us talk about loving your customer as yourself.
“ We are ever giving thanks to God for all of you, continually
mentioning [you when engaged] in our prayers,
Recalling unceasingly before our God and Father your work
energized by faith and service motivated by love and unwavering hope in [the return of] our Lord Jesus Christ (the Messiah).”
— 1Thessalonians1:2-3 AMP
MODULE 3
PILLAR #3: LOVE YOUR CUSTOMER
“ So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sum up the Law and the Prophets.” – Matthew 7:12 NIV
In business, you are a missionary. You will spread whatever Gospel you live by, whether you intend to or not. To spread the Gospel of Christ, you MUST love people. You must love your customers, vendors, employees, employer or colleagues. You even have to love your competitors and your worst enemies!
Love is expressed through service. So you must love serving. Most of the time, when love is mentioned in the Bible, the actions of “giving” or “serving” is also mentioned.29
So, if you are employed right now, doing a 9-to-5 job for a company, your customers in this context are your boss, vendors, colleagues and the customers that your company serves. If you are a business owner, your customers are your employees, vendors, and customers (end-users of your product or service).
As you do your work as an employee, you want to keep the primary customer (your employer) in mind, to make sure you are following the instructions that he or she gives you. However, you must also keep in mind there is an end-user using your company's product or service. You want to do your work with love, knowing that a human being is going to be using your product or service.
Even if you are working in a massive Fortune 500 company, and you don’t understand the big picture or see the total value of your work, you should always bear in mind that there is an end-user of your product or service.