— by Tom Darden

We often see media reports about the latest survey of people’s fears. These tend to come in two varieties— some are about phobias, while others deal with real-life fears. The phobia stories are fun to read because they remind us of visceral fears that most of us share, such as spiders, heights, or public speaking. But the surveys about real-life fears tell us something about who we are, both psychologically and culturally.

Chapman University asks Americans every year about their leading fears. Some of the top ones in 2018 include corrupt government officials, environmental pollution, contaminated drinking water, and respondents’ own economic futures. The sickness or death of loved ones, environmental extinctions, global warming, and medical bills also rank high, being listed by over half of all respondents. Interestingly, most of these fears are societal as opposed to individual. Other than personal economic outcomes, medical bills, and maybe clean drinking water, Americans mostly are afraid of things that affect society or the planet at large.

These societal fears can be just as intense as personal concerns. Early in high school, I had frequent stomach pains and ultimately saw a gastroenterologist. He found nothing, but he asked questions about my life and whether I worried very much. I told him that I worried all the time, specifically about environmental doom. I felt like I needed to be doing something about it, which created dissonance because I was in no position to do so. The doctor sent me away, saying my stomach was fine but I should stop worrying so much. This was only half-helpful, and it marked the beginning of nearly 50 years of wondering – and even worrying – about worrying.

Over decades of being in business, I have seen that fear is a key factor affecting executives. Search on the words “executive fear” and you can find 4,924 references to articles, cases, etc. in the index of the Harvard Business Review (HBR) alone. You will find titles such as, “Don’t Let Your Inner Fears Limit Your Career,” “How to Overcome Your Fear of Failure,” or “What CEOs Are Afraid Of.”

HBR would not publish thousands of articles about executives’ fear unless it were a real issue, but this would surprise the world at large. Business leaders are viewed as being fearless. Articles and polls about positive or even negative traits of executives do not discuss fear. And no one wants leaders of any kind to be afraid. According to Gallup’s “State of the American Workplace Report,” employees want their company leaders to be inspiring, caring, visionary, enthusiastic, competitive, and intense. The public wants similar traits in the US president, according to Gallup. Clearly these attributes seem inconsistent with fear. It would be difficult for a leader to be inspiring or visionary, much less enthusiastic or intense, while focusing on fear in the background.

While business leaders seem to be as fearful as everyone else, there is one difference. They worry more about themselves than they do about the world or societal issues. Their top fear, according to “What CEOs Are Afraid Of” (HBR), is the imposter syndrome—fear of being found incompetent. Additional leading fears include underachieving, appearing vulnerable, political attacks by peers, and appearing foolish. Others mentioned include retirement, dying, and loss of reputation. About 60% of the executives responding said that at least some of these fears afflicted members of their own teams, impeding honest conversations and causing internal politics, game playing, and bad behavior.

Even though the executives interviewed talked a lot about their fears, 95% of them said their colleagues were unaware of them. Said another way, they believe their own fear is a secret. This is particularly odd since they are aware of the fears of their team members, and they know their fear creates problems in the office. Like the emperor with no clothes, can they possibly believe nobody else is aware, and only they can see it? This suggests that a remarkable level of dysfunctionality is based on fear and the inability of organizations to address it effectively. Fear leads to bad performance, and business executives have a lot of it, but they cannot fix it. Clearly business outcomes would improve if we could find a way to reduce fearfulness.

When fearfulness or its impact on organizations are discussed in business literature, the solutions are predictable. Hire people with high emotional intelligence, which presumably correlates with either lower levels of fear or better coping skills. Train for fearlessness or fear management by encouraging people to be vulnerable. Encourage employees to discuss their backgrounds and fears so they become desensitized to appearing vulnerable. Or follow the advice of a banker friend who once told me, “Ninety- five percent of what people are afraid of won’t actually happen, so you might as well quit worrying.” Whether that’s helpful or not remains unclear to me.

Outside of the context of business, there are many resources for managing fear or worrying, including journaling, hypnosis, neuro-linguistic programming, and therapy. Presumably these other tactics could have a positive impact on the side effects of fear, like organizational problems. But treating symptoms is less effective than treating root causes. We should be asking, “Why do we fear,” rather than, “What do we fear” or “How should we manage fear?”

Aside from our phobias, our fears arise from our lack of control over outcomes we believe are important to us. For business executives, these tend to relate to how we are perceived, or how we perform relative to some set of expectations. These expectations likely have to do with financial performance, career esteem, physical health, or reputation.

While the answers may seem obvious, we should ask ourselves not only why but also whether we should care about these at all. Businesspeople are especially hard-wired to be responsive to others, and to conform to the expectations of the people and broader cultures around us. Company success correlates to this, and businesses that meet or exceed society’s expectations are rewarded. As individuals, our early socialization motivates us to do a good job, as defined by others. My elementary school report cards included conduct assessments, such as “Takes pride in his work.” I remember being confused about why my school considered this to be a positive behavior. If the work was meaningless, or if I had done a bad job, why should I be proud of it? And in any case, wasn’t it arrogant to be proud of myself? But the point of the conduct grade was to drive children to care about meeting external expectations. The unintended side effect is that we worry about deviations from society’s normal path, and we fear that others might realize we are suboptimal. We believe we will be happy if we meet the norm, and unhappy if we do not.

It is ironic that we believe this so intensely, given that we are not very successful at predicting how contented we will be if our circumstances change—whether for better or for worse. Furthermore, centuries of research on happiness, from Plato to St. Augustine to modern thinkers, conclude that we struggle on hedonic treadmills, with external events in our lives only causing temporary blips upward or downward. Business history is filled with stories of miserable people who “succeeded” and happy people whose companies were upended by unexpected problems. Instead of worrying that our happiness requires following a linear path to a specific outcome, how can we learn to be content in whatever circumstance we are in?

One useful resource on this topic is the Apostle Paul, who addressed it often, and most specifically in his prison letter to the Philippians (4:6–13). His previously- comfortable life was dramatically disrupted, and he suffered almost unimaginably. Yet he ignored all that and stayed on his mission. He wrote that he had learned to be content whether he was rich or poor, hungry or filled, and by implication, even whether he was in prison or not. He was able to dismiss his fears because he knew what mattered; almost none of what we worry about mattered to him. We may never have his strength or suffer from his challenges, but we can learn from Paul how to stop worrying and focus on what is important.

Article originally hosted and shared with permission by The Christian Economic Forum, a global network of leaders who join together to collaborate and introduce strategic ideas for the spread of God’s economic principles and the goodness of Jesus Christ. This article was from a collection of White Papers compiled for attendees of the CEF’s Global Event.

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Episode Transcript

Brian Roland: That essentially created a formula that provided a meaningful framework for me so that I knew at the end of the day, you know, whatever hard situation it was driving Kingdom Impact and what I did not expect was that meaningful work for me would turn into meaningful work for my team. And when you have multiple people around a meaningful endeavor like that, you’re creating shared purpose and cultural alignment and ultimately community.

Rusty Rueff: Welcome back, everyone, to the Faith Driven Entrepreneur podcast we trust you’re having a fantastic week today, William and myself, we’re going to take a little trip on Zoom to Scottsdale, Arizona. And we’re going to meet up with the founder of Obscenity. Obscenity is a six times Inc 5000 company that’s powering corporate perks for top brands like U.S. Bank and MasterCard. Now, while obscenity provides millions of subscribers with private discounts, the company’s social mission is fighting extreme poverty with every program they deliver. Our guest is Brian Rowland. He’s going to take us through the story of obscenity, and we might actually hear a little bit about how he likes to roast coffee and slice of droughts. Let’s listen in. It is just awesome to be back here with you, William.

William Norvell: It’s a great day. It’s a great day to be on the Faith Driven Entrepreneur podcast.

Rusty Rueff: It is. It is. And we’re missing Henry again on this one. We are here and he’s he’s off doing Faith Driven Entrepreneur work and Romania, which is just awesome. We can’t wait to hear those stories when he comes back. Bryant, welcome to the podcast.

Brian Roland: Hey, guys. I’ve been looking forward to this for a long time. Thanks for having me.

Rusty Rueff: We are so excited to have you. And you know, our friends over at C12 did a great job of covering your story and how your team is so innovative. I mean, it was just it was an awesome piece and I want to go there, but I want to start with the basics today, you know, just tell us who you are, where you’re from. And and it also shows, you know, a little bit about how God’s led you to where you are today.

Brian Roland: Yeah, I better start in little see 12 plug in from where I am, I’m just I’m a musician sales guy who stumbled upon a really neat business, really neat product, and I needed SEO training desperately without even really realizing it as the business started to grow. And so see, 12 for me has been over a decade of this is what CEOs do. And that was how Steve, 12, was valuable for me for so long, and it was a place where I could rub shoulders with and walk side by side. Other CEOs who had been doing this for a long time with a faith driven worldview. And it was a tremendous blessing. So I was grateful to that story, and they’ve been along the way with us all the way. So my story is essentially I’m an entrepreneurial guy. I’ve always been doing something. Whether it was selling lemonade on the sidewalk or or recording my own trumpet CD and doing a little church concerts to working and as kind of a college level studio musician or teaching trumpet lessons to kids, I always had something that I was developing. And when I was in my first job out of college and it was an outside sales role, essentially I was selling cell phones and my boss said, Here’s an $18000 salary. Anything else you want to make? You got to go find and don’t come back until you sell 30 phones. And so it was outside sales knocking on doors. It was a tough road, selling cell phones, selling cell phones,

Rusty Rueff: knocking on somebody’s door and saying, Hey, do you have one of these?

