In Part Two with Chip Ingram, CEO of Living on the Edge, we find Rusty asking Chip to give his take on a previous mailbag question from an entrepreneur who didn’t see the value of church anymore as what comes out of the pulpit isn’t relatable to his life. While Chip agreed that most pastors aren’t very conversant with the entrepreneur’s life, he flips it from a what do I get to what can I give mode of thinking. He encourages entrepreneurs to see church as God’s company while acknowledging the frustration of not seeing change or progress fast enough. Henry has Chip share on some practical ways of how Pastors can love on the entrepreneurs in their midst before William tackles the subject matter of entrepreneurs struggling with failure, sometimes even a series of failures. Chip tells us that God must first work in you deeply before He can use you significantly. Rusty closes this week’s episode asking Chip to give listeners perspective on how to use power righteously. Chip’s response: it’s about stewardship.

 We hope you receive encouragement as well as insight from Part Two of our time with Chip Ingram. We’d like to hear from you on how you are stewarding the power and influence God has given you and how you’re overcoming the temptation of self-reliance in the comment section below.

Photo by Matthew T Rader on Unsplash

In Part Two with Chip Ingram, CEO of Living on the Edge, we find Rusty asking Chip to give his take on a previous mailbag question from an entrepreneur who didn’t see the value of church anymore as what comes out of the pulpit isn’t relatable to his life. While Chip agreed that most pastors aren’t very conversant with the entrepreneur’s life, he flips it from a what do I get to what can I give mode of thinking. He encourages entrepreneurs to see church as God’s company while acknowledging the frustration of not seeing change or progress fast enough. Henry has Chip share on some practical ways of how Pastors can love on the entrepreneurs in their midst before William tackles the subject matter of entrepreneurs struggling with failure, sometimes even a series of failures. Chip tells us that God must first work in you deeply before He can use you significantly. Rusty closes this week’s episode asking Chip to give listeners perspective on how to use power righteously. Chip’s response: it’s about stewardship.

 We hope you receive encouragement as well as insight from Part Two of our time with Chip Ingram. We’d like to hear from you on how you are stewarding the power and influence God has given you and how you’re overcoming the temptation of self-reliance in the comment section below.

Photo by Matthew T Rader on Unsplash

In this Monday’s video, we take a look at Weifield Electrical’s amazing work to end poverty in Denver — through its hiring. The company offers 4 years of job training and a long career to those out of the penal system. A win for the company’s own workforce development but as Karla Nugent (Partner and Chief Business Development Officer) emphasizes — it’s a second chance for someone to get their life back on track!

That company belief rings most beautifully through an employee’s words “They (Weifield) treated me like a normal person rather than a convicted felon.” What redemptive work!

Enjoy this 4-minute video where Colorado Governor, Hickenlooper, introduces and praises the company as further testament to Weifield’s impact in the community.

QUOTES:
“We build amazing buildings and we have amazing clients. But in the end, these lives that we’re changing … that’s what it’s all about.”

“Work is work and faith is faith but really your faith is every hour of the day. I would encourage any person that has an area of influence that they consider it… because it’s revolutionary.”

“If every company could partner with a NGO and give to them their time and talents, what an impact that would make for our community.”

…

Special thanks to Fachy Marín on Unsplash for the cover photo.

— by Patrick Lowndes

The following post was first published on patricklowndes.com by our friend Patrick Lowndes.

In this final post, I’ll get into the implications of living in the spotlight, dealing with compromise and aiming to leave a kingdom impact. Let’s jump in.

Living in the Spotlight

When you’re watching football or basketball it’s common to fix your eyes on whoever has the ball. They are in the spotlight. When you tell anyone that you love and follow Jesus, you place a kind of spotlight on you. People already carry around a stereotype of what you should be like based on experiences they had with other “Christians”. They might have just relied on the negative narrative in the media or social circles. In some cases, people are just looking for evidence that their label of a “Christian” has been validated with yet another data point. Don’t we do this for stereotypes we have about others as well? That’s a separate topic.

