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CHAPTER ONE
EYE TO THE HORIZON
Cultivating a Vision and Thriving Through Crisis
If you don’t have a dream, what do you got?—PENNSYLVANIA AMISH ENTREPRENEUR
The patchwork acres and stone barns of the Amish settlement in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, seem to reflect a way of life from a time well past.
Eighteenth-century forefathers laid the agrarian foundation that has supported the Amish for nearly three centuries in North America. Amish dress, transportation, and aversion to worldly ways have changed but slowly and incrementally in the years since.
Until a few decades ago, the farming vocation was the primary way to make a living as an Amishman. Milk checks made few Amish rich, but that was never the point.
Farming was a means to raise a family in an environment mostly shielded from the urbane influence of the world. Farming also meant continuity. The tangible assets of fields and meadows—and a way of life based around tending the land—were passed from father to son for generations.
Across America today, Amish farmers continue to cultivate their fields. But the real story is what’s been happening in the buildings and shops that have sprung up next to the barns.
Driven by necessity, the Amish have laid a new entrepreneurial economy atop their agrarian heritage, in the process becoming one of the most unexpected business success stories in recent memory.
Amish businesses provide for vibrant communities whose members exist in a way their modern-living neighbors would consider primitive. Yet the firms the Amish run are far from backward when it comes to satisfying customers. Some sell nationwide and overseas—multimillion-dollar operations are not unheard of—while creating employment in their rural corners of America.
The Amish business example, pivoting around concepts such as integrity, family, and simplicity, is rife with insight for application in the modern business environment. And in examining the Amish business story, a good place to start is with the motives and visions that drive these robust small companies.
Regardless of whether you put on pinstripes or suspenders in the morning, having a well-formulated vision is an indispensable part of business success. A guiding vision proves particularly relevant when the start is harder than expected, when recession strikes, or when a newcomer challenges a long-established market position.
Ups and downs alike present challenges to owners and managers. A guiding vision, undergirded by integrity and personal commitment, can keep spirits up and focus sharp in lean times, and feet grounded in good times. A clearly formulated and internalized vision safeguards integrity when ethical issues are on the line.
Just like the family dairy, the Amish-owned business has served as a vehicle to support large clans and to entrust trades. While the temptations of prosperity have proven problematic for some, the typical Amish business motive is anything but consumption-centered.
Amish forefathers sowed their acres with the ultimate aim of perpetuating family and faith. Amish entrepreneurs today cultivate their businesses with similar ambitions in mind. Along with this cultural ideal, however, comes the individual vision of each Amishman, which naturally varies, just as it differs among non-Amish.
In this chapter we’ll examine business visions of successful Amish entrepreneurs, and how they serve to buttress business achievement. We’ll also look at some Amish start-up stories and lessons learned along the way.
The start can prove particularly difficult, especially when initial enthusiasm sputters out in the face of discouraging results. We’ll explore what it takes to persevere when faced with weak sales figures or when all you seem to hear are doomsayers.
We’ll also ponder the role that faith plays in running a firm—an unsurprisingly prominent element in a God-centered culture. Finally, we’ll examine what to consider when formulating a business vision, a topic we revisit in the final chapter.
Amish may seem different from the rest of us, but their motivations, challenges, and hang-ups are frequently the same. Ultimately, the entrepreneurial experience of the Amish shows that business issues commonly seen in the “real” world in fact transcend cultural bounds, and that the tools and strategies they rely on are present in the modern toolbox as well.
CULTIVATING A VISION
Scanning Amish-themed features in the media, one comes across a well-worn journalistic template. It’s the portrayal of the Amish as a standoffish, world-wary folk, suspicious of modernity and staunchly insular. Many pieces start with a standard assumption of the Amish as pious Luddites, wanting as little to do with us modern backsliders as possible. “Get thee gone, Englishman,” they seem to murmur between the lines.
True, the Amish do delineate their world from the non-Amish one, making important distinctions that help preserve the integrity of their faith and communities. But get to know enough Amish people, and the aloof and prickly portrayal starts to wear thin.
Case in point: Jonas Lapp. Jonas is a “people person” in every sense of the phrase. I recall first approaching his Pennsylvania home, unannounced, on a muggy July evening. Suddenly, the Amishman materialized, nearly throwing the door off its hinges. Before I could open my mouth, I found myself tractor-beamed into the house. Have we met already?
I’d hardly recited my name before Jonas, bright eyes and beaming smile, had me at the kitchen table in front of a couple slices of his wife’s pizza. On my return visit a half-year later, Jonas’s children frolicked, and a handmade mailbox sign announced a new baby boy to passersby.
The second time around, the veteran homebuilder was no less hospitable, sharing ideas on his trade and on business in general. The whole time Jonas hammered away at one concept: relationships. That came as no surprise, based on my experience with Jonas, and his Amish neighbors’ warm comments about him.
Jonas relishes what he does. But you can see that it’s less the actual construction of homes or the financial payoff that drive him. Instead, it’s the chance to be a father figure to an employee who never had one, to form a friendship with a “customer” who in the end never even does business with him, to do his small part to strengthen ties in his community.
“Builder” is a hat Jonas wears, one that allows him to achieve higher-plane ends such as these. But it didn’t always come so easy, nor provide so much satisfaction. Early on, Jonas struggled with the F word.
Fear.
“I got into business ... scared,” he admits. “I knew there was a chance to make more money, a better opportunity.” But, he says, “I probably believed a lot of lies about business.”
Lies?
“ ‘It’s tough.’ ‘You probably won’t make it.’ People talked about the ones that didn’t make it—not about the ones that were doing well. And you kind of buy into that. So the first two to three years I was running the business scared.