Brian Roland: Well, yeah. So to be good inside, be to be knocking on doors, talking to businesses about, Hey, are you providing cell phones for your people and working on closing big deals? And that was really where the journey began for me. And it’s been a discovery process from there of what it is that the Lord wants me to do. Essentially, I moved from the music industry wide in Nashville to do Christian music ended up not being something that I was super excited about. And so I moved into the sales job and knocking on doors and talking to businesses about their phones was super intimidating for me as a 23 year old kid. So like, I just go talk to the purchasing department or, you know, the CFO and see if you can save some money and they’ll love you if you save them money. It’s like, Yeah, I don’t. I don’t even know what CFO stands for, right? So that’s not for me. So I went back to Belmont University, where I just graduated from, and I said, Hey, could I talk to your parents about getting a cell phone for their kids? And I did a couple of parent meetings. I spent the rest of that August making phone calls from the swimming pool in my apartment complex. I was like, Wow, this is awesome. I don’t want to go the office. I’m calling people and talking to people, and I’m in the swimming pool and I sold my 30 phone, so I’m back in the office and I’m checking off boxes as I go and September 1st hits and the whole board is just wiped clean and my boss is like, All right, great job, you did it now, do it again. I was like, Wait, what? I was like the while the kids are all back in school, like they’ve all got their phones now. What do you mean? Do it again? And so that was the life of the outside sales guy. You know, hustle, hustle, win, start over. And I found my way by discovering that employees of companies get discounts off their personal cell phone service. So instead of knocking on doors and talking to CFOs, I called the departments of large companies. I said, Hey, did you know your employees get a discount on these cell phones as a benefit of working here? And they said, Well, you know, do you have a flier? We could send everybody. So we started making fliers. Here’s a flier to give their buddy, you know, be better to have a website you could give to everybody. So I went to my brother, I was like, Hey, Mark, you build websites where you build a website that kind of has the logo of the company and the cell phones that we’re offering at the discounts. We just need a database and a front end. And I started selling a lot of phones with these procurement portals that we stumbled into. And it turns out that Sprint Corporate was who was serving mostly at the time, had a hard time getting those portals out there. And we found that the national account teams for Sprint were learning that, Hey, these two guys up in Nashville working for this phone dealer can actually get us a portal faster than our corporate I.T. team. So they started coming to me and introducing me to their Fortune 500 accounts. And the next thing I knew I was working with large hospital systems Oracle, Disney, H&R Block and I was their cell phone guy with this awesome website. There was a day where I provided phone information to a couple of weeks for it to get it published for the employees to view. And this is at The Walt Disney Company for about 200000 employees. And the information was wrong. And H.R. was getting complaints from employees at Disney. They’re coming to me. I had no power. Only the IT department had the power to pull it down. Sprint was not happy that information was wrong because people are going in their stores with the wrong information and we were all just stuck until we were at the mercy of corporate it until it was their priority to fix this little small air benefit thing that was out there. So at the end of that, I said, Hey, look, if we built a platform for you that managed all your merchant relationships, I was one of 300 at the time for them just doing cell phones, and we could have solved this immediately. We could have fixed it right away. You would never have to touch a merchant offer. Merchants would update, manage their own information. It would never have to manage or communicate any of this, and we’d make it so much better. We’d bring in mobile apps. We categorize that we do all these cool things. We’d vet the merchants before they came in and make. The offers are real. So we got some yeses to that idea and that became ability. And so today, Bentley has over a million redemption locations for thousands of discounts on everything from pizza and the zoo to movie tickets, oil changes, car rentals, hotels. We serve U.S. Bank Corporate and MasterCard Corporate and 400 other companies, as well as we have a whole small business plan where for 150 a month, companies of any size can have access to the same perks and benefits that we’ve been managing and running for the Fortune 500 for over a decade now.

Rusty Rueff: Now, I’m assuming there’s no more cell phone discounts anymore.

Brian Roland: Well, I’m not managing the cell phone discounts anymore, but we still got them.

Rusty Rueff: Still got them, still got them. We’d be remiss to run past this because you did all this work with all these cell phone carriers. Which ones are the best?

William Norvell: The commercials? The commercials say they’re all the best. I’ve seen the light up maps of the U.S., but which ones are

Brian Roland: really the best? Yeah. So the biggest competitor, the one that was really hard to just deal with was Cingular. So Cingular all the way, which has been gone for about 15 years, right?

William Norvell: That explains it.

Brian Roland: I’m not answering that question. OK.

Rusty Rueff: You don’t. You don’t have to. But we had to ask if that’s the way it works. You know,

Brian Roland: when I watched the movie the other night from five years ago, where Sprint was a big sponsor and it was all over the movie and everything, and I was like, Man, whoever did the product placement didn’t realize that you know how out of date it makes their movie seem when you know some brand is just obsolete because it gets bought out. And Sprint’s now T-Mobile, which is the craziest thing, and there’s a huge case study to be had in that industry. I’m looking forward to somebody doing that.

Rusty Rueff: It will happen. It will happen. So let’s go back to obscenity. OK, so you start a business with your brother? Tell us what that was like.

Brian Roland: Yeah, that’s right. Mark has always been my right hand guy. Like we always say, I’m the idea guy, and he’s the one that makes it happen. Mark is an electrical engineer undergrad. He’s got his master’s degree in arts, computation and design, and so his master’s thesis was around combining the virtual world with reality. And he essentially designed this beautiful coffee table that had electric circuit boards underneath, and it read the weight of whatever item and position on the top of this table, which was a standard table. And it caused these magnets to spin around and create patterns in the sand with ball bearings that were kind of mixed in with the sand. And then he wrote the software on the computer that basically instructed the table what to do based on what conditions. So, you know, the market goes up to a certain point. Physical reality displays on the table. The market goes down to a certain point, physical reality displays on the table. So I mean, this is mark like anything I could dream of. He can make happen. And so in those early years, we ran a long way with his background in graphic design and back end development, front end development and server management. And so it’s been a beautiful, beautiful partnership. Listen, it works because we could not be more opposite. We continually care about completely different things, and for the most part, that’s really good because he’s like, Whatever you do, I trust you. Whatever you want to do, I trust you. And for me, it’s whatever you want to do. I trust you. And the only times that we’ve run into an issue was when we wanted to talk about what to do with our giving. And that created some divisiveness. And if it wasn’t for our social mission, which is a predefined impact plan, then that could have been a very divisive issue. But as soon as we realized that there was friction there, we’re just like, Look, this is why we have the impact way, and this is why we came up with the plan to begin with so that we’re not given any external footholds and we’re marching on towards the mission that we have and we can find other ways to support these other things that we care about people.

Rusty Rueff: It’s really cool. Yeah, I know I’m supposed to be listening to you, but I just looked at Marc’s website, that sand table is pretty awesome.

Brian Roland: How did you find it?

Rusty Rueff: Yeah, that’s pretty awesome.

Brian Roland: He just won an award in the last little bit, and his latest thing is he’s got this. I won’t do it justice explaining it, but he’s written this algorithm that basically he’s got a pen like a fountain pen kind of thing attached to a little robotic arm. And so he’s asking people from around the world to send him photos and he’ll mail them a postcard with their design that they send in. His little pen does it. And so he was just showing me last week when we were at a retreat, he was showing me pictures from. He was like, Oh, this one just arrived in France and this one just arrived in Canada, and this guy just got his in L.A. and I was like, Oh man, what a unique little thing.

Rusty Rueff: So no shortage of creativity in your business partner. That’s for sure. That’s that’s right. That’s right. Awesome. That’s right. OK, so you guys, the two brothers, you take a vanity and you bootstrap it right there, bootstrap it up, and then you did something really unique that seems today people will go, Oh, well, I’m doing that. You created a fully remote team, right? And that when you did it, I want you to talk to us about that because it’s not as easy as what people think and those are doing it now because of necessity. Have a lot to learn. I know that for a fact. So I’m interested in just, you know, this remote team concept. And why did you and your brother even start it that way?

Brian Roland: Yeah. So Rewind Day one for us was twenty six. And essentially after this debacle with Sprint, I went to my boss at the cell phone companies and they look, if we had a platform that managed the discounts for them, we could essentially control the narrative. And like a good entrepreneur who’s only focused on cell phones, he said, No, we need to keep the main thing, the main thing like we do cellular. I don’t know what you’re talking about, but we do cellular. So I said, Well, I’m going to explore it on the side. Took about a year and a half exploring it on the side, and it came to be. And then to the point where we had to decide it was taking too much time from my day job and I couldn’t fit the work I needed to do after hours and lunch breaks. And I didn’t feel like I was stewarding my time well for my employer, and I was like, right on that edge, so I needed to go full time. And so that full time opportunity was really only possible for my wife’s $36000 your teacher’s salary. And so we took the plunge and I’m in Nashville. Mark is finishing up his master’s degree in Irvine, California. We’ve been doing remote, the two of us for a long time and employee number three or employee number one, depending on how you want to look at it with somebody we already knew and she needed to move to Virginia for her husband’s job. He was in the military and we said, Hey, look, we can figure that out. And so we started off as a remote team, as a necessity. And then employee number four was, you know, we just always had this mentality that it’s like, well, who is in our network? So we have really gotten disciplined about hiring people that are just two or three degrees of separation from an existing team member. And when you’re not limited by geography, the talent pool is pretty huge. And I mean, if you think that the average person has, say, 200 friends on Facebook with the spouse that’s tightly aligned with, then you know, you kind of have this really loose culture fit from that. And so, you know, today identity with 30 employees and about 400 touches out there, that could be a culture fit across 30 people. The talent pool is pretty huge. And so we just kept building based on people regardless of geography. And that worked for us and we didn’t think we were doing anything unusual. We were just doing what made sense at the time, and we learned a lot of tools along the way to keep and maintain a healthy team and healthy communication and all those things.

Rusty Rueff: So tell us about some of those tools.

Brian Roland: Well, yeah. So rewind back to day one. And I had done really well selling cell phones as a twenty three to twenty six year old guy, making six figures pretty much right away. More money than my dad, pretty much right away, was not interested in money. I was not driven by money. In fact, it became kind of frustrating because it was, you know, I had some guilt around that that I had to learn to see money as a tool that’s in my toolkit as opposed to anything else. And so what was really missing in my cell phone years was not success. It was meaning and you know, why am I spending all these hours? What am I accomplishing? Because I’ve reached a level where I’m no longer interacting with the actual customers. I’m not building relationships with people and shepherding a team, and that’s a good thing. But why am I giving all my time here in the deepest way I could get to was, um, helping save people money on their cell phone bill. And so. Day one with obscenity, I said, Hey, Mark, if we’re going to do this, I need to know that when it gets really hard and you know the brand, let us down. Our customer lets us down a competitor like gives us a hard kick in the gut that my way is deep enough to overcome that. And so I said, I need an output to a cause for every input to the business. And I want that cause to be driving something eternal and helping lead people towards a relationship with Christ and an eternity and heaven. So how do we do that? And that is a big question mark. And so sitting there with my wife in the Starbucks and Cool Springs Boulevard in Franklin, Tennessee, she said, Well, hey, you know, I started sponsoring a child through a company called World Vision at a concert. And World Vision just serves people regardless of race, religion, ethnicity. They’re focused on solving extreme poverty, which is the United Nations number one sustainability goal to eradicate by the year 2030. She’s like, they kind of do it all. So you could funnel your support through them and they kind of do it all. And at the end of the day, their mission is to introduce people to the Lord. And so that’s what we did. We started our first impact plan and we defined a metric so that for every this, we’re going to give this. And from there, we just started giving to ministry and a very programmatic way. And that became what we now call our impact plan.