This reality gives me pause. I don’t litter my car with Christian bumper stickers, because, I’ll admit: I haven’t fully brought my driving under the lordship of Jesus Christ. More bluntly, I don’t want to tarnish the name of the Lord in my weaker moments of bad or “assertive” driving. (I justify myself because I used to be an “assertive” city bus driver while in college).

In the workplace, especially as a leader, I’m very aware of my ability to tarnish the name and reputation of Christ. Making decisions, building the product, working with customers, and caring about life outside of work are all opportunities to show people who Christ is and what His Kingdom is about. Ask yourself this question: How am I helping or hindering people experience the goodness of God in the workplace? As my pastor challenges me with often, “What do you see left ‘in your wake’? How do people experience you as a leader and what do they think about you after working with you?” Is it a good taste? Or not?

Since you and I are not Jesus we will often fail the “what’s left in your wake” test. But isn’t that part of the good news as well? As difficult as it is to admit and face failure, it presents the chance for us to point to the Gospel of grace. We can highlight how God made a way for failure-prone children to still enjoy relationship with Him – through repentance and faith in Jesus. Our identity is not in our performance, but in Jesus’ perfect performance on our behalf. That is good, refreshing news to a stressed-out worker who is constantly evaluated by their performance.

Compromise, Shortcuts & Regrets

Gray areas. How do faithful founders handle them? I’m regretful that I didn’t do as good of job submitting these quandaries to the Lord as they arose. Why do we like to cut corners to get our way? Is it laziness, … greed, … frustration? Why do we justify and explain away our decisions so easily without going to God with the quandary – believing that He is a rewarder of those who seek him? I regret not pausing and holding these things before the Lord in prayer more diligently.

While we made some good decisions to not hire certain candidates, we had an experience that I wish I could go back and redo. We hired a generalist to fill the shoes of two specific roles we needed to fill. Being in a high-performance role we defined what levels of success were, but we failed to clearly define what failure was. We needed to test the skills earlier on to help the person focus on their deliverables, but I got them distracted. When I looked up, I realized how little progress was made on the bigger goals and I didn’t have enough time to help the employee improve. That resulted in a rather abrupt performance improvement plan and the employee was unable to hit the milestones we need to hit.

Good leaders help their employees succeed and provide the arena for them to improve. Given how cash-strapped we were, I didn’t have the time and space for improvement, making the departure a difficult and tear-filled last day. I admitted my shortcomings, but I also had to make a business decision as well. That was the most painful day I experienced as a manager. Faithful founders need to own up when they screw-up.

While the firing decision couldn’t be reversed, we did decide to offer a reasonable departure package (for a startup to give) to help the employee through the transition. Caring for people beyond your obligation is another way to live as a faithful founder – although I fear all the times I only did the minimum required.

Lasting Kingdom Impact

I’ll write more on this topic later, but faithful founders keep their eyes fixed on the goals of God’s Kingdom. Not the goal of starting or running a sustaining or successful business, but that of making a mark for the King and His Kingdom in a world that is dying without hope and needs Him badly. They need to experience the grace, the patience, the justice, the sacrificial love and strength that comes when you’re following the King of all kings. But where does this impact happen, and how?

Kingdom impact can happen on a personal level, a community level, or even an industry level. For those of you working in a busy high-tech city like Seattle, or San Francisco, or New York, you likely have the challenge of slowing life down so people can feel and face the emotions of life. You might need to show entrepreneurs the freedom from their “slavery to succeed”. You might want to show off a workplace that highlights showing grace to each other and working as a team, instead of inflating individual status or ego. You might aim to be a purpose-built business that focuses its efforts on an underserved or overlooked population in your community.

For those of you reading this who intentionally built your companies in locations that are less developed, you have the chance to bring economic prosperity, vitality, innovation, and service to this community, city or nation. When you show-up, create wealth, jobs and care for people in ways that most other outsiders wouldn’t care about, locals take notice. When your light shines brightly before men, for the good of the people you are employing, the customers you’re serving and the community you’re building up, people will being to praise your Father heaven (Matthew 5:16). That is what Kingdom impact is all about. There is a transformational impact and a spiritual impact happening at the same time.

