Sarah Adams

On Friday, December 6th, our dear friend Sarah Adams passed away, along with 2 other Young Life leaders, in a tragic automobile accident in Africa. We have been grieving and mourning her loss the last 3 days, and the pain is not subsiding. We spent the year with Sarah when we lived in Malawi in 2009-2010. She became like family to us and was a huge part of our time there.

Sarah was one of the most selfless loving people I have ever met. I don't know where she mustered up so much energy to serve and give back to others all of the time with such vigor. God's spirit was truly present in her life! She radically loved the people of Malawi, and everyone else that she met. In the end, she lost her life doing the thing that God called her to do and that which she was passionate about, loving and serving the youth of Malawi.

There is so much I could say about Sarah, but I found these two pictures of Sarah that really say so much. These are pictures of Sarah in the Phingo village in Malawi in 2009. She is at an orphan day care that provides food and education for young orphans.

This first picture is my favorite, for several reasons:

1. As a white person and visitor to the village, she would not have been expected to serve anyone. In fact, she would been placed at a seat of honor. Of course, Sarah would never let that happen, she was there to serve. She is dishing out the meals for all of the orphans there that day.
2. She has a baby strapped on her back! This is common to see among the Africans, but the African ladies would have loved seeing Sarah do this. She was always trying to fit into the culture there and do things the way Malawians did as a way to show respect and connect with them.

This picture taken at the same location after all the kids were served. Her smile says it all! She truly loved serving and being with these kids.

One day, when my young daughter is older, I will show her pictures and videos of Sarah and explain to her how well Sarah loved others and lived selflessly. I will challenge her to live her life with as much passion, energy, selflessness, and love for God as Sarah had.

Sarah, your legacy has only begun. Your life was well lived and an example to all of us on how to live selflessly and generously. We miss you dearly, but know that we will see you one day with the One whom you so passionately served.

Excelling at Underachieving

"We're Michigan. We don't play to everyone else's level and for the last two weeks we have. But we're going to step it up," defensive end Frank Clark said. One of the most storied programs in college football, the University of Michigan struggled for a second straight week in a row and barely defeated a far inferior team, the University of Connecticut (the week before they barely edged out Akron).

When I read this quote on Sunday it got me thinking about how most people actually live their lives this way - playing down to their competition or environment. The truth is, most people play down to their environment. We tend to achieve just enough to get by, so if the bar is really low, then we typically do just enough to get over that low bar.

The problem is that most people spend their lives completely underachieving because they are surrounded by mediocrity, on a good day. Most people complain about their jobs, can't wait until Friday rolls around to start the weekend, aren't living out their passions, and somehow they feel just good enough about themselves and their situation that they never make a change. Barely surviving another week existing in a sub-par environment somehow makes us feel just good enough to prevent us from pursuing something greater, something impactful, something risky, something excellent.

Even though Akron and UConn lost their games against Michigan (and I'm sure they were massively disappointed), the confidence that they can compete with the a top team will carry forward with them for the rest of the season. Competing against one of the top teams in the country and losing a close game was way more valuable to them than scheduling and beating some lower tier mediocre team just to get a win.

So sometimes it isn't just about winning. In fact, most of the time it isn't about winning. It's about putting ourselves out there to try something bigger, something riskier, something we feel called to....something that requires that we move out of our comfortable mediocre environment and stretch ourselves. If we are going to attempt to reach the full potential that God has called each of us to, then we will need to move towards environments and people that raise the bar for us and challenge us to new heights!

Drip Coffee

OK, so this post has nothing to do with coffee, but rather all about drip. I heard Seth Godin on an EntreLeadership podcast recently talking about the concept of drip. Seth has written over 5,000 blog posts; one post every day for the last 10 years or so. This is a monumental feat that has given him an amazing voice into the world of marketing. Most of his posts are just a few paragraphs, most of which probably took him only a few minutes to write and publish. I big part of his success has to do with his consistency over a long stretch of time, which he even admits. He has dripped his knowledge out to the world for the last 10 years, one blog post at a time.