Rusty Rueff: So we may have jumped over it, and it’s probably worth coming back to.

Brian Roland: That’s right, yep, growing up. That’s right, yeah, my parents were kind of first generation Christians. They came to know the Lord post-college years. They were both kind of apathetic, raised and kind of loose religious households that didn’t drive them towards really understanding a relationship with Christ. And really, shortly after I was born, they were able to come to faith.

Rusty Rueff: And so your brother and you share this faith, you start affinity, you go through all of this and you’re searching for the bigger. Why was he searching for the bigger? Why as well?

Brian Roland: You know, he was still in his college years, so it hadn’t hit him yet. He’s just a very generous again. We’re kind of on opposite ends of the spectrum, so he’s just a very generous individual and so he was very interested in doing something that was meaningful. And so while I had firsthand experience working for five years basically and succeeding without kind of a vision mission on the horizon, he was very generous to kind of trust me and that initiative and give up some of his potential income and earnings now. I will say, and this is something that I tell new enterprises all the time, that setting up the mission on day one before you’re making any money is key because we didn’t have to think about what we were giving up because we hadn’t made any money yet. And so it was baked in. So anything we needed to do to succeed just required us to work a little bit harder than we would have otherwise. But we never had to consider, how do we start doing this? What do we have to not do that we were planning to do? What do we need to give up?

William Norvell: Brian, I want to jump in real quick and go back. I think I heard the story of sort of how you became a remote company. I’d be really curious, though. This is something that a lot of people are dealing with now, whether they want to or not, right? Whether that’s a preference or it’s a necessity. You have 30 people, it sounds like in a lot of different locations. What are some of the tactical things to keep a culture together to know your fellow coworkers to keep everybody on a mission to remind? I mean, that’s a lot, but just kind of maybe just talk for a few minutes about just how do you run that and how do people thrive in that type of environment?

Brian Roland: Yeah. So at the end of the show, I’ll give I’ve got two resources to kind of answer both these things. I’ve got a phone number that you can text and get a one page resource pack, really, that impacts plan that we put together that essentially created a formula that provided a meaningful framework for me so that I knew at the end of the day, you know, whatever hard situation it was driving Kingdom Impact. And what I did not expect was that meaningful work for me would turn into meaningful work for my team. And when you have multiple people around a meaningful endeavor like that, you’re creating shared purpose and cultural alignment and ultimately community. And what was really exciting to see was that at the very top of this result in this outcome was a competitive advantage for our company, and we had people start choosing us because of what we stood for as we continue to share our social mission with more and more people to the point where we’re just published in online and open with it. And last year, we just crossed over $1 million of direct giving and it’s just become a really neat thing. And so a huge piece of our healthy remote culture is our team’s alignment and interest in doing more with our work than the services we provide. And so we have built a culture of people that are really passionately pursuing this common mission. Outside of that, we have a very tactical approach. I call it our rules of engagement for communication, and these rules have really helped us go a long way in developing authentic relationships being present for each other in spite of our distance. And I wrote an article, If you go to Brian Whatcom can look forward. It’s called stop sending internal emails. And I mean, the big idea is there are great tools out there to help you communicate in the right way. And so we really haven’t sent an internal email in over a decade. Email is the wrong channel for anything you want to communicate internally. So if you have a task for somebody, put it in a task manager, get it assigned to them. Don’t drop it in a chat. Hey, I want you to do this. It’s just going to get buried and lost by all the other chats. Same thing for email. Don’t email somebody. It’s just going to bog down their email and their workflow and not build a framework for them. So we say, if you need me to do something, it has to go straight into a task manager with us on it. If you have questions about that task, if it’s a quick question, pop it in the chat. Anything you put in a chat needs to be able to disappear and go away. It’s not an archive of information, it’s just a quick answer. It’s way more efficient than a phone call. If it requires more communication than a chat, then it’s time to pick up the phone where everybody is a little different on this. But I really encourage people, especially in remote work, to use the phone more than they use. VIDEO The phone is great for one on one conversations. VIDEO is, in my opinion, not as great for one on one conversations one the phone lets you get up and walk around. The phone also removes this element where my brain is trying to process the fact that I see you, and yet you’re not there. And so with video, my focus is working a lot more than it is on a phone call. And as a result of that, I’m more easily distracted and it gives me a lot more tired. So I encourage people, Hey, when you need to collaborate, collaborate on video, but just a phone call from one on ones, we really have a note text messaging rule, no texts or for emergencies. I mean, like, it can’t wait for emergencies. One of the main reasons is because people are not disciplined enough to get a second cell phone so that they can have a healthy work life balance. The moment you give your text message away to somebody your number away, then they can interrupt you at any point in your life and create an unhealthy workflow for you and take your attention and time away from the things that matter outside of work. And I’m guilty of this and I’ve learned the hard way, and as a sales guy, I’ve given my phone number out to customers and all kinds of things. And listen, those customers leave you alone on off hours when they love you and they’re fun to talk to when they love you. But when there’s a problem, they’ve got access to you on every holiday, all the time after hours, and they can just get your mind away from your family. And this is where I truly believe this concept of if you don’t build a margin for yourself, you don’t have a mission and you need to be maintaining margin to maintain mission. And if you don’t have the pieces in your life to have that level of discipline, then you need to not do it. So if you’re not going to get a second cell phone that you can leave in the office and pick up the next day for text messages, then don’t use texting. And really, from there, you know, we haven’t had this trouble much, but some people have trouble with social. Platforms, so when you have remote work, you know, two workers might be friends on Facebook, and so they use the Facebook Messenger, talk or whatever, and you know, Instagram Messenger, LinkedIn Messenger, like it never ends. That’s a terrible way to communicate. There’s no record of it. It’s completely lost, and it’s outside of our rules of engagement. And so this just leads to our no internal emails rule and trickles down from there. On top of that, maybe the most impact driven initiative that we’ve done is what I call no agenda one on one phone calls. And for the longest time I did these. My leadership is doing these now, but it started as a once a month and at a certain point we grew into every other month and we try to keep it to at least quarterly. But it’s a there’s a tendency, especially in remote work, to only talk when there’s a problem and you for sure aren’t getting into anything deeper and validating and building an emotional connection with somebody when you’re putting out a fire. If anything, you’re irritating each other because you know you both have too much skin in the game and it’s hot. So no agenda, one on one phone calls or pre-scheduled. They have no agenda. It’s, you know, Hey, tell me what’s on your mind, what’s been going on? It’s just some questions. They’re not even preset questions. They’re just, you know, I care about you, what’s going on in your life, you feel and how you’re doing? How’s how’s the family? And you just see kind of what bubbles up out of the person and you keep an eye on that. And those conversations have created some very, very strong relationships and some really great business insights have come out of them and led to next steps. And so the combination of all of these components together the social mission, our rules of engagement, the no agenda, one on one conversations has really led us to develop the healthy, fully distributed remote culture that we have today.

Rusty Rueff: You know, I’d love to have you back at some time because I’m sure you’ve got like a whole treasure trove of learnings on how to hire, you know, in a totally remote company and culture. And that in itself is an entire topic. So we can’t go there today.

Brian Roland: We could get lost in that. Yeah, we could.

Rusty Rueff: We could. But it’s an important topic, right? I mean, as it relates to the culture and the people you bring in, you know, in all of those rules of engagement that you just put, I heard something. I heard the golden rule. I heard, you know, treat others as you would want to be treated yourself right because you know, you’ve built these rules that say, you know, look, I don’t always want to be interrupted, hey, I don’t want to be, you know, strapped into communication. You know, do loop that is going to take forever. I don’t want my time to be wasted, which leads me to the question, you know, what role is your faith had in all of the development of, you know, the type of culture that you and your brother have created?

Brian Roland: Well, that’s a great question. Prayer has been a regular part of every all team meeting for as long as I can remember. You know, at the end of the one on one phone calls not uncommon for us to ask people how we can pray for you. People generally are very open to and willing to be prayed for. A large percentage of our team have a common faith, but I wouldn’t say everybody’s in the same place. And that’s a healthy place to be. And I very much believe that, you know, the currency of heaven is relationships, and essentially building the relationship is what needs to be the primary goal. This is something I was backstage at an event for World Vision and I was speaking and I was just talking to an older lady about what we do. I didn’t know who she was, and I said, You know, one thing we really like about World Vision is they show up in the the hardest places, the most remote places, most disease infested places, places with the highest poverty. They just show up and they serve people in love regardless of who they are, regardless of what circumstances are in their life, and they earn the right to speak to them about the world. And the lady wrote back and she said, You know, when my dad, Bob Pearce, founded World Vision and Samaritan’s Purse. From there, he said, that is exactly the mindset that he had. And that’s really the mindset we take into every employee communication. Every external communication is it’s like, show up, put people first. We say perks are about people. We’re all in the people business and earn the right to meet them where they are and lovingly lead them towards the Lord.

William Norvell: Amen. Well, that’s a that’s a perfect segue way to what is typically our final question and what we love to do is try to figure out a way and why. Actually, we don’t figure out a way God figures out a way. It’s always amazing to us to see how God’s word is fully alive and transcends our guests and our listeners. And we love to ask that, you know, where is God’s word coming live to you? Could be today could be this morning could be. This month could be this season. But we just love to see our God’s scriptures alive and working and just loved invite you to share with our audience what stories or specific passages might be working on your heart today?

