In this masterclass-style episode of the Faith Driven Entrepreneur Podcast, we highlight three unique ways that community can shape the lives of entrepreneurs.

Dude Perfect’s Coby Cotton gives insight into how his tight-knit community of college friends has had to learn how to live as co-founders and leaders of one of the largest entertainment brands in the country.

Mickey Peters shares how his lack of community nearly brought him to complete ruin and how finding community has helped him recover.

And Scott Weiss talks about why the OCEAN Accelerator programs have always  emphasized the need for community amongst the entrepreneurs they serve.

If you’d like to hear more about the Faith Driven Entrepreneur community groups, go to faithdrivenentrepreneur.org/groups.

Coby Cotton’s Full Episode: https://www.faithdrivenentrepreneur.org/podcast-inventory/episode-176-dude-perfect-the-worlds-most-trusted-source-of-entertainment-with-coby-cotton

Mickey Peter’s Full Episode: https://www.faithdrivenentrepreneur.org/podcast-inventory/episode-208-death-of-a-lone-wolf-with-mickey-peters

Scott Weiss Full Episode: https://www.faithdrivenentrepreneur.org/blog/2019/5/21/combating-loneliness-with-community-scott-weiss-ocean-accelerator

Episode Transcript

Joey Honescko: I don’t know if it’s nostalgia after passing 300 episodes, or me just looking for every bit of wisdom I can find for my own entrepreneurial journey. But I’ve been digging through the podcast archives recently, and it’s allowed me to hear from a variety of folks, even from way back in the vault. So today, as we wrap up this little focus on community and friendship, I wanted to bring back some old episodes that most of our listeners probably haven’t heard. We’ll borrow from conversations with three different leaders who have experienced the benefits of community in different ways. First, we’ll hear a bit from Mickey Peters, an international CEO whose lack of community nearly led him to ruin as he buckled under the weight of leading a large company. Then we’ll head to Cincinnati and hear from Scott Weis, who is the now retired but founding CEO of the Ocean Accelerator Program, some really dear friends of ours in the faith driven movement. He talks about why they have always emphasized the need for community so early in the lives of entrepreneurs. And lastly, we’ll hear from dude Perfect’s Coby Cotton, whose tight knit community of college friends suddenly became a community of co-founders. He’ll share how they’ve navigated those complex waters as they’ve become one of the most recognizable entertainment brands in the country. I’m Johanna Nasco, and I’ll be popping in to guide you through each of these conversations, but you’ll also hear the voices of Henry Kastner, Rusty Roof and William Norvell as they go through the interviews. All that is coming up on the Faith Driven Entrepreneur podcast, so let’s get into it.

Henry Kaestner: Let’s start off with some of the basics. And then, as God has led you to today, and then. Yes, absolutely. Please bring us through the story that you and Stephanie have gone through. Please.

Mickey Peters: So, born in Fresno, California, middle child, elder younger sister and I moved around a lot when I was really young, but really raised in Texas. My father was he managed a factory in Mexico, a large textile factory, and we were a very devout Catholic, which meant we went to church every Sunday, going through all the sacraments when I was growing up. But it really wasn’t a big part of my life. It was just kind of a check the box thing. And one of the things early on that has marked my journey over and over again, and we’ll share more about this. But I was exposed to pornography when I was young, about 10 or 11 years old at home. And so I learned over from that point forward, using the porn as a way to, they say, medicate my emotions. If I didn’t like the way I felt, if I was feeling any negative sadness, any negative feeling or frustration, I learned to escape through looking at porn from a very early age. And so then I went to Texas A&M University. I’m an Aggie. I was in the Corps of Cadets, which is, you know, ROTC program that you live together in barracks, you know, spend all your time together marching and all that good stuff. So it’s a very active ROTC program. I met my first wife there, graduated from Vietnam with an accounting degree, and really, I would say Met Christ at Texas A&M and, you know, ended up marrying. It was my first wife, and we were in Houston getting a job and working first with Ernst in. Back then it was Ernst and winning now really, and was an auditor for about four years and then went to really Duke Energy who was not at the time. And then she became Duke Energy. And my first marriage ended up not working out. My first wife left me for another man. But a lot of that time I was acting out with pornography. And, you know, that was I was also very active in my church. I was very active in Sunday school and, you know, very, very present on Sundays and during the week, but also very much addicted to pornography. So then after my divorce, really acting out a lot more. But I met my second wife and still my wife, Stephanie, my current wife, and, but had done no work and worked on myself and had not overcome that addiction. At this point, it was definitely an addiction. And so we got married, moved to Lima, Peru, and I was still with Duke Energy and was named the CEO of their business in Peru. In Ecuador, I was in my early 30s, was way over my head, you know, spoke a little Spanish. I was managing a pretty good sized company for, about $300 million in revenues and 300 employees. So, you know, I was just, you know, very, very much beyond myself. So sleepless nights, you know, I was really stressed out. My boss was not very supportive. And I had, as you said, no support network. I was again active in my church. I was actually in charge of stewardship, but began again acting out sexually to relieve that stress. I had nowhere to go, nobody to talk to, no way to get any encouragement or support. And so I went back to the old behavior, right. Which was to act, sexually. But at this time, this is a progressive disease. So at this point, I started acting, I was prostitutes and eventually had an affair with a woman and got her pregnant. And so I had to share that with Stephanie. And that is where our journey of recovery and healing began. Coming home, talking to our pastor who had married us, you know, emeritus, five years earlier, I had to say, well, here’s where we are today. You know, tough conversation. But he directed us to some great resources. And I got in, you know, diagnosed as, sex addict and got into recovery, which was a very, very important milestone to get into. The 12 step program moved to Brazil, where we lived for seven years, which again, you know, the big change from Peru to Brazil was living transparently, living openly and also with others, with Stephanie. But also we had a home church, you know, we had a small group, other expats, and really were open with them about our story and formed really a familial bond with that group, about 6 or 7 other families. And so we were very close, and that was probably my first small group, if you will, is that group of families were still very close to this day and then moved back to Houston in 2010. And really, as far as entrepreneurial, we bought into a franchise and opened a few locations, found a local church still at the same church, active in our church, and again joined a small group of men. Continue to be active in recovery with, you know, sponsoring others and going to meetings. We started working with a group called the Fair Recovery and telling our story and mentoring other couples who were going through similar crisis in their marriage and still doing that to this day. And so, yeah, just really continue to build, as you said earlier, a network of support, not only where we get that support, but where we can also give support.

William Norvell: Thank you, William here. Thank you for sharing. I’m curious, as entrepreneurs can think that, you know, too busy two overwhelmed. You kind of have to commit to family and work and that’s it. I just don’t have time for anything. And I know part of your story is just how the importance of community and having that around you. I’d love for you to share a little bit about how that was important and has been important and still is important in your life, and maybe some words of wisdom for entrepreneurs that may think, hey, you know, I’ve only got time for a couple things and you know, that’s not one of them, right? I got to stay laser focused. How would you maybe answer that or encourage someone on that journey?

