Patience is a virtue especially in business. Without patience, it is easy to outrun the blessing that is about to come your way. By Gary Shotton #000316

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Patience

By Gary Shotton

Hello, my name is Gary Shotton and I’m here with you in my machine shop. There’re some workers in the background. We have about 60 employees, and we’re here making metal parts. I’m here today to talk about a word that isn’t all that exciting. Sometimes when you hear the word patience, it’s like I want to turn this off and listen to something else; but please stay tuned in because that’s a word that we need to talk about. You know we live in a society where everything is instant. We have microwave cooking, we have Next Day Delivery with orders we can buy online, we have same-day delivery in some cases. We have situations where if we’re driving behind somebody in on a four-lane highway or two-lane highway and they’re going slower than we want, we want them to hurry up. We’re not patient. And so, we’re going to talk about how patience plays into a business and how if you’re going to really be successful, you’re going to have to develop a skill that you become patient. You can be aggressive in your moves and in your motions and where you’re headed in life but you still have to have an element of patience. Because without it you’re going to find yourself running away from the blessings of learning something in your business career.

I’m going to use some examples about my dad. You’ve heard some if you’ve listened for very long. But I’m going to go in to more depth about some of the things I look back in my life with him. I’m going to talk about where I had to be patient. I always want it faster, we always want it now, but you’ve got to learn patience. Well, my dad first of all he was came out of the Korean War and that was shortly after the world war two. The ability to buy a tractor was not very readily available because they’d used all the metal and all the manufacturing capacity there for the war and so he wasn’t able to buy a tractor when he wanted one to start farming. That was his lifetime career. And he had to be patient because there wasn’t a tractor to be bought. He actually put his name in on a queue so that it was going to be about three years before he can get and buy a tractor. When he did that he actually enlisted into the Navy and that way when he came out of the Navy he had the money to buy the tractor. Oh my, three years I’m telling you three years planning so he could get his first tractor. Then he went into farming and I know situations where a year after year after year not week after week or months after month but year after year things didn’t go always so well. He was renting his land and he always wanted to buy the land. I know for a fact that it was about 20 years he was renting somebody else’s land, paying them for the rent while he was making what he could profit from his labor of farming with the equipment that he had. 20 years, 20 years of patience until when I was just out of high school and in college, he was able to buy a significant amount of land that was a part of our family farm. But the point is patience. He had endured through this process without a willingness to quit. Patience means it’s going to take some time.

He got into the cattle market. He would buy cattle year after year after year and fatten them into the beef cattle. There were times that the market dropped clear out of sight and he lost tons of honey. He was patient, he was consistent and he stayed with it. He didn’t give up. He didn’t quit. He wasn’t inclined to stop because he knew that there was going to be a reward if he stuck with it. That’s what we’re talking about in your business. There’s going to be times it doesn’t look so good. There’s going to be times you’re going to want to quit. There’s going to be times that you wish you had never started. But if you’re called to do something in the business world do not be quick to quit. You must maintain and be patient.

Well, in my life I worked my first nine and a half years for the big corporation and I got a nice paycheck and I experienced what it would be that worked for the big company. But I knew that wasn’t for me. I knew that I was going to need to own my own business. So, I moved to a new town. I was expecting to have a nice job just to launch me and then start my own business. Out of necessity, because I couldn’t find a job or a business that I thought would fit me, I started moving people with my borrowed horse trailer. A trailer that would be used to move horses or cattle and I put furniture in there and I started moving people, one family after another one, wash machine after another, and you know this went on for two years. I’m thinking this is just going to get me by. But after two years I decided you know this could be a business. And now I’m actually in business, but you know it didn’t happen overnight. It didn’t come about that I was successful overnight. I actually own that company for 17 years.

And I’m telling you that’s one of the qualities that I maintain was a diligence, but a patience to stick with it time after time, week after week, tough times. I knew what it was like to have a very large payroll and very little money in the bank and I had to work through that and learn. You see it was during those learning times, the times I didn’t want to be there that’s where I learned the most. I learned about my accounting and how to make sure I had a good control on my finances in my accounting. I learned how to manage people that were working for me because I had 50 to 75 workers at that time when I was in the thick of things. I had to work with people that were not necessarily all that excited about working for us, because it was a real manual job (moving furniture).

I had to learn to work with the customer. Oh, my goodness, we had customers that gave us all kinds of troubles. They gave us all kinds of grief. Most of the customers were fine, but a few were very bent on very determined to be difficult to work with. I had to learn how to work with them. That doesn’t happen overnight. This is not a get-rich-quick scheme. I’ve heard people and I know people that if it’s not going to be fast, if I can’t get rich quick, I’m going to try something else. You know I’ve watched and followed these people and they’re still trying to find that home run, that golden opportunity where they can get rich really fast. And in some cases, they’re like 10, 12, 15 years later they haven’t even started because they’re still looking for something. Because they’re not patient.

Patience is a virtue that you’re going to have to maintain I believe, and conquer in some degree if you’re going to be a successful business owner. Yeah, you know you can inch up rapidly but you can’t jump past certain steps because you’ve got to learn the lessons, and you’re going to learn more when things are going difficult than when things are going well. I guarantee you there. When everything is going too super smooth, the money’s coming in, you’re not learning much. You want to put yourself in a position that you’re actually testing your own patience. There’s a scripture in the Bible that talks about that, if any man lacks wisdom let him ask of God and He will give it to you. First, he’ll give you patience, and patience will give you endurance, and then endurance will give you faith. I’m not preaching to you. I’m just giving reference to a good book and that’s a reality at the process from wanting to have success there’s going to be some time of endurance and patience that is going to be necessary. Well I hope you will grasp some of this and in the process of time you will develop your patient muscle and become a success over time. Thank you for being a part of this. We bless you and thank you for being a part of Inspiring Better Business. Thank you.