ASI 2010: Inspired to Finish Strong

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ASI 2010 Seminar: Business

Dene Sue Ross

For Such a Time As This: A Business Plan that You Can Live With!

Our Heavenly Father, we thank you for bringing us all safely here to ASI Orlando, Florida.

And we pray just now, Lord, that the Holy Spirit will fill our hearts and our minds.

I pray that the words that I speak will be your words, Lord, and that the Holy Spirit will bring home those points that will bless each and every 1 in attendance this morning.

We ask for this in the name of Jesus Christ, who is our Lord and our Savior.

I'm hoping if the folks could move up because it's a little bit hard to hear you there.

Please, let me invite you to come forward.

It's much nicer for me to have you a little bit closer anyway.

Again, my name is Denny Sue Ross and I'm the founder and the president of Rightway Inc.

Is a contract technical writing and training firm based just outside of Boise, Idaho.

How many of you know where Boise, Idaho is?

Our business objective is to place contract technical writers, documentation specialists, and trainers into a variety of state and local governmental businesses and corporate.

Most of my work days are spent in an office at the Capitol Mall in Boise.

And that will be important later on in some of the things that I'm going to share.

While I'm there during those hours of the day, I serve as RightWay's contract monitor to the state of Idaho.

Now let me give you a little bit of an introduction to today's seminar.

Of course, the title of it is, for such a time as this, A Business Plan That You Can Live With.

I have to confess, I really had a great deal of difficulty arriving on a title and coming up with a description for this course and they ask us to do this about 6 months ahead of this weekend.

Well, in the last 6 to 8 weeks, more has happened in my workplace witnessing situation than in perhaps the last 12 years.

So I have to warn you this morning that the content of this seminar has dramatically changed since the description was written and I want to give you a little heads up about what I want to talk about this morning.

First of all, I want to talk about, as Adventist business owners and professionals, what is the practical application of accepting the call to workplace ministry.

I want to also talk this morning about what it is like and what we can expect if we are telling the truth in these kinds of troublesome times.

Because the times we're living in are different than they were a year ago, 5 years ago, 10 years ago.

I also want to talk about living out our witness in the workplace.

I'm not going to focus a great deal this morning on specific suggestions about we'll do this or do that.

We're going to talk a little bit more about the philosophy and the theory and the boundaries that we have to work within and what the biblical principles of being called to witness in the workplace are this morning.

If you want to get some tips and suggestions, you are in the right place because ASI is a very rich environment in terms of providing you with workplace materials for witnessing.

Barbara Taylor, who's going to be doing a seminar tomorrow morning, has developed a little booklet called Witnessing Made Simple.

And she has about a hundred of the best ideas I have ever heard for marketplace witnessing in that little book.

And for every 1 of Barbara's suggestions that you read, you will think of at least another 1 that will bounce off of 1 of her ideas.

Also, the last thing we're going to talk about this morning is persistence under persecution.

I was baptized in 1996, and since I came into the Seventh Day Adventist Church, I hear a lot about a time of trouble that is yet ahead of us.

For some of us it'll be here tomorrow or the next day.

But my personal experience tells me that it will be coming for each and every 1 of us.

And talking about persisting in troublesome times is different than actually doing it.

And I think that we need to admonish and lift 1 another up and that's what we're going to do this morning.

Now as I said, quite frankly, some events have happened over the past 6 to 8 weeks that have really dramatically changed the content of what we're going to talk about this morning.

And that is my conviction that we have been called for an incredibly special purpose at an incredibly special time.

There are those right now, even as we meet here this weekend, who either are or are very close to becoming willing to accept Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior.

And the Holy Spirit is going to bring the right people across your path at the right time.

Quite frankly, as Seventh-day Adventist business professionals, I don't think that we can afford to further disregard the fact that God has a business plan for us.

And in fact, it is a business plan that we can truly live with.

1 that has been designed to grow us, to bless us, and to bring us where we need to be.

I'm feeling so sentimental about being back here in Orlando, Florida.

I just want to share a little bit about how witnessing for Jesus Christ in the workplace began for Dan and I.

We attended our very first ASI National Convention in Orlando, Florida in 1999.

And I cannot begin to tell you the change that it has made in our lives.

But trust me when I say when we got on that airplane and returned to our offices in our home in Boise, Idaho, nothing has ever been the same.