Mickey Peters: Well, I mean, you know, entrepreneurial is pain, right? Being an entrepreneur is suffering. You know, sleepless nights. Am I going to have enough cash to make the payroll? You know, are we going to get to the end of the cycle? And, you know, God didn’t make us to do life alone, and that includes business. We need others. And so, you know, you had the obvious, you know, just processing things, learning from their experience. Other than I was in Ypo in Brazil, a young president’s organization and as a part of a small group through that, and you learn from each other’s experience is not a spiritual element. There’s so much but just, you know, hey guys, I’m struggling with this, you know, getting others input. And the main thing is the part that when I was in Peru, you know, tossing and turning at one in the morning, feel like you’re alone. You’re all alone and you’re trying to figure it out in your head. How can I get over this hump? How can I, you know, solve this problem and it doesn’t work. I couldn’t figure it out. You know, fast forward when you have people you can talk to. First of all, I’m not alone. You know, I just immediately get some relief just from that. But then being able to talk about it and get some input from somebody else has faced a similar problem before. Hey, try this. You know me. Connect you to this guy or this person, this organization. Oh, okay. You know, there’s a solution out there. I don’t have to reinvent the wheel. I don’t have to, you know, try to solve it on my own. And really, it’s the way I look at it today is it’s a form of discipleship. You know, Jesus told us to go and make disciples. We kind of always think of that in a church context. But as an entrepreneur, you know, when you’re out there and you’re feeling the pain and the struggle of being an entrepreneur, you’re able to get vulnerable. When you’re in pain, you’re willing to be vulnerable. And, hey, I need help. I’m dying here. And so if they I love what you guys are doing with the small groups, and then you’re able to ask for help from your peers, people that are on the same journey with you much as we do in recovery. And so then. Wow. Good idea. Thank you for that. You know, immediately, a lot of that pressure and tension is relieved and you have a way forward. And then of course, you can give back. Maybe you’re the guy that has an idea or the solution. You’re able to reach out, hey, dude, you know you’re going to get through this. It’s going to be okay. You know, this too shall pass. And so it’s just the way God made us, I believe, is to do these things together. And that’s what Jesus modeled force in the disciples, you know, 12 disciples in a small group. And so I think it’s really the way, especially in our culture today, a great way to do discipleship is in groups like you guys have, where you’re in a similar journey. You’re able to, you know, get vulnerable, get help, give help, and then maybe take that home and maybe take that to your church or into your community and basically disciple, right, with Jesus’s last command, go therefore and make disciples.

William Norvell: So it’s in there somewhere.

Mickey Peters: Yeah, exactly.

William Norvell: Oh, Amen. Well, thank you for mentioning that. It’s, you know, definitely was a part of the creation of the Efd groups and how the team is scaled. That is just to have people wherever you can, wherever you are. And, you know, sometimes that’s local. And of course, now in this world, it doesn’t have to be. You can have a great friend across the world that can be there for you, and a text message in a video call, as we unfortunately have come to a wrap, one of the things we love to do at the end of our episodes is invite our guests to share a little bit of from God’s Word on what may be stirring in their heart these days. So this could be a verse you read this morning. It could be a verse you’ve been meditating on for some time. It could be a version of meditating on your whole life. But we just love to remind our audience that God’s Word is alive and moving, and they’re moving through all of us. And so we love to invite you to share that, if you wouldn’t mind.

Mickey Peters: So we put my glasses on. So this verse is the comfort thing, right. And so the verse was comfort important to Jesus is the question. And so the verse is Luke, Luke 22 at the end of Jesus ministry. And he’s telling Peter that he’s going to die. And I am here it is. Chapter 22. Luke 22 verse 32 says, but I have prayed for you, Simon, that your faith may not fail. And when you have turned back, strengthen your brothers. And so the only thing he tells him, right? The only instruction he gives him is to comfort his brothers, strengthen, encourage. And so, obviously, those are his last words to Peter before, you know. But when you overcome your disappointment and frustration for denying me, be sure you encourage brothers a little bit further on. When he’s in the Garden of Gethsemane and he asked God to remove this cup if there’s any way, any other way, and God says, no, you know there is no other way. Yeah. And they say that angels came and comforted him. And so in his time of need, you know, God sent an angel to comfort him. So, you know, if it was important to Jesus, it should be important to us, right?

Joey Honescko: Mickey story reminds us of the potential downstream effects that come from the lone wolf mentality. It is so essential for entrepreneurs to address this deep need early in their careers, and that’s why the Ocean Accelerator in Cincinnati has always prioritized community for the founders they work with. They see the reality that technical skills and grit will only get you so far. Faith driven entrepreneurs especially need others for guidance, support and encouragement. So in this next segment, Scott Weiss will tell us a little bit about the origin of the Ocean Accelerator. And then he’s going to talk about why they have always emphasized the need for community early in the lives of the entrepreneurs they serve.

Henry Kaestner: We’d love to get started with you talking about the origin story. How did ocean get started? What was your involvement and then bridge into what ocean does today?

Scott Weiss: Oh, that’s a great question. As origin stories are so unique story. So picture a senior pastor walking through a large atrium of a church in Cincinnati. He’s walking through every day, day after day, and he sees the same young millennial guys pounding away on their laptops. That pastor’s name is Brian. And tell him Brian’s a pretty impatient guy. So he finally stops and ask one of them, why are you here? Why do not have a job? And the young guy, a gentleman named Tim Michener, answers him. I’m starting a company as the atrium, open to the public, provides free Wi-Fi and has free coffee. And Tim walks Bryan around and points out ten different startups. Half of them were being led by Congress who do not attend that church. Probably had no relationships. Brian’s blown away and is a really curious guy and says, hey, I will host a breakfast for anybody from this movement who wants to be there and I will disciple you. I will provide leadership lessons that are gospel based and let’s see where this goes. So about ten people said yes, and six months into it, Brian had discipled them long enough and said, hey, you have to have an active service. You know, key part of that, being a disciple, being a follower, is to serve others. So they decided to put up a sign in that church that I attended that said, hey, Wednesday night we’re going to do this very informal gathering. No video, no PowerPoint, no music. We’re going to call it unpolished, really rock. And if you’re an entrepreneur or if you’re interested in after worship and you want to hear three founders talk about their journey and kind of reveal how God shows up in that journey. Come on over. Set up the room for 90 people. 450 people walked in the door.

Henry Kaestner: Oh my goodness.

Scott Weiss: Wow. Yeah. Now we know. Now what we did not know that we know now that desperate, lonely struggle that entrepreneurs face. We know now that it’s half the people who attend. Anything we do publicly are not a member of any church, and they attend because they are desperately lonely. And if you throw a networking event where I can meet other people who are on this journey, or I might find a customer or a future co-founder or an investor, I’m showing up now. These attendees were all over the board. They’re high tech, their main street. They’re three years post-launch, they’re three years pre-launch. They’re all over the board. They’re incredibly diverse. About 60% of the people who show up to ocean events are female. When we told them locally, about 20% people of color in that index, in a city that’s about 12% people of color. So this is really mind blowing, right? So I’m gonna keep going and we start to have more frequent events. And then that same original crowd of ten, three of them had launched high tech businesses. Two of them, I believe, are doing to other accelerators. And they had found experience pretty soul deadening, pretty difficult. And they said we ought to try to launch an accelerator specifically targeting fast growth, high tech businesses that integrates their low code principles, particularly around leadership, how you lead your own life, how you lead a company, how you connect that to the mission God set down for you. And we launched it. And that’s when I came into the picture in 2014. We decided to go. In 2015, we held our first class. I was just exiting a long career and had sold the company that I was leading, and I had worked in that career for 30 years and knew that balance in my life had to be spent focusing on the knowledge I required and also building the kingdom. So I stepped in as the founding CEO, and here we are five years later, with a much broader operation of ocean programs.

Rusty Rueff: That’s really cool. And this rusty, I’m a huge fan of what you’re doing and tapping into the entrepreneurial spirit in Cincinnati. How do you think, you know, you’ve been able to bridge that gap between believers and nonbelievers all feeling comfortable sort of in this ocean that you’ve created.