But how we accomplish this if we’re not ready to give a reason for the hope that we have?

Acknowledging Christ

“Anyone who acknowledges me before men, I will acknowledge before my Father in heaven, but anyone who does not acknowledge me before men I will not acknowledge him before my father in heaven.” Matthew 10:32-33

How do you feel about those words of Jesus? Are you acknowledging Christ in your business, for His grace in giving you the skills or opportunities you have, the favor you’ve received in the marketplace from new customers or partners, from governments or economic authorities?

If we don’t acknowledge God’s grace in developing a product, meeting deadlines, delighting and serving customers and generating revenue, who are we bringing glory to? Just to ourselves, or only to our team, or even to luck?

Good leaders should praise the accomplishments of their team and draw attention to the ones who help you realize your dream. But who gave you that team? And how did all of the pieces come together at the right time to make it happen? You might not have the liberty to speak openly about the Lord on public stages, but some of you do. Others can look for ways to share what God has done in the smaller venues or in conversation.

When is the last time you sat back and observed the evidence of God’s grace active in your business? When was the last time you internalized and meditated on that? When we realize how God is at work, we will more naturally point to this reality along the way.

At the celebration dinner post-acquisition, we made it a point to thank a bunch of people who helped us achieve a success. We honored the team and family members who were there as well. But we spent the last several minutes thanking Jesus for how God’s Spirit had united us together as founders, gave us success the way He did and showed Himself faithful to us in the process.

Final Thoughts

There have been times when I excelled in these areas and other times when I face-planted. Amidst it all, I encourage you to honestly evaluate how well you’ve acknowledged the Lord before people. Ask him to highlight areas of compromise in your life; go ahead – I dare you.

What areas have you not fully surrendered to Him? List them out and confess them to God. Deal with your Creator, who faithfully founded you long before your heart ever started beating. The answers He gives will be sobering, but eternally rewarding.

Once you do, you will find the same joy that the Apostle Paul found, when he worked the marketplaces building tents but also drew people to God.

Perhaps one day, you’ll look back on all those hours you spent “working your job.” After the money has been forgotten, titles have disappeared, and customers remembered no more, you will see all the souls of people who were affected by your living. Some might have even come to faith in Jesus because you decided to live as a faithful founder. We can see some of the fruit of our labor in the short term, but ultimately, what will God say when you meet Him at the end of your life? We all hope to hear what the Master told his faithful servant:

“Well done good and faithful servant. You have been faithful with a few things; I will put you in charge of many things. Come and share your Master’s happiness!” (Matthew 25:21)

…

Editor’s Note: If you liked this piece from Patrick, we encourage you to check out his other FDE blogs:

FDE Blog – Faithful Founder (2 of 3): Employees, Investors, Customers & Prayer
FDE Blog – Faithful Founder (1 of 3): Motivation, Co-Founders, Values & Family
FDE Blog – Founder’s Manifesto

…

[Special thanks to Zac Durant on Unsplash for the cover photo.]

— by Patrick Lowndes

The following post was first published on patricklowndes.com by our friend Patrick Lowndes.

In part one of this series, I focused on the foundations and motivations of being a faithful founder. In this post, I will unpack how those things are put on display throughout the workday.

Let start off with a somewhat contentious topic about how followers of Jesus should conduct themselves in the workplace.

An Integrated Person

In the western world, we tend to compartmentalize our lives pretty drastically at times. In one setting, we are a passionate student of Jesus, and in another, we’re a soccer player, and in another we’re just an employee, working our eight-to-five job. Even though we have many roles in life, we must not segregate our faith away from our working hours. Said differently, we must not elevate our identity of “worker”, higher than our identity of son or daughter of God. Let me unpack this a bit more.

