Owning a business could look to be all about profit, revenue, systems, and creating business goals, but helping others in the community should be a big part of the formula for success. By Gary Shotton #000376

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Love Your Neighbor

By Gary Shotton

This text is in Extreme Rough draft and will be edited in the near future.

Hello my name is Gary Shotton, and I’m here speaking to you in behalf of inspiring better business IBV talks. Today we’re kind of talking about helping the community. You know, every business has the day to day activities of business and it’s kind of a grind and you’re selling something and you’re producing something and you’re and you’re actually counting something I mean it can be very, very stressful, but as you grow in your business skills and you get a little bit bigger. There’s really it’s worth considering how can I be a help to the community. Now, I could say that you could do that individually. In our case we normally do that through our churches, and that’s also a very good way to do that but you will always, I believe, have a local responsibility to help the community that you’re serving. Let me give some examples. In the case of owning a business that I have. There’s people that have a need for a job that do not have extremely good history personally. And in particular, some of them have been in college, incarcerated they’ve been in jail. And we had a situation where a lady became aware of her skills or situation had recently coming out of prison for something that was a relatively minor and been in prison for just a little while, and had three children and she’s trying to hold her family together. And we took a chance we interviewed her, and she’s one of the best workers we possibly could have in our company right now. She’s very young in the company. And she’s very appreciative. And we pay her a very fair wage, but she was in our community and needed help. We provided a way for her to have a job. Now if she couldn’t do the job we couldn’t keep on if she doesn’t report to work on time and be diligent we couldn’t keep her so we’re not giving her a gift. Were we giving her a chance to be entered back into society, our church, for example, is very much into what’s called Love your neighbor, and some churches we know of a church in in Eldoret Kenya, that that church. And actually this business is quite large, when they go into a community and then we’re having a rock quarry that are a business, they’ve improved the roads for everyone, they actually did a survey of the older people in that neighborhood, making sure that they’re helping taking care of those older people. They also determined that that the children didn’t have a fair and good playground and they’ve made a safe playground with a few playground pieces of equipment, swing set, and a few basic things to improve the community. Our church has what’s called Love your neighbor, and they have a couple times a year especially that they call it’s a large church but they call for volunteers, and they say, tell us what kind of skills you would like to like you have, can you mow grass, can you paint fences, can you paint buildings, can you clean inside the house. What kind of things that you can do. And on one day, a large number of people, then divided up into small teams of four or five or six people. And for instance one team went out to a house where the elderly person didn’t have a chance to clean the backyard. It was a mess and didn’t have a chance to paint some of the fence or some of the walls of a house, and in one day five or six men did it all. Amazing. They went from terrible to why a quite a blessed looking place. Other people went in and help people in one day volunteered to clean houses to cook and to make provisions, some went over to a school, and again they put in a playground equipment, and I took a little money, and many times if you’re in a developing nation you say I don’t have a lot of money. Well, Time is just as valuable, and sometimes even more valuable than money just reaching out to help somebody. As a part of your company as a part of an individual effort as a part of your church. I believe God will bless that love your neighbor be part of the community. Do something that helps improve the community volunteer to help somehow, you have to have balance. Don’t overdo it. But in the process I believe God will bless you. If you get a chance, go to Eldoret Kenya and talk to our friends there, and you’ll see what they’re doing, it’s really fabulous. Well I hope this helps. Inspiring better business. Thank you.