I left here that weekend with a much greater understanding of my role as a 7th Day Adventist business person.

My perspective was totally revolutionized.

I want to outline 3 things that really changed for me that weekend.

You might want to jot some of these words down if this rings true with you or if it resonates with you.

First of all, when I left that initial weekend, I was a little bit rattled, a little bit shook up to find out that my business goals, my purposes, my priorities, and my definitions of success were not only completely out of line with those of the Lord, but that in fact they were unsuitable and unacceptable for a Seventh-day Adventist business person.

I knew when I left here that things had to change.

I knew that I was going to have to become willing to surrender the true ownership of RightWay back to its true owner.

How many of you here this morning are business owners?

Okay, oh my goodness, then I really am speaking to the right audience.

Well, you know the kind of people that we are.

We have these tendencies and we have these traits and we probably didn't end up being Adventist business owners by mistake or by accident and we have tendencies to want control of the businesses that we feel that we have founded or given birth to or started and sometimes it's easy for us to forget who has the true ownership of our business.

I also realized that I was going to have to become willing to even accept the calling because God had a different plan in mind for me than what I had for myself.

So let's talk a little bit about what does it mean in a nuts and bolts, kind of rubber meets the road way.

Now we have precious little time this morning, so I am going to make an assumption that you all embrace some fundamental spiritual truth like the fact that do we all believe here this morning that we are called to be ministers for Jesus Christ.

We don't have to convince any of you of that.

In addition, do we all agree that it is the Holy Spirit who does the convicting and the calling?

And I want you to know this morning that the purpose of this seminar is not to guilt you into doing something.

The purpose of this seminar is to inspire you so that you can leave here and return to your homes and inspire others.

When I first began my workplace ministry, I realized that my understanding of the concept of being called to minister in my marketplace had been very strongly influenced by my whole world view.

Now, I'm about to share some things with you and this might cause you to chuckle, but I think if you search your soul, you'll find out there's a little of this in all of us.

I felt that I had a duty and a responsibility as an Adventist business person to achieve and to succeed.

And a standard world view was dictating to me exactly what that meant.

But just to show you how easily we can be misled or we can mislead ourselves, I want you to take a look at 3 things.

Number 1, I felt that my first responsibility was to take care of my own needs.

We have a lot of biblical support for taking care of our own needs and taking care of the needs of others, correct?

And on top of that, we can also justify our position that we are in fact bringing glory to the Lord.

You're going to hear a lot this weekend about how we walk the walk and how we're watched by others and people are watching us to see what we're doing and all of that is in fact true.

John Thomas

Creating Value, Making a Difference

I'm really honored to have been invited to speak at ASI, especially coming from last year at university.

But today my topic is creating value and making a difference.

Because I serve as the Dean of the School of Business at Lawson University, I will explore the subject primarily from the perspective of business education, especially entrepreneurial education, as offered at Lawson.

Entrepreneurial business education at Lawson is on 1 hand very much like any other school at any reputable institution in the world.

It develops courses and experience that help students develop competencies in management, accounting, marketing, and finance.

For budding entrepreneurs, this also includes stimulation of vision, passion, innovation, and courage.

However, on the other hand, entrepreneurial business education at La Sierra is very different from what is offered in most business schools.

The difference stems from its foundation in the Seventh-day Adventist mission.

This mission is to help prepare the world for the return of Jesus.

It is to be achieved by the proclamation of the everlasting good news of salvation through faith in the death and the resurrection of Jesus.

It is to be embodied in the life of service to others as commanded by Jesus of Nazareth and exhibited in his daily activities.

According to the Gospel of Matthew, he even stated that people would be judged ready for his return only if they have served others in this way.

I will explore 3 major themes today in the context of entrepreneurial business education and Adventist mission.

Creativity, creating value, and making a difference.

Human creativity derives from God's creativity.

Creativity is essential for entrepreneurs.

However, creativity is not a product of human development, but an innate divinely given human characteristic.

Humans creatively derives from God's creativity.

The foundation for this lies in the creation stories of Genesis 1, 2, and 3.

In Genesis 1, chapter 1, God is at the center stage directing the origin of everything through a series of creative proclamations over 6 days.

This climaxes with the creation of humans.

According to the stated divine strategic plan, these complex beings are to be in God's image.

