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Don’t Follow Your Heart, Follow God’s Heart
People usually say, “follow your heart”, however that doesn’t necessarily guarantee you’ll get to where you want to be; whereas, if you follow God’s heart, you know for sure you can never go wrong.
Gregory Gray, founder, and CEO of Gray Solutions LLC is a culture and leadership expert. He is a business advisor and an executive coach who is passionate about helping small business owners thrive and succeed in running their business. Greg is an entrepreneur with a background in continuous improvement, lean methods, project management, strategic planning, business development, operations management, and human capital. Back in 2010, Greg felt the calling to pursue living a life with a purpose. He decided to follow God’s heart and left the corporate world.
The two decades of running different facilities and divisions while holding various credible positions in corporate America propelled Greg to pursue his passion. He founded Gray Solutions LLC out of his desire to help people figure out how to master startups and run their own company. This desire came from a clear understanding of the difficulties that most small business owners face when running their business.
Question: Q: What excites you every day about life, Greg, because I think that’s a key piece of why you what you’re doing and why you’re so good at it?
Greg: T give you a little context to the answer is. That answer could be different when I was in my 30s or my 40s. And now I’ve just clicked over into the 50s recently. So that answer’s different than it would’ve been 20 years ago. And what really excites me today is the fact that I have identified my purpose in life. I know what my passions are, they are tied to God’s will. They are tied to the plan that HE has for me.
Greg strongly believes that if your heart is tied to God’s heart you can’t go wrong but if you follow your heart, you have to be cautious because you may get to places you didn’t know you were going to get into.
Together with his wife, Greg practices to wake up as early as 4 AM and spends about two hours preparing for the day. This is his personal time with God, and he makes sure to do meditation, prayer, and discernment to gear him up for what’s to come.
Question: How do you coach people to slow down and wait for that confirmation?
Greg: The way we coach people is by the example of what we do. We believe, without a shadow of a doubt, that the first thing you must do is prepare yourself. That’s by being close to listening to God, listening to the Holy Spirit, and prayerfully considering things.
Both in his personal and business life, Greg is a strong advocate of applying the STOP-START-CONTINUE retrospective technique. He believes this an essential exercise to avoid things that are derailing you from excellence.
Question: If you were starting again today, what would you do differently?
Greg: I think the most powerful thing that we use right now in our practice if you will, I wish I had been, more app to use back when I was younger and starting out, is what we call a Vision Story. We require each of our clients now before we delve into their business, when I say business, it’s not just the hard business stuff, it’s everything, the person, the leader, the business. We require them to do a Vision Story, and the VS, what it really is, it’s much beyond what we call the Business Plan. A Business Plan, they’re helpful but the Vision Story is much more powerful. It takes the life of the business owner, their family, their business and looks at that holistically across the board.
He deems that when we have a reason behind why we’re doing things, it drives our activities differently. Every step becomes a bit lighter and it doesn’t feel cumbersome because we’re doing it for a reason.
What you will learn:
- That you need to be courageous to pursue your passion.
- The importance of having personal time with God.
- Building a business that’s aligned with God’s plan
- Requiring a Vision Story from your clients.
- Value of applying Stop-Start-Continue technique
Resources:
Business Owner Freedom Website
BIO
Gregory Gray, founder, and CEO of Gray Solutions LLC, is a culture and leadership expert. Greg is an entrepreneur with a background in continuous improvement, lean methods, project management, strategic planning, business development, operations management, and human capital. He and his team specialize in providing mentoring, training, and coaching to people and organizations in the industries of agriculture, manufacturing, franchising, biotechnology, textiles, services, insurance, and network marketing.
Prior to founding Gray Solutions, Greg was employed for over twenty years for companies that are national and international in scope. He spent much of his career in automotive and industrial manufacturing. Greg held positions in Sales, Operations, and General Management for companies such as Bosch, Siemens Energy, Servpro Industries Inc., and Hubble Power Systems. Greg has also owned and operated businesses including Family Insurance of Tennessee LLC and direct sales firms.
Greg and his team at Gray Solutions strive to enable business owners to find their freedom! Freedom from the chaos, overwhelm, and lack of direction that many business owners experience due to the demands and struggles common when venturing to building a systematic, progressive, and prosperous business.
