Hello. My name is Gary Shotton, and I sure enjoy doing this and I hope these things are helpful to you, and today we are going to talk about the “Power of Words”. The things we speak; the words we speak. You know, I am going to talk about how words can be influenced and how things result, but never am I stating that you can just speak over something in place of doing good business. In other words, you need to understand your financial statements. You need to understand the flow of your business. You need to understand your product. You need to understand a ton of things, and that comes first, and without that you are probably not going to be a successful business. Those are other topics we are going to talk about but understanding that you have made diligence at being a good businessperson. There is one more thing. It is like the cherry on top the ice cream.

The dessert. The power of words. You know I watch my words, and they have a creative ability. I do not fully understand it. I do not understand how this all works. I have a particular interest in the Bible, and how God teaches us. So, I am going to refer to that a little bit.   Whether you agree with that or not that is up to you, but I will tell you as a matter of history using the Bible as a textbook only, you will read in Genesis that the heavens and the Earth were created. I say created by words. God spoke and different things happened. The light happened. God spoke and the Moon came. God spoke and the heavens and the Earth were separated. God spoke, and those are words. That is how powerful the words are even biblically. There is the reality of how Jesus was born. Again, you can agree with this, or you can go another direction.

That is up to you, but it was told clearly that Mary never had relationships with Joseph and Jesus was born. God spoke that into existence. So, there is a precedence here that you need to recognize. Now, let us go into the moving. Let us go into the business world. What do I mean by it? Well for 17 years, I owned a moving and storage company that means I picked up furniture. Dressers, sofas, mattresses, desks for offices, and our workers picked up these things. Maybe we carried them down two flights of stairs, and maybe we just carried them out the door. Maybe we carried them 10 feet and maybe we carried them a hundred feet. Maybe we used a dolly, and we could roll them down, and maybe we just picked it up and carried it. But we loaded furniture, and, on many occasions, we had to determine do we have a big enough vehicle, a big enough van, a big enough truck? Will this stuff have any chance of fitting into the truck?

Now again, if there was no way it was going to fit into the truck, it is not going to fit, but if we knew it was going to be close, we were careful what we talked about. We would not say things like, man. There is no way this is going to fit. I am sure that– we’ll try.” No, we did not say that. We said things like there is lots of room. We believe, keyword, we believe there is lots of room. We believe that we can fit it all in and not have a second truck. We believe that we can fit things tighter than ever before, and you know it was so funny. Sometimes we would finish the truck and we knew how close it was, and we would pull that door. Many times, it came down like this, and we could just barely shut the door. It was a good load. We fit it all in, but it all fit. Man. Let me tell you another example. I own this machine shop. I bought it a little bit cold turkey. What do I mean by cold turkey? I did not know much about machine shops.

I knew about business, but I did not know about this based business, and I bought it, and I borrowed money to buy it. I am testing my business skills. I am at the peak of my test, and I have some loans, some big loans, and I own it from the year 2006 and on January 1st, 2009, the economy dropped. Big-time, huge layoffs, lots of workers. We went from 65 employees to employees we had to relieve of their duties because we did not have work. You know, I had to watch what I said. I could have said things like “Oh, no. We are going to go under. Oh, this is terrible. There is no way we are going to make it. I cannot understand what has happened. Woe is me.” No do not say that. Do not do that. I did not do that. I said this, “You know, I don’t fully understand this. It does not look all that good, but we are going to come through this as a better company. We are going to come through it stronger than ever before. We do not understand it, but this is going to be a good thing.

Not a bad thing, because it is going to allow us to get rid of bad habits. It is going to allow us to clean out some of the employees that we probably did not want to have here anyway. We’re going to come through this stronger than we ever have.” This is where we are at right now. I am videoing.   You are watching this when I am sitting in basically March of 2016. We’ve had a smaller economic turndown, and I’ve said in this situation, I wouldn’t say things, “Oh no. What are we going to do? Oh!” and wring my head and hands and have sweat on my brows. That is not going to help the situation. I said “You know, this is going to be a shorter economic turndown than ever and imagine. You know what? When we are going to come back, we are going to be stronger than we ever did before. It is going to be so amazing. The amount of work we’re going to get.” and you know, the first of this week, we actually started this happening.

We laid some people off and we had to cut the workforce, but we are coming back strong. I had this happen on a personal basis. I will not go into detail. It was a close associate of mine had a depression issue, and this depression issue was severe to the point of a deep depression, and I had to think of this situation like no, woe is me” This is never going to work. What’s going to happen?” Sure, it was in my mind. I had some thoughts, but I would not speak it out. I said things like “This person is going to come out a better person than ever before. They are going to be a better husband than ever before. They are going to be a better father than ever before. They are going to be a better part of their family than ever before. They are going to be a better part of society. They are going to come through this stronger than if it had never happened.

And in fact, even though we did not want it to happen, and they did not want it to happen, it has a purpose, and it’s going to come through as a someone that’s going to help others in that same situation. And you know what happened? It happened. They came through it. They found something better than before. They are stronger than before. I am so proud of this person. Last one. We had an employee here just last week had a furnace, a small explosion right in their face. It burnt them immediately. They were life lighted. With an emergency, we heard about this, a small group of us. Within the same couple hours, there was a text and it said “Danger. He’s in serious condition.” and we four of us huddled and prayed, and we said you know this person, his name’s Ray, he’s going to recover.

First, it is not going to be near as bad as it first looked, and the second thing we said with our mouths and prayed with our prayer is that he is going to recover faster than anybody ever imagined. You know that was a couple of Saturdays ago, and God is my witness he is coming to work tomorrow. Faster than ever expected. Was not near as serious. Did not even spend more than a couple hours in the hospital. They life flighted him like life and death. They got there and it was so much better than they imagined. They released him in a couple three hours, and he did not spend the night. We hope this is helpful. We hope you would share this with others. If it is helpful to you, it could be helpful for others. Thank you so much for listening.