Chasing Lions and Wild Geese

When I started writing this we were approaching a year since my wife, Lorenda, and I had been reunited, it's now a couple days past that date. Prior to that we had been separated for over two years. Shortly before our separation I began my search for God, not the God I wanted, or imagined, but the God who is. I believe Lorenda started her search shortly after our separation. We attempted to reconcile several times in that two years, but the pain and recollections of our individual offenses were much too closely held for that to take place. God's timing is nothing like our timing, his is perfect and he wanted us to know, with all certainty, that he was the one bringing us back together. We had completed the divorce papers and they had been filed, I think we were drawing near the end of a 60 day, court established, cooling off period when God, at the last minute, decided to change the outcome of our lives. Face now, the miraculous. After returning to Arizona, from my daughter Ashley's graduation in Spokane, we were two days away from a date that I had set as the "drop dead" date for our divorce. We had traveled together to and from Spokane, but stayed separate while we were there. The trip did not go well, and we fought through much of it. We had missed Church that week, our Church which we shared, although we had been attending separate services. When we returned home we were both informed of a sermon our Pastor had preached the week we were in Spokane and we both decided to listen to it on the Internet, separately. The day after Lorenda heard the sermon, the day of the "drop dead date", Lorenda moved home. You might ask; is that the miracle? Well, I believe it was a miracle, but that's not all. It's like the Lord God of Hosts erased my hard drive; I had no recollection of the things Lorenda had done over the years to offend me. I Was Free! Shortly after that, in a meeting with our Pastor to arrange our baptisms, Lorenda said that she did struggle with how I had offended her in the past, but not to a degree that she could not overcome, through the grace of God. If you're familiar with offense, unforgiveness and how Satan uses them against us, you'll understand the miraculous nature of what had occurred. Almost a year later now, and I'm living a life I don't deserve, with a wife I don't deserve, in God's mercy and grace which I certainly don't deserve. Praise The Lord!  

Now, every morning I wake up, read a daily devotional, the Word of God and some particular Christian book of interest. Lorenda reads the Word of God, and a particular Christian book of interest to her. Just the other day, Lorenda was reading "In a Pit, with a Lion, on a Snowy Day, by Mark Batterson. The title of the book is taken from 2 Samuel 23, 20:23 about Benaiah, chief of King David's body guard. I was reading the sequel to that book, "Wild Goose Chase" by Mark Batterson. The title for that book was taken from the Celtic Christian's word for the Holy Spirit, An Geadh-Glas, or The Wild Goose. I had finished my reading and was sitting out on the patio alone with God, when Lorenda came out, kissed me hard on the lips and proclaimed "you are a lion chaser; often people think you're crazy and you have no fear of uncertainty". I guess that's right, but not me, God's Holy Spirit who lives within me. I don't need to know where I'm going, because I'm chasing the Wild Goose. There is no reason to fear, because God is with me. God knows where I'm going and that's enough. What's so wonderful is that she seems perfectly content to travel that adventure with me, right by my side. Where could one find a wife like that?

I'm no stranger to risk, but reuniting with my wife was the greatest risk of my life, to date. I didn't take that risk on my own authority, rather in obedience to God. Our reunion must have been a huge risk for Lorenda as well. Obedience to God produces God's blessings upon us. I'm seeing the blessings of my obedience every day. So, the journey begins anew, and I couldn't be more content or feel more blessed.

A Time for Patience

For: DeeDee

For a time, I ran a guided horseback tour company in Arizona (Trail Horse Adventures). At our location in Sedona the terrain was pretty severe in some places, so it was a good location for producing wet saddle blankets. That is to say, If we had a hot horse we could just have a guide use him/her on their rides for awhile and they'd settle right in. Before you knew it, they'd be in the dude string.