Brian Roland: Yeah. Well, thank you. A couple things in the last week that are memorable for me. One is our families fostering kind of a new Ministry of Hospitality. We’ve adopted our oldest. We’re very interested in connecting with and serving adoptive families. My wife’s background backgrounds, working with kids, with special needs. So serving kids who have special needs and our church is very involved in foster care ministry. And so serving families, foster care. And so we’re really deciding how can we? I’ve got three girls and we all love to serve all the people, and we’re just hit by a third. John, one five, where it’s talking about as believers, how impactful it is for the body of Christ just to open up your home in hospitality and be available and serving one another. And that was an encouraging verse for us because we’re doing our best to kind of put ourselves outside of our comfort zone and open ourselves up to more people in a way that we can serve and encourage them. Outside of that, my my reading plan right now has me in Leviticus, which honestly at first was kind of like watching a rated-R movie, which is something that doesn’t really connect with my soul as well anymore, because it’s just so much of it just feels like wrong. So I’m reading through Leviticus and I’m like, Ah, this is gore is everywhere. And you know, it’s just these animals and it’s just gory. And then we’re throwing splattering blood and we’re cutting things off and dividing things in half. And, you know, it’s like, I’m thinking today, I was like, I don’t know how you clean up after that. Today was like a pressure washer, and it’s just like gory. And I’m just reconciling in my mind, like what? In the world? Like, how does this fit into the church? We know it is beautiful, manicured, like a church that we have, you know, you spilled coffee and you wipe it up off the floor right away because you don’t want to stain the carpet in the sanctuary kind of thing. It’s like their sanctuary, the temple. So it’s very funny. Typekit It hit me talking to one of my mentors kind of through that same thing, and he’s like, You know that all that blood, all that bloodshed, all that growth, that is the high cost of our salvation and our relationship with the Lord. That all went away because of what Jesus did for us by taking that all upon himself. And so I’m just kind of in a moment of humility right now before the Lord and the realization that, you know, this blood and gore and this true, true nasty cost of our sin is covered by the blood of Jesus once for all. And that it’s more than the clever kids songs and kids stories that we read. It’s so much deeper and darker and more impactful and so much more to be grateful for. Such a high cost was paid on the cross by Jesus in a way that is hard to comprehend, but so amazing that we don’t have to continually reconcile ourselves in the way that they were doing in Leviticus on a daily basis.

Rusty Rueff: That’s a great message. I wish those annual Bible reading plans would preface the book of Leviticus with that, because I think that, you know, a lot of people abandoned the Bible, Leviticus, and then, you know, if you get through that, you got to go through numbers and they go, I don’t get that either. But, you know, if we could just, you know, have the preface of that explanation, there’d be a lot more people who’d make it through. Yeah. So thanks for being with us today, Brian. I mean, what a great story and a William. You know this. This is a good one. Right? Is this?

William Norvell: Well, I mean, I just think it’s so timely, right? I mean, the remote for and I don’t want to forget, you said you were going to leave us with a phone number and some other resources for our audience who may be interested.

Brian Roland: Thank you. Yeah. Well, I especially like to connect with more Faith Driven Entrepreneur, so please reach out. Listen, in the last year and a half, I’ve been able to hire a CEO to run our business president and CEO to run operations. And so I’m in a really unique founder role. It’s allowed me to do a lot of the debriefing that we’ve talked about today and build some of these resources that I’m going to get you. But more than anything, I’m looking to connect with more faith driven entrepreneurs to say, How can we all be on mission together and how can I help you get there? So I set up a text number with the group called Unity. You just a lot of form and you’ll get straight access to me. I know I just preached about not sending text messages. And this is a social platform that I use the text messaging as a vehicle for it. And that number you can text to is Area Code six one five eight zero two six eight five three. If you text the word impact to that number, you will get my one page impact plan back right away is a blank PDF for you to fill in the blanks on your own. Create your own impact plan. If you text the word rules to that number, you’ll get my one page rules of engagement for remote teams that breaks down those communication channels and how to use each one and again. Personalize it with your own service that you’re using, so that you can send both of those out to your team to help develop your mission, vision values and in those specific areas. So again, phone number six one five eight zero two six eight five three. Text impact or text rules.

Rusty Rueff: You know, Brian, you couldn’t get away from your cell phone business that you started. You’ve come all the way back. That’s right.

William Norvell: What do you do? Standard text messaging rates apply. That’s what that’s what I need to ask.

Brian Roland: Standard text messaging rates.

William Norvell: OK? OK. I just just had to check. Just had to check because this used to cost like thirty cents each, you know, man.

Brian Roland: Well, I love this. One thing I love about this new direction towards connecting with people by text messages is it’s algorithm free, it’s ad free. It’s you’re not subjecting people to the machine with your message. You’re actually interacting one on one with a real person in an efficient way. So it’s been a fun platform to experiment with.

Rusty Rueff: It’s great, and there’s been a lot of fun having you today. So thanks so much, Brian, and we appreciate you and your brother and all you’re doing with the.

Brian Roland: Thank you, guys. Thanks so much for having me today.

Rusty Rueff: Thanks so much for joining us on today’s show. We hope you enjoyed it.

— by Peter Greer

As he was building the McDonald’s empire, Ray Kroc famously commented, “If any of my competitors were drowning, I’d stick a hose in their mouth and turn on the water. This is rat eat rat, dog eat dog.  . . . You’re talking about the American way.” Kroc may define this approach as the American way, but not all entrepreneurs would agree. 

Winemaker Robert Mondavi pursued an alternative approach to Kroc’s cutthroat competition and cast a different vision. The opening line in his sales manual summed up his philosophy: “Your competitor is your ally.” 

Born in 1914 to Italian immigrants to the United States, Mondavi had winemaking in his genes. After working with his brother and father for two decades, Robert struck out on his own in 1966, when he founded Napa’s first major winery since Prohibition. Committed to excellence, he built his winery after visiting the most famous wineries in Europe and learning from global industry experts.

Mondavi could have hidden his discoveries from his compatriots in California, attempting to grow his winery alone. After all, wouldn’t it be better for business if his wine were superior to that of the other vineyards around him? Isn’t this survival of the fittest? But Mondavi did something unheard of: After each trip to leading European winemakers, he invited owners of the surrounding rival vineyards to his vineyard and shared with them what he had just learned.

Mondavi’s generosity extended beyond his fellow vineyard owners. Over the decades he lived and worked in the winery business, he led many “mission tours” throughout the region to create awareness about the burgeoning wine movement in Napa. After Mondavi’s death in 2008, his son Tim described his father’s strong personal ties with many winemakers. “He developed friendships with other [winemakers] and exchanged ideas with many people. Not only did he learn from them but we shared what we had learned.”

Why would he share with his direct competition all the valuable information he’d spent years gathering? He could have used his expertise in winemaking to outperform every winery in the country. Why didn’t he?

Mondavi believed in a bigger vision than owning a great winery. He wanted the entire Napa Valley to be known as an exceptional wine region. His vision expanded beyond the boundaries of his vineyard. In Entrepreneur magazine, Tracy Byrnes writes that Mondavi “pushed Napa Valley to up its standards and compete with the world. He supported everyone and shared everything he had, all to make sure they won.” His vision was about what “they” could accomplish together and not merely about his own vineyard.

Mondavi’s generous, openhanded leadership approach with his rivals succeeded beyond what he could have hoped. Today, Napa Valley is the American wine destination. Amateurs and sommeliers from around the world descend on Napa to experience the movement Mondavi started by helping his competitors win. The mission of Napa Valley hasn’t been achieved by one singularly successful winery. The collective work and collaboration of the valley’s winemakers, propelled by Mondavi in the 1960s, made it possible. Robert Mondavi saw beyond his winery’s boundaries and was a pioneer in ideas of collective impact, open-sourcing, and cluster theory. 

Though we have no evidence to suggest that Mondavi was intentionally building his business on Christian principles, he led with open hands, humility, and an attitude of abundance. If openhanded generosity put Napa Valley on the map, imagine the impact if followers of the One who turned water into wine decided to pursue a similar path. What if those who follow Jesus were known as ridiculously open-handed and generous, focused on a calling that extended beyond the boundaries of any one organization? 

It’s challenging to tame our egos to prioritize the Kingdom over our little clubs. But when we lead with radical generosity and openhandedness–seeing beyond the boundaries of our organizations, businesses, and churches–the Kingdom expands.

——

Adapted from Rooting for Rivals by Peter Greer and Chris Horst with Jill Heisey. More info at www.rootingforrivals.com.

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— by Seth Buechley

When launching a new venture or entering a new phase of life, finding a mentor is always an important goal.  Knowing someone we can trust with life’s most important decisions is a big deal.  What major should I pick? Should I leave the corporate job and start my own business?  Is now a good time to buy a house?  Ultimately, these decisions are ours to own, but what a blessing to have a mentor to consult with.

Unfortunately, many have lost hope, or at least traction, in finding a mentor.  Culturally, the process of mentoring it’s still a bit blurry and undefined, perhaps the equivalent of “discipleship” in the church.  We’ve heard about it, but we’re not sure whose job it is, where it happens or where we can sign up.

It seems that mentoring is both a lost art and critical need. Each new generation is wondering, where’s my mentor?

To reach our God-given potential, I believe each of us needs mentors. I also believe anyone can find a mentor if they know what they’re looking for.

I’ve been fortunate to have several mentors along my journey and, over time, I’ve discovered what I believe are four primary marks of a mentor.

Each of us know teachers, coaches, gurus, and pastors…but they’re not necessarily mentors to us. A mentor is more like a guide walking alongside us as we grow.

Here’s are the four marks of the mentor we should be seeking; 

#1. Wisdom

A mentor is somebody who has wisdom they are willing to share. 

Note that I didn’t say information, opinions, likes, or follows. Those are abundant in today’s digital world. Wisdom is different. Wisdom is the battle-tested application of truth and, according to James 1:5, it is given generously by God. A lot of wisdom comes from pain. It comes from failure. It comes from living life and listening for lessons as God reveals them. There is simply no shortcut for experience. 

But note the back part of the phrase – it’s wisdom that they’re willing to share. Unfortunately, today we see extremely talented people who are too self-focused, busy, or needy, to have time left over for sharing what they have. They’ve gathered insight and even wisdom to the point of overflowing, but they’ve never made the important shift to sharing it with others. They can’t be bothered from chasing their dreams to attend to the dreams of others. If someone has made themselves unapproachable or even unavailable…well, they’re not your mentor.

Cain famously asked God, “Am I my brother’s keeper?”, raising a question humanity has wrestled with ever since.