This means that in some important aspect, they are like God.

We could explore the rich nuances of this idea.

However, in the text to this point, there's only 1 characteristic of God that is clear.

Therefore if humans are in God's image they must also have the capacity of creativity.

Of course while God is the Creator with a capital C, we are creators with small c.

In Genesis 2, the creation story focuses mostly on the creation of humans.

Man's first activity is an exercise of His creativity.

He's invited to give names to the newly minted animals.

Human creativity is valid only as it retains its relationship with divine creativity.

In Genesis 3, human creativity becomes distorted and misused when separated from God's creativity.

The moment man or woman decided that they knew more than God, it led to the alienation from God and from the life that resides only in God.

They became oriented to death and the world hostile to their lives.

However, God did not abandon them, but activated a plan for the ultimate restoration.

Even if diminished, the image of God still resides in them.

They still possess divinely given creativity.

That creativity would be necessary for their survival as they toiled and sweat to provide food for themselves.

God works in and through human creativity to make people's lives better, richer, longer, and more fulfilled.

Creativity is the heart of social change.

Quantum leaps and societal changes have been made through creativity.

Let's look at simply the development of money and of the pricier system.

Beneficial relationship between you and I could only occur through the fact that we have a price mechanism.

And the economics literature is filled with examples of creative ideas of creating value.

Institutions like schools, hospitals, and churches mobilize communities for improvement.

And we should include in this group the many good things ASI has done through the last 63 years around the world.

Creativity is essential for social change.

Here is an example of how students and lay members have used their creativities to mobilize and improve lives in a small village in a small village in Ethiopia called Kalala, way back in 2004.

I, for my part, am grateful that I have the opportunity to speak on this issue today.

We are moved by the fact that there is a great need for that.

It is a little bit sad to say that these people do not have the opportunity to come to this area My name is John Collins, Dean of the School of Business and Management at Longstreet University.

This year, we borrowed a credit card that took our students to jail.

We built a small, old school on a station in Longstreet.

Yet, it is 1 of the cores, we chose to communicate on a particular basis, on a particular occasion, that we had the message of the Indian government was still in touch with the time, the money, the effort, and made sure that the start that we had had would be successful.

I'm David David Rivera, and I'm a student at the University of Los Angeles.

I'm currently a sophomore in Spanish and English majors.

I had the opportunity to learn at the A&M and work with the ITP on this project.

I had a great experience meeting a fellow there.

I had the opportunity to work with a local farmer in a small school in the town of Colada.

People there were extremely helpful as to the phenomenal farm that we had in Colada school.

And they were also very interested in learning the new genomics and new ways to deal with animal life.

And this is to me, for a great honor to be able to visit the center of the group of center founders for that historic day that I pursued, I apologize.

And I've been a part of the Boston University team since 1999, which is my first international project.

So this project I got to visit Ethiopia and work with a little school in Kerala.

This school was fun to work with because we got to explore with the students, as well as local farmers and local people in that community.

The other thing we got to do was work with the farm with goats and cows.

The interesting thing for me was to meet Nesbitt and her baby Syke.

Those 2 folks were the more important people we got to work with.

The experience was enjoyable and I have to give it back to the education agency.

Thank you for supporting this part of the community.

Thank you for giving us the opportunity to support and empower the people of Kalama to produce A-Mount soldiers, for enjoying this part of New York.

Thank you for doing this production, this sport, and the power that we brought up to allow to produce Vietnam soldiers, to produce Vietnam that are the ultimate of themselves.

And finally, thank you for the generous support and for the business you have made.

And I thank you and I'll see you in the first 1.

Thank you for the generous gift, the freedom it has given, and I thank you for the loss of your person.

♪♪ to come over here, down to the bathroom, and meet with the farmers.

Thank you all for coming here on a very high day, on a very high day for the U.S.

We hope that this interview will provide a good, on how you make a very high-quality product.

So much of the hope that this is a dream, a lot of people, a lot of people, believe that this is a dream.

We want to first thank the biggest appreciation by the university, the society, and all the other donors that came to support me with the work that I did.

I'm so impressed by how you all people from inside, the students, the professors, have sought to get this project off the ground.

And I think we want to get hand in hand, go from the side and then ask local politicians.