The drip concept - doing small, even micro, activities on a very consistent basis for a long period of time to see huge shifts and outcomes. This idea has struck a chord with me. In a world where everything has to be done instantly, fast and in a huge way, the idea of drip goes against our cultural norms. 

Drip requires discipline. 
Drip requires long-term vision.
Drip requires deferred gratification.

I've been mulling over what it would look like if this drip philosophy infiltrated my world: my relationships, my work, my friends, my connection to God, etc. 

What would it look like to take 10 minutes every day and find a place of stillness for my soul? 
What would it look like if I wrote one thank you note to someone every day? 
What would it look like to call one customer every day to see how they are doing and how I can serve them better?
What would it look like to intentionally speak 3 words of affirmation to each person in my family every day?

I think that over a longer period of time I would see significant change in my own life and those around me, changes for the better. I think most change in anyone's life happens over years of time, not over days or weeks. For some reason I don't live with that in mind. I tend to think so short sightedly, only looking a few hours into the future. I think it might be time to start experimenting with different daily drips that will bring significant change to my life. 

Sorry Keurig, time to slow down a bit and embrace the process of brewing the coffee….

one

drip 

at

a 

time.

#dailydrip

Reflections on a Year of Business

One year ago today (June 18th) I launched full-time into Torrent Consulting and a life of entrepreneurship. When I left the 9 to 5 job to pursue my own business, I had no idea if I would make it past the end of 2012 or if I would be updating my resume and looking for the next salaried position. I am a deliberate risk taker and this was a huge jump for me and my family, but it has turned out to be one of the best decisions that we've ever made.

It has been amazing year and time of growth, both for me personally and for the business. I've learned a lot throughout this first year and I thought I would share a few of my thoughts about those learnings.

• Support - I have an amazing wife that has supported me and has been understanding to the challenges and energy involved in starting a business! I could not have done it without her support and encouragement. 
• Business Partner - Very early on in the business it became clear that having a business partner was a smart and wise move. Phil Brabbs and I joined forces to get Torrent launched and off the ground. Phil is an amazing man and I am blessed to spend each day working side-by-side with him! (For anyone starting a business, I would never recommend starting alone. Always try and find someone to partner with you!)
• Start Small, but Dream Big - I've seen others who either think really really small about their business and it never gets anywhere, or they dream really really big and never get anywhere because they don't break the work down and execute day in and day out. I've learned you have to dream big so you will have forward momentum, but if you can't execute every day, then you will not get anywhere. 
• One Shot at a Time - We had wise former NCAA golfer give us advice that he learned from a golf instructor, "take one shot at a time." On the golf course you can't think about 2 or 3 shots ahead, you have to be completely focused on the shot you are taking. In business, it's easy to look ahead and dream, which you need to do, but you can also over analyze and lose focus. From time to time we'll remind ourselves to take one shot a time and just focus on the day at hand. 
• Team of Advisors - We've built an informal team of advisors that we go to for advice about our business. These are people that we can have lunch or coffee with and throw ideas out and get feedback. It's amazing to me how many people are willing to provide advice and guidance to us. We've been able to tap into a lot of knowledge, especially in areas where we have short-comings. We've certainly been able to create a better business because we've had this team around us. 

These are just a few of the learnings that I've had along the way. There are plenty more, so maybe I'll share in another blog post.

Don't start your business like Charlotte's streetcar to nowhere

Charlotte streetcar tracks with no streetcars using them

For whatever reason, it's seems like the last few months have found me a lot on Elizabeth Avenue here in Charlotte. This is probably why the Charlotte streetcar project has been on my mind lately. Sometime in the last 10 years somebody believed it would be a good idea to re-introduce streetcars back into the Charlotte transportation scene. Not in and of itself a bad idea. So the first bit of construction they did was to lay tracks, not at the start of the tracks, but at the end of one of the first phases on Elizabeth Avenue. I don't know the details, but the city removed funding or lost funding for the project so nothing more is being done. So this half mile stretch of tracks sits completed and dormant, not at the beginning of the line, but in the middle of the proposed line. Sitting there, day after day, month after month, year after year not being used.

