“Thus says the LORD to his anointed, to Cyrus, whose right hand I have held, to subdue nations before him; and I will loose the armor of kings, to open before him the two-leaved gates; and the gates shall not be shut; I will go before you, and make the crooked places straight: I will break in pieces the gates of bronze, and cut asunder the bars of iron: And I will give you the treasures of darkness, and hidden riches of secret places, that you may know that I, the LORD, who call you by your name, am the God of Israel.” (Isa 45:1-3)

Okay. Here it is early in the New Year and I’ve been expecting to find some treasures in darkness and hidden riches in secret places. I found one that we expect will dramatically impact the endowment we are raising for the Christian Business School some of you know I am heavily involved with. Although the endowment grew by tens of millions of dollars in the last two quarters of 2007, we expect that to pale in comparison to 2008. If I told you the goal for 2008 you would not believe it, but that’s not important. We do.

We need the endowment to launch the school and we intend to eventually take it internationally to help lesser privileged people groups have access to first world, kingdom class business training. Naturally, to raise hundreds of millions of dollars takes a combination of God’s favor (without which we would be nowhere), diligent work, tremendous vision and insightful strategies. One of those strategies opened up to us as the New Year began and I really want to share it with you so you can apply it. Here goes…

Remember the Parable of the Sower? Besides the intended message, it also teaches us something about High Probability Selling. When it was all said and done, less than 20% of the seed in that story produced over 80% of the return. As 2007 came to a close, we evaluated what the profile of our high returning opportunities were and in 2008 we are able to filter out the hard ground, the stony ground and the thorny ground opportunities, despite the fact that they contain millions of dollars of potential revenue for us. By knowing what the good ground looks like and directing our efforts exclusively in that field we can now increase our result by a factor of 5 in the coming year. (God willing)

You have to be willing to let some opportunities go to others while you focus on High Probability Targets. Remember, time is of the essence. We are told to redeem the time and make the most of every opportunity. Moses told us in Psalm 90 to number our days that we might apply a heart of wisdom. One way to do that is to recognize that time is ticking and ask the Lord to show us the High Probability Targets for developing the vision He has given us to bring to fruition.