Even before you are an employee of XYZ company or an American citizen, if you have submitted every part of your life and faith to Jesus as His disciple, and He your Lord, then you are first and foremost a citizen of heaven. Since we are ambassadors of that heavenly kingdom, we have a duty to “let our good deeds shine before men that they would praise [our] Father in heaven”, which is found in Matthew 5:16. Jesus’ parting words to his disciples before leaving earth were to share his message “as you go” in the different areas of life – like at work. Another angle on this is found in 1 Peter 3:15, where Peter writes, “Always be prepared to give an answer to anyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have. But do this with gentleness and respect, keeping a clear conscience…” This means that God wants us to be an integrated, person in our daily walk. What does the world think about this?

In recent years, many in the corporate world have praised colleagues who declare, “I am the same person here at work that I am outside of work.” People often want to experience the most “authentic you” you can bring to work (footnote: Seattle might be a little overly open compared to other areas of the world). This is why, if we truly call ourselves a faithful disciple of Jesus, we cannot be silent in the workplace, at lunch or events with co-workers about what matters most to us. It would be disingenuous to omit our faith from the conversation. If we struggle with that thought, we may need to invest more time in our own walk with God to see why our desire doesn’t align with His command.

Most full-time workers spend 50-60% of their waking hours on earth in the workplace (9-10 hours including lunch). When we stand before the Lord one day and give an account for how we acknowledged and represented him during these hours, what will we say? Do your co-workers know about your love God? Do they feel served and cared for by you? (more on this below) We must find ways to love God and make him known in every arena of life – from the home to the workplace, to the soccer field to the grocery store and every other place we find ourselves.

The Bedrock of Prayer

As believing co-founders we often prayed for our fledgling business, trusting the Lord for sales, partnerships, employees and capital investments. We prayed for more love to serve and care for our customers and our employees with all the situations they faced. We also prayed for ourselves as we faced the throes of startup life – reminding each other that our identity is not in our performance, but in the perfect life that Jesus already lived. These times were usually only 15-20 minutes, but they were a powerful pause in the busyness of the startup world. We acknowledged how the Lord was working, even in ways beyond our control and we would point to Him when He showed up in the results.

Since prayer was key to each phase of founding, building and selling the business we could speak openly, praising God about how He had responded to our prayer – despite our challenges and shortcomings as founders (more on those in a few sections).

Pastoring Diverse Employees

Diverse teams outperform homogenous teams with 35% higher likelihood to deliver results above average than homogenous teams (HBR article). Especially if you’re a Christian, you should be seeking to hire not-yet Christians to put God’s love on display for those who likely won’t set foot in a church building. Even well-meaning Christians need discipling & mentoring to follow the Lord in the workplace – if they are open to it. Try to strike a good balance of building in diversity where possible. You’d be surprised by how many opportunities arise to show care for and encourage not-yet Christians in your workplace.

As a CEO and a manager of people, you have a duty to hire people equitably and in alignment with HR best practices (not showing favoritism or disadvantaging employees because of their race, religion, gender, or sexual orientation) in line with being an Equal Opportunity Employer. Although we weren’t the shining example of the most diverse team, we definitely made an effort to draw in people with different views than our own.

Because we mentioned our gratitude towards God and pointed to God answering our prayers, it became natural to offer prayer to our employees when the situations of life were hitting the fan in their lives. This was one way to “pastor them” and show them the Kingdom against other toxic work environments they’ve worked in – or bad leaders they’ve worked beneath.

As VMware CEO, Pat Gelsinger, shared in a sermon, he views himself like the pastor of a mega church – referring to the massive software company of 19,000 employees. To be clear, CEOs are not the literal “Pastors” of their employees and businesses do not submit to the biblical structure that is required for God’s church (Gelsigner agrees). However, I do admire how his pastoral mindset influences the way he leads. He recalls the stories of praying for employees who bring hardships to him and respectfully getting permission to pray for them. He is blessing them and acknowledging the Lord as the source of that blessing. This picture has inspired me to care for or “pastor” my employees as much as they welcome it in our relationship.

