In life as well as business there are periods where you began to hit the rhythm and things begin to work for you. They only last for a season and sometimes that season is a few months and other times it can last for a few years.

I don’t invest in stocks because I am old school in that I want to know before I open the envelope, that the amount is greater than it was last month. When your holdings are in the stock market you will open the envelope 8 times and the value will be down and 2 times the value is up. You never know when it is going to happen. Many people have told me how foolish I am not to be invested in the stock market. I don’t care. Did you know that the greatest daily gains on Wall Street for the last 105 years happened on 20 days? So there were 38,325 days in the last 105 years and if you were not invested on those 20 days, you missed the greatest gains. There is a rhythm to Wall Street investing that has never interested me.

Take General Motors for example. Their rhythm was during the 60’s and 70’s when they controlled the greatest global automobile market share. They have been largely out of rhythm for last 30 years. Look at Sears, their rhythm began to go downhill 35 years ago and they have never gotten it back.

Rhythm in business is hard to create and even harder to keep going. That is why it usually only lasts for a season. These rhythms last as long as the leaders can see the vision. Let me say that again. The periods of rhythm last as long as the leaders can see the vision. Take any company or any church or any civic organization that you know of and they will grow and success or began to falter based on the leader’s vison and talent to run the company. Once the leaders began to get complacent and satisfied, the company or the organization just crested the hill and is starting its way down.

When you experience a rhythm season in your life, you need to take notice and savor it like gold because it is a special special gift. How many times have we seen people take for granted the favor they are seeing in their life? When something good is happening, I have seen many people layback and think they have made it and don’t need to keep working. These are usually the ones that experience a very short rhythm season. Ha

Rhythms are very scarce and when they happen, be alert and focused and above all, be thankful. KT

Being the biggest should not be the goal in business. If being the biggest was a guarantee of success, we would all be using IBM computers, driving GM cars, shopping at Sears, using Blackberry or Motorola cell phones, buying music CDs at the store, renting videos at Blockbuster, drinking Maxwell House coffee, and eating at Shoney’s.

All of these companies have one thing in common. They lost their market share because they thought they were too big to fail. New competition is something to be reckoned with and every company will face it.

There are some things that should never change like the way you love your children or cut the grass but in business you must always be watching the curve and make sure what you are selling is something the market still wants.

I remember when I started selling hotels and there wasn’t email, texting, cell phones, websites, scanning or many of the communication outlets we have today. When we listed a hotel we literally had to write the book and then print the book. Then you would call the buyer on your office phone and if he was interested you had to mail the printed book to the buyer. You have to go see every hotel because you had to take pictures. There were was no internet and therefore no pictures. You had to take a camera with Kodak film and get on a plane and go see each hotel. When you got back you took your rolls of film to the development place and then went back two days later to get the pictures. Ha. It is amazing how things have changed.

What is my point? The point is that there are areas of our lives that need not change but if you are in business, run a drug store, in sales, work at an airline, pastor a church etc. we need to be ready for change. KT

In business you will beat 90% of your competition if you just show up with a smile on your face. You stand a good chance of winning over the other 10% by showing up prepared.

I am big proponent of the face to face. I have so many personal flaws such as speech, education, writing, spelling that the only chance I had of getting hired was to show up face to face when the other competition wouldn’t. Many of my competitors like to make phone calls and hide behind emails. There is nothing wrong with phone calls and emails but the quicker you meet in person the better your chances are of getting the business.

I remember one deal early on that I have to laugh about when I think about it. I was in the business for about 3 months and I barely knew how spell the word hotel. There was this group in Summerville South Carolina that had 8 Holiday Inn hotels. I had sent the owner a letter introducing myself and low and behold he called me back. In those days there wasn’t the internet, email and cell phones. I asked him if I could come up the next day to meet with him. He said sure, so I cowboy up and drove over to South Carolina the next day to meet him. We really bonded up that day because he was a fellow Christian and we developed a mutual respect. Side note, that would have never happened on the phone and only happened because I drove 6 hours to meet him.

He asked me to put together a presentation on the 8 hotels and come back. This is the part where I laugh when I think about. I literally did not know what to put in the presentation. I put together 8 separate folders with the hotel name typed nicely on the outside and on the inside, typed out the information I could get from the Holiday Inn book on the numbers of rooms, what businesses were nearby, how old it was and any general information I could find. I had also driven to see all 8 hotels so I could talk about them. I had copies of his profit and loss statements but I didn’t know what to do with them or how to understand them. So I go into the meeting with my briefcase and pulled out these nicely typed folders on each of the hotels and just started talking about his hotels as though I knew what I was talking about.

To my surprise, they decided to hire me. Ha. That was the largest portfolio the company I was working for at the time had every listed. The funny thing was I still didn’t know what to do but I figured it out along the way. Those clients remained good friends for many years thereafter and we worked together on multi occasions.

The point is, I knew I would never be able to earn his confidence on the phone so I did the only thing I could do and that was to go see him.

In life I believe many tough and stressful spots can be smoothed over if we are prepared to physically sit down face to face and talk about it. This goes for business and personal situations alike. There is something magic about telling a person that they are important enough to meet with. In my line of work there have been hundreds of meetings I went into where I didn’t know how it would turn out but the importance and magic of getting in front of someone has never lost its advantages.

Even in the bible, the word “go” is listed 1,542 times and the word “stay” is only listed 62 times. KT