“Of course, what bothers me is that if we really do seek God’s guidance on every day’s activity, on every project” “What you’re saying is a business God runs doesn’t need the counsel of an efficiency expert?” “I guess so, except” “Except what?” “Put it this way,” I tired to explain. “I’m human. Though I try to follow God’s guidance, I’m not immune to making mistakes.” Juanita looked at me but did not comment.

“It’s the stewardship side that concerns me,” I went on. “Every additional hundred dollars we can turn in profit means that much more we can give. I want to be sure I’m not doing things which might hinder profits. Nobody’s pressuring me. We aren’t running into any obvious problems of any sort. But the idea of getting some counsel has been on my heart for some reason.” “Maybe that’s because you should do it,” my wife said. “You’ve always been on your own. You don’t have the usual type of corporation board for counsel. You never had a chance to pick up executive experience from an employer the way many men do. Maybe an efficiency expert could give some helpful suggestions.”.

So it was that a George S. May representative came to evaluate our corporation. “I want you to be rough on us,” I told him. “Don’t pull any punches.” He went over the plant from the front lobby to the shipping dock. We showed him our billing procedure. He spent several hours nosing around our shipping department. He went over ware-housing mechanics, reordering procedures, quality control, all aspects of customer services. “You look to me like a pretty healthy operation,” the efficiency expert said. “Remember,” I chided. “We want criticism.” He had a few observations such as more effective methods of invoicing, but nothing momentous.

I was a little disturbed as to why I had felt such a compulsion to have him come. Maybe it was because I knew we were in good operational form and wanted someone to give me a pat on the back. I’m not above such chicanery. But then the May expert came up with a simple but great idea. “It looks to me like you’re missing a god thing in the plastics business,” he said.

“What’s that?” I asked. “Well, you’ve been very careful in the selection of products items with a good markup and fast turnover but you promote these with a lot of unrelated leaflets. Why not get all this information together in an attractive catalog?” This one suggestion has been worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, for our annual catalogue has become the bread-and-butter backbone of our entire operation!

In ten years the plastics division grew from just under fifteen thousand dollars per year to multimillion dollar annual gross, and it’s still growing. Our initial corporation handling the silver business was organized as the States Smelting and Refining Corporation. But son it became necessary to initiate a new corporation called United States Plastics. The plastics business is a tremendous windfall, for we see an eventual termination of the silver industry. We place many of our collectors in hospital X-ray labs, for example, but now the trend is toward videotape instead of emulsion film. Similar innovations may take over in other areas of photography. But plastics in its field is the wave of the future.

Our growth has been so phenomenal that the Internal Revenue Service audited our books for ten consecutive years. As a matter of fact, the local IRS man told our lawyer his office averages about eight “squealer” letters each year from people who claim to have inside information proving we welch on taxes. Last year we paid substantially over three hundred thousand dollars in taxes, and for the first time the IRS didn’t come in to audit our books. Apparently, they at last believe us when we say this business belongs to God, and we operate it on Christian principles!

“You know, sweetheart,” I said to my wife one day, “it’s just the way the prophet Malachi put it. The more we give to God, the more He opens the storehouse of heaven and showers us with material blessing. If we hadn’t turned fifty-one percent of the stock over to Him, I’m convinced that the one hundred percent profit we’d be making would be less than half of the forty-nine percent we now receive from the company.”

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