One day our shoer brought in a couple horses he wanted to sell. One of them, "Carmelo", was not broke, but was very gentle. He was somewhere between 1 and 2 years old, and was just barely over pony size. I paid $400 for him. We immediately threw a saddle on Carmelo and started sending guides out on him, but only in the drag rider position, meaning, at the back of the line, behind the guests. Sound dangerous? Well it was, not for the guide though, for the horse. You see, I rarely met a guide that knew as much about horses as they thought they did. It didn't take long and Carmelo was doing pretty good on the one hour rides so I started sending him on our 2 hour creek crossing tours. That didn't go so well because every time they got to the creek, instead of crossing, he would simply buck the guide off. This had happened a couple times when I sent a female guide out on him who had not tried crossing on him before. She seemed to think she could get him to cross. She came back to the ranch about an hour later, completely soaked, boots full of water, and crying. Because of these failed attempts to cross the creek on Carmelo, the guides were starting to use that four letter word that I don't like so well, "can't", and it was then that I knew I'd have to step in and do something. So, I threw my saddle, the one with the good buckin' rolls, on Carmelo and rode drag on the next ride out. He did very well and was surprisingly manageable, until we got to the creek. He stepped up, lowered his head and took a good look at the creek and then just started prancing around a little and hollering at the other horses in the string, who were by now, 1/2 way across the creek. I just let the reins go slack and took a seat, quietly letting him do what he wanted. So, he moved up the shoreline, down the shoreline and back to the crossing. I just sat, patiently, quietly, waiting for nature take its course. By now, the rest of the horses had crossed the creek and had started toward home.  All of a sudden, Carmelo just gathered himself up and leaped as far as he could out into the creek. I think I let out a shout. Oh yeah, that was fun alright! He crossed for the first time and many multiples of times after that without a single problem.

Point is: I've never been a very patient man. It's really too bad we don't come hard wired with patience the way a horse comes with the instinct to join the herd. In fact, I'm not sure our own desire to join up isn't stronger than our patience. But, I can be patient when I can see that it's the thing that needs to be done to achieve a desired result. The rest of the time I just try to practice patience; you know, practice makes perfect.  

Paradigm Shifts

At the age of 52 my father announced that he was considering building a large grocery store in the Spokane Valley. He claimed, that if the store he wanted to build was not successful, he could loose everything. Not like he hadn't been on the brink before, but he was younger then and had significantly less net worth at risk. At 57,000 sq. ft. this store would be almost twice the size of our next largest store and would house over $1,000,000.00 in inventory. The interesting thing is, the time was right. There had been changes made over the years that allowed some mitigation of risk, and the concept had proven successful in the Midwest.

About that time a couple of companies entered the market claiming that they could accurately predict the sales of grocery stores of various sizes built on a given location. They had been having some success throughout the country. Before they came along most grocers used their own version of the S.W.A.G. method, (Scientific Wild Ass Guessing).

In addition we had just purchased our first desktop computer, a Burroughs. I don't remember the year but it cost $13,000.00, had very little hard drive, and ran on the dos operating system. Windows did not exist at that time. The thing came with a Multiplan spreadsheet software and over time I taught myself to use it. The spreadsheet made it possible for me to run sales and expense scenarios very rapidly and while that capability may not have actually mitigated risk, it did help us to understand the risk we were undertaking.

Finally, we had made trips to areas of the country where they were building this store concept and my father having experience in building stores had no problem overseeing its construction. At the time the store was under construction I was still managing the Sandpoint store and didn't go to Spokane to help out until it was time to bring in equipment and start stocking the store. Since I had been actively purchasing direct truckloads of merchandise for the Sandpoint store, I also purchased about $500,000.00 in direct truckload merchandise for the grand opening of the Spokane Valley location.

The store was completed, it was the last night before the grand opening. I'd walked around the store that day just to get a feel for it. It felt right, it looked right. Even though I had no knowledge of paradigm shifts, at the time, I suddenly realized I was in the middle of something different. A specific time or window of opportunity that would not last. That night at my Fathers home I suggested that we should start building a second store, of that same concept, in Spokane, right away. I guess he thought that was a little funny when he asked me where we'd get the money. I knew he had a couple grocery store buildings that he'd been leasing out. I just blurted out, sell the Deer Park building if you have to we need to get another one up as quick as we can. Shortly thereafter he did sell the Deer Park building, and we began construction on the Foothills store.

