A COMPANY (OR TWO) IS BORN

Yesterday, it became official.  Outthink LLC and Joi Bags LLC were established!!!

Please continue to pray for wisdom as we move forward.

ACCOUNTABILITY

I had a couple conversations about the Outthink initiatives with people from Grace this week.  I was a little surprised to hear that people "don't know what's going on" or "wonder if some rich guys just took all the ideas for themselves" or a couple other similar sentiments.

I took (at least) two things from these conversations...

First, I'm reminded how tough communication can be.  There are hundreds of people interested to know everything that's going on, and I (nor our team) simply can't spend personal time with each one for play-by-play information.  I hope each of you, that desires to have info, understands this physical limitation.  Yet I feel a responsibility to do a better job with communication.  So here is what you can expect:

 - Quarterly (4 times per year) bulletin inserts

 - Weekly e-mail updates

 - Occasional blog posts

 - Twitter updates as things happen (we'll see how it goes).  Follow us here.

Second, there is a general skepticism about businesses, their leaders, and mostly their owners (or as I've heard - fat cats).  I understand that many people have had bad experiences that shaped this viewpoint, and that's really unfortunate.  Bad things have happened to good, hard-working people.  Acknowledging this, I would ask you to form your opinion about these ventures based on what actually happens, not past experiences.

I titled this post "Accountability" because I want everyone to know we don't have any secrets. We're happy to talk to you any time about any thing we do.  Everyone on the team (Dan, Lonnie, Chris, Jason and myself) donates time and resources.  We don't get paid in any way. Each of us views our participation as a ministry opportunity, and we love it!

Please continue to pray for our three active opportunities:

 - Hand bags from excess RV materials: Joi Bags

 - Wheelchair

 - eBay for charity

CHANGE

This shouldn't come as a big surprise to anyone, but things change ...

Regarding the handbag business, we are no longer going to partner with the local sewing company I wrote about previously.  They decided to not be in a retail business, just sell a few bags locally, and not mass-market their bags.  They wished us well in our venture.  So we're on our own and pursuing a slightly different path.  We've created a brand called Joi Bags.  The name comes from the Italian translation of the word joy and pronounced "joy."  You can check out our website here.  We're getting things going this week with sample bags.  We hope to begin making bags next week because sales are ready and waiting!  It's exciting!!

Regarding the wheelchair prototype, we had to postpone our initial review until this Friday.  More info to come ...

Thanks for your continued prayers as we try to launch these businesses!

UNBELIEVABLE

It's been too long since my last post.  Sorry about that ...  There is so much to say.  This post will give you the highlights, and I'll fill in the gaps in the (hopefully) near future!

It looks like Outthink is going into the handbag business.  We're going to partner with a company in Goshen that sells to the RV, Mfg. Housing, and medical industries.  They have excess fabric, and they are making handbags out of it.

They have received a lot of publicity in the news, and there's more to come!

We are going to start a company to brand, market, sell, and distribute the handbags.  We're finalizing our partnership right now (which is one reason to keep the details to a minimum). We're building a website to be the front end for both wholesale buyers and (soon) consumers.  We have all kinds of open doors, and we're going to need help.  The demand is growing very quickly!!

CALL TO ACTION:

If you are good on the phone and know your way around a computer, you might be just the person we need.  As the orders roll in, we need people to answer phone calls, enter orders on the website, compile orders from the website, deliver product, etc.  Could that be you?  We really need some help in the next couple weeks.  Are you great on the phone and really know how to sell interesting products?  If so, we could use you to help us get the products in additional stores in the Michiana region.  We're going to need help with that as well!

Please don't hesitate; send your contact information here!  Do it today.

We need help as early as next week.  So we're going to have a planning meeting Saturday afternoon.  I'd love to have a bunch of people join us.  Please get in touch, even if you cannot join us Saturday.

MOST IMPORTANTLY:

Please pray for these efforts.  People are already going back to work as a result of this project, which is just great.  We want more people back to work.  Hopefully, the selling described earlier can turn into paying jobs.  But we really want prayer for the people we encounter along the way.  We want to be Jesus to them.  Some may not want to see Him, but we have so many opportunities to be a light and witness.  We want to do a great job at that!  So please pray for hearts to find Jesus as a result!

VOLUNTEERS

I received a lot of feedback from the various e-mail and blog "calls to action."  I just want to say thanks and keep them coming!  We can't reply to all of them, but we have them and will be in touch...

EBAY?

We've got an idea to use eBay to help people in Elkhart County.  The quick explanation is that we would launch an eBay store to sell stuff that people don't want or no longer need.

We could have two sides of the business.  One side is driven by donations.  People simply bring their items to a storage location (or we pay someone to go pick them up).  We sell the stuff on eBay and provide tax receipts to the donors.  We could then use the revenues to cover the transactions costs and pay a staff to work with the inventory, list the items, ship them, etc.  The proceeds could support great ministries like Community Hope, Feed My Starving Children, Asia's Hope, etc.

