"The Art of the Start" Discussion Pt. 1 - Causation

Recently a classmate of mine led a discussion on the book "The Art of the Start" by Guy Kawasaki. Guy has had much experience in the field of jump-starting businesses from the ground, up. I think it is very beneficial for us as Christians and sports ministers to read literature from people who are not necessarily christians, but have experience as an entrepreneur. I think many times we almost immediately discount any literature that is not written by christians because it is coming from a secular viewpoint. But I think there are many valuable lessons and principles that we can learn and apply to our ministries, as long as we run the principles and lessons through a Biblical grid.

With that in mind, I would like to review a couple points that I found most helpful and interesting in the discussion of this book.
More after the jump...

Guy talks about "Causation" in his book, and he lists 4 things that an entrepreneur must do at the beginning, before they do anything else.
These are:

1. Make Meaning: create something that makes the world a better place.
2. Make Mantra: a powerful statement including what the business model is about.
3. Define your business model: Target the customer, make it simple.
4. Weave a "MAT": Milestone, Assumptions, and Tasks.

I won't talk about each of these specifically, but I think many times when starting something new, ministry or not, we get too far ahead of ourselves. We start thinking about the small details of how we are going to do everything before we actually figure out why we are doing what we are doing. Specifically in sports ministry we might start worrying about where are resources are going to come from, and what facilities we are going to use before we even figure out who we are targeting.

Guy points out here that before we get bogged down with all the small details, we must first give meaning to our ministry. What does this look like?

This means writing a mission statement. It means thinking about who your target audience is. It means, laying out the big milestone goals of the ministry before worrying about how we are going to achieve those goals.

This is just one aspect of many that Guy discusses in order to start a successful business.

I think it is also important to remember that in many aspects our ministry is a business. While we shouldn't treat it exactly as we would a business, in many respects we have to, and causation is just one way in which we should treat our ministry as a business.