Scott Weiss: So ocean, when it was launched, was intentionally launched as an independent nonprofit. So we are from the church and of the church, but not a part of a church. And that was a specific design choice that Brian and I made, because we wanted this to have the potential to attract interest from. Churches throughout the region and throughout the nation. And so crossroads is an incredible partner of ours that we are not a part of crossroads. Rather, we are from an up or down, not answer question. How do we put this all together? I view it as an open door in this discussion about entrepreneurship and faith. It’s a long journey, and there are people who specialize in taking companies that are the post revenue and already generating revenue of a profit, and they want to scale. And let’s delve into those strategies and really connect with them on their spiritual walk. Work the front end of that, and we want to sell the funnel with people who aspire towards a business, and we want to be in that space for two reasons. First, in our judgment, it’s the most at risk space. You’re most at risk of losing your identity to your enterprise when you are in the initial stages of it. You have so much to do. You don’t know how to do it. Are desperate for funding. You work harder and harder and harder, and all of the research shows you better off from faith, from family units, or from health insurance, or from finance. Anxiety and depression goes through the roof. 60% chance of being diagnosed with depression 60% divorce rate versus a national average system. So we want to be out there because we’re so people stepping out of the water and need support and service, and we think we can provide that.

Henry Kaestner: Tell us more about how you work with these companies and these entrepreneurs over time to be able to help them focus on faith and family and and so that they don’t become part of the statistics you mentioned.

Scott Weiss: So terrific question. The ocean itself today runs two large training programs, the accelerator, which we have been discussing last about five months. It has a global draw of this year’s class. You mentioned one company from Turkey. There’s companies from Pakistan, there’s a company from London, etc. so that’s each other. They also run small business training, which we call Genesis. And that’s where people to start businesses in this region or whatever region we operate in. And that’s a job engine for any city, right? Local small businesses create jobs. That’s a nine week program following six months of mentoring. And I mention that because both of them rest on the same pitching foundation, and we rely on a concept called the five chapter. This gotcha data start with five capitals most important stewardship chapter of our relationship with him, our relational capital, my friendship with Henry, our fiscal capital, my energy level, my health, intellectual capital beyond my knowledge, my skills. I’m a woodworker and I check out the Foundation signature chapter. And this calculation is supported with specific biblical principles and lots of specific lessons. These capitals are not static. They’re fluid. They change all the time. And once you understand you have access to five separate chapters, you can begin to face up to various challenges by drawing on where you have strengths, or drawing in friends or relationships that have strengthened that basis. So we base all the content on that. Companies come in to each other. The first thing we do is go away for a weekend retreat. All we talked about is, where are you on your spiritual walk? No matter whether you’re Christian or not, we take them through a series of exercises as they go deeper, deeper and deeper into who are you? What’s your mission in life? What’s your relationship with that big scary guy called God? If you have that relationship, how does that influence your life and why you’re here? They come out of that weekend with a sense of where they are on those questions. We then switch gears and for the next two months, we get real heavy at classic high tech stand up content, we focus on three things the commercial things. And about that time they’re now making sales tools. They’re talking to early stage investors that get their act together. We then go out to another retreat. Again, all we talked about is what is your mission? What are the values you are going to build into this culture you’re creating? You’re going to be a company and you’re a culture creator. What are the values that you’re going to imbue in it, and how are you going to sustain them? And from that point forward, which is where we’re at this season right now, all we talked about are some of those values from the wife, which is bringing into practice the biblical leadership lessons organized around those five chapters. I started with. The exact same thing happens in our small business training program, Genesis. In our frequent public events and in our conference, we always organized number one, some aspect of one of those five chapters or the interplay of them. So some very consistent teachings, outward bound. That impacts the people in the program. The alumni will remain connected with and the broader public who we try to serve.

William Norvell: That’s really interesting, Scott. One of the things that I always find interesting on entrepreneurial journeys is just the surprises and the twists and turns that it typically takes people on. As you have been shepherding people through the entrepreneurial journeys. What might be surprised you the most that you know, as you look back over 5 or 6 years, what would surprise you? What’s really interesting that you found out about how people go down this journey? We had another guest, Julie Barrios, talk about entrepreneurship as a spiritual discipline, right? It is so unique in what it takes people through, and the trials and tribulations and the ups and the downs. And just interested in your view from the people you’ve walked with.

Scott Weiss: Yeah, I heard that talk to someone who was profoundly wise and such. And since you breakfast, I can now see that intergender this match. So I really appreciate your.

Henry Kaestner: Please do, please do. Luckily, the things that we use on this podcast. We’ve stolen from you and you’ll notice we never get credit. Hahaha.

Scott Weiss: I think you know, from my personal perspective it’s such an act creation. And acts of creation are tumultuous. They’re uncertain. They have episodic violence, that physical violence, but violence as walking away from old paradigms, destroying old beliefs, walking away from relationships that are holding you back. So you’re literally destroying some things, if not permanently, to gain new things. And so as I engage with the participants and my wife Cheryl, and I always some group dinners at our house, and over the course of any accelerator, every founder and his or her family or their employees, we have them over to the house for dinner, so we try to provide some personal support. It’s all inspiring to me the steadfast courage that the founders displayed in the face of daunting timelines and clear uncertainty, that they just keep chopping the wood, they just keep going. And I had never been this close to pure entrepreneurship. I’ve started a bunch of things that are in a different format with a lot more resources, and to just watch that. And particularly when you’re standing on one side and walking alongside a believer who is starting this as a believer, and to watch their faith grow as they connect to two weeks worth the journey they’re on. And they begin to connect the dots that I’m creating a business as God created, and I’m trying to replicate the lessons she laid down. And of course, none of us will ever be gods. But to replicate those lessons and try to walk that out and to watch that growth and somebody and then I get to sit in a real special place.

Joey Honescko: Our final guest today has had to think a little differently about community than our other two. Coby Cotton and four of his closest friends started Dude Perfect almost by accident when they were still in college. Since then, of course, they have grown to become one of the most influential entertainment brands in the country, with well over 60 million YouTube subscribers. Each of those founding members have had to navigate the complex waters of starting and scaling a business with your friends. Their company and their community are deeply intertwined. So in the final segment of the show, Coby unpacks how they have managed to keep their relationship intact as Dude Perfect continues to grow.

Henry Kaestner: There’s so many different things I want to talk about in the program, in terms of the team dynamic and your faithful obedience in the same direction, and how you keep things going over and over. I want to get into the question that I’ve been thinking about, as I was looking forward to our interview today, which is you got five guys around and each of you play a really, really important role. Talk to us about that team dynamic, because there’s a chemistry that you guys have that is amazing. And I think part of your appeal. And yet that’s got to be hard to do. And just tell us about how that works. Presumably there’s a lot of stuff also that goes on behind the scenes. So walk us through the team dynamic.

Coby Cotton: That’s a great question, Henry. I think it’s part of the appeal and that’s always part of the challenge as well. Right. I think there’s benefits and cons to having five guys in kind of an entertainment company like we do, right? We were just out filming with a guy who was an individual, and we were talking about how challenging it would be if everything rode on just you. Right. So we have this ability to share kind of the spotlight and the creative challenges of coming up with things with the other four guys. But at the same time, you know, it’s not an individually led, typical CEO running a company type standpoint, right? Where there’s all these shared opinions and sometimes it can be difficult to come to consensus. So there’s definitely pros and cons. I think what we’ve been so grateful for is that each of the five of us do have natural gifts and skill sets. And so honestly, from the very beginning that way we broke up. Kind of the business roles and responsibilities is where we are today. 12 years later, I’ve kind of run a lot of the business side. My brother has spearheaded the production management. At first he was the one doing all the editing and now he’s managing that team. Tyler runs and leads all the creative. He’s the one who says he thinks of cool ideas. That’s just something that happens to him. Garrett has run our merchandise and our financial staff, and Cody has run our social media for all these years. And so kind of all the natural events and abilities between the five of us has really been so helpful in just shouldering that load. Yeah, from the beginning.