I've been out working on my current consulting business (Torrent Consulting) for almost a year now and I've had a steady stream of people emailing me and calling me to talk about their business ideas. It's becoming pretty common place for me, and my business partner Phil Brabbs, to sit down with people to discuss their business or next idea. It's something we love to do, always looking to see how we can help someone along in their journey.

One of the things we've found is that a lot of people don't know where to start or what to focus on in their new business, so they go to the place where it is easiest or where they enjoy working the most. In other words, they lay their tracks in the middle of nowhere, not at the center of their business to build out from there. They may get excited about their idea or business and spend months building a web site or thousands of dollars trying to perfect a product that's never even sold to one person. They may spend 6 months building a business plan without ever talking to any potential customers or without having a real product or service that they've actually sold. Most of these ideas never get off of the ground or scale to anything more than a glorified hobby.

We've leveraged some ideas from the book Lean Startup by Eric Ries and customer development principles from Steve Blank's writings to push people to focus on their MVP, or Minimum Viable Product. What is the most minimum product or service you could deliver to your customer in order to get started? For example, could you just build 1 mile of tracks starting at the center of the city and run the streetcar along that stretch to see if it gets used and deserves funding the rest of the project? Could you just start baking pastries out of your house and start selling to friends to test your idea before you sink $100K into starting your own bakery?

In other words, start small and focus on the customer needs, trying to solve that problem in the most minimal way, which usually is the most inexpensive way to launch your idea. This will keep you much more intentional on listening to your customer and determining exactly what their needs are so your product can meet them. It will allow you to really quickly test your product and see if you are really meeting the needs of your customers.

The alternative to this is spending a lot of time and money laying tracks on a road that may never get used.

Your idea probably isn't great...but it doesn't matter

In the past 3 months I've read the book, "Start Something That Matters" by Blake (not Tom) Mycoskie, twice. It's a really great book that tells the story about how TOMS Shoes was started and grew.

There's one small quote that jumped off of the pages that I have been thinking about a lot lately: "...the success of most ventures actually lies in the execution phase, not in the idea."

For years I was always searching for the perfect business idea, but always afraid that if I committed to one idea that the next week I would think of a better idea and not be able to pursue it because I had already committed to the previous, now sub-par, idea. I had fallen into the trap that most people do: that success in a venture is directly tied to how innovative the idea is.

I'm learning that nothing could be farther from the truth. Of course, you need a decent idea with a good market for your idea, but that won't make or break you in your endeavor. What makes you successful is how you are able to translate your idea it goals, and your goals into an executable plan, and then the day-in day-out, week-in week-out, month-in month-out execution of that plan. There are some other variables, obviously, but if you can get up each day and execute your plan with great consistency, the odds of being successful are exponentially higher.

Some people have a hard time translating their ideas into a plan to form executable tasks. I believe it is actually somewhat of an art-form and and something that takes practice and can be learned. But if you are one of those people that struggles with that, then find someone around you that can help you do that and that will keep you accountable.

By the way, I believe this concept applies to all areas of life, not just business. You can have great ideals for being a good spouse or parent, but if you don't execute or act that out each day, it won't matter what your ideals are because it won't translate into meaningful action. A teacher has to execute about 180 days a year in front of students that don't want to be in class. It isn't the teacher's ideals that will make them great, it will be the grind of getting up each day and engaging kids in a way that imparts knowledge in a stimulating fashion, which in turn could produce the outcomes that the teacher envisions for his/her students and school.

Business Purpose #2: Invest into other people's lives

Business Purpose #2: Invest into the lives of our clients and employees

Behind every business there are people; people that have dreams, fears, struggles, families, sickness, seek affirmation and the list goes on. Most of us have worked for companies where we were just a number: employee JA-8941. It's pretty uninspiring to be a number...to know that at the end of the day your company really doesn't care what happens to you in your personal life as long as it doesn't interfere with you showing up at 8:30 on Monday morning and as long as you can get the TPS Reports out by the end of the week, and the rest of the time they really don't care what happens to you in your life.

