Brian Roland, Founder of Abenity, wanted to create a company that changed the way corporations offer and manage the perks they offer their employees. More than just seeing an opportunity to innovate, Brian realized that his vision was less about profits and all about people. He wanted his company to have a purpose.

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 Abenity. Abenity is a six times Inc 5000 company that’s powering corporate perks for top brands like U.S. Bank and MasterCard. Now, while Abenity 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 Abenity 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 Abenity. 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 Abenity, 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 Abenity, 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 Paul Michalski

It is not what a man does that determines whether his work is sacred or secular, it is why he does it. (A.W. Tozer)

I pursued my legal career without any Biblical understanding of work (I believed in God and Jesus, but I really didn’t have much of a Biblical understanding of anything).  When I was growing up, I thought that there were just two ways to look at work—either you were a “work to live” person who viewed work as primarily a way to fund your life, or you were a “live to work” person for whom work became their identity, drawing all their satisfaction, joy and self-worth from their job.  

I frequently said that I was a “work to live” rather than a “live to work” person, and that if I “hit the lottery” on Saturday night I would not be at work on Monday (provided it was a big enough jackpot).  I certainly looked forward to “retirement” even before I started working.  While I claimed to be a “work to live” person, once I started working I had no concept of “work-life balance”.  My career was one in which work became all-consuming, but I rarely viewed it as a burden—I loved what I was doing.  Until I hit that big lottery, I couldn’t imagine enjoying any job more than the one I had.  Little did I know that I had come to worship my work because it had become my identity and an idol.

I also did not have any understanding of work in the context of God’s Kingdom or in the context of my own humanity.  My “WHY” for work was wrapped up in MY needs and the grand plan for MY kingdom.  I have come to understand a third way—“work as life”—work as God intended.

Work As Usual

I use the term “work as usual” to describe work as the world sees it.  For some it is “work to live”—work as a necessity–and for others it is “live to work”—work as an identity.  In both cases, “work as usual” can be a burden .  I suspect business owners and salaried “white collar” workers tend toward work as identity, whereas hourly “blue collar” workers tend toward work as necessity.  A “career” vs a “job”.

Sadly, “work as usual” is broken in the factory and in the office.  There is no “one-size-fits-all” description of the problems of “work as usual”, but when you dig down below the surface, there are surprising similarities between the tall shiny skyscraper on “Wall Street” and the factory on “Main Street”.  If maximization of profit is the “end” to which a business is managed, then, by definition, people (whether “white collar” or “blue collar”) can never be more than tools of production to be managed toward that end (“No one can serve two masters“, Matthew 6:24).  In the words of Jeff Van Duzer (author of Why Business Matters to God):

When a business perceives its labor force as a mere cost of production, it distorts God’s original intent.  In effect, it denies the humanity of its employees.

Live to Work: Work as Identity

Work as an idol and identity is a product of both American culture as well as a “business as usual” culture.  American culture, in particular, glorifies our work as our primary identity.  What is the first question asked at a cocktail party upon meeting someone new?  “What do you DO?”  Almost reflexively, Americans label themselves by their work:  “I AM an entrepreneur.”  “I AM a lawyer.”  “I AM a banker.” I AM a venture capitalist.”  Is it any wonder that people feel a profound loss of identity when they’re in-between jobs–they have ceased to BE anything.

“Business as usual”—business in the way of the world–also contributes to our unhealthy focus on work as identity.  It is characterized by profit as purpose, assumptions of scarcity and self-interest, and “can we” ethics (rather than “should we” ethics).  Long hours leave little room for other identities.  Management or investors often demand loyalty over other interests.  Even a person’s primary extra-curricular activities can be work-related when sports teams and community service projects are employer-sponsored.

Our self-worth and value is wrapped-up in whatever we see as our primary identity. There are numerous problems that can flow from work being our primary identity and source of worth and value.  An employer or investor has the power to take away “who we are”, if even for a short period of time.  If those to whom we answer (e.g., managers, investors) are driven by profit and power, we are vulnerable to extreme manipulation in their pursuit of worth and value through their job.  Most importantly, A person can only have one primary identity, and they will sacrifice their secondary identities to ensure success in their primary identity. With work as identity and idol, identities grounded in things like faith, family and fitness will be compromised or even sacrificed to ensure success at work.

Work To Live: Work as Necessity

For many people, work is not an identity or an idol—it is a necessity.  It is “necessary” to pay the mortgage, “necessary” to put food on the table, “necessary” to avoid getting fired.  I grew up in an industrial town where work for many people was monotonous–factory shift-work (and even piece-work) that was just a way to pay the bills (barely).  Retirement was a dream and “work/life balance” was not even a concept, because work fell into a very defined part of the day.  Work was a job but probably not an identity or idol for most, and it was likely viewed as a burden most days.  “Worshipping” work is not the problem.

