New Year Plan

I made light of new year’s resolutions in my earlier post, but that doesn’t mean I don’t believe in taking action and trying to improve things. We’ve identified two strategic themes for CiRCE for 2009. First, to achieve operational excellence and second, to strengthen our financial stability. There are two reasons for these two themes. In order to fulfill our ministry and serve you we need to have stronger operations. And if we are going to expect people to support our vocation, we need strong operations to ensure that we provide excellent customer and client service. It’s pretty straightforward.

Nancy joined our team in May as our business manager and has made tremendous progress sorting us out. That’s why this year we’ve determined to make even stronger operations our strategic focus. This means planning better, communicating better, serving better, and coordinating all our activities better.

Why am I writing this here? Well for one thing we are a public company, so we want to be open about our plans. Also, we want you to hold us accountable and to help us know where our weaknesses are evident. Have you experienced a shortfall in our service to you? Have you seen evidence of a weakness in our operations? Let us know. You can write us at info@circeinstitute.org and help us fulfill our goals.

The two strategic themes are bound together. Unless we serve our clients well we’ll never have strong financials. And unless we have strong operations, we won’t be able to serve our clients well. But there’s still a lot more to it than that.

At CiRCE we believe in what we call the three “global factors.” It’s not just cash flow that marks business success. You also need to sustain goodwill and energy. Goodwill, energy, and financials each need to be maintained because they interact, but the first two are a lot harder to measure. It’s crucial to realize whose good will you are seeking too. At CiRCE, we want yours, but we want God’s even more. He’s our provider and reason.

And He has called us to the mission of Christian classical education. So our first priority is to please Him through faithfully fulfilling our calling. If we are, we trust He’ll provide as long as He wants this work to continue. Faithfulness is our first priority. And we can’t be faithful if we don’t have strong operations.

It all revolves around our commitments, vision, and mission. If we don’t make them concrete, they aren’t real.

Please keep us in your prayers and let us know how we can be more effective.

Thank you.