William Norvell: It’s amazing. I mean, you guys have built a business too. As you mentioned earlier, all five of you all do different parts of the business. One of the things I would love to jump into Kobe, I mean, you know, so 12 years, 12 years running a business, you know, I think we could get sucked into stories and fun and all those things. You guys have been running a business, you’ve been running an entity. It sounds like you’re you’re probably all close with your wives, too. You went to college together. I mean, that’s a long time to manage through friendship. Manage through business. I’d love, if you wouldn’t mind, share maybe a couple the difficulties of going through that over the years that you can think back on, and maybe how you guys figured out a way to manage through that together with multiple intertwined friendships, multiple intertwined families. I just think that’s so fascinating to dive into.

Coby Cotton: Yeah. I mean, it is a long time, right? 12 years crazy that we’ve been doing it for that long and anybody’s done anything for 12 years. Knows that there’s ups and downs. Right. And so we actually made it was I think it was two years ago now we came out with a documentary on YouTube, which was a ton of fun, and it tells our whole story. So for anybody who’s interested in seeing all this in video format, you just type in the Dude Perfect documentary on YouTube. It’s I mean, it’s a 90 minute movie, basically. So it’s not a quick five minute watch, but if you had the time, I think you really enjoy it, really proud of it, but it shows kind of some of those ups and downs as well. And I just think probably the biggest one is just friendship over time. I think for us, you know, the bedrock of the business really is five friends. And so we have learned over time with good counselors and friends around us of, hey, like, y’all have to protect that friendship and you have to work through conflict together. Because if you don’t, you know, the whole business could crater based on just the five of you guys and the closeness there. And so for us, obviously, our faith is at the bedrock of that. And we each have to have a strong, abiding relationship with Christ. And then, you know, it’s important to all of us that we are each involved in community, where we have people around us who don’t care that we’re doing perfect, don’t care that we have all the subscribers that we have and can speak into our lives. And then we do. Like I said, we’ve gotten better. I can’t say it’s been perfect, but we’ve gotten better at resolving conflict between the five of us. The phrase we use as guys to make it easier is we sort ourselves. So if somebody needs to own something, they say, hey, look, I’m a sword myself on that. And that was on me. I’m taking that one and owning that. And so I think that has been significant for us over time.

Joey Honescko: Well, folks, that’s a wrap for today’s episode. If you are an entrepreneur looking for community, check out our groups page on our website. There you’ll find information about our no cost, no catch communities, where a handful of like minded leaders meet for eight weeks and discuss what it means to live as a faith driven entrepreneur. You can learn more at Faith Driven Entrepreneur Gorgui groups. Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next week.

Ricky Dickson, the retired CEO of Blue Bell Ice Cream, joins the Faith Driven Entrepreneur podcast to discuss his experience leading and scaling a national company through growth and incredible pitfalls.

Using his new book, One Scoop at a Time, as a backdrop, Ricky shares how his 40+ year career at Blue Bell started right after college. He gives an overview of the ice cream market and how Blue Bell positioned itself as a high-quality, middle-ground option and talks about the importance of constant innovation and listening to customer feedback.

He also discusses the challenges Blue Bell faced during the Listeria outbreak and how the company focused on safety and rebuilding trust. He emphasizes the value of consistency and staying true to the company’s culture and values and shares how his faith has helped him find peace in the midst of challenges by relying on God and His guidance.
Find more about Ricky in his new book: https://www.amazon.com/One-Scoop-Time-Stories-Lessons/

Episode Transcript

Joey Honescko: All right. So look, sometimes life throws random interruptions your way, right? And at the podcast, we’ve had this nice plan to focus on community and friendship. And while we will keep hitting more on that in the coming episodes, we had this particular interruption come up that we just had to adjust for. See, we’re publishing this episode on July 16th, which we just learned is right in the middle of what turns out to be national ice cream month. And if you’ve listened to the show for awhile, you know, that ice cream is maybe our second favorite thing behind faith-driven entrepreneurship. So when Justin and I had the opportunity to interview Ricky Dixon, who’s the recently retired CEO of blue bell Creamery. One of the most noteworthy ice cream brands in the country. We had to jump on it. Especially because Justin and I are both from Texas, just like Bluebell is.

Bluebell is a staple of the state. And so we’ve got ice cream, we’ve got Texas, we’ve got entrepreneurship, so it’s a little outside of the flow but it’s a phenomenal conversation. You’re going to hear ricky give incredible [00:01:00] insights from his experience and from his new book, one scoop at a time.

He talks about leading a scaling national brand, growing alongside the company

and bringing that company out of some of the hardest challenges he would ever imagine.

It’s a great conversation and it’s coming up now on the faith driven entrepreneur podcast.

Let’s get into it.

Welcome back everyone to the faith driven entrepreneur podcast. I’m your host Joey Hanesco alongside Justin Foreman and Justin. I hope our listeners don’t mind a little Texas time today because we’ve got some, we’ve got three folks with, with some Texas in their blood today.

Justin Forman: We’ve got some texas in our blood.

Let’s let’s establish that up front. We’ve got some green and gold bleeding through We’ve got some baylor connections here, which is always a great thing for the faith driven entrepreneur podcast And you know, we’ve got a really important issue. There’s a deep love, you know every faith driven entrepreneur has their Their crutch their thing that like they just they fall for and for many of the faith driven entrepreneur host That is ice cream.

Let’s face it. [00:02:00] There are some there are some hosts on this podcast We won’t name any henry’s we won’t name any henry’s that might you know have different loves we’re still working on Swinging his vote to a different side Um, but I will I will make my position very clear today that uh that I our family.

We’re a bluebell family We’re a bluebell family. So that is a It’s a fun treat, uh, for today’s conversation. Uh, it’s exciting to, to think about so much, uh, that’s here. And so it is a joy, it’s an honor to welcome Ricky here to the podcast. Ricky, thank you so much for joining us.

Ricky Dickson: Well, thank you. And it’s great to be in the house.

It’s great to have some Baylor, uh, blood flowing and, uh, I’m not sure. I haven’t met Henry yet, but, uh, that sounds like a prayer request to me and we’ll work on that.

Joey Honescko: I don’t think that there’s besides entrepreneurship, I think the second most common topic in the, in the 300 plus episodes we’ve now done.[00:03:00]

So it’s a joy to have you, Ricky. Ricky is the, uh, just recently retired CEO of Bluebell ice cream. And you’ve got a new book out. It’s called one scoop at a time. And it’s this interesting mix because I found it interesting because your personal history and the history of the brand oddly overlap, at least in my mind, I’m seeing a connection where.

Uh, you know, you started at the company right after college, your career grew alongside this company that was relatively small when you started and then it grew to this massive national brand. So as we get started here, I’d love to just hear about what it was like to be part of and then eventually be leading this scaling company.

Ricky Dickson: Well, um, absolutely great question, and it’s always fun to talk about something that you love, and Blue Bell Ice Cream is definitely dear to my heart. Uh, what’s so neat about it is the fact that my career actually started before my career started. And what I mean by that is I wrote a term paper in college at Baylor.

[00:04:00] Had to follow a company for a semester, went back to the apartment, call my dad, said, I’ve got this project. And at that time, he’s actually reading an article on the little creamery in Brenham. Uh, and so let me start this article over. This could be the company that you’re looking to write the paper on.

And so, uh, that was just probably the biggest eye opener of anything. I was a marketing journalism major thinking about public relations or advertising. And I thought, I want to go back and interview with that little company down in Brenham. And you know, I had no idea what I’d be interviewing for, but I knew one thing.

They made good ice cream. And I thought, you know, we could make this work if it if it turns out that way. And you’re exactly right. It was really taking off. We started in 1907 as a butter company, uh, didn’t start making ice cream till 1911. But in 1958, we put put butter aside, actually. And in 1960 went into the Houston market for it.

Just outside of, we’re in Brenham, Texas, and it’s just a slow growth methodical. Let’s make the best ice cream we can [00:05:00] and not try to get ahead of ourself. And so, when I came on, what, 20 years later, they had expanded from Houston to, uh, actually, Houston to Austin and the surrounding areas, and they’d just gone into Dallas, and, and that was our footprint.