A mentor knows that their gifts have been given by God for the benefit of others as well as their own joy.

#2. Time

A mentor is somebody that will invest time to get to know you. 

Why would we take important advice from someone who doesn’t know us? 

A mentor will take the time to get to know you personally…and you’ll get to know them as you walk together.  You’ll share history, strengths, fears, and dreams with each other.  This provides the context for real relationship and shared insights.  Both context and contact are critical in the mentoring relationship and this can only happen with time.

It’s also important that someone looking for a mentor pick an appropriate target.  I’m not saying to aim low, but at each stage of our growth we each have a strata of experience, need, and influence.  Our ideal mentor should be several steps ahead of us on the road we’d like to travel.  Not a mile ahead, and certainly not behind us.

Though it sounds exhilarating, someone starting their first small business likely doesn’t need to be mentored by a billionaire because the two will be running on completely different stratas.

This investment of time also speaks to the power of relationship vs the value of insights.  Insights are important but knowing and being known by a mentor is more valuable than the information exchanged in the mentoring process.

#3. Love

A mentor is somebody who loves you.

Not a squishy kind of overly sentimental love and certainly not an erotic love, but Biblical love motivated purely towards the benefit other person.   

It doesn’t mean that they only say nice things to you. In fact, some of the most important and most loving conversations you’re ever going to have will happen when somebody confronts you and calls you to your potential.  But a true mentor is never going to be manipulative and they’re never going to allow themselves to get tripped up in a conflict of interest by giving you advice that’s really intended to benefit them. 

A true mentor loves you, has your back, and is looking out for your interests. They will follow the instructions of Ephesian 4:15 and “speak truth in love”. Even when it hurts.

Would you take advice with regard to life’s most important decisions from somebody that doesn’t love you and want you to succeed? I hope the answer is no. 

#4. Values

Your mentor will be values-aligned.

At first glance, this mark of a mentor may seem controversial to some, because it might feel narrow-minded or exclusionary.  But realistically, how can we closely follow the path of someone who has a different worldview when it comes to why we are here on earth and how we keep score?   

In my experience, people I admire who don’t pass this last test evolve into allies and friends, but not truly mentors.  In our early years many of us are still codifying our values and a mentor can significantly shape those values.  However, once we know what we truly believe about God and revealed truth, following someone headed the opposite direction simply becomes untenable.  At some point we have to decide if we believe there is a King in the Kingdom and what that means in the way we live our lives.  A mentor encourages and challenges you on your journey because they are, ultimately, on the same journey.

Looking back, I’ve found this list to be helpful in explaining why certain people had a huge impact on my life as well as why some people I’d hoped would be a mentor to me never became one.  

Once we’re clear on these marks of a mentor, something else happens.  We get clearer on our own responsibility and opportunity to be a steward of the influence we’ve been given, particularly as the sunset of our career comes into view.

Eventually we should shift from asking “Am I my brother’s keeper?” to “Am I being the mentor I always hoped for”.

——

Seth Buechley is the CEO of Cathedral Consulting, host of the Business Done Right podcast, and the author of Ambition: Leading with Gratitude.  A lifelong entrepreneur with several multi-million dollar exits, Seth is focused today on helping entrepreneurs with momentum build value through advisory services and capital. Connect with Seth via LinkedIn, Facebook or his website at SethBuechley.com

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Bryan Kelley is the chief empowerment officer of the Prison Entrepreneurship Program, or PEP. But to think of this as just another prison ministry would be a grave injustice. PEP doesn’t want to simply change inmates, instead they want to transform the 150,000 men incarcerated in Texas from the inside out. Teaching practical entrepreneurial skills helps release fathers and husbands from generational bondage. Bryan joins us on the Faith Driven Entrepreneur Podcast to share the story of how PEP is doing just that. And he illustrates just what they are doing to set men up for meaningful and lasting success after they are released from prison. 

Episode Transcript

*Some listeners have found it helpful to have a transcription of the podcast. Transcription is done by an AI software. While technology is an incredible tool to automate this process, there will be misspellings and typos that might accompany it. Please keep that in mind as you work through it. The FDE movement is a volunteer-led movement, and if you’d like to contribute by editing future transcripts, please email us.

Henry Kaestner: Welcome back to the Faith Driven Entrepreneur podcast, I’m here in our virtual office suite with Rusty Rueff Rusty.

Bryan Kelley: Greetings. Good morning, Henry. How are you today?

Henry Kaestner: I’m awesome. Thank you. How about that Purdue football team?

Rusty Rueff: You know, if your number two in the country, watch out for us, if you’re anybody else, does it matter?

Henry Kaestner: Yeah, but that was one big game. And you know what? You’re going to be talking about that game for the next 10 years if you’re a Purdue fan.

Rusty Rueff: That’s right. And we’re going to talk about that’s all we got. It’s all we got.

Henry Kaestner: Yeah. And we’re going to talk about Purdue football a little bit because otherwise we’re talking about college football. William would be on it. It just it. Just join us out with all this Alabama talk. And so we’re just going to pretend it’s all about Carolina football and Purdue football on this. I am just back from Africa. I think over the course of the next couple of podcast episodes, I might share different things about it. But Rusty, I’ll tell you one thing that’s interesting about the trip was that I show up to the airport and you know me well enough to know that I’m lousy on email. A shock to the airport early, and I’m looking at my email and I never shut the airport early. It’s definitely not something I do. But I thought, You know, I’m here early. Maybe I’ll go back and I’ll look and catch up on some of my email. One of those email that had been sent 10 days prior was important things before going to Africa. It’s like, OK, I’ll open that one. And Nicole, who runs our office, said, You need to have a yellow fever test. You need to have a PCR test, you need to have your visa for Kenya. And as I said at the

Rusty Rueff: airport, how many of those did you have? Let me get

Henry Kaestner: zero. I had none of them and none of them. And so I had to cancel. The flight from San Jose to L.A. was can take me to Doha because I wouldn’t have enough time to get a PCR test. I scramble rebooked through San Francisco, which leads at the same time, gives me an hour and a half to get the PCR testing, get the PCR test. I arrive at the ticket booth to get my boarding pass. We can’t give you a boarding pass because you don’t have a visa. You can’t get on the plane. So I had to go ahead, cancel that ticket, get another ticket to South Africa, which will allow me to get to Qatar, hoping that I get approved for the visa while is in the air, which ended up happening. And I’m like, I just I’m not going to do anything with yellow fever. I’m just going to take my chances. The woman at Qatar Airways didn’t ask for it. I get to Doha. Indeed, my visa has now been approved and then cancel the flight I’d had to Cape Town. I then rebooked to Nairobi, and then I like, you know, you need a QR code in order to get in the country. The health department website in Kenya was down and is going through and they’re like, You know, if you don’t board your plane within 20 minutes, we can’t cancel you and I’m going to go twenty three, twenty two. I guess somebody in our Nairobi office to go ahead gear that out for me. I get it. I sprint through the airport. If you’re old enough, you know about O.J. Simpson, you went through. That was me. And if I didn’t run Rusty in both runners, if I hadn’t been running like five days a week for the last couple of years, I would have missed the flight. I get the flight when we’re going from south that we’re going from Nairobi to South Africa. Later on in the trip, Justin’s there. They asked for yellow fever. I grabbed no I. I grabbed my passport and my boarding pass, and I just run to the gate. I’m like, I’ve got to get to South Africa because we’ve got this Faith Driven Investor conference with Traeger and I got to get home. And so in in working out, I didn’t need any of the three.

Rusty Rueff: But, you know, I wasn’t going to say anything because our listeners actually can’t see you. But I thought it was just the light. But I do. I see a little tinge of yellow. I mean, there’s yellow fever show up.

Henry Kaestner: Yeah, that’s right. That’s right. It’s the kind of delayed, you know, you know, six seven days after you get back is I now have. Well, we’ll share with our listeners more about this epic trip that Justin and I and so many of the rest of our team had to find out what God was doing with Faith driven entrepreneurs and Faith Driven Investor is in Nairobi and Cape Town. We’ll do that later. But we’ve got a really special guest on today and I don’t want to keep on holding any longer than he has. Brian Kelly, thank you very, very much for joining us today for talking to us about prison entrepreneur program Pepe. And as we try to do, of course, with all guests, we like to set the stage and love to hear your story. You’ve got it very, very interesting one. It’s different than most. And while we want to talk about the incredible work that you guys are doing, we want to hear about your personal story first. So welcome to the program. Who are you? And how did you get here?

Bryan Kelley: Well, Henry Rusty, thank you so much for having me on. It’s an honor to be here. I’m Brian Kelly, CEO of The Amazing Prison Entrepreneurship Program. We’re a nonprofit in Texas that raises the banner of entrepreneurship to foster transformation in Texas inmates. We’ve done that 17 years, and I’ve got a staff of about 30 people, volunteers that number in the low thousands to three thousand three thousand graduates. And my gosh, every day is just an amazing adventure. I could see transformation stories happen all around me, but I’m not only the CEO of the program, I am also a graduate of the program. I went through the program in prison about seven years ago, seven eight years ago, got out in 2014, having done nearly twenty two years in prison.

Henry Kaestner: Oh my goodness.

Bryan Kelley: And so I’m not only helping to foster change, but that change is happening in me as well. You know, long, storied history. There is the I grew up in a small town in Kansas. My dad took off when I was a little boy. I’ve never really known him, never had a solid male influence in my life. My mother, bless her heart, did the best she could to kind of, you know, keep dinner on the table and a roof over our head and, you know, just basically high school diploma and no other real marketable skills. And so we struggled and I tried to figure out what being a man was by looking at my environment around me. What I garner from TV and what I realize is the things that I pulled together were a perverse caricature of manhood. I thought a man, you know, drank hard costarred, worked hard, treated his women hard. You know, that’s what I thought being a man was. And so that’s what I grew up into and became. I moved to Dallas after a short stint at a Division Two school. I actually went to college on a track scholarship, but I majored in partying and didn’t get it and didn’t go to track practice. And who knew they expected you to do that? So I ended up in Dallas working construction for a few years that it was really all about, you know, partying on the weekends and I got caught up in the nightlife and the nightclubs. I was going to clubs with a lot of the Dallas Cowboys like, you know, Tony Tony Dorsett to tell Jones. And I remark and smothers arrived. And that’s, you know, I dove into that and there was a really strong cocaine ceiling going on at that time. And, you know, I jumped in with both feet. And now, you know, has some things going on in my life. By that time, somebody introduced me to smoking cocaine. Hmm. And my life fell apart. In the course of about three or four months, I had lost everything. I own a cocktail. I was about to lose my apartment. I was driving a terrible car in in a in a loss desperate state. I killed a man and a dope deal that went horribly wrong on a criminal justice system would apprehend me. Take me to trial on that, and I was given a life sentence for murder in 1992, was remanded to the prison system. Everything I had come to really count on for life, my selfish life, my refocused life was stripped away and I was sent to just a bizarre environment or bizarre culture of men that I found out were just like me. They were also perverse caricatures of men who demanded respect through violence and threats and things like that. And so, you know, the path that I chose in life I was given and a fulsome way in prison.

