There is a very successful businessman in Palmerston North from whose life I reckon we can get two good illustrations.

When Steve Lange turned 15, the headmaster at his school in Cambridge wished him well and showed him the gate. Now, 23 years later, that reluctant school boy owns a chain of nine highly successful retail tyre shops, Tony’s Tyre Service, all located in the lower North Island, turning over more than $12 million annually. “The school system and I didn’t see eye to eye,” Steve says.

Steve obviously learned the basics, but he certainly used his own flair and personal ideas to get his business going. His business experience was apparently gained by being in business, not studying business theory in a classroom. Once again we see that the real world of the community, the family and the marketplace is where real education takes place.

Steve then instituted something into his business that has really caused it to attract a loyal clientele. It is a thing called service. “When it comes to a customer there is no limit, no dollar limit whatsoever, on what any one of my people can do to satisfy a customer’s complaint. It’s written into their contract that they’ll never get reprimanded for satisfying a customer’s complaint.” He cites the case of an employee who accidentally transposed a number during the etching of the car’s registration number on the vehicle’s windows. The $10 job cost the company $1850 plus gst to remedy, as all the car’s windows had to be replaced. The employee is still with the company as second-in-charge of a depot.

Here is a real challenge. Do we tell ourselves that there is no limit on what we will do to advance the Godly education of our children? Now the beauty here is that the best investment we can make is one of TIME rather than money. Pouring our LIVES into our children is going to be far more profitable to them than to pour money and resources into their laps and hope that somehow knowledge will get into their heads. Perhaps it will. But the WISDOM we really want our children to have will only come, by God’s grace, as we impart to them in word and deed and example the wisdom God has built into us up to this point. Give your children time. Not only quality time, but quantity time as well …….lots of it…..no limits.

From Keystone Magazine
July 1997 , Vol. III No.4
P O Box 9064
Palmerston North
Phone: (06) 357-4399
Fax: (06) 357-4389
email: craig@hef.org.nz