And, uh, there was something special. The culture, uh, the product, but I would say most importantly, the people. And so, to jump on a board in 1981 and to be able to write it for over 43 years, uh, Was just a remarkable blessing and, um, just a fun career, um, along the way. And to be right there in the front row, getting to see firsthand people trying bluebell outside of the state now, gosh, 23 States.

Uh, so yeah, it’s been really exciting.

Justin Forman: So give us a flyover, Ricky, when you think about ice cream, I mean, obviously we’re, we’re big consumers were connoisseurs here in the podcast, but if you were to describe the ice cream wars, if you will, if we were to put it in those terms. What’s the makeup of the market when you think about ice cream across the U.

S.? Like, what’s [00:06:00] Breyers, what’s Blue Bell, what’s the market share distribution like?

Ricky Dickson: Yeah, it’s um, it can be defined in a lot of ways, so I’ll try to keep this real short. Basically, two components of making ice cream. You have to be 10 percent butterfat, And you cannot whip or incorporate more than 100 percent air into the product to give it a specific texture.

So the more the butterfat, the less amount of air, the heavier the product, or the more the dense, uh, that you have. And so when you talk about the national brands that you see, um, uh, the Ben and Jerry and the Haagen Dazs, you’re looking at a very high butterfat, very low, Error or overrun and then you have all the way on the other end where you have a store brand where it’s more of a price point and you’ll have that 100 percent error and the 10 percent butter fat that we did not that I described and so what we’re trying to do, you know, the philosophy was where do we want to fall?

Because really, you can, you can Fall in a hundred different categories, I mean, categories or areas. And we want it to be right down the middle. We want you to be able to go to the freezer, get you a [00:07:00] bowl, get some ice cream, sit down and enjoy it. And if you want to get up and go get a little bit more, you’re able to do so.

So, uh, it’s just a, it’s a rewarding dessert that seems to, um. Um, really come through, you know, good days, bad days. And so, um, we feel like we hit the sweet spot by the way we make it, uh, with the inclusions that we put, uh, if, if it’s a butter pecan, there better be pecans. If it’s a strawberry, there better be strawberries.

Uh, but, um, that’s probably the biggest difference between, uh, when you look at the different brands that are out there.

Justin Forman: Okay, so let’s hit on that because this is a big thing for the Foreman family. We currently have, um, plus or minus four tubs of Blue Bell in our freezer. Let’s get that out in the open.

Okay. But one of the breakthroughs for us that we think is deeply, I don’t know if it’s scientific, I want to know how it happened, is it felt like somewhere in the last five or six years, The idea as you said of just putting butter pecans or pecans [00:08:00] in the ice cream putting cherries in the ice cream Yeah, that was one thing people have been there done that but these days like Groom’s cake bride’s cake peppermint bark.

I mean you guys are just throwing tons of stuff into the ice cream When did that change and when did that just like go on to another level? It felt like something tipped there

Ricky Dickson: I I think that it’s been there, but maybe not to the um attention or um Focus that it looks like today. And the reason I say that is you, you look back at 2000, uh, we had millennium crunch.

That was one of those flavors that, you know, uh, in introduction, people said, why do you introduce new flavors? Well, you’re looking still for that home run. You’re looking for the one that becomes your best friend. That’s how that’ll be us. You know, it’s, you sustained it throughout the year. So you take a product back in the late seventies, early eighties, cookies and cream was introduced.

And so that would be one of those flavors. That’s an iconic product. Uh, flavor today. From there, you have cookie two step. Another version of that. Uh, [00:09:00] we’d like to pull you to the case. Uh, we want you to find something that’s new. And again, you have your staples, your homemade vanilla, your Dutch chocolate, mint chocolate chip, great divide, which is homemade vanilla and Dutch chocolate together.

But, but, uh, you know, every now and then you want to try something different. So we try to, Keep the excitement at the case and rotating flavors in and out. And, um, you know, every now and then you do hit that grand slam. Sometimes they’re doubles. Sometimes they’re singles. Every now and then you go back and sit on the dugout or in the dugout.

There’s only one or two flavors I could think of that just really didn’t make it.

Justin Forman: Okay. So, so important question here for the Foreman Household. Now I’ll stop the personal questions, but. How many cartons do we need to commit to from the Foreman family to bring chocolate covered cherries of groom’s cake back?

Like, do we need to commit to a hundred, a thousand? Do we need to do a petition in the city? What’s it going to take?

Ricky Dickson: Oh, this is a good moment that I can say I’m retired. [00:10:00] No, I’m kidding. I will tell you that we, they just had a contest and, uh, it was, it was one of these brackets and bring back, uh, Uh, flavors and groom’s, groom’s cake was one of those flavors.

So next year you will see groom’s cake back, back into the lineup. And so, uh, uh, the chocolate covered cherry, that one’s a good one, a tough one to make, um, it really comes down to, you know, what sells and you nailed it. Uh, if you, if it, you know, the product’s moving, obviously you want to bring it back, but

Justin Forman: yeah,

Ricky Dickson: 50 percent of them coming back the groom’s cake.

Justin Forman: There we go. There we go. So, uh, faith driven entrepreneur, stay tuned instead of a March madness bracket. Next year, you are going to find yourself in a bluebell bracket being promoted on faith driven entrepreneur. Uh, and we will, uh, rank those accordingly to the form and family’s favorites. So, uh, so when let’s press into that, when you talk about like the single double thing, When do you guys know that you have something?

Is it 30 days, [00:11:00] 60 days, 90 days? Is it a long tail in a market like this? When you’re introducing a product, if you’re pushing into the business side of it, when do you know when you’ve got a good one on your,

Ricky Dickson: you know, that’s a, it’s a tremendous question. And, and the reason why it’s a little hard to answer is there are flavors come out of the blocks.

We’d like to keep a new flavor three months. And so if you have a new flavor come out within four weeks, you’ve sold out of everything you’ve made. You feel like, okay, we’re on to something. Uh, I use southern blackberry cobbler is a great example. I mean, it came out, we’re out in 44 weeks. It’s hard to get all those ingredients once you run out to be able to reload and come back, you lose all that momentum.

And so the next year we doubled. Uh, what we were going to make and again, four weeks. Oh my gosh, it’s, it’s out again. And so we think, man, we’re on to this flavor is going to be out there on a regular basis all year, but in that particular flavors case, it’s a great three month flavor, but then you move on.

And I don’t know if it’s summer. I don’t know if it’s just, uh, you hit that niche and you’re happy with it. Then you move on. My, one of my [00:12:00] favorites, key lime pie. I love key lime pie, but I find myself, I’ll buy it one time and then I move on, you know, so, uh, to be a rule, a flavor that, uh, sustainability that really holds its power, it takes longer than, than maybe one run, uh, or, or, um, Maybe one season to see, and groom’s cake is going to be an interesting one going back to that because it did okay, but bride’s cake just blew it, blew it out of the water.

And so, uh, with groom’s cake coming back, we have had a lot of requests for gloom groom’s cake. So we’ll, we’ll see what happens with that. But great question.

Joey Honescko: This is great. Cause I think, you know, we’re podcast. A lot of our listeners are in the early stages. And so it’s great to hear about some of the, uh, unique perspectives and challenges that come from scaling.

And I think we want to hone in on that here in a couple of minutes. But before we do that, I think we’ve made it clear that, uh, Joey’s a fan of Bluebell. Justin is a little bit of a fan of Bluebell. We’re very familiar with the brand. Um, [00:13:00] talk a little bit about the scale kind of today and, and where it’s at in terms of, uh, the rest of the market.