Work As Usual: Burden Rather Than Blessing

“Work as usual” has also become something far from God’s good and life-giving design in Genesis.  It has become a burden rather than the blessing it is was designed to be.  

Genesis 2:5 shows us that God’s creation needs human work to unleash its potential (and keep it from becoming overgrown with “weeds”) and flourish, and Genesis 2:15 reveals that work was created before the Fall as a good thing—a blessing–to allow us to flourish as humans created in God’s image.  Just as God creatively and productively worked to create all things, as God’s image-bearers it is in our very nature to be creative and productive workers.  We were made to work—it is an essential part of being human, which is why unfulfilling work and burdensome work are actually dehumanizing.

Employee “engagement” is a helpful proxy for assessing whether work is perceived as a burden or a blessing, and studies suggest only 10% of workers are effectively mobilized–experiencing an essential part of their humanity.  The remaining 90% are experiencing varying levels of dehumanization–work as a burden rather than a life-giving blessing.

• Our cultural obsession with finding “work-life balance” is perhaps the best indicator that work has ceased to be the blessing God intended and has become a burden.  We no longer view work as part of our life–part of the rhythm of life.  Because it has become all-consuming or unfulfilling, we see it as something that keeps us from life–an oppositional force.  It gets ingrained through cultural phrases like “TGIF” and “Monday morning blues”.

The deception of “work-life balance” demonizes work and actually prevents us from being fully human:

Is it any wonder that people long to “retire” and spend their remaining years as far from God’s life-giving gift of work as possible.  Seeing work as opposed to life also leads to the idolization of “retirement”.

When people are not engaged in their work, their WHY for working becomes “getting by”–doing as little as possible to get the raise, get the bonus or not get fired—and their goal in life becomes ceasing to work as soon as possible.  Seth Godin recently wrote “The current crisis is a vivid reminder of how empty a job focused on getting by really is. Because getting by is a lousy way to spend our days.“

Work a Better Way:  Work As Life

“Live to work” and “work to live” are both wrong–we were designed to “live more fully through work”. Finding that “third way” to experience work requires discovering a new WHY for work.  I use the term “work a better way” to describe work as God intended, inspired by an understanding of God’s design and purpose for humanity and work.  In order to re-imagine your work, first you must renew your mind about work itself from a Biblical perspective.  

The Bible is also clear about the ultimate WHY of our work, because it is the ultimate WHY of all we do.  Isaiah 43:7 declares that glorifying God is WHY we were created, and 1 Corinthians 10:31 reinforces that glorifying God is the WHY behind everything we do—including work.  Humans glorify their creator God through work by: 

• Being (and helping others to be) all that God created them to be–fully human through living out Imago Dei as reflections of a creative, productive and relational God;

• Obediently pursuing the Creation Mandate in Genesis 1:28–pursuing the flourishing of God’s creation; and 

• Using their gifts to love their neighbor generously through the creation and provision of goods and services that people need.

To once again quote Jeff Van Duzer:

When humans engage in creative, meaningful work that grows out of relationships and gives back to the community they become more deeply human.

 Our goal should be “life balance”.   Work is an essential part of life, along with our family, our fitness and our faith.  In fact, what we learn in Genesis is that work is necessary to live fully and be fully human.  Worshipping work as an identity and idol is not God’s design.  Escaping work through the pursuit of “work-life balance” and retirement is also not God’s design.  Experiencing flourishing and the fullness of our humanity through work with a WHY of glorifying God is God’s design.  I believe the answer is “work as life” with a primary identity based in Jesus (but “identity” is a topic for a future post).

Paul Michalski has been on a journey that resulted in the creation of Integrous LLC, a law firm providing integrity advice and legal counsel to faith-driven clients. Integrous is the by-product of a 50-year journey, including 30+ years as a lawyer and 13 years of involvement in marketplace ministry and the faith-work movement. It also reflects Paul’s life-long commitment to “integrity” as a core value and his personal purpose statement: “To serve by redeeming work through the impartation of wisdom, spotlighting God’s truth and connecting its meaning to organizational cultures and practices.” 

Paul graduated from Harvard College, magna cum laude, in 1983 and Harvard Law School, magna cum laude, in 1986.  He became a partner with Cravath, Swaine & Moore and for over 22 years practiced corporate law in New York and London. 

www.integriosity.com

Editor’s Note: This article was originally written by Paul Michalski of Integrous LLC and shared with Faith Driven Entrepreneur for publishing. Republishing must be approved by the author.

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— 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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