hello mountain, it's me muhammad

[caption id="attachment_1492" align="alignleft" width="300"] The Charlie “T” Jones Conference Center[/caption] If the mountain will not come to Muhammad, Muhammad will come to the mountain. Life is all about making a series of decisions designed to move you closer to your goals; decisions that often involve seeking out alternative routes to get you to your final destination. My father, Charlie “Tremendous” Jones, joked, “Plan on everything going wrong. If something does go right, we’ll just have to work that in!” Like every other living, thinking person on this planet, I get up every day looking for ways to further my professional mission. I try lots of different things, plan on them all going wrong, change it up a bit, and pray a lot. This strategy kept our business steady and even on a sustained growth pattern for the last four years. Life is good, but good just isn’t good enough anymore. There’s got to be a better, more concentrated strategy out there that we just haven’t discovered. For several years, I’ve mulled over various usage options for our vacant warehouse space. My inner child had dreams of an indoor putt-putt facility, go-carts, and bumper cars; even a year-round haunted house spooktacular. But alas, I just couldn’t link that directly to our core mission. I had even considered a flea market since our founder was such a lover of collecting antiquities and books of all types. However, nothing led this opportunity to fruition materialize either. All this was going through my mind as I was still working at building our clientele base, going out and speaking, giving away books, and hosting various events at our current facility. That’s when the idea of a state-of-the-art conference center was born. Rather than go out and sing the praises of how books can transform the life of an organization, why not build a leadership annex where I could bring the entrepreneurs, chambers of commerce, and business people in so I could actually show them! Rather than put a link on our site about how we funnel our profits to ten tremendous organizations via the Books for Tremendous Living Foundation,  why not open up a gorgeous area where these groups could come and conduct events educating people in our area about ways they can get involved and help their neighbors! Rather than trying to get booked into high-dollar venues, why not have intimate settings where attendees can learn sales techniques from Jeffrey Gitomer; how to write books from Mark Sanborn; how to become a speaker from Don Hutson; and how to combine your faith with your profession from Naomi Rhode? So the planning process began, and we started setting aside the money and reviewing architectural drawings. After years of trial and error and due diligence, the groundbreaking will commence on June 3^rd, 2013. All systems are finally go! And while I’m still assuming everything will go wrong, I do know I’m moving that mountain one step closer. And in life, that’s all that matters. Check out our tremendous progress on our website and watch it all come together!