The other side of the business is driven by consignment.  Instead of donations, we list people's items and charge a commission for the service.  No tax receipts here.  The consignors get some money, and we use our share for the same things: pay people to work and donate to great charities!

Think of what this accomplishes.  It takes stuff people don't need or want and turns it into cash for the people that own it (consignors) and/or the people that need it (charities).

So here's a call to action:

 - We know there are some eBay gurus out there.  If you have a heart for the outthink mission to really help people in Elkhart County and have a desire to get involved in this, please contact us.  Send an e-mail here.

HAND BAGS

Another idea to help workers in Elkhart County has been brewing over the last couple weeks, and it came to us today.  We met with Pat and Dawn to discuss an idea for ladies hand bags made from excess and obsolete fabric in the RV industry.

A local business is really hurting, and Dawn has a very tender heart for the workers.  They happen to use a lot of fabric for the RV parts they make, and Dawn had an idea to make hand bags out of them.  So she did!  She's worked with people at the factory to turn out the bags and has interest from several specialty shops around the county.  She's already sold more than 100 of them!  They even developed a tag (that goes on the bag) that explains the story behind the bags.

Get this: they even called back 6 laid-off workers to help make the bags.  These bags are making their way around too.  They're getting into the hands of county and state government officials, perhaps even to a former Presidential candidate.  As Dawn is quick to point out - it's quite a God-thing!

So here's a call to action:

 - We need contacts in the sales rep channels for women's accessories and apparel.  These would be professional sales representatives that communicate with regional specialty shops that might be interested in this product.

 - We could also use some contacts that know something about the fashion business (from experience or study) and have marketing and branding savvy.

Remember, it would be great to have like-minded people that understand our mission to really help people in Elkhart County.  Please send the contact info here.

MORE IDEAS

We've got another meeting tomorrow to sift through a few more ideas.  Please pray for more businesses to launch as a result.

Also, please keep those medical contacts rolling in ... e-mail the info here.

WHEELCHAIR

Thanks for your many prayers leading up to our analysis meeting.

Believe it or not, our unanimous #1 project is to build a new and improved wheelchair. We think the idea has a lot of promise, so thanks JT! The plan to move forward is pretty simple right now. JT is going to build a prototype. That will probably take about one month. During that time, we need to network in the medical community to understand how the business works and if our product really solves problems for the users.

Without going into a bunch of detail, the chair is intended to really help people. We hope it helps the occupant the most, but we also believe it can help medical staff while they help the occupant. We will leave the description of the chair purposely generic because there's no sense giving away all the "secrets!"

Here's a call to help. If you know believers in the medical community, we want to meet them. We're looking for doctors, nurses, EMTs, medical device sales people, etc. If they work with people that need wheelchairs, they're just the kind of people we want to meet. When the prototype is ready, we want to get feedback to see if we really have the product we think we have. Please e-mail contact info here. Thanks a lot!!

We intend to focus on the wheelchair idea, but we are open to pick up any of the other ideas when/if the opportunity presents itself. Some of them were complimentary (from a production standpoint) to the wheelchair and may fit right in down the road. Others were completely different and will allow us to pursue other avenues. We will remain open to launching them in the future. Again, thanks to everyone that contributed. Your creativity and passion inspires me!!!

INFO ON THE WAY

Just a quick update. We had a great meeting today. Thanks for your prayers. We have a couple things to do, and we'll have some more info to post!

AGENDA

The agenda for tomorrow's meeting will be:
- Prayer
- Discuss SWOT of everyone's top two ideas (more time)
- Discuss SWOT of the rest of the ideas (less time)
- Pursue or defer?
- Next steps: market research, business structures, etc.
- Prayer

Thanks for your prayers!

ANALYSIS - I

Please pray for our review team's analysis meeting this Friday, 3/13, at 8AM.

Here are some things to pray about:
- Wisdom, Wisdom, and more Wisdom
- Clarity of thought and direction for the next steps
- Proper vision for the ideas we decide to pursue
- Wisdom, Wisdom, and more Wisdom
- Objectivity in decision-making
- We won't limit what God wants to do
- Contacts to help get things off the ground
- Prepare investors for capital requirements
- Wisdom, Wisdom, and more Wisdom

Many of you have written to say you are praying for us. Thank you so much. We really appreciate it!!!

GOOGLE

I love American ingenuity and creativity. It fuels our economy. So in times like these, bring it on!!

We aren't alone. Google has an initiative called Project 10^100 (ten to the 100th, otherwise know as a google). They committed $10 million to implement ideas that change the world and help as many people as possible. Sound familiar? $10 million may sound big to you, but it's really us with the advantage. We have the Creator! He's never had a problem financing His work around the globe!!!