I'm sure we can make a difference, not only for the school and the community, but we can be physically more that was in 2004, Ed and I were there in Ethiopia and it has some bad memories for me because while I was in Ethiopia I was told that my wife had cancer.

But God is good And my wife still is a survivor and survives today happily.

But let's take a closer look at the definition of creativity.

Wayne Atwood

Barbara Taylor

Six Secrets to Success in Business and Beliefs

Today we're going to be talking about things pertinent to our business world, in our business life.

And I'm going to share with you a little bit, a little bit about some of the ideas.

I always tell everybody, Everyone throughout their life has what I call a million dollar idea.

And when I was very young, I was in my early 20s, the very first idea that I came up with in my mind in the world of business was I wanted to start a chain of Snoopy restaurants.

Now are you familiar with the Peanuts cartoons?

Well, I decided that this would be a great idea.

I was working at the time in the hotel industry for the Hilton Hotels, and so as I Was starting to contemplate this idea, I thought, you know, I'm just going to put together a menu and I'm going to put together a business plan.

And I didn't have a great idea about business plans back in those days.

But I set up a menu and I decided that we are going to, and again, the restaurant was going to be a Snoopy dog house with Snoopy laying on top of the dog house as you see in the cartoon in the Peanuts characters.

And I was going to have little Linus napkins, the little blue napkins for security napkins.

And we were going to have little Linus hot dogs and we were going to have little Linus hot dogs, and we were going to have salt and pepper shakers that were going to be Lucy and Charlie Brown.

We had the little dog dishes that were going to serve the food, and so I had all these little ideas.

I made the whole menu out, and I just put everything around the characters of the Peanuts cartoon.

I also decided that we were going to have a gift shop at the very beginning of the restaurant, so that when the people came in, all the children could buy all the little Peanuts characters and the little cartoons they could take or the little dishes and the salt pepper shakers, everything they could buy there in the gift shop and take it home.

And I thought, this is a million dollar idea.

And so I had everything put together, and at that time, Baron Hilton was in charge of the Hilton Hotels.

I actually sent a letter off to Charles Schultz, who was the character cartoonist, And he lived at 1 Snoopy Lane.

He even agreed to have the restaurants at a 10% commission royalties.

And I was so excited and I went to Baron Hilton and I gave him this idea and I gave him the menus and I put everything together and he turned me down.

And of course I was only 24 at the time, I had no money, I had no financing, and I just was so deflated.

And I've always thought over the years, I wonder what it would have been like had we been able to start a chain of Snoopy restaurants.

But then I came up with another idea later on.

A friend of mine was lost in the woods and could not find, for 2 days they were lost and they could not find them.

And they spent tens of thousands of dollars searching for this party who had been lost.

And I thought, you know, why don't we come up with an idea where we will take a little container about the size of a small cigarette lighter, we'll have helium in it, and we'll have a cord that will go up in the air and will have kind of like a weather balloon so that if someone gets lost, they can have this little kit that would cost approximately $5.

And if they're out in the woods or on a boat or somewhere a child is lost or something, you just teach this little child, you just press this little button right here, the balloon would inflate, would go up, you have to be in a clearing where it could clear the trees, And I thought, you know, this is going to save millions and millions of dollars if people get lost.

They'll be able to find the person by finding this brightly colored, I had an orange and red balloon concept in my mind, and it would be iridescent and people could see this balloon and be able to rescue them.

Once again, I never followed through on this million dollar idea, and later on I found out that 5 or 6 people had patented a similar idea, and it never came to fruition.

And I thought, you know, isn't that a sad thing, because you still hear about people, millions and millions of dollars of people trying to find lost children, lost people that are in the woods or that are on camping trips or things like that.

Later, as I did get into the business world and was involved in many different types of businesses, I eventually came to own a men's sportswear business with 4 other gentlemen.

And we built the business up to a $43 million business and I learned very quickly that to be able to succeed in business you must have a plan.

You cannot have a successful business without a plan.

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Series

ASI 2010 Seminar: Business

Six Secrets to Success in Business and Beliefs

Transcript

Parent Series

Parent Conference

Sponsor

Recorded

Parts

For Such a Time As This: A Business Plan that You Can Live With!

1h 14m

Creating Value, Making a Difference

1h 13m

Six Secrets to Success in Business and Beliefs

1h 13m

Managing Business Finances in the End Time

1h 10m

Sound Doctrine