Business and Prayer – Week Four

Week Four

My lawn care friend and me showed up at the meeting about thirty minutes early because we both decided to try to add prayer to our business dealings. We had heard that this was a good move from several other business owners and so we aimed our meditations. Why not add the supernatural to our natural attempts. At first we were both a bit nervous as how to start but after about ten minutes we got a rhythm. Most of our prayers for success were about surrendering all of our efforts to God and asking Him to show us how to best run our businesses. It felt good to join up with a fellow brother and do this – we committed to this practice for the following weeks and we both have high expectations for the results.

The speaker this week was a businesswoman who runs a highly successful Lubbock catering firm. Catering in Lubbock is a huge field and so we were all excited to see what she would share. Our excitement was not disappointed. This woman talked about how their business used generosity to build up a positive face in the community. She told about how for the past several years that her company opened themselves up to giving away their catering services to non-profits who needed to make money to do their jobs better – make things easier for them. She said that by giving away free food to these groups created a powerful word of mouth among those in the community and actually drew a lot of new customers who were extremely loyal. She said it seemed that their generosity did not take away from their profits but instead raised their profits by over 25%. I was amazed at hearing this sort of idea because it had never occurred to me to do the same with my business. During our dialogue time, she posed the question, “What can you give away to non-profits that will do the same sort of thing for all of us?” And the discussion around this question was great. Other businesspeople there piped in and either told how they too had used generosity to bolster their community reputation and almost everyone else there shared what they planned to give away so that they could do the same things and hopefully get a raise in profits. All in all it was a fantastic group meeting.

I am interested in hearing from you readers – what do you think of this idea? Would you also be willing to be generous in various ways to raise community awareness of your business? Please feel free to comment and share your opinions and ideas about how this might affect your business in a permanent positive way?

I look forward to hearing back from you.