The dream for many is to be the owner of a business.  Why not? #000087

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Owning a Business

By Gary Shotton

Hello, my name is Gary Shotton and I am so excited to be with you today via video and I am starting with an introduction video that would outline a future series of videos that I hope will help you. I hope it will help you in either owning your own business and starting your own business and we are talking about smaller businesses.

I am an advocate of starting small and growing. So, I just hope you enjoy this. I hope it is helpful. I hope it’s beneficial. Now, I am not interested in just helping people in the United States of America. I would love to help people in my local community, but this series is intended to help you wherever you are in the world. I have friends in Mongolia, China, Myanmar, Mexico, Guatemala, Ecuador and this video series is intended to help you where you are at and it is not something that is just Americanized.

I have to tell you; the world is getting much smaller so it is a case of I hope this is universally true lecture or teaching. We just thank you for that. And now, to know a bit about me would be valuable, I think, because that would give you a point of reference.

I am happy that I was born and raised on a farm and ranch. My father was an entrepreneur. I got to sit under that. I did not know what was happening, I was just going to work every day, branding cattle, driving tractor, helping him along with my brothers and he was an entrepreneur deluxe. I dig back and learn from him. He has passed away more than 30 years ago, but I pull on that experience from him and I just thank God for that

So, from being raised on a farm and ranch, I graduated from university as an engineer and I worked my first 10 years for a big oil company. Now, that was good too. It was not for me because I did not want to work all my life for some corporation but that was okay because they paid me to learn some lessons about basic business and working with people.

Then I moved to a new town in Tulsa, Oklahoma area and I started my own first business. It was a moving and storage company. I started with a family-owned borrowed horse trailer pulled behind our family car, a 1974 Pontiac. I have some pictures of that and I hope you realize that what I am teaching you is not something I read in a book or went to university to learn. What I am teaching you are things I learned, you are probably faced with at different phases of life. And I feel a responsibility to share that.

After a few years, actually 17 years, we sold that business, my wife and I, and we now own a manufacturing company. We are sitting in the middle of our new products warehouse where we have parts here that are ready to sell. We made them in advance because of production requirements and we have these going out by the thousands. We are talking several hundreds of thousands of dollars per month in sales and 70 employees. So, once again, I have experience. I am willing to share my 40 plus years of experience and I hope you gain from it.

Now, I want to outline what is on the upcoming series. You can watch this video and say it’s not for me and save yourself a lot of time. Or you can take this video and say it is introduction and these are the things I will be teaching on and you can do with that as you want.

Number one, a lot of people come to me, they have an idea. Well, guess what? I have thousands of ideas and frankly ideas are cheap. Unless I can turn the idea into a business and the business to be profitable, that idea is not worth much to me. And then I want to teach you on how to find a business that fits you. People start a business for the weirdest reasons and I think God has molded you and guided you into something that is unique to you and you ought to own a business and operate a business somewhere into that corridor. And then after you kind of identified that, you might have an idea for a business that is inside your wheelhouse, is this thing actually feasible? We can do a little bit of work together, I will help you understand at the end of all this work, does it even have a chance of being profitable. That’s important.

People all around the world want to start a business, but many times they are waiting for some kind of money to get started. I say that is wrong. I would like to think like I did and like I saw my dad do that you can start a business with little or no money. Actually, no money. And I mean, don’t borrow money from your mom, from your grand mom, from your aunt. Don’t borrow money from the bank on your first business, I am going to talk about that.

Then we need to understand financial statements. Too many business people that I know even today, they don’t understand financially where they are at. They don’t understand income statements and balance sheets and cash flow analysis. We will talk about that on a series. And then writing your own business plan. We are leading up to something that at this point, you have done enough research and asked enough questions and you got an idea, you better be able to write it down in four or five pages, not 40 or 50 pages, write it down, so I could read it or somebody could read it and we will try to help you. I cannot answer all your questions, but I can read somebody’s plan and give some comments back and ask and answer that through that mechanism.

Now, getting a bank loan, there is a time to get a loan. I have a loan on this business. I.am not saying loans are bad, I’m just saying don’t start with one. There are business skills that you must learn that are different than just the technical skills of making a cake or fixing somebody’s hair or machining a part. The technical skills are one side, but understanding the financial and banking side or the business side is where you are really going to make your money. Experience, I think it is so valuable. If you are starting with little or no money, I will talk about experience as one of the keys.

A lot of people want just, they own the business and they start buying a new pick-up truck, running up personal bills. You have to have a discipline in my opinion to delay that. That is called delayed gratification.

And then, you’ve got your business. How are you going to make a profit? Well, I’m sold on systems. I have systems upon systems upon systems and I will teach on why I think a system is so paramount to any business. Well, that is an introduction of the steps that I plan to introduce and I am going to add more to that series than what I have just mentioned, but I would be amiss, I would be doing you a disfavor if I did not challenge you to take action.

This is not just check out this video, check out a movie, watch it, go home, and keep things the same. I am going to give you three points that you can take action now.

Number one, are you willing enough to give up something in your current schedule? If you are married, have children, if you are working someplace, all of us fill our time up with something. So, in my personal opinion, you must remove something outside your schedule and I would like to know what you took away from your schedule. Was it TV? Was it a hobby? Because you have to be serious about that.

These series are not intended to be all inclusive, everything you need to know. This series in intended to help you, but you will need daily ongoing help and I say find a mentor. You need a mentor within your church, within your realm of influence, within your community, and they are there.

I will help you. You identify them and I will help you introduce yourself to them so they will help you. And then, of course, I read biographies. I am not a great reader, so when I read something, mostly I like to read biographies.

Honestly that is why I like the New Testament. I am reading the biography of Jesus. I am reading the biography of Paul. I am reading the biography of Peter. I do not get every bit of it in the New Testament, but I see real people facing real problems and how they overcame it. So, I read biographies about Christian business owners and even non-Christians because I can see what they went through to get started. Not the end, but how they got started. With that, I just hope that you enjoy and benefit from being a part of this video series.

Thank you very much.