As you are still settling in to this new year, I thought it would be helpful to hear from Phyllis Sather, creator of the Purposeful Planning materials! I pray that you are being blessed in this new year and that you are planning for your future with your family and children. Her products can help you do just that!We are a relatively new business. In fact, we really never meant to become a business, it just sort of happened! Our main product line is the Purposeful Planning materials. These are based on the planning weekends our family has been doing for 13 years – in fact, we just finished our 13^th planning weekend on January 19th!

Tell us an interesting fact or story about your company. 
I would have to say that our products and business are the result of my rather poorly done attempts at submission to my husband Dan. This excerpt from “Purposeful Planning” shows you my initial response when Dan suggested we go away for a weekend of planning:

Give us a general overview of your company and the products you sell through the Schoolhouse Store.

In the beginning . . .

“Do I have to?” (Said in a very unbecoming and whiney voice.) That was my response when my husband suggested that he and I go away for a weekend eleven years ago and set some goals for us as a family. I didn’t want to leave my “babies” for an entire weekend. After all, Emily was only 8, Rebekah 6, and Eric 4. Eric was in the midst of 3 1/2 years of chemotherapy for leukemia. Who would I trust with them? But looming bigger in my mind was the thought of having to “set goals.” Just the thought of that sounded appalling to me. Setting goals meant you had to meet them, didn’t it? I was in “survival” mode, barely making it through each day. The thought of all that failure was just too much for me at that time of my life."

My second poor response was in 2007. During our planning weekend we were discussing ways to make what we were doing available to more people.  

Now that two of our children are adults and the third is quickly approaching adulthood, Dan thought I had a bit more free time and it seemed to be the time to gather our materials together and share them. So, he suggested that I write a book.

Well, I did enjoy writing little bits of this and that, but a book…I wasn’t too sure about that, so I just put it on the back burner and did nothing about it.

In December, I was reviewing our notes from our 2007 planning weekend in preparation for our 2008 planning and was reminded that Dan had asked me to write a book about our times together. Since it was already December and we were deep into Christmas preparations, I have to confess that I simply made a very feeble effort to pull a few things together so it would look like I had at least started to follow through on what Dan had asked me to do.

During our 2008 planning time, with Dan’s encouragement, I finally caught a vision for the book which became “Purposeful Planning.” It came together quickly after that and was being sold by July 2008.

Since then, purchasers have encouraged me to write a supplementary handbook with easily printable forms that would require even less effort for them to prepare for their own planning weekends. They also asked for Purposeful Planning to be available in MP3 format, since so many were used to multi-tasking and they thought their husbands would be much more open to using it if they could listen during their commutes. Late in 2008, both of these items became available.

How can your products best benefit the homeschooling community?
Our title verse is, “Where there is no vision, the people perish,” Proverbs 29:18.  In 1996, when we began our planning weekends, our marriage was in dire straits. We had survived three years of Dan being in college, then a four year residency, had three babies in five years, and then our youngest got leukemia. The long hours, short funds, lots of babies, and illness had really taken its toll on our family. That first planning weekend gave us hope. Hope that with the Lord we could survive, but even more than that; we could actually thrive as a family.

As we spent time together yearly, sought the Lord prayerfully, and made plans for each area of our life, we began to see things coming together in a way we never thought possible. We were reaching our goals and accomplishing more than we ever hoped to accomplish.

Which of your products are you most excited about?
Having just finished our 13^th annual planning weekend, I would have to say I’m even more excited about “Purposeful Planning.” Now our children are 21, 20, and 17, and because they have always been involved with our annual planning, they were as excited as we were to have a few days apart from the hustle and bustle of everyday life to look to the Lord for His plans for us as individuals and as a family.

What new items can we expect to see from your company in the next year? 
We have discussed either revising “Purposeful Planning” or writing an addendum or part two. From the input we’ve had from families who are using it, we’ve learned a few things we think would be helpful. We are hoping to get permission to share them with our readers. We are also considering making it available in a couple of other formats to further meet the needs of our readers.

Purposeful Planning SPECIAL Offer:

Purposeful Planning SPECIAL Military Policy:
Purposeful Planning also has the policy of giving these materials free to all military families. Early on, several of them wrote to say how helpful it was to them when a spouse returned from being gone for a year or more. They were able to use our format to reconnect to each other and get moving forward as a family again. It’s our little way to say thank you to the men and women who are serving us by protecting our freedoms. Please contact Phyllis@Phyllis-Sather.com if you qualify for this.