“It is for freedom that Christ set us free.”

- Paul, to the church in Galatia

When did running your business cease to be fun?

When did it quit feeling like a grand adventure in entrepreneurship and just become a job?

When did your business start feeling like it owned you instead of the other way around?

When did the things you used to love to do quit being very much fun to do?

I don’t know a single business person who started their own business because they wanted to live in frustration, pressure, and overwhelm.

But an alarming number of them do.

Watching my father’s struggle with running his own business and counting the years that it likely took from his life, has changed the course of mine. I am spending most of my time trying to prevent more of that same.

I have come to realize that most entrepreneurs got into business for fun, freedom, and the ability to do things differently or better than they saw them being done. In fact, some of my favorite stories are business origin stories. (There is even a podcast called “How I Built This” that offers hundreds of them.) Part of our process in working with corporate teams is to have them walk through the timeline of the company’s history. Nothing is more powerful than an individual or organization’s story.

Those stories are full of hope, adventure, excitement, and the desire for change. They’re also full of a lot of challenges and redemption. One of our first tasks is to help excavate all those hopes and expectations that were around at the outset of their entrepreneurial adventure. To glean all we can from the story of how they got started and then mine their story to recover learned lessons, core values, and important ideas. With all of that really clear, we start working to reclaim everything.

At SummitTrek, our purpose is…

…restoring leaders and organizations to their original intended purpose through coaching.

That statement means a couple of things to us:

There was a hope and an expectation you had for your business when you started it…we want to restore that original intended purpose.
We believe that God made us co-heirs of his Kingdom. We are responsible for the lives and livelihood of the people entrusted to our care through our businesses…we want to restore that original intended purpose as well.

We just finished a two-day offsite to plan for 2018.

we worked on organizational health as a team
celebrated all the success of our clients from 2017
noted some challenges we need to address in the coming year
built plans to address them so that we arrive at the end of 2018 on purpose

But if I had to sum up what we did at our offsite at a very high level, I would simply say that we spent two days figuring out how to more powerfully fulfill our purpose to restore leaders to their original intended purpose through coaching. Everything we focused on was about doing that even better with the people we already know, and figuring out how to bring it to more people.

From each restored story of a growing library of them, our conviction and desire to do more of the same increases. We pray that 2018 is a year of reclamation for you. Of remembering why you got into business in the first place. Of recovering the fun, freedom, and adventure you first hoped for. That is our deepest desire for all of you. It is why we exist.

Consider

Are you having a hard time remembering why you ever got into business in the first place?
Does all the excitement and inertia of that season seem like a different lifetime at this point?
What is it costing you to not be operating with the momentum of enjoying your work?