Serving Customers with Great Experiences

Any good and lasting business will serve its customers well and make sustainable revenue while doing so. It’s a delicate balance to achieve both. Early customers often need more attention than you planned for in your cost model. Since providing great service can be at odds with sustainably making money, you’ll often have to make difficult decisions about that trade off.

This is why it is so important to run your business in a way that meets a real need and does so in a profitable fashion. Are customers delighted by your product or service? Are they grateful when you speak to them? How do you accept and apply feedback from customers to serve them better? Are customers excited about the outcome your product or service has created for them? Have you really enriched some part of their lives? You know you’re delivering great customer experiences when you hear customers say, “Wow, this is amazing!” or “You’ve just made my life a whole lot easier. Thank you!”

You know that Jesus was a craftsman and a stone-builder (likely not a carpenter: read this). As Jesus worked His craft, I wonder how he served His customers? Did He not see them as people who God called Him to love? People who needed the kingdom of God as well. Our motivation to build great products and services stems from the two greatest commands – to love God and to love people. That’s why part of our daily and weekly worship of God is finding ways to serve and love our customers, with the same love, precision and excellence that Jesus likely served His customers.

Let’s finish this post on an important topic for every founder.

Relating to Investors

Scripture teaches us in Proverbs 22:7 that “the rich ruler over the poor, and the borrower is slave to the lender.” Wise business leaders carefully consider their need for cash. Do I really need the money? Is there a way to bootstrap this business, or minimize dilution? If you’re developing hardware, or dealing with raw goods, you might have a high cost to startup.  Software businesses, on the other hand, require far less capital to launch. If you decide you need capital, you’ll have to juggle the tension of striving for funds and discerning compatibility at the same time.

Faithful founders listen to God’s Spirit while they meet investors, paying attention to when yellow or red flags appear in the investor. There was a specific investor that I stopped pursuing because he said, “If sales are hurting, see your family less.” Red flag went up. I thought to myself, I would never want to take this guy’s money.

As a CEO friend of mine advised me, “Don’t hook-up your wagon to horses that are running in a different direction than you want to go. Their money is not worth the pain you’ll experience in working with them.”

Once you’ve found investors you trust, agree with and signed-up with, you’ve found a great thing. But after the money has been transferred and you’re three, six or nine months down the road, you should ask yourself these questions:

• How do they feel about the business you’re building and the value you’re creating in the market? Are you building their confidence or eroding it?

• Have you laid a foundation of trust that helps you share honestly about your challenges?

• Are you coachable, and asking for feedback – or are you stubborn and avoiding questions or obfuscating the answers?

Faithful founders put their walk of faith on display even in their relationship with their investors, advisors, and mentors. I think we’re often intimated by investors because of our fear to lose investment, to lose the power they represent. What does this say about your faith and trust in God and His wealth, His influence and His power? Seriously, who are you more impressed with? a mere man or woman with a tiny sum of cash, or the King of all the universe, who owns every penny and with His power maintains the feeble & short-lived lives of all people in the palm of his hand? The answer to that will help you see what you really value in life and whose approval you’re trying to gain.

Certainly, not all investors will want to talk about spiritual things, but when you bring up how you’re relying on God and thanking him for favor, they should respect your faith as important part of the integrated person you are.

Let us not forget this truth from Colossians 3:23, which says, “Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as if working for the Lord and not for men.” Remember Who you are really working to please.

In the last post in this series, I will unpack a few other key topics for being a faithful founder.

…

Editor’s Note: If you liked this piece from Patrick, we encourage you to check out his other FDE blogs:

FDE Blog – Faithful Founder (1 of 3): Motivation, Co-Founders, Values & Family
FDE Blog – Founder’s Manifesto

…

[Special thanks to Ben White on Unsplash for the cover photo.]

— by Patrick Lowndes

The following post was first published on patricklowndes.com by our friend Patrick Lowndes.

