I received a phone call last week from a woman who had just discovered we were building a new soap room in Scottsburg. We had a nice conversation and then she made a comment that stuck with me. She asked me how long we had been in business and when I told her four years she said something like, “How did you manage that? I’ve been in business for 10-15 years and haven’t had that much success.”
I’m not sure exactly how I responded, but I probably said something like, “It was God’s grace and a lot of hard work.” While those are the basic reasons, the real answer is much more complex than that. There are a lot of factors that have gone into our success, and I’ve been thinking about those reasons.
Last night I was reading two online articles from Success Magazine about The 3 Big Questions for a Frantic Family by Patrick Lencioni. They quote him as saying:
The first and most important thing is to have a rally cry for your family. A rally cry is your family’s primary goal or top priority for the next one to six months. (Shorter than that is a fire drill and much longer than that is difficult to focus on.) Families function most productively when they have a common goal to achieve. Both short-term goals like taking a summer vacation or long-term goals like improving family communications help bring a family together. It gives them a rally cry to understand why “we’re all in this together,” Lencioni says.
