Three crucial questions you should ask before doing business

As youth leaders, we often need to use the services of others to do things for us. We need flyers, t-shirts, supplies, food, crazy stuff for games, you name it. We may need sound equipment, a technician or a bus driver. But how do you decide with whom to do business?Say you need some flyers printed for your youth ministry and there are three suppliers that offer more or less the same prince and quality. How do you decide which one to business with? And what if one is cheaper than the others, should price always be the deciding factor?Before doing business with anyone, whether business-business or spiritual business, there are three questions you should ask yourself. Taking the time to answer these will help you to do business with the right people. Here are the three questions:

Do I like them?

Do I trust them?

Do I respect them?

Often, we have instinctive feelings about people or businesses that tell us whether we should go into business with them or not. But we have been so trained by society and our culture to ignore our instincts and make more ‘rational’ decisions, for instance based on price, that we don’t take our intuition seriously.Famous investor Warren Buffet does take his intuition seriously. He’s the one who came up with these three questions and always asked them before going into business with anyone. It made him a very rich man.No matter how good the deal looks, how low the prices are, if you can’t answer all three questions with a resounding ‘yes’, you shouldn’t go into business. The funny thing is that once you realize you don’t trust someone, or don’t respect someone, you’ll be able to explain why as well. You knew all along, you just hadn’t put it into words yet. Taking the time to listen to your gut will prevent you from making bad decisions in doing business.I read about these questions a few years ago in a book called The Power of Focus (which is a book you should really read, lots of great practical tools in there to realize your goals). My husband and I started applying these questions to every business we did and it helped us immensely in making the right decisions and doing business with the right people.We’ve come to value trustworthy partners as more important than the lowest price.The first reason is that in the end, it will pay off in quality and service. But there's something else. When you apply these questions consistently, you’ll build better relations with those you do go into business with. And as Christians, having good relations with people should be fairly high on our list because a good personal relation, even if it’s business-related, may give you an ‘in’ to be a witness.So before you do business with anyone, just ask these three simple questions:

Do I like them?

Do I trust them?

Do I respect them?