We are so over that model! We are seeking to humanize our clients and employees and treat people as just that, human beings that exist for more than just creating widgets  We are looking to invest into those that we come in contact with in our day to day business. This plays out in a lot of ways, many of which will never be published on a web site or a Twitter post, but they happen quietly and respectfully.

I must add a disclaimer, we aren't perfect ourselves at this and we haven't even done all of these things listed here yet, but these are some of the ways in which we are/and hope to invest into our clients and staff.

• Dream Dreams and Live them out - Help our employees develop clear paths and opportunities for them to discover and pursue their personal dreams and passions.
• Be a Blessing - Seek ways to bless the lives of our employees' and clients' families.
• Invest in Families - Pay for weekend retreats for our employees and their spouses.
• Inquire - Ask people how you can pray for them. It's amazing how non-threatening it is to ask this and how willing people are to share their struggles. Most people are really grateful that someone cares enough to ask them about their lives.
• Pray for Others - Pray for our clients and employees. Each Monday morning my business partner, Phil, and I get together at 7:00 to pray for the upcoming week. We use this time to pray for our business and for those that we are going to come in contact with during the week. 
• Give Back to the World - Send our employees to other parts of the world where they can give back to. We haven't quite figured this out, but we hope to provide opportunities for our employees to go and give back to places in the world that have great needs that we can help meet.

Business Purpose #1: Meets the needs of our families

Business Purpose #1: Meet the needs of our families.

This seems like a pretty basic purpose and it really isn't that earth shattering, but I think it is important to state and set goals around what that will mean for us in the coming year. If we cannot meet the needs or our own families through our business or don't have a plan to get the business to a place where it can support us, then we probably should reconsider whether we should even be in this business. 

We believe it is vitally important that we build our salaries into the financial model and pay ourselves on a regular salary schedule so we can take care of our families. There may be times where we need to pay ourselves less for a while due to the nature of a startup, but our goal should be to get to a point where we are drawing a regular salary.

I've met people who don't have their own salaries built into their financial models or don't have any sort of idea what they should be paying themselves. This is very unhealthy for businesses as it creates a false financial picture and reality of their business.  It is a very healthy practice to pay yourself a salary no matter how much it is starting out. It could be $50 a week or $5,000 a month, but either way you should build it into your model even when you are starting out.

It's also demoralizing to work on something and not reap any sort of financial reward. It's human nature to want to be see the fruits of our labor and financial reward is a big piece of that. We want to make sure that we aren't robbing ourselves of that psychological encouragement as we ramp up the business. There are enough challenges and hard work ahead of us with this start up and we want all of the encouragement we can get, even if they are small victories starting out.

What's the purpose of your business?

What's the purpose of your business?

This is a question that I started exploring much more intently while living in Malawi, Africa in 2009-2010. Living in Africa causes one to return to the basics of living and surviving, which is why this question emerged for me. Business in Africa for most people is a simple means of survival. Buy $1 worth of tomatoes, sell them for $2 and feed my family the next day off of the $1 of profit. This simplistic view of business was one of the factors the led me to rethink my entire paradigm of business. (I could probably write a whole book about my business learnings in Africa, but I'll keep it brief for now.) I began reading, networking and exploring a new paradigm for the objectives of business. This learning continued as I returned back to the US the summer of 2010, but I didn't have a very practical way for it to be applied until the summer last year when I started my own business.

As I've moved down the path of starting my own business, I've been blessed to have people around me that have served as advisers and offered up their experience from which I could learn. As I've sought out advice from these people the question, "what's your business' purpose(s) or objective(s)?" has continued to surface. A few things that I've learned about the purpose of business:

• I've learned that if I/you can't answer this question (or aren't seeking the answers to this question), then we probably shouldn't be running our own business/organization.
• I've learned that if making money is my/your only objective for our business, then we will never be satisfied with our business endeavors.

So over the last few months my business partner and I have developed the purposes of Torrent Consulting and in the coming blog posts I will share these purposes. They aren't über polished or word-smithed very intensely, but I'll share them and maybe you'll find them helpful.