Reflecting on my journey as an entrepreneur so far, I’ve found I love helping other founders. Specifically, I really enjoy helping men and women trying to follow Jesus and honor God in the way they run their startup. Unlike experienced consultants or seasoned entrepreneurs, I do not profess expertise in many kinds of businesses or industries, or even in a potent or broad skillset.

One thing I am confident in is my awareness of my purpose on earth: to live my life in a way that makes God [His Kingdom, His Story, His Love, His Message, His Son Jesus] bigger and me [my pride, my kingdom, my name] smaller. It would be easy to live out this purpose if it wasn’t for my incessant battle against the selfishness and pride that wars for the seat of power in my heart and mind. Shout out to Adam and Eve in the garden for passing down sin nature to all of us.

In this post, my aim is to encourage founders of businesses who want to bring God’s kingdom into the foundation of their business and their everyday operation. I’ll use my story of founding, building and selling a B2B software company, VendorHawk, as the context for my ponderings on what it means to be a “faithful founder.” Some lessons are driven by my failures as well.

But first, here are two verses from God’s Word that motivated me to write on this topic:

“When the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on the earth?” – Luke 18:8

“42 The Lord answered, “Who then is the faithful and wise manager, whom the master puts in charge of his servants to give them their food allowance at the proper time? 43It will be good for that servant whom the master finds doing so when he returns. 44Truly I tell you, he will put him in charge of all his possessions…From everyone who has been given much, much will be demanded; and from the one who has been entrusted with much, much more will be asked.” – Luke 12:42-45, 48b.

Questioning Motivation

Why do you want to build a business? Do you want to fund it with angel investments and grow it to be valued at 5X the revenue… and then sell it within 3 years? Or do you want to labor for 7-12 years and aim for the 0.5% of companies that could reach a solid IPO? You could be a hundred millionaire by building a ten-billion-dollar, venture-scale juggernaut of a business (sorry – letting my tech startup lingo come out). Or on the other hand, do you want to build a sustainable business that blesses a rural community that has never known a steady, profitable company that provides jobs for locals? Whatever the case, if we’re honest, many founders are motivated by some combination of more financial freedom, more time and making an impact in work in which they passionately believe. Building companies is a hard thing. If it was easy, then 9 out of 10 companies wouldn’t die within the first five years of operation.

Knowing this will be a difficult journey, we must be established in our purpose. As a person of faith, Colossians 3:23-24 reminds us “23 Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for human masters, 24 since you know that you will receive an inheritance from the Lord as a reward. It is the Lord Christ you are serving.”If honoring God with your life and work is important, why don’t you formalize your commitment to God and to each other?

At VendorHawk, we wrote out what we called our, “Founder’s Manifesto: Startups for Jesus”. In it, we clearly described how we could build a high-growth venture capital-backed business, but still stay married, love our families, and bring a taste of God’s kingdom into the secular tech culture. Can you found a company and honor God alone? Let’s explore that question next.

A Unified Co-Founder Team

There are few passages in Scripture that describe how to pick a business partner, but as I studied more about the following passage, I found it to be a helpful guide.

We read in 2 Corinthians 6:14-16, “14 Do not be yoked together with unbelievers. For what do righteousness and wickedness have in common? Or what fellowship can light have with darkness? 15 What harmony is there between Christ and Belial[b]? Or what does a believer have in common with an unbeliever? 16 What agreement is there between the temple of God and idols? For we are the temple of the living God.”

In context, Paul was confronting the Corinthian church on the issue of co-mingling the pagan practices and beliefs with the those of the Church. Many pastors use this phrase about being “unequally yoked” in reference to choosing a spouse in marriage. I think it can apply more broadly than to other partnerships as well. If you’ve ever co-founded a fledgling business, you’ll know co-founders are like spouses and the business is the young child that needs parenting, nurturing, and developing. When startup founders share the same values it’s easier to build those values into the company. You can co-create norms of behavior from a mutual motivation and a focus on serving each other out of humility and reverence for Christ.