Talk a little bit about for, you know, the five or six listeners that are listening who maybe aren’t familiar with Bluebell or don’t have four cartons in their freezer. Give us a sense of kind of where it’s at today.

Ricky Dickson: Yeah. You know, uh, we’ll probably touch on here in a minute, uh, of the struggles that we went through back in the 2015, 16 era.

Uh, but where we are at today is we’re back in all markets. We did pull everything out of the market. Back in the middle of 2015, uh, we have returned at every market and, uh, in a great strong way. And St. Louis was our newest entry. We went into the St. Louis market earlier this year. We still use a, what we call a direct store delivery system, meaning that we make it ourself.

We transport it to one of our 67 branches. which are like a like a depot or a warehouse. From there, we put it on our route trucks and take it directly to the store in our own personnel, put the product into the case. Uh, we [00:14:00] believe that ice cream is probably one of the most fragile products in the grocery store.

It starts melting around zero degrees. Uh, you go, A week or so at zero, you’re going to have a, the product’s going to start changing, uh, it’s a texture and everything about it. So you’ve got to keep it in its, um, protected state. And so that’s why we use the model, uh, that we do. It’s expensive model because, you know, we’re running a lot of trucks on the road versus just shipping product to a warehouse, but you just ask a minute ago about other brands.

We’re one of the very last that do handle it ourself. And so. Uh, the limitations to that, we, we cannot be everywhere all at once. And, and so we have to pace ourself to make sure that we can keep up with demand, to have the right flavors and the right mix where we have it and uh, promise what we said we were going to do, uh, and no, do what we said we’re going to promise.

I said that backwards. Uh, you know, We want to be able to take care of the customers where we’re at and then slowly, continually grow. It’s not [00:15:00] necessarily, and this is my philosophy, I’ll speak on my behalf, uh, you can do some things to become a number one brand in the nation. That never was my particular goal.

Sure, you want to be number one, it’s what we all say, uh, at Baylor, we all said we want to be number one, and one day we’re going to be number one. But, uh, Thank goodness for basketball. Right.

Justin Forman: Hey, we’re there. Let’s not glance over there. We are there for basketball. We were there for basketball, football.

That’s right. Different, different story. You

Ricky Dickson: know, little work to do. But, but you want, you wanna give it and be the very best you possibly can be, uh, wherever it is that we’re at. And so. You know, we have a saying that we want to consistently meet the expectation that drives the passion. It’s kind of a wordy statement, but the people that love Bluebell, as both of you, it sounds like have a passion.

And when you go to the store and you bring home that groom’s cake for the first time in 10 years, you know, You have that expectation. Yeah, you have that expectation and it better come through and so that’s that’s the reason we want to make sure we move at a pace that we [00:16:00] can we can do all we can to meet that expectation.

So I gave you a long and a kind of a different answer to that. Um, you know, we rank one of the top brands in the country, but I focus are we taking care of the consumers where we’re at. That’s

Justin Forman: so good. That’s so good. Ricky, you know, you touch on this earlier and I think entrepreneurs, we, we romanticize, um, the later stages of success.

We make them talk about the origin story, but there’s so many highs and lows in between. I, we see the covers of the magazines, the, the, the other things, but, but there was a season and you alluded to it where the man, there’s moments of tough and sometimes they come in unexpected times and, and unexpected things.

And it’s a season. Can you talk to us about that season? And again, for some of those that might not be as familiar and some of those States that don’t have bluebell, talk to us about what you ran into and what that journey was like.

Ricky Dickson: Yeah, it’s, it’s, um, uh, it’s a great question, delicate question, but it really is part of who we are as a company as we’re [00:17:00] moving forward.

Uh, we did have a pathogen. We had listeria that was identified in the product. And so, uh, Uh, it got very dark. It was probably, it was the most humbling of anything, uh, in the company that I’d ever been a part of. Uh, the news was devastating. Uh, and, and yet at the same time, you have to then start answering questions.

Uh, how are we going to go about, you know, handling it? Um, and, and how will this define us as we come out? And really, honestly, through faith, through prayer and a strong, strong, uh, dedication to take, take all the safety to a whole new level. Uh, ice cream should be safe. It should be a fun product. You shouldn’t have to be worried about it.

It was a very low risk item when you look at FDA’s standards, but it happened. And so, um, you know, I’m proud to say that You know, not just the upper management, not just middle management, not just the employees from from all over. Uh, it was everybody collectively [00:18:00] embraced the challenge. Uh, and we, we saw that this, this could be a death blow if we don’t do it right.

So humbly, uh, we, we got on our knees, we got with experts, we brought them in and we did some things from tearing up the floor, tear down the walls. I brought a microbiologist to learn, okay, what can you teach us? And I’m happy to say all three plants now go through an annual certification. It’s called BRC, or British Retail Consortium Food Safety Audit, so it’s an outside audit that comes in.

And we’re not only getting A’s, but A pluses. And that’s all from an outside firm coming in and looking at everything. It’s about a three, four day process. Uh, we don’t want to, uh, leave a stone unturned and, and so, um, Thankfully, we were able to, um, to, to get back into the market. We went out of the market in April.

We came back at the 1st of September and it was a slow process of getting back to all the markets. But, um, you know, I [00:19:00] think that, you know, for me, it taught me a lot. It taught me to, you know, remain faithful, but most importantly, to stay true to who you are, stay true to the culture that you’re in and, um, you know, just, just get back to doing what you said you’re going to do.

And boy, I tell you, we all, I think. cried the day that the truck came back out and people were waiting in the store for the product because you really don’t know. And we don’t want to let people down. We want to be that good friend. So, uh, yeah, I’m glad. I’m glad we’re down the road.

Justin Forman: Yeah. Well said. And, uh, and obviously there’s a, there’s a lot there.

And I think that there’s, I think there’s something to that when you talk about the size and scale that you guys were both heading in and where you are today, but there’s a point where all of a sudden you kind of feel like you know, your systems, you know, your things and an entrepreneur, it can probably be pretty tempting to feel like we’re in control and that we’re not as dependent as we think that we are.

On God and his, uh, direction and wisdom and insight and all those things. [00:20:00] There’s, it sounds like there’s a moment of that recalibration for you guys, as you kind of go through that journey, but specifically in the business sense. I mean, case studies, obviously were all made for the, the Tylenol case study of the years, years ago, and the safety procedures and processes that were, were through that when you guys work through that and you’re going through those moments, How do you navigate that?

What does that look like when you, when you realize, like, um, do you, do you turn to examples like that in case studies that you kind of dust off of things like the Tylenol situation and kind of what they went through? What, what were those first steps in those first moments of learning like?

Ricky Dickson: Yeah, um, those are, those are great case studies.

What’s interesting is Pretty much every situation is going to have its own personality. Uh, there’s going to be some common denominators, but then there’s going to be some things that really, there’s not a, uh, textbook or there’s not a template to go to to say do one, two, and three and you’ll be back. Uh, and, and [00:21:00] so in our case, I think it was identifying Not just where the source of it came in, but how did not, not only where it came in, but then how do you keep it from coming back and, and then really, uh, humbling yourself to ask good questions from good people.

Uh, I mean, from, from in the industry and I’ve served on the international, um, dairy board, ice cream board, and I’ve talked to many people in our industry and, um, You know, I’d love to share what we were doing just because you want ice cream to be a safe product. And, and so there was a really a big learning curve for everybody, I would say.

Uh, some of our techniques were, were first time ever used. Uh, we steam our equipment either once a week or once a month. We take it literally into a room and steam it because steam can get into places that, um, chemicals cannot. Um, and, and so, uh, It was just a matter of, yes, we truly believe that we have a great program, but you, you’ve got to keep asking the tough questions.[00:22:00]

And, um, you know, back then it was Listeria. Today, what is it? What’s that thing that could be out there? And you want to be ahead of it. You don’t want to be behind it. And, um, uh, we have an aggressive team that does nothing but study that risk management from a food safety standpoint. From when product comes in, ingredients come in, all the way to testing every single product that we make before it goes out the door.