Henry Kaestner: Wow. Tell us more about the time in prison because we’ve come to understand a bit of the man you are today, which looked very, very, very, very different from the man that we might make a bunch of assumptions about, from watching the nightly news or something like that back in 1992. So there is a transition. There is a transformation. What was 22 years like behind bars? What happened?

Bryan Kelley: You know, the first prison that I was sent to was the largest prison in Texas. Of nearly 4000 inmates, the demographics was eighteen to twenty one. At 26, I was referred to as old school at that time. And, you know, kind of young angst filled too much energy. We were fighting over everything they would fight over. You know what TV shows to watch, who could sit on a bench, who could say who? It was just bizarre. There was just way too much testosterone going on. So I just I jumped into that. It was in a riot on the regular and I didn’t know what started it. And it’s just a bizarre, violent environment. And I kept thinking to myself, this is what my choices have led to. And about a year into my incarceration, just thinking my life is over. A friend of mine invited me to a prison ministry called TIROS, which you probably know was a Greek term for God’s special time regard as a point of time unheard of. But I said, What’s Kairos? And he said, Well, for you, what it means is four days of home cooked meals. And I said, Well, sign me up because the food here is terrible. And so I went to that the prison ministry and the model that is free to Christian Man come in to have a four day retreat with 42 hand-selected inmates. And we have talks and small group discussions and prayer and discussions about forgiveness and choices and things like that. And you know, quite frankly, I’d never been around like that before. I love the encouraged. They listened. It was. It was so refreshing, but I didn’t think there were real. I was poking and prodding and asking questions and saying, You were a men like you come from. I was intrigued but skeptical. And I bonded with a Lutheran preacher who’d went to Kansas University near where I grew up, and he won my trust. Just talk to about hometown stuff. To that point, I had never admitted to anybody that I was guilty of my crimes. I’d lied to everybody. I lied at trial, lied to my family. I lied to my fellow inmates. And I just couldn’t carry that darkness anymore. Being around those men of the light. So I told Keith, I said, I need to tell you something. So we went off to the side and I just, you know, I put it all out and I told him everything about my crime, the details. And, you know, I was just a blubbering mess and he let me finish and he looked at me, said, Brian. I’m so incredibly honored that you would share that story with me first. That is huge. And I want to tell you something. I forgive you. I fell apart. I mean, I was a snotty hitch mess, and he let me pull it together and he said, You know, Brian, although I forgive you. And that’s true. You need to ask God to forgive you, you know? I promise you he will. And I said, You know, Keith, I get that, but I can’t. And he said, Well, understand why not? And I said, Well, I don’t deserve that. I don’t deserve his forgiveness. I deserve this. Or worse, I get it. I’ll take my medicine. And he looked at me, actually laughed, and he said, Wow, I didn’t realize when I came here this weekend, I was going to meet somebody who was smarter than God. And I said, Well, hold on, Keith, I didn’t say that. He said, Oh, sure you do. You said you admitted God would forgive you if you ask him. But you know how to handle this better than he does. How has that played out in your life? And all of a sudden, I just realized that my very best thinking had led to a life sentence for murder of May Never Get Out. What do I know about a living? I’m a mess. I’m a part of the problem. I want to be a part of the solution. How do I do that? So I just hand it over to God that day. I say, God, here is the broken pieces of my life. I’m sorry that it’s such a mess, but do with it what you will. And on that day, May 28, 1994, there was a change that was made and it didn’t get me out of the consequences my crown. But it certainly changed the trajectory of my future.

Rusty Rueff: I’m almost at a loss for words. I mean, the story is just so amazing and I and and thank you so much for sharing it so authentically and openly with us and our listeners because, you know, transformation is a hallmark of the Christian journey and so many times we see that or we think we see it. But you know, what you’re explaining to us is a profound transformation. And so thank you for sharing it. I’m going to transition into the prison entrepreneurship program. So when and where did you get involved in that?

Bryan Kelley: Sure. So shortly after my transformation, my conversion, I dove into the school, I would earn a degree bachelor’s degree in psychology. I dove into recovery to learn, to understand, you know, what were my triggers? What led me to be so dependent upon drugs and alcohol and chemical substances? I dove into church and the Bible. A man stepped up and went disciple me for 10 years straight. We lived together and we worked together. And every day we would talk about the fundamentals of Christianity coming out of the Bible and how we were applying that in our lives or failing to apply that in our lives. But there was authenticity. We just work that stuff out. He disciple me, and as I was disciple, I started to disciple others. So I was leading group, small groups, prayer groups, Bible study groups just getting involved and started pouring out everything that was being poured into me. As I was doing that, more and more opportunities popped up, and there came a time when I was invited to be a peer educator, a leader, a shepherd inside a prison for the prison entrepreneurship program. And I actually transferred units to go do that, and it was amazing. I was pouring in to man 50, 60 70 at the time, helping them work on their character, work on their business plan. Think through different options or visions for their life. And I absolutely loved it. It was the perfect way for me to use my experience, my passions to really make a difference, even if I never got out of prison. At that point, I didn’t know if I would or not. And so I dearly loved it. And it’s interesting that at the graduation of the very first class that I invested in, I was sitting over there among the staff among difference makers in this world, and I was crying. And it’s an emotional moment anyway. But the reason I was weeping was because I had never been aligned with such incredible people making a difference for the kingdom. And I remember, you know, crying out for God’s sake, I don’t ever want to leave a company or people making a difference like this. Thank you for inviting me into this. Please continue to surround me with people making a difference. I want to be a part of that. No. That very night I got shipped back to my old unit because we were about to switch units where we’re going to host the program, and I couldn’t go because I had too much time. And so everything I just landed in my hand, this jewel of peace was stripped away and oh, I was upset. I wrestled with God over quite some time. And I just asked myself, Why would you let me taste that? Strip it away? I don’t understand. That’s cruel. And you know, he must be looking at me, you know, outside of the bounds of time, looking at where I’m at now, seeing my sanity was just weight on my timing. Everything’s going to be okay in the fullness of time. You know, I I actually swung a deal with parole, my 13th time up for parole. I had just cleared the 20 year mark. I’d been denied 12 times and the parole commissioner was basically telling me I’ve made parole. And he he asked me at the end, he said, Son, do you have any questions? I said, Yes, sir, I’ve got one. Will you give me parole next year? Oh my goodness. He said. He’s here for you. Are you asking me to stay in prison for another year? I said, Yes, sir. And he said, Why? Why would you do that? And I said, Well, I would like to go through the prison entrepreneurship program. But the only way I can do it is if you give me a hard release date for next year. Otherwise I have too much time to go with Adrian. And you just looked at me for the longest time. And finally, he said, let me look into this. Basically, he gave me exactly what I asked for. I bargained for an extra year in prison to go through the prison entrepreneurship program because I knew the value that I was going to get out of this. It was an investment in my future.

Henry Kaestner: Wow, that’s an awesome story on so many different levels. So with hundreds and hundreds, I think this podcast episode number 200 or something like that. Lots of entrepreneurial stories talking about seeing an opportunity in the marketplace, you know, problem is broken and being able to be just be out and be able to test market, find product market fit. What’s the entrepreneurial process like if you’re in prison? And you come up with an idea. But presumably you’re somewhat limited in how you go about it, and yet I know enough about people to know that there have been quite a few successful entrepreneurial companies that have been birthed out of it. But what’s that process like when you start off in prison?

Bryan Kelley: You know, Henry, you’re right. We’ve had right at 600 businesses started by ex-felons after they’ve been released, and now several of those, many of those had revenues and sales over a million dollars last year. But, you know, it really starts and this goes back to our very genesis. We recognize that the man in prison and they can see themselves as an entrepreneur. They can’t see themselves in corporate America because of the rigid policies written against, you know, felony convictions and things like that that they can see themselves as small business owners. And I’ll tell you this, too. From their very survival on the street, the men in prison have natural business skills. They know about supply chains and risk management, profit margins, marketing, sales, reading, people recognizing opportunities. Now I think that we would all agree that they have taken a negative advantage of opportunities in the past, but we need to just restructure that and teach them how to recognize positive opportunities that are going to benefit not just them, but the community at large. I mean, isn’t that what a definition of an entrepreneur is? Somebody who knows gaps or problems and sees them as an opportunity, an opportunity to make money or an opportunity to make a difference? So that’s what we do, but we recognize that character is the most important part. That’s the platform. That’s the foundation that we’re going to build upon. And if we don’t have character, it doesn’t matter what you know about entrepreneurship. I tell the guys all the time we can teach you how to run a million dollar business. But if you don’t have the character sport, it doesn’t matter. You’re going to crash and burn. So we start with character development, and quite frankly, that’s the lion’s share of what we do on the inside. We start with that. We get a common language and we give them some practice of doing some things like that. And then we begin instilling business acumen knowledge, helping them form a business plan, thinking about what that’s going to look like. We invite volunteers in to help shape what their plan is. Make sure that it’s viable. That makes sense, that they’re thinking through all those issues. And what we found is that guys are incredibly creative. They typically come up with delusional solutions. I think at times and so they need people who are clear eyed who have done this, who have started and led businesses to help them think through. It takes somebody with experience to teach someone. Look, this is just discipleship. You know, we are called to the workplace to be instruments of God. This is true discipleship without the Christian needs.

