THE EVOLUTION OF A BUSINESS PLAN

I'm spending the week enjoying a family reunion at a resort campground a few minutes outside of Zion National Park in southern Utah. For the last few years I've assumed that there are about 300 members of my family, all related to my Scandinavian grandparents who immigrated to America in the early 20th century. The organizers of the week-long reunion provided the attendees with name tags that included a number. The higher the number, the more recently you were born, or married into the family. I was pleased and surprised to discover that there are actually a total of about 465 members of my family and nearly 350 are in attendance this week! The weather is great and the scenic views are spectacular. By the way, I'm number 15.

As I visited with family members that I haven't seen in years, some eventually asked me about business. I related to them how I sold the family business and now spend most of my time in the shop working on my car collection and writing for my blog. At first, I felt as though my ambitions sounded a bit relaxed, but I noticed that the more I explained my business plan to interested listeners, the more I fine tuned the plan itself. As a result, I'm more focused and confident.

I'm not much different from Eli, the young son of my cousin Dana, shown in the picture above. On the way to breakfast this morning  I noticed him with a collection of a half dozen grasshoppers in a glass tube. I cautioned him that sunlight through the glass tube super-heated the buggers and would eventually kill them. I noticed him again about midday and saw that he'd wrangled up about 50 or so of the critters in a critter-friendly box, and to avoid criticism, he presented them like circus animals on the hitching post just outside our bunkhouse. The majority of them were mostly dead, the rest were considering retirement. His similarity to me remains: we had modified our business plans in the wake of constructive criticism, and are quite pleased with the result.

Doug