“And that’s aggressive,” he concedes. “You get very aggressive when you have fear of not making it. But it’s not healthy.”
Fear poisons motivations. When operating anchored in fear, he explains, “you’re not establishing relationships. You’re in it for what you can grab today. You’re after as much as you can get.
“You try to do a good job, but as fast as you can. And the relationship thing? Well, I don’t know if I’m going to be in it long term.
“Because you have this thought in the back of your mind,” Jonas continues, “that this might be the last year the economy’s gonna be strong. This might be the last year before there’s a recession. This might be the last year before I fall and break both legs and I can’t do this again.”
Talking to Jonas, you get the sense that he’s been through his share of rough spots. Recounting start-up struggles, Jonas feels that early challenges are often rooted in a person’s mentality more than anything else. And so having a solid grounding plays an important part.
And here’s where the other F word comes in.
Jonas’s faith is what grounds him. He returns to it over and over. “After a bit you start to look around, and you start to realize that God is long term. And the Lord’s going to take care of you.
“And if you really believe he’s gonna take care of you, then you should start doing business like God’s going to take care of you.”
Amish lean on faith. It’s a seemingly bottomless source of strength and security. Faith helps them see hope when tragedy strikes. Faith fosters gratitude in the fortunate. It’s a basic element of Amish life and, by extension, their approach to business.
Whatever grounds you—spirituality, family, core principles—what matters is being actively aware of it, and understanding its importance.
Mission statements have long fulfilled this “grounding” role, at least on a companywide level. Some firms take mission statements seriously. For others, they seem to serve more as wall decor or as marketing tools.
The idea of a mission statement does fit inside the concept of vision, but the two are not one and the same.
The concept of business vision can be somewhat difficult to pin down, but it typically includes a company’s or business owner’s more general goals: the needs it plans to fulfill, the unique qualities it aims to bring to the table, how large, how much, what, when, and where.
Yet vision also takes in the individual’s perception of his own role in the business, and how the business is meant to intersect with everyday, “nonbusiness” life. Vision, by its very nature, motivates.
Vision can include the potential positive impacts a company desires to have on a community, a market, and in the most profound cases, the country or world. Creating a vision encourages imagining how life could be different for you as well as for others whom your business can possibly influence—your customers, employees, neighbors, and family.
Mission statements typically capture a company’s aims and ambitions in a market context and often take into account some of the impacts just mentioned. But a personal business vision necessarily includes in its scope how running a company affects the owner and his immediate environment, as well as what he and others can be or become through the business activity. A well-formulated, deeply held vision is often highly personal.
HEAD CHECK
Vision can also be a crucial source of strength. Fear takes over when we focus on failure. Jonas’s vision has helped him battle and destroy this disabling emotion.
Jonas neutralizes fear by shifting his focus. “If you’re a servant-leader, that means other people are gonna come first,” he explains. “People have to be very important to you. You’re not in it for the dollar anymore...you’re in it to help people. And the profits? They come.
“People need people that will take the time to make them [feel] important.” He sees the people focus as part of a personal mission. In Jonas’s vision, he is a mentor to his employees, an ear for his customers, a reliable partner for his business peers. He executes in the day-to-day, while the far-horizon focus frames each decision.
When we are oblivious to all other concerns but our own, minor issues take on far more importance than they deserve. Directing our concern outward and acting to aid our fellow man is one of the greatest fear-destroyers in the modern businessperson’s arsenal. But to do this, you need both humility and an ability to empathize.
Jonas raises another worthy point relating to vision: sorting out motives and ambitions before techniques and strategies. Vision is concerned with the why before the how. It may have taken a journey to get there, but Jonas has his why sorted out—in his case, to be a person who adds value to others’ experiences, be it by mentoring, listening, or collaborating as a contributing, productive member of his community.
Are you long term or day-to-day? While entrepreneurs like Jonas stress the importance of the here and now, at the same time they realize they must have a long-term vision to be effective in the day-to-day—in Jonas’s case to avoid the place of fear by residing in concern for his fellow man.
Small-business owners can be providers in numerous meaningful ways: products or services that improve lives; jobs for members of the community; contributions to charitable causes. Amish bosses who provide these things often stress the good of others before they get to talking about their own pockets.
At the same time, successful Amish businesspeople take great satis faction in the roles they create for themselves and in the fruits of their labors. The examples of Jonas and others seem to suggest one question relevant to anyone who is considering, or reevaluating, a personal business vision: Where’s your head?
HEAD CHECK, PART 2
Getting your head right also means locking down the raw, nuts-and-bolts knowledge needed to achieve competence in your field. At the same time, mastering the tech side is only one slice of the pie. And in some cases, in a managerial context, intimate knowledge of every procedure in your firm not only is unnecessary but can even become an obstacle, leading overzealous managers to lose sight of the wide view.
In the business classic The E-Myth Revisited, Michael Gerber explores a basic error, which he terms the Fatal Assumption: Just because you are good at doing something means you’re ready to make a business of it.
Like their English counterparts, Amish businesspeople often seek guidance at some point in their business lives. As we’ll examine in the next chapter, this may take the form of offhand consulting with a father or brother or neighbor. It could mean seminars and books. It may even mean kicking ideas around with their current boss—some of whom are surprisingly supportive of their employees’ entrepreneurial ambitions. The wiser entrepreneurs identify what they are lacking and supplement the missing bits. The Amish even have their own consultants.
Isaac Smoker is a deliberate man who weighs every comment carefully before speaking. Neighbors and fellow church members alike speak highly of him. Seen as an authority, Isaac is trusted for his no-nonsense business counsel. At the same time, Isaac, a bishop, fulfills a valuable function, guiding his business contemporaries and coreligionists on how to stay true to their beliefs and cultural practices while running successful fi...