Rusty Rueff: It’s fascinating to me because as you’re talking about these entrepreneurs in prison, you know, I think sometimes about, you know, in the cyber technology world where you’ll get Apple or Google or Facebook going out and paying people to hack their systems because they know that they think in a different way. And so there is entrepreneurial ism, you know, residing there. It just needs to be shaped in the right direction. And so, you know, hats off to what you’re doing inside of this prison ministry. You’ve shared your story with us. Are there particular stories coming out of Prep that are on your heart to share to us today?

Bryan Kelley: Oh my gosh, there’s so many it’s hard to eliminate. But you know, a couple of years ago we recognized that, you know, we’ve got just an incredible transformation story, an incredible businessman to share with the world. So we hosted a showcase entrepreneur, Shark Tank, if you will, in Dallas, Texas, at the George Bush Center SMU campus. We highlighted three of our graduate entrepreneurs and they were fishing for about 250000 growth capital. All of them had established businesses. Well, take them. I wondered to start out with the guy, I think, who won the show that night, who won $100000 in gross capital, which is an amazing story. Rubin had went through be about eight or nine years previous when he got out. He had never had a job before, and he had no real marketable skills. But he had newfound character and he had some tools and a tool belt that he knew he could apply. So he got a job out in West Texas in the oil field, recognizing that he could earn some quick cash and get on his feet as quickly as possible. So he went to work out there and his boss dude to loved him because he had that character, the work ethic, he had that loyalty. He was dependable and trustworthy and showed up and work hard. One day they ran on a truck that was service on oil well and the truck broke down. So Ruben called up the shop, said, Hey, you know, you can fix my truck today. We’re long, excuse me, five or six days. And so Ruben took the initiative we’ve got on YouTube, figured out how to fix it himself did so, and it wasn’t, Oh my god, you’ve got mechanical skills that need to be developed. What if I get you some training is the pinnacle of that. So they gave us the training. They moved him out of the shop. He quickly moved up to shop foreman and then the entrepreneur came out and he started recognizing gaps in the service business in the oilfield. And he started his own business doing preventative maintenance to the trucks that go out to service the oil wells. First year, he did a million nine. Wow. Three hundred net. And that was without any marketing at all. Just great customer service and a trustworthiness of providing great service and being willing to go out at two o’clock in the morning and twenty degree weather and fix a truck. And so he was pitching to us. He wanted to build a shop at that time. This is just pre-COVID, just a few months before COVID hit. And he won that hundred grand. He was thinking about building the shop. COVID hit and he pivoted into fashion, and he said, Hey, there’s an opportunity here to grow my business. And so he bought two other trucks instead and increase his fleet and is now. I think I heard just last week he’s looking at doing four million this year. Wow.

Rusty Rueff: Great story. Great story. Yeah. It also reminds me of so many times in the entrepreneurial world. We talk about grit, right, that people have to have grit. And I think about, you know, someone who spent time in prison, you know, and then making the transition back to society. And I mean, it’s about grit, right? I mean, you. So there’s a place where, you know, we have that evidence, we have that evidence before I transition into an Segway to talking a little bit more about transformation. How are you finding capital? Are these entrepreneurs having an opportunity that investors are showing up?

Bryan Kelley: You know, that’s a really great question, and it’s been super difficult over our 17 year history for our would be entrepreneurs to find capital and especially startup capital. I mean, that’s a that’s a super risky asset class for banks anyway. But when you factor in that, they’re ex-felons they probably have or or no banking history. It’s almost crazy for a bank to even consider that we have discouraged in the past angel investors from our network of volunteers because I think we just need to have some safeguards in place. And so our approach has always been for them to bootstrap, to get out and get a job and prove their worth and save some money and save the necessary 10, 20, 30 thousand dollars to start their business. And we’ve done some crowdsource funding, but that has been spitting and sputtering at best. And so about a year and a half ago, we recognize we need to launch a lending arm and we’re done so. It’s called contract capital and it’s a second chance friendly lending arm. We pull in some social impact investors who have created a pool. Of money. Well, they recognize that we’re going to do a great job of vetting and underwriting these loans, making sure that they make sense, first of all, that what we’re underwriting character finance, everything like that and we’re pairing our guys with a business mentor to walk with him along the way. Today, we’ve had about 10 loans totaling about $300000. Every one of those loans is performing perfectly. And the stories of transformation that are coming out of that are just incredible. A quick story just to highlight that there’s a guy right here in Houston who three or four years ago started a metal fencing business, everything from chain link fences to the wrought iron spear point. And he’d been doing about two hundred and fifty thousand a year, and he came to us and he said, I want to borrow some money to get a used forklift. I need to be able to move more metal. That’s my bottleneck. We did a deep dove scrub of his business plan and his finances, and hey, this guy’s stand up. There’s some places that need a little polish, but we can help with that. We assigned a business advisor to him and they did a rough scrub on his business model, making sure that he understood where his biggest margins were, where he should be prioritizing his time and his efforts. Next year, he did about a million and a half six x increase. And I promise you, it was not because of that forklift. It was because he is now surrounded by somebody who is in his business, making sure that he’s thinking about optimizing his business. And so that’s exactly what Pep brings is a army of volunteers to help you think through your business and how to do that more Typekit.

Rusty Rueff: And how do you keep them spiritually grounded once graduated?

Bryan Kelley: You know, there’s a spiritual component to it. Now we don’t require a professional face. We’re not what I would call faith based, but what we do is introduce what a successful, practical life of faith looks like. 70 to 80 percent of our volunteers are Christian. They go into prison. They invest in these man who can do really nothing for them. You know, it’s because they have that heart to serve to disciple. And so we institute in our character formation part what being an honorable, godly man looks like. We pray in and out, but we do not require a profession of faith. We don’t require them to have any particular faith that I encourage them to pursue and investigate faith because faith is not scared of any amount of investigation, right? So I encourage them to find that out. And what they see and practice in our volunteers really resonates with them. It becomes faith that’s not necessarily tough. And so we follow through. We try to keep guys in community after they get out. We’ve got a continuing education program. We’ve got community events that we want to include in law, and we’re really focused on building our vision now of a post-release second chance incubator and accelerator that will start in Houston, Texas, where we bring together our volunteers and our guys in a more impactful and intentional way. We’re calling out the PDB collider because we want to foster more of those positive collisions, and when those two groups get together, it’s amazing how God can work through that.

Rusty Rueff: That’s great. And we’ll make sure that on the website, we post everything about Pepe and Andre Capital. I mean, we have lots of listeners who are not only entrepreneurs but also faith driven investors. And you know, I find a lot of times we begin to seek for social capital and we look sometimes overseas for microloans and different kind of lending vehicles. And, you know, right here at home, you know, you’ve got an amazing ministry and an amazing program going on that I would imagine is picking the interest of our listeners right now. So thank you for that. I’m going to transition because I know you like to talk about going beyond change, and I had used the word before transformation, your own personal transformation. And this whole conversation is just really should remind all of us of the Apostle Paul’s, you know, phenomenal transformation, you know, probably the most dramatic story in the Bible of transformation. You know, a guy who goes from being a persecutor to a guy who, you know, probably helped cause the death of Christ followers today in turning around and spreading the gospel around the world? You know, what I find and we all find fascinating is that Paul never stopped being a zealot. You know, even in the times that he was imprisoned. But the direction of his affection and his enthusiasm totally changed. Right. He went from being this prosecutor to being on the other side, a defender and a lifting up. Does this speak to the difference between surface change and deep transformation?

Bryan Kelley: You know, I think it absolutely does, and I think Paul is a great example, I think many of our guys are great examples of that. I share with him quite often, you know, allegiance to town. Also, we are God’s workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works. Our call to the workplace, our call for our hands to get dirty is just as high of a calling as being called in the pulpit. You know, we are, we’re called impact our families and our community around us, and we spend most of our time at work, so we need to be prepared to do that. But one of the things that I remind them is that word for workmanship is in the Greek poema, from which we get the word poem. We are God’s poem written to the world. And you know, every great poem, every great work of literature has a catastrophe overcome that turns into a great story. And so these guys are an excellent example of how God tells a great turnaround story. However, we also render masterpiece, and I remind them that, you know, we come to this opportunity as broken pieces just like my life was broken pieces and God takes those broken pieces and turns them into a masterpiece, and that transformation goes on display for all to see. It’s undeniable from our families, our community who knew this in the past when we are not the same man that we used to be. We go from being vessels of dishonor to vessels of honor and light and love and wives. We have that abundant life. It’s undeniable, and everybody around us recognizes it and takes notice and wants to know, how do I get that? And so I just love it when those stories happen around me and just it just mushrooms at a Domino’s. And that’s exactly what the Kingdom of God is supposed to be like.

Rusty Rueff: It is that. And are you talk about the inside outside strategy? Is that what that is

Bryan Kelley: at the inside, outside and in a couple of different ways? You know, we start inside a prison and we follow up on the outside, but it starts inside and radiates outside individually as well. And so there’s both fronts of that. Yeah, absolutely. And you know, going back to the macro, folks, there are a lot of prison programs out there that are just inside or they’re just outside, and I really think it takes both. We plant seeds. We give them a tool belt on the inside that’s going to prepare them for what they’re going to encounter on the outside that you can follow through and continue to walk that path. You know, discipleship means walking along with somebody, and it takes some time until we get to the place where we’re independent. We can do that on our own. We can become disciple makers. And so that’s what we’re trying to foster. We’re taking men who had been vessels of dishonor, turning them into doting fathers, philanthropists, even investors and just job creators, difference makers in our community.

Rusty Rueff: I’m curious, Brian, is there institutional acceptance to this in our prison system?

Bryan Kelley: You know, there absolutely is. We’ve got a tremendous brand in Texas, former criminal justice. They’ve been partners of ours for our 17 year existence. We actually operate to a private prison. MTC has management training corporation, our great friends of ours. They have both institutions have bent over backwards to help foster change. I’ll give you a great story. One of our guys got out about a year ago and he had been in prison for 10 years. About three months out, a friend of his invited him to a trip in Cabo. He said, I just got out of prison. Let me take you to Kabul and have some fun. And he went down there and met some folks and actually got a job while he was on vacation and didn’t come back. He got a job running an art gallery. He had learned art while he was in prison. The guy recognized his character and his entrepreneurship gave him a job leading an art gallery down there. And he also sells some of his own art through that art gallery. Well, the president of the private prison that we operate in. Heard that story and just happened to be going down to Cabo, and he saw him out and found him, he said. His name’s T.J. So T.J., I just wanted to come see this for myself. I’ve heard stories about your transformation and what you’re doing. And I wanted to see it with my own eyes. And T.J. said, Yeah, it’s true. And he said, Do you also sell your own art through here? And he goes, Yes, sir. And the president of MTC said, And I’d like to buy a piece from you. He said, That’s crazy. I’ve just sold out. He said, Well, can I commission something for me? Well, what do you want? He said, I want a portrait. He goes, I’d love to do portraits, you know, portrait of who? And he said, I want a portrait of you. I want a picture of you to hang in my house and remind me that the men who are in my prisons all across this country can turn out to be just like you. Wow.

Rusty Rueff: Wow, that’s an amazing story there. And yeah, we all should be having that portrait. Hanging in our houses here. You know, it’s unique that we would have someone who has this kind of insight into the topic that we’re talking about, so I’m going to take us a little bit of a different direction. You know, not all individuals who come through the prison system and become paroled or served their time become entrepreneurs, but they can become productive employees and workers. And I spend a lot of years in the human resource world. And, you know, I look back and I think about and I worked in manufacturing plants and sales organizations, and I think about the number of people who checked their application that they were a convicted felon or committed a crime. And that application was discarded, right? Because we couldn’t look past that. We have entrepreneurs listening right now who have companies that are growing. Talk to us about giving the second chance to those who served their time and are coming back into society.

Bryan Kelley: When I got out of prison after almost 22 years, I had never Googled anything, ever sent an email and never use a debit card or a cell phone. I mean, the learning curve was straight up and I applied at a sign shop for my very first interview because I’d done some graphic layout and some stuff in prison for about 12 years. And so I walked into this franchise show up and they got my resume. And he looked at it briefly and he goes, You’ve got a lot of sign shop experience. And I said, Can I can be completely honest with you? And he said, Sure. And I said, I just got out of prison. And not only that for almost 22 years. And he sat down in his seat. He goes, Wow. Can I ask why? And I said, Sure, murder. And he pulls his glasses off and he looks at me and he said, Brian, I’ve never had an interview like this. Can I ask you how that happened? I said, yes, thank you for the opportunity. So I gave him a quick rundown of, you know what my life was like, what happened, what it’s like now, how I can add value to his company. And he just he looked at me at the end and he said, I am so intrigued. This is the most captivating, intriguing interview I’ve ever been a part of. And I love seeing the transformation that’s going on you, but I’m struggling with the idea of having you come to work here. Having been in prison for so long and for that reason. Can you talk to me about that? And I said, Yeah, absolutely. Here’s the deal is, you know, at that time, I was 48 years old and I thought, I’ve got nothing. I said, I am going to be so focused on creating wealth for me to get ready for retirement. If I can do that, I’ll work every hour. You throw my way, I promise you. You can’t outwork me. Dare you to try. He kind of smirked and he said, OK, yeah, that’s fair enough. I said, But you know, not only that, I’m a creature of routine for my twenty two years in prison, so I’m going to be where I’m supposed to be and I’m going to be at work. When I’m supposed to be here, I’m I go home and I’m, you know, not and I’m comfortable in that routine. And then I started talking about, you know, some of the things that I had learned in prison that were going to be beneficial for him, especially the things that he did. And as I went through that list, and I think number one of that is loyalty to the person who gives a guy a chance when he gets out and went through this whole list of things with this business owner, he looked at me and goes, You make me wonder why I haven’t been hiring ex-cons all along Amen. And so I think there are many employers out there right now who are struggling obtaining the labor that they need, and there is an untapped labor pool coming out of prison. But not everybody coming out of prison is ready because we’ve worked on character because we’ve worked on some business acumen and skills. The men who are coming out of TPP are vastly different than General Joe coming out of prison, so I think we’ve got some opportunities for employers out there.

Rusty Rueff: Absolutely. And we’ll have to figure out a way to dig deeper into this topic because you’re exactly right. We do have a labor shortage. That’s labor shortage doesn’t look like it’s going to go away anytime soon. We have entrepreneurs trying to figure out how to bring their businesses off the ground struggling with that labor shortage. And we have a talent pool that we don’t recognize or don’t understand we should recognize. And so we all need some help in that. So we need to figure out a way to bring you back and dig deeper into that. And then we’ll talk about that for sure. So we have to bring this episode to a close, unfortunately. And typically our other co-host here, William will ask this question. So I get the honor of asking it today since he’s not with us, but we like to close every episode hearing about what God is teaching you right now, like in this moment, and also how we could be praying for you. So share with us, you know, he’s got God to have a word on your heart or word from the scripture that’s speaking to you right now.

Bryan Kelley: Oh my gosh, he’s dealing with me right now with John 10:10. The Norvell came to steal, kill and destroy, but Christ came so that we might have life and have that more abundant. The reason I bring that up is I’m helping my church launch a Christ based 12-Step program called Regeneration. We actually launched last night. We had about 30 souls who were desperate for freedom from sin show up. And so we just said, Hey, you know, I recognize I’m not saying any of you, you’re not Christians, you’re probably Christians who are carrying around chains and baggage, and we’ve got some keys that will unlock that. We want you to have, like life more abundant. We want you to see authentic life like that. And some of us who have found some of that freedom. And we’re going to do this together. It’s always about cycles. It’s always about community. And we should not be people as Christians who are going around in misery and depression and we are not home. We are filled with lies and lies more abundant and that should show Amen.

Rusty Rueff: And how can we be praying for you?

Bryan Kelley: You know, there’s so many things, so many good things on my plate. I think I’m a victim sometimes of saying yes to too many things. And so. I would just ask for clarity of God’s purpose and, you know, doing things of my church, doing things with our guys. Matter of fact, I’m taking 10 guys on a men’s retreat this weekend. You know, I just pray that I continue to get filled so I can provide the overflow to all those around me.

Rusty Rueff: Amen Well, let’s do that right now. Or we just thank you for this episode with Brian and the gift that he has given us today. And Lord, we just ask you to bless him and he and his family and this he has so many opportunities coming in front of him. I could feel it, even as he expresses this need to be able to have clarity and wisdom about what to do and what not to do and how to spend his time. We ask you to give him that. And Lord, we also lift up the PEP program. What an amazing gift you’re giving to so many men and women inside of the prison system, and we just ask you to bless that ministry. Keep it strong and let those who are wanting to support it feel divinely appointed to come that way. We lift up all these things in your precious name, and we say that so Amen Brian Kelly, the man who decided he wanted to stay in prison for one extra year. And thank you for doing it because you know your ability to speak to us today and to lead an organization like Pep might have not happened had you not stayed in that extra year. So what a sacrifice that we’re all benefited from. So thank you so much.

Bryan Kelley: Well, thank you for having me on today. And like I said earlier, it’s amazing what God can do with broken pieces. He can turn it into a masterpiece, and I’m not just talking about why he does it everywhere.

Rusty Rueff: Thanks so much for joining us on today’s show. We hope you enjoyed it.

— by Reuben Coulter

Steve Jobs, Elon Musk or Sara Blakely come to mind as outstanding entrepreneurs. Many of us think of entrepreneurs as lone heroes – valiantly overcoming challenges and finding great success. The reality is that entrepreneurs are often lonely and can become overwhelmed. The negative consequences can not only impact your business but also family and faith. Tim Tebow or Lionel Messi would never seek to compete without having a coach and a whole team of other experts to support them, so why not an entrepreneur? The difference between success and failure is realising your limitations and finding the support you need to grow. 

“The Lord God said ‘It is not good for man to be alone’” Genesis 2: 18

Research shows that entrepreneurs who have a supportive community significantly outperform their peers and experience greater joy in the process. Invest in yourself this year.

Here are some key questions that you need to ask yourself.

1. What help do I need? – This will depend on what stage in the journey you are at. You may be looking for spiritual support or might need more practical advice, from marketing to capital raising.

2. What format works best for me? – Would a peer learning experience or one to one advice be more effective? Do I prefer online or in-person?

3. How much commitment am I willing to make? – You will need to make time available to get the most out of this experience. Some support is free, while other programs have a cost.

Networks and peer groups 

There are many different Christian business networks worldwide, some within churches and others independent of them. They typically focus on prayer, discipleship and networking and tend to have a low membership fee. Examples include FCCI, CBMC or Europartners. Other organizations, like C12 Group, provide a more structured approach to leaders of larger businesses helping them develop as a leader and grow their business. Entrepreneurs are organised into small groups with a chair who leads the group and provides coaching. They are higher touch and so usually have higher fees than networks.

Accelerators and incubators

Entrepreneurs worldwide face enormous challenges to take their ideas to scale—90% of businesses do not grow and over 75% fail within three years. In the past few decades, accelerators and incubators to support entrepreneurs at different stages of their journey have become popular. Great examples include Praxis and Ocean in the US, Creo in Europe and Sinapis in East Africa. Incubators are typically focused at idea stage businesses and usually provide office space and guidance to prototyping and developing an idea. Accelerators provide support to early stage entrepreneurs who are looking to scale. This often combines cohort-based learning and coaching. The best accelerators also invest in or connect entrepreneurs with investors. Each caters to a slightly different group and has particular areas of expertise so talk to their alumni to see if the program might be the right fit for you.

Mentoring and consulting

Sometimes your needs are quite specific. There is an area of personal development or professional expertise that is critical to address. In that case, a more tailored approach with a capable mentor or consultant may be more appropriate. The more specific you can be about your needs the more likely you are to find the right fit. There are many excellent mentors and consultants out there but also a few charlatans so make sure you get recommendations from other entrepreneurs.

The gates of Liverpool Football Club have their team motto inscribed on them – ‘You’ll never walk alone’. Make it your New Year’s resolution to get the support that you need to thrive. Our prayer is that 2022 would be the year of the Lord’s favour in your life and business.

We’ve selected the best Christian organisations who can support you;

• Top 10 Networks and Peer Groups

• Top 20 Accelerators and Incubators

• Top 10 Mentoring Opportunities

Or join a Faith Driven group today. Practical, purposeful discussions with others who really get it. One hour a week for 8 weeks you will connect with 10-15 like-minded entrepreneurs to walk through the Faith Driven Entrepreneur Study and discuss what it means to embrace your call to create and fulfill God’s purpose for your life and work.

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