Is this the only way to be a faithful founder? Absolutely not. Part of your mission might be to work alongside business partners who don’t follow Jesus to show them what honoring the Lord looks like while building the company together. But having picked co-founders who shared my love for the Lord, I enjoyed the fact that we could stand together in the manifesto we wrote, and seek to honor the Lord together.

Intentional Culture & Values

What does God value in life, in work, in relationships, and the way businesses build teams and serve their customers? Using our founder’s manifesto, which was based on the Bible, we chose culture and values that we felt aligned with God’s word, and with “Lean Startup” principles.

As founders, we used this origin story to share with employees about our values and how we should work together as a team. We said something like, “As founders who have faith at our core, part of our motivation for building a great company is to honor God while doing it. That’s why we crafted our values from two best-selling books, The Bible (a classic, all-time best seller) and the Lean Startup (a modern guide to best practices on building businesses). While you might want to read these books to better understand where we’re coming from, you don’t have to read them or agree with us on them. We want to build a team who brings perspectives to the table that are different from our own. We do expect, however, that all of our team would uphold these eight values that I’m about to walk you through.”

It feels good to align how you work with what you believe – and that shined through in these conversations. See our values in the previous FDE post of Founder’s Manifesto.

We also learned that articulation of values was not enough. We needed to add “norms of behavior” to give flesh to the bones we’ve laid out. Give tangible examples in quick points about what you do, or what things you say to help new employees better understand what values look like in practice. Your value might be, “Do the Right Thing,” but a norm of behavior is, “If you sense we’re not doing something with integrity, just call it out in the moment or offline with the person or a founder.”

Faithful founders clearly define their values, talk about them often and back up their talk with a consistent walk.

Values and relationships at work are important, but we cannot neglect what happens outside of work as well.

Faithful to Family

Ephesians 5:25-28 says, “25 Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her 26 to make her holy, cleansing[b] her by the washing with water through the word, 27 and to present her to himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless. 28 In this same way, husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself.”

Building a business is a family endeavor. It’s rare to build a business from nothing with ease, as if you’ll work less than if you had a day job, working for someone else. Faithful founders do not neglect their spouses and families in the midst of starting, building or running their business.

Just as you have a working agreement with your co-founders (defining how you want to work together with them), you must also discuss your boundaries for working at home. You need to establish a type of “home work agreement” with your spouse to protect your time when “away” from work. Make your decision early on things like putting away your cell phone during dinner hours, spending time with your kids in the evenings or taking your wife on a date each week.

With three young children (under the age of five), the only way I knew I could run my startup was if my wife was fully onboard to support me while I did it. We established “holy hours” from 5:00-7:30pm each night where I did no work, except the work of being fully focused on my kids and the house duties I could squeeze in. Scheduling date nights a few weeks out was important for me so I could prioritize time with my wife – who was bearing a heavier than normal load at home. Do my kids see that I’m still in love with mommy more than I’m in love with work?

Once you’ve decided on your boundaries, set a recurring calendar invite every other week or month to check in on how well you’re holding to those commitments. Long after your business starts, succeeds or fails, you’ll have your family – with many or few memories of their dad during the startup phase. Will those memories be warm and sweet to them, or filled with stress, distraction and unmet relational needs? Making the most of your time at home is your responsibility as a founder and your spouse needs to be fully on board to help you do this.

If you are building your startup as a single man or woman, you might apply this section to your local church or a group of close friends instead. Running the race alone is a great way to get tired, fatigued, and completely consumed by your job. To avoid falling out of touch with most of your friends, family and church family, schedule time with those people to keep a refreshing life outside of work alive.

Now that you’ve contemplated the deeper motivations and foundations for how to be a faithful founder, in part two of this post I’ll discuss how to put living faith on display in the everyday decisions of running a business.

…

Editor’s Note: If you liked this piece from Patrick, we encourage you to check out his other FDE blog:

FDE Blog – Founder’s Manifesto

…

[Special thanks to Ben White on Unsplash for the cover photo.]