Justin Forman: Yeah, I love it. Well, one of the things that we saw obviously through that was just the rich brand loyalty that had been built up before they came charging back afterwards. And I love some of the things that you’re saying there. I’m reminded of another faith driven entrepreneur, Megan McCoy Jones and a story that was filmed with Faith Co.

Another Texan that was just talking about that idea that you’re talking about with competition. Is that there are some things that are proprietary. There are some things that are unique, but there are some things when it just means the safety of the industry and the safety of the space. Why wouldn’t you want to share?

Why wouldn’t you want to champion those practices in a redemptive way that, uh, is spurred onto others. And, and I love that heart. I love that perspective. [00:23:00] Um, and I know the Foreman family has loved, uh, that roaring back and seeing that loyalty of things there. And I’m sure Joey has too. I mean, we haven’t gotten yet.

Joey, how many cartons do you have in the fridge? But we’ll get to that.

Joey Honescko: I’ve got, I’ve got plenty. I love a classic cookies and cream Bluebell, man. There’s nothing. I like the fancy stuff, but cookies and cream will, will get it for me. Um, I think one, one of the things that I keep coming back to as I’m hearing you talk, Ricky, is you’re saying, Uh, from the way that you guys even stock it in the grocery stores to the way you handled this situation and this challenge.

There’s so much dedication to the, the customer and to the product and to this idea of excellence. Um, and, and even when we think about it scaling and we think about the growth that it’s gone on. I’m fascinated by you saying that there’s sacrifices you’ve had to make in order for it to sustain the kind of growth that you wanted.

And I think that can be a tough world in the entrepreneur stories that we [00:24:00] hear a lot of just up into the right all the time. It’s hockey stick growth. It’s just go be as big as you possibly can be. And I think of people we’ve had on the show, like Lindsay Snyder from in and out who talked about something very similar that actually sometimes what makes your product excellent and what’s going to make your brand.

phenomenal and last is Creating those things that are actually gonna say hey We may not be able to grow at a rate as fast as possible or as big as possible And so I’d love to hear just a little bit more of that thought about these sacrifices that become worth it Because the product and the customer don’t demand the fastest and most efficient all the time.

They actually sometimes demand something excellent that takes a little bit more care.

Ricky Dickson: Right. And, um, I think, you know, you’re spot on with the question. And it is frustrating and hard when you get letters all the way from New York to California from people that really can’t understand the concept. Why, why are you not here yet?

And, uh, there are some, you know, three to five year [00:25:00] windows that you can make that happen. Obviously we changed the complete model. Uh, but you know, we’ve seen the success we’ve seen. The success in a way that, again, I go beyond the profits and the losses. I go beyond, uh, being a company. I look at it as a family member.

And so when you eat it, I get so much enjoyment watching the expression and listening to the stories of people that either tried for the first time or receive that flavor that does come back, uh, back on the shelf. And so I think that, um, it’s easy to get caught up into trying to grow fast. Uh, that’s, that’s, it’s just our human nature.

Um, I’d love the fact that that was not something that was pressured on to me. Um, now we want to grow, don’t get me wrong. And, and there are ways that you can do that. But, uh, when you run hard and you tax, you know, the production side to keep up with the sell side, uh, you’re doing a lot of things there that you can do on a short term, but if you get too far out in front of it, But it will [00:26:00] then catch up to you quality wise, um, people, employee, employee wise.

And so, um, truly believe that the employees are family, uh, we all love to see the numbers when they do, uh, increase, but, uh, it’s a very, all we do is ice cream. That’s it. We don’t have, we’re not owned by a parent company that has one of a thousand different products. This is all we do. And so we have to make sure that we’re doing it right, um, and taking care of business in the right way.

And I think that’s a kind of a loyalty even to the, to the employees. And really to the customers too. Because what you don’t want is to end up again, uh, with compromising to the quality to, to hit a number. And, uh, I’ve just seen a lot of companies do that for the sake of trying to be big, trying to be big fast.

Justin Forman: That’s so good. Ricky, um, talk to us a little bit about just kind of take us into your faith journey. Talk about the faith throughout the book. Um, and one of the things that we love actually as a part of [00:27:00] this podcast and the ministry of faith driven entrepreneur is really introducing people to some of the stories behind the story and seeing that like in a family business and some of those stories in some ways have kind of been the Stories that haven’t looked to be told.

They haven’t wanted to have been so afraid of maybe being too prideful that they’ve stayed humble. And so it’s an honor and it’s, it’s fun for us to really kind of draw some of those things out, but talk about that journey for you and what that looked like in the company and coworkers and partners and vendors, and just what, what that journey of faith has been like.

Ricky Dickson: Sure. Uh, you know, I was fortunate to grow up in a Christian home, a mother and a father that taught early, uh, of not just going to church. And I want to make sure that that comes out right, because church is an important part of it. But both my mother and father really taught what it was like to have a relationship.

You know? And so when you give your heart to Christ, it’s more than just, okay, I’ve checked that box. It’s you have, you know, the savior [00:28:00] of the world at any point in time you’re able to talk to. And so it was a young. Um, you know, high school, college into my young career, uh, there was a lot of moments up and down that, um, I relied on that.

Uh, as we get older, uh, it seems to me that, uh, not always the case, but at some point you’re going to have heavier issues to deal with, uh, and they can come early, don’t get me wrong, but for me, they came later and, um, I don’t know, it’s through my faith and, and how to, where do you find the peace in the middle of the storm?

And that really was the heart and soul of my book. Uh, I love talking about my journey, how I went from, you know, college to, to Bluebell, I love talking about the magic behind the freezer door, but really the heart and soul of the book is, uh, how do you find peace in the middle of the storm? Not, not after the storm has passed.

And ironically, I thought a lot about that in the last couple of days with a hurricane hitting the Texas coastline. Um, and so. Saying all that, [00:29:00] I’ve, I’ve, I have found if I continually anchor on the foundation of my belief in Christ and I spend time with him, then when the storms do come, it’s natural for fear to kick in.

It’s natural to ask umpteen questions. Most of the time you don’t get the answers, but how do you get past that to have a peace? Okay. I don’t get this. But you, I get you, God, and I trust you that you, you’re in control. And, uh, maybe one day it’ll be heaven that I get that answer. But to be able to, to be able to rest, I use Mark 4 as one of my favorite passages.

Where the, the disciples get on the ship with Jesus. He goes to the front of the ship, go to the front of the boat, goes to sleep, and then the waves come. And while they’re trying to get water out of the boat, he sleeps. And, um, they finally go and wake him up and say, don’t you care? We’re going to die. And he obviously says, you have little faith and does one of these mic drops and, uh, stops everything.

And it was the essence of [00:30:00] the fact that he could sleep, he, you know. He could have stopped that from happening. He, in fact, got on the boat probably knowing because he’s Christ that this is what’s going to happen, but that’s where I try to go when I get in the position where I don’t get it and the waves are coming over me, I try to mentally go to that spot and say, okay, Christ, I’m going to rest at your feet.

And trust you because I can’t figure this one out. And, um, that piece, uh, that passes all understanding that I love in Philippians. Um, I call it my second wind. I don’t mean to start going into this, but I love if you’ve ever run track. I ran track as a high school and a little in college. I was a miler, so I, I did a lot of, uh, road running where I’d go out and run 3, 4, 5, 6 miles.

And there’s, there was days where you just get to a point, you just wanna stop. I, I’m exhausted, I don’t wanna go anymore. And then all of a sudden. That second wind comes, and it’s like, you just started all over again. That, to me, is the best example I can think of that’s [00:31:00] the peace that passes understanding is, I don’t get this God, but I have the energy now and strength, and you’re in control, and I’m gonna follow you.

