Where to Now?

Breakfast with Bill

Bill and I go to breakfast about once a week. Today we were scheduled to have breakfast, but due to our busy schedules, we couldn’t make it. I had some things I wanted to say to Bill so I thought I’d send him an email and if you are reading this article then I guess Bill decided to post it on his Blog site.

If you are a constant reader of this blog site, you know that Bill is an expert in the field of leadership, diversity, creativity and spirituality. I have the advantage of being able to talk to Bill about these subjects each week at Breakfast. Sometimes the things Bill says seem to be miles above my head. I’m just a simple businessman running a small self-publishing company. I don’t consider myself to be an academic or an intellectual in any field.

But over the years, some of the things Bill has taught me have sunk in and they have helped transform me as a person and they have also helped transform my company. I wanted to share with Bill how his patient mentoring has paid off for me and ZDocs (my company) and I think I am now beginning to see how living spiritually and creatively can be implemented into specific business tactics.

The first experience I wanted to share is that during one of our first breakfasts, Bill told me that it is a vendor’s job to help its customers be successful AND it is the customer’s job to help its vendors be successful. I bought into that concept immediately and the specific business tactic I employed was to start developing strategic partnerships. Over the last couple of years, ZDocs has developed several mutually benefiting strategic partnerships.

About four months ago, we hit pay dirt. A customer with the potential to double our company overnight met with me and during the discussion it became clear that what this customer really wanted, besides a reliable printing company, was a company that would work with them to develop new accounts. I told them that we believe in strategic partnerships and that we would be happy to work with them. We closed the deal in less than two weeks!

One of the first things we did was build this customer a website and then show them how to effectively promote that site. This site just received a bid to produce 4 million books. Then last week we had the opportunity to meet with a publishing company that has the potential to triple ZDocs’ revenue. I realized we couldn’t close the sale without our customer’s expertise so I took my customer with me to the appointment. We are very close to closing this sale and if we do, the new account will be our customer’s account and then ZDocs will provide the supporting services.

Without mutual trust, two separate companies cannot work this closely together. And building mutual trust is a spiritual skill. I can’t think of any other way to explain it. This experience has taught me the value of spirituality in the workplace first hand.

The second experience I wanted to share is an internal experience. Some of my employees are Wal Mart haters. They seem to think that corporations should be more caring and supportive of their employees and the community. And on one level I agree. In fact, being a compassionate company is part of living spiritually in the workplace in my opinion. But a company can’t be compassionate unless it is profitable.

So one day during our Friday lunch meeting, I asked the question, “Should a company be compassionate?” I got mixed answers, but from the Wal Mart haters I got a resounding Yes! Then I asked the employees how a company could be compassionate if it wasn’t profitable. I got blank looks from those Wal Mart haters.

This discussion helped us all realize that for the most part we all shared a common value that a company should be compassionate to its employees and its community, but that in order to be compassionate, the company had to be a high-performing company. All concepts Bill taught me while eating scrambled eggs and toast.

My intent with this message today is not to just tell everyone how great Bill is. My goal is to relate some real life experiences about how the concepts Bill talks about can have a huge impact on a company’s bottom line and do so in a spiritually fulfilling way.

Thanks Bill for everything.