If you understand the history of a certain industry and stay on top of the latest technological advances across industries you can, to some degree, predict the future. Predicting the future is where entrepreneurs stake their claim to fame and fortune. Keep an eye out for paradigm shifts.

Thoughts on Mentors

I struggled a little writing this piece because in some ways it may sound disrespectful. It's not meant to be; it's just what it is.
I can't say I know any natural born mentors, which leaves me to believe that mentors are made, not born. I myself, would not make much of a mentor. I really don't have the patience for it, although I'm sure some clever individual could extract mentoring from me. Personally, I had a fantastic mentor, but it was work. It's not like he came up to me and said come on - let me mentor you. Far from that. I selected my mentor and when it came for the selection process, there was only one clear choice for me, the best in the business. I wanted the best in the grocery business, only later did I discover that his knowledge would encompass all retailing, and to some degree all businesses. That's who I wanted and that's who I trained to become my mentor. I found the secret by mistake one day. My mentor was never really much of a conversationalist, unless you were talking to him about business. I discovered this sometime after I began working for him. I was trying to maintain a conversation with him at his lake home one weekend and discovered that talking business made for rare, easy conversation. Once I knew that was the only thing he really actually loved to talk about, I knew I could build a mentor. Of course I loved talking business as well, so it worked.

As time went by I began to acquire most of the knowledge I needed and began using that knowledge applied to various situations to develop some new tricks of my own. I was gathering information and new techniques from wherever I could whenever I could. As I began to introduce these techniques to my subordinates in an effort to further improve operations my mentor would, at times, let me know I had gone too far. My real problem was that I had not gone far enough. I had found a program developed by Tom Winninger called "Selling in the Supermarket". As a store manager, I had trained my employees using this program and felt that it had be very helpful in improving sales and customer relations. When I was promoted to Operations Manager and given the assignment of training all 500 employees, I used this program as the center piece. One of the key points in this program was asking "open probe" questions, and that extended to answering the telephone. All 500 employees were taught to answer the telephone with an open probe question - "how can I help you?" As it turned out my mentor did not like this telephone greeting so one day he told me he wanted me to have our employees stop answering the phone that way. This of course, was very upsetting to me. I had spend a lot of time and money teaching all 500 employees to ask open probe questions and that training alone had produced some significant sales increases for the company. I tried explaining why they were taught to answer the phone that way and how significant it was to our overall training, but it didn't matter. He wanted it stopped. I had to buy some time to regroup and prepare my sales pitch so I got him to put the matter on hold until he returned from the vacation he was about to take. While he was gone I contemplated the matter and worked on what exactly I was going to say to him when he returned, I was sweating it out though; it wasn't going to be easy. When he returned I had planned to schedule a meeting with him to discuss the topic, but when I called him he wasn't interested. It seems that while he was on vacation the resort he stayed at had been trained to ask open probe questions and in fact he was running into it everywhere he went. I was allowed to continue my training and the employees continued to answer the phone with "how can I help you". One of the greatest things in the world is having a mentor - don't make the mistake of thinking it's going to be easy. My mentor was/is my Father.