And so, I gave you a really long answer, but that’s, that’s, um, that’s my core, and that’s why I wrote the book, is how to find peace in the middle of the storm.

Joey Honescko: No, that’s so great. And I, I love a line that you have in the book is the fear of the Lord is the starting line of this thing called life. And it replaces the fear of uncertainty when total trust is placed in him.

And I think that’s a lot of what you’re talking about here, right, is replacing the fear of uncertainty with the fear of the Lord. And I mean, as entrepreneurs, business leaders, there’s so much uncertainty. So there’s tons of things to be afraid of. And I’d love to just think about the key of what you’re saying is, That’s happening in the storm, not just after it, right?

It’s, it’s finding that rest within the midst of the storm. And so, are there practices, are there habits, are there things like that, that help you reorient when you’re [00:32:00] experiencing that fear of uncertainty? How do you practice replacing that fear with the fear of the Lord instead?

Ricky Dickson: Well, I go back to the word relationship.

I try on a daily basis, start my day, um, really, uh, with Jesus. I mean, and I, I, from scripture through prayer, there are times where I’ll just pray, God speak to me today and I’ll try to just open my mind to whatever comes in. I’m, I’m taking, you know, whatever direction, especially when I was running the company, uh, there was some, you know, a lot, a lot of things can, can be a burden.

I mean, you’re taking the weight on now, 3, 500 employees and making sure that what you’re doing is right. And go in the right direction. So allowing him to speak, it was, was also a real pivotal thing for me. And, and another thing, I’ve got the little Holy Bible app on my phone. And, and so as I read scripture on my phone, I, I highlight a lot.

And so on those days where things do pop up that maybe, [00:33:00] um, are challenging and not necessarily on a one to 10, it’s not a 10, but it’s not a one that I go to my highlight section and, uh, I just read scriptures that at one point in time meant something. And, and, and I’m telling you that it’s almost like plugging your phone back into the wall and building that, that battery charge back up to a hundred percent and getting that, okay.

You know, there’s, there’s, uh, excess 1414 says the Lord himself will fight for you. Just stay calm. And I love that because there are times I’m, you know, as a leader, you’re, you’re being looked at, uh, and you should just know that he’s got this to, so gravitate to him and just stay calm. I love that passage.

Justin Forman: I love that Ricky, you know, one of the things that, uh, I think is so remarkable about your story is, is some of the faith driven entrepreneurs that we’ve, we’ve talked to, there’s, there’s a generational mindset of like, I’ve grown up in this business. As you said, you were. Uh, and as you said in the book, you’re, you’re part of a family business and a family [00:34:00] thing.

You were, I think we the first outside of the direct family connection to step into leadership of that, but there’s a consistency of place. And I think in today’s, maybe it’s a hustle culture. Maybe it’s because there’s so much attention on, you know, the big raise, the big exit, the big thing, the big, that, that there’s this variety where it’s like, it’s not, it’s not just enough to do PayPal.

You got to do Tesla and SpaceX and who knows what else can you talk to us about the value of that constant, consistent presence in a place. And when you, if you’re speaking to an audience out there that Thanks. It’s going to be two or three different places and there’s always looking for the next big thing.

How would you make the argument for consistency, place, and that long obedience in that same direction?

Ricky Dickson: Well, I think that, um, you know, for me and to step into the role of when I did, and it’d been right at a hundred years that the Cruze [00:35:00] family had run the company. And, uh, I’ve worked under, um, three different Cruzes.

Um, EF Cruze started or took over 1919 and then his two sons, um, when he passed away in 51 became the next two. And then, uh, one of those two sons, Paul Cruze is who I replaced. And so, uh, I really never. I never gave a lot of thought with one day I’m going to be president, which was probably a good thing.

In fact, I use Bubba Watson’s comment about, you know, and ask what’s it like to be president of Blue Bell Hall? Honestly, I never got this far in my dreams when Bubba Watson said that, you know, when he won the masters. Uh, but the, the, the responsibility to, to the foundation of who we not just were, but who we are and where we’re trying to get, uh, was so much bigger than me.

Um, there’s a lot of things I’d love to do. And, you know, you can walk in as president, say, this is what we’re doing. We’re going to do, change this. We’re going to do this. Um, but I think that the culture as much as anything you want to, you want to [00:36:00] hold on to that culture. You want to just remind yourself on a daily basis of why you’re here and what you’re doing and what you’re doing.

And really my prayer to God is God, what are you doing through me? Because it’s not me. I will promise you that, uh, you know, again, the guy that was a journalism marketing major now stepping into this role 40 or 37, whatever years, uh, later. I made it the last seven. So I made it to 43, but, um, I knew that this was a role that God had placed me in, but it wasn’t about me.

It was about what he wanted me to be doing for his glory. And that kept me grounded. That kept me centered and, and, uh, starting again today by God, whatever happens today, make sure I recognize you, that I hear you and that you guide me because you can get pulled, uh, you know, It’s, it is a prestigious, people love Bluebell.

And when they tell, you know, you tell them what you do, um, you know, all of a sudden, you know, it’s, it’s an exciting time, but it’s so much bigger than who I am. And really when I stepped [00:37:00] away, my prayers, God, am I stepping away at the right time? Is this what you’re having me now to do? And I, I finally came to a real peace, uh, in that.

And that’s why I wrote the book and I’m praying that God will continue to use me telling great Blue Bell stories, but more importantly, telling about what he’s done in my life. And so, um, I’ll end with this on this thought. Uh, there is a TV program of CBS Morning News that I watched. They were interviewing a restaurant owner in New York City and he had won, I think if I remember it right, the award for the number one restaurant three years in a row.

And they said, how is it that you, you have won it three years in a row? And I’ll never forget his answer. He said, I have to, I have to change to stay who I am. I have to change to stay who I am. And I mean, I rewound it. I wrote it down. So what that spoke to me is you’ve got to keep your eyes open. You got to stay humble.

You go with confidence, but, but at the same time, don’t forget the culture. Don’t forget the roots and make sure you’re taking the [00:38:00] steps, not for the one year, five year, but for the 50 year journey. Because 50 years from now, when you look back and that’s why we’ve been around since 1907, um, you know, you can look back and say, yeah, that, that same culture continued on, but changing where you need to, to stay who you are.

And I just love that. So.

Joey Honescko: Yeah, that’s incredible. Yeah. Staying, changing to stay. That’s, that’s wild. Um, as you think about that, not just in bluebell, but as you think about that, even in your own life, you’ve talked about prayer, you’ve talked about scripture, you’ve talked about even going through the YouVersion Bible app and, Highlighting different different passages, so we always close asking the same question all of our guests, which is how has God been speaking to you through his word recently?

So is there something maybe the most recent highlight or maybe one you just find yourself coming back to all the time? What, what is a particular passage that has stood out to you recently?

Ricky Dickson: Well, I [00:39:00] mentioned Mark four, but my, my life, uh, I guess verse has always been Philippians four, six, and seven about, don’t be anxious about anything, but with everything, but prayer, praise, and petition, present your request to the Lord and the peace of God that passes all understanding will guard your heart and your mind.

And I loved it. The first time I read it, I loved it. When I started going through trials. Because that’s what we want. We want peace. Uh, we want, we don’t want trials, but we want peace. But when you look at James one and it says pure joy comes from trials. I’ve never understood that passage either, but I want to, I want to be able to rest and knowing that I’m right where he has me.

So in my life right now. I want to be doing the things that he’s asked me to be doing and, um, uh, be real open minded to that. Uh, I could be, you know, I’m retired now. So, uh, playing with grandkids and we’ve made plenty of, uh, baseball games and piano recitals and, and all that’s tremendous. And spending time with