Owning a Business

Hello, my name’s 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’ll help you in either owning your own business and starting your own business and we’re talking about smaller businesses. I am an advocate of starting small and growing. So, I just hope you enjoy this. I hope it’s helpful. I hope it’s beneficial. Now, I’m not interested in just helping people in the United States of America. I would love that and I help people in my local community, but this series is intended to help you wherever you are at in the world. I have friends in Mongolia. I have friends in China. I have friends in Myanmar. I have friends in Mexico, in Guatemala, in Ecuador and this video series is intended to help you where you’re at and it’s not something that’s just Americanized. Now, 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’m happy that I was born and raised on a farm and ranch. My father was an entrepreneur. I got to sit under that. Didn’t know what was happening, I just was going to work everyday, branding cattle, driving tractor, helping him along with my brothers and he was an entrepreneur deluxe. I dig back and draw from him. He’s passed away more than 30 years ago, but I pull on that experience from him and I just thank God for that. And 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 wasn’t for me ’cause I didn’t wanna work all my life for some corporation and be a number, 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 doing the same thing you’re 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’re 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’re talking several hundreds of thousands of dollars per month in sales and 70 some employees. So, once again, I have experience. I’m willing to share my 40 plus years of experience and I hope you gain from it. Now, I wanna outline what’s 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’s 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 oughta own a business and operate a business somewhere into that corridor. And then after you kinda identified that, you might have an idea for a business that kinda is inside your wheelhouse, is this thing actually feasible? We can do a little bit of work together, I’ll help you understand at the end of all this work, does it even have a chance of being profitable. That’s important. And then, people all around the world want to start a business, but many times they’re waiting for some kind of money to get started. I say that’s 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’m gonna 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’re at. They don’t understand income statements and balance sheets and cash flow analysis. We’ll talk about that on a series. And then writing your own business plan. We’re leading up to something that at this point, you’ve 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’ll try to help you. I can’t 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’m not saying loans are bad, I’m just saying don’t start with one. There’s 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 is one side, but understanding the financial and banking side or the business side is where you’re really gonna make your money. Experience, I think it’s so valuable. If you’re starting with little or no money, I will talk about experience as one of the keys. And then delayed gratification. A lot of people wanna 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’s called delayed gratification. And then, you’ve got your business. How are you gonna make a profit? Well, I’m sold on systems. I have systems upon systems upon systems and I’ll teach on why I think a system’s so paramount to any business. Well, that’s an introduction of the steps that I plan to introduce and I’m gonna add more to that series than what I’ve just mentioned, but I would be amiss, I would be doing you a disfavor if I didn’t 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’m gonna 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’re married, have children, if you’re working someplace, all of us fill our time up with something, so you, 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? ‘Cause you gotta be serious about that. These series is not intended to be all inclusive, every thing you need to know. This series in intended to help you, but you’ll 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’re there, and I’ll help you. You identify them and I’ll help you introduce yourself to them so they’ll help you. And then, of course, I read biographies. I’m not a great reader, so when I read something, mostly I like to read biographies. Honestly that’s why I kinda like the New Testament. I’m reading the biography of Jesus. I’m reading the biography of Paul. I’m reading the biography of Peter. I don’t 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 ’cause 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.