Enthusiasm

Let's call this my version of Marley & Me. One of the most important things to take into any project and life is enthusiasm. It's not always easy for humans to maintain that enthusiasm throughout a project let alone life. Not so with my dog Sable. We live on a 7 acre property in Sedona Arizona. There are a lot of lizards on our property and Sable thinks it's her job to find them and kill them. We sort of reinforced that in her when we started taking her down to work at the warehouse each day. We got into this thing of asking her each day if she was ready to go to work. She knows what that means now and each day when we ask her she gets very excited. She'll start jumping up and down, running to the door and then running back to me and back to the door again. Now that's enthusiasm. As long as we're down at the warehouse she'll be out chasing lizards, her little tale stub just wagging like crazy. Funny thing is she rarely ever actually catches a lizard. Still she maintains her enthusiasm for work. You'd think she'd get discouraged, but I guess that never crosses her mind. She knows each day she's going to go to work and do her very best to do her job. Some mornings if we don't go down to the warehouse early enough she'll begin to come to my desk to get me. She'll lead me to the door as if to say come on, we gotta get to work. I ask her to be patient but she just can't contain her enthusiasm. Of course, Sable reminds me to do many things that I should do that I often forget. Before we go to work she always stretches right in front of me as if to remind me, don't forget to stretch. She leads by example, she can certainly show you how to be enthusiastic. Dale Carnegie teaches, "act enthusiastic, and you'll be enthusiastic". I believe enthusiasm is important to success and although it doesn't always seem to come as naturally to me as it does to Sable, I can certainly act enthusiastic until I get myself there. Thanks for the reminders Sabe, you're the best.

Turning A Negative Banker/Partner

For about 12 years I put my entrepreneurial pursuits on hold to help my father with his. I don't think that I'm talking out of turn here because he knows I think he's a little too pessimistic and sometimes negative. I'm the opposite and maybe that's why we were so successful together. In the early 80's he purchased a really bare bones type warehouse market grocery operation in Sandpoint, Idaho. Did I mention I love Idaho? I moved from Spokane to Sandpoint to manage that store, his 3rd at that time. It was immediately the most profitable and was showing steady growth. About the time he had purchased that store another local grocer had sold his store to Safeway and a few years later he decided to build another store just a stones throw away from our old beat up steel warehouse with cement floors. My Father would visit the store about every two weeks from Spokane, we would go over numbers and discuss operational changes. From the time the new store up the street began construction every visit had a similar tone. From my Fathers prospective we were going to loose 35% of our business and no matter how positive I was and no matter what I was doing to prepare, he was convinced, we were going to loose 35% of our business. While all this was going on I was trying to improve customer service by training my employees in "Selling in the Supermarket" and another training program dealing specifically with customers feelings. While I was working on that at the store, at home I was working out pretty hard. I was building up for the fight. I had no misconceptions about what we were, we were never going to be the prettier store, we were the price store. We would win or loose this fight on price and customer service, that's just the way it was. I believed we would win, and my training helped keep me in a positive frame of mind, even with the negativity in my face every other week. On my Fathers last visit before the new store up the street opened he decided he was ready to do what he could to stop our 35% loss in business. He told me on that visit "spend $100,000.00 if you have to, but don't loose market share". Now that put a smile on my face, I had everything I needed to win the war. To make a long story short, the store up the street opened and within two weeks of that I was showing moderate increases again. In that quarter I had spent $52,000.00 of my allotment. Within a couple years the new store closed down, I thought I had the final victory. That's when my Father explained to me that once a store had been built, someone would be occupying it. Sure enough, I had another competitor within a year and we started the cycle over again. Stay positive, work hard, listen to the nay sayer's when you have to, but make sure they are hearing you.

Partner/Banker Negative Energy

Let's start with what not to do, when your partner/banker is flooding your space with negative energy. I heard this story about my Grandfather from a family member. At one time my Grandfather had opened a grocery store in a small town. I guess he borrowed some money from the bank to get it done. One day the banker came in and was giving him a lot of grief because he was behind on his loan payments. At some point Grandpa got fed up and threw the keys to the store to him. He told the banker if he was so damn smart why didn't he go ahead run it himself. Then he walked out. Now, as much as you might want to do this - don't. Grandpa sure gets points from me for that one though.
When I have a negative banker/partner I try to limit contact with them as much as possible to reduce their impact on my Psyche. When I do have to meet with them I try to prepare. I want to flood them with as much positive information as I can. Of course, I listen to what they have to say, but still I won't allow the general negativity to get into my head. If they're talking about all the things that could go wrong, I'm talking about all the things we can do to avoid that outcome. Never let them drag you into that negative thought, the outcome would be bad for both of you.