You can check out their project here. The idea submission deadline has passed, but you can still vote on the ideas if you're interested.

SWOT

[NOTE: I think the blog is up-to-date enough that I can switch to the present tense.  My previous blog entries were mostly written in the past tense since I was trying to get everyone up to date.  I think we've finally made it!]

So what is SWOT?  SWOT is what we need right now.  SWOT is an analysis tool.  It's an acronym for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats.  They are categories to organize your thoughts on strategy.  That's exactly what we're trying to do.

Each of the review team members will record his top-of-mind thoughts about each of the business ideas.  We will put those thoughts in one of the four categories.  We will ask ourselves what are the Strengths and Weaknesses of the products or services.  Then we will ask ourselves what are the Opportunities and Threats in the marketplace and industry.  We will collate our thoughts into one document, and it will serve as the center-piece for our analysis meeting.

If we don't have many thoughts on a particular idea, that probably means it's not ready to pursue.

If we have a lot of positive thoughts (and similar thoughts) in the Strengths and Opportunities categories, that probably means we should pursue it more.  We are going to be honest about Weaknesses and Threats, but we're not going to let them stop us. They are simply things that need to be mitigated.

Please pray for effective SWOT-ing over the next couple days.  Our analysis meeting is tentatively scheduled for Thursday, 3/12.

ANOTHER IDEA

One of the ideas we wanted to pursue had to do with wheelchairs (Jim). Our schedules didn't work for this meeting to take place with the rest of them. So we got together last Thursday. Thanks for your time and passion, Jim! It's a really cool idea!

INFO MEETINGS

We extended invitations to several people to meet with the review team and share their ideas for new businesses based in Elkhart County. We had a couple other ideas we wanted to pursue, but the people were not available for a while. So Thursday evening, 2/26, the review team had nine meetings. We met from 4 PM until 9:30-ish.

Here was the schedule:
- Managed Print Services (Boyd)
- Garage Storage System (Josh)
- Truck Bed Cover (Keith)
- Relish Recipe (Danell)
- Photo / Video Service (Jim)
- Mobile Pizza (Emmon)
- Static Film Sunglasses (Brad)
- Car Repair Shop (David)
- 20 Ideas (Joe)

The agenda for each meeting was pretty simple.
1. Prayer
2. Thanks and reminder that we don't know what, if anything, will come of the meeting.
3. Presentation
4. Questions
5. Discussion

Boyd, Josh, Keith, Danell, Jim, Emmon, Brad, David, and Joe - Thanks!!! Thanks for sharing a part of your heart, passion and ingenuity!

We had a great time with these meetings and have A LOT of information to digest and analyze.

COMMUNICATION

I really wish this blog would have been up and populated all along the way, but the reality is - it was not.  I'm sorry there hasn't been play-by-play coverage of the process so far.  I wish everyone could have as much first-hand knowledge of this process as they desire.  Hopefully, this blog will go a long way to satisfy the demand for information about our efforts.

While we're on the topic of communication, here are some things I'd really like you to know ...

1. We covet your prayer for wisdom and discernment.

2. We need you to be patient.  We may not provide the level of detail you want.  Please understand that is never because we want to keep anyone "out of the loop."  It simply may be because we can't go into detail (we may not know the detail, or we may be contractually restricted).

3. This is a fantastic opportunity for everyone to learn about entrepreneurship, and I hope this blog becomes a primer on starting a business.  If this process spawns a bunch of entrepreneurs, I would be thrilled!!!

4. We may not be able to answer all your questions and/or comments.  We appreciate each of them though!  Send e-mail here.

EXPECTATIONS

A wise man once told me that Vision is a picture of the future that creates passion (that is - in leadership terms; I guess it's also what your eyes do, but that's not what I'm talking about ...). I've used this definition in my own life many times. I don't think I've ever found it lacking. But another thing I know is that passion leads to expectations. The size of the expectations is very likely correlated to the size of the vision.

The vision to OutTHINK created a lot of passion. Anyone at GCC on 1/18 could testify to the energy and hopefulness to help the unemployed and hurting in Elkhart County. That passion was raised exponentially at the vision meeting where we prayed, worshipped, and brainstormed for a couple hours.

When Dan and I first spoke after that meeting, we discussed the expectations that may come from this. I think Dan said it best, "some people may expect a cure for cancer now." His point is spot-on. Many people, perhaps you, may have expected something quickly and huge the next day or week. I guess in a sense, so did I. That never materialized. I feel like I've followed each lead and opportunity I was presented, and there was never an opportunity to snap my fingers and have a plant running with hundreds of newly employed workers.

Given these circumstances, the key is to manage the expectations. That is done with open and honest communication, and until now - that hasn't been good enough.

UNCHARTED

These were uncharted waters. We had lots of questions; not many answers. One of my questions was - Is the church starting a business? The short answer is no. The church has a bunch of people passionate to help hurting people. So what happened is that God used the combination of passion for It's Time to OutTHINK and the pain we so easily witness around us to bring a group of people together that most likely never would have done so otherwise. It's just like God - to be right in the middle of our economic mess with His Plan.

Since Jim asked me to lead the review team, I took all the notes from the vision meeting at The Link and combed through them to create a list of all the ideas. I then met with Dan (over the phone) to try and pick around ten ideas that had real promise. We wanted a mix of ideas that might be able to happen relatively quickly and ideas that had the possibility to be big in the future. That's a tough task when you consider we just had words on a piece of paper (unless we heard an explanation in our small groups at the vision meeting). So we prayed that God would bring the right ideas to mind.

We also set an important guideline moving forward: we will never eliminate an idea. It may sit for days, weeks, months, or years, but nothing is off the table for good. We serve a big God, and if he wants us to build a car that runs on garbage - we'll do it!

We had 10-12 ideas to review but still had a little bit of a problem ... review for what? The five guys on the review team can easily evaluate them as a start up business idea, but there's no business plan, very little market research, no capital to invest. Plus we had issues about structure, ownership, profits / non-for-profit ... There were still a lot of questions.

We decided to invite the people that submitted the ideas we selected to an informal 20 minute information-gathering session. We asked them to bring anything or anyone they needed to help communicate the idea. They would pitch the idea, and we would ask questions. Then we'd do the whole thing again with the next idea. So we waded into the uncharted waters. Unsure what would happen. Confident in God's call!

OUTTHINK?

After a welcome to the blog, I guess the next thing needed is an explanation of what it's all about.  Those of you familiar with Grace Community Church in Goshen Indiana probably don't need an explanation, but I have a strong suspicion that people around the world will read this blog.  So for them - a "quick" explanation.

As 2009 began, there was a lot of uncertainty in Elkhart County, in America, and all around the world.  Large portions of the US economy had taken a serious beating.  The housing bubble burst.  Foreclosures were increasing dramatically.  Record high energy prices had recently stung people and businesses.  Financial markets were shaken to their foundations.  Credit came to a standstill.  The automotive industry reported record low sales.  The US economy was in serious recession, and Elkhart County led the Country in one of the most painful ways possible - unemployment above 15%.

Grace Community Church witnessed the real-life pain and suffering of significant unemployment first hand.  And I am so proud to say, her leadership and congregation did not sit on the sidelines.  Going back to August of 2008, a series called Bridge Over Troubled Waters was presented to meet hurting people right where they were and help them toward whatever God had for them.  The Elkhart County economy is tied inextricably to the RV industry.  Unfortunately, the RV industry tends to be a leading economic indicator of a down-turn.  So Elkhart County felt the pain long before many other communities.  Yet through the second half of 2008 and especially into the holiday season, I have witnessed so much love shown to those hurting.  If you're not a part of it, you should also understand the love is directed out of the church walls.  It's not like we were just taking care of each other.  We delivered food to people we've never met before just because we learned of a need and want to love on people.  There are so many examples, it would take a really long time to recount them all here.  Just read Pastor Jim's blog for some of the great stories of love!

The theme at GCC for 2009 is "It's Time!"  It's Time to: OutTHRIVE, OutTHINK, OutSTAND, OutGIVE, and OutLEAD.  Something special happened on the morning of January 18th when Pastor Jim implored us to OutTHINK.  As a matter of fact it was so special and unique, he decided to replay the video of the first service during the second service.  To put it simply, he said "Why Not?"  Why not us at GCC?  Why not Goshen Indiana?  Why can't we be the ones to come up with an idea or product to change Elkhart County and the world?  We love and serve the living God, Creator of the Heavens and the Earth.  He's big enough.  Why Not?!?!?!  I want to scream it even now - WHY NOT?  To anyone with faith in God, the question is rhetorical.  There is NO reason why not.

So a few weeks later, nearly 200 people packed in The Link at the Goshen campus of GCC and brainstormed business ideas. Products. Services.  Nearly 100 startup business ideas were thrown on the table that night.  Creativity oozed out of the building.  Unbridled entrepreneurship.  It was really fun.  Many of you were there.  So I sincerely want to say thanks for your hearts and desire to help people.  For Jim's blog about that night, go here.  There were a whole bunch of ideas, but what in the world would we do next?

Pastor Jim asked five local businessmen to review the ideas and forge a way forward.  So Dan, Chris, Lonnie, Jason, and I (Eric) have been working on this ever since.  I'll leave subsequent (and hopefully much shorter) posts for more info on the process ...

WELCOME!

Welcome to the Outthinkin' blog. I want this to be the place you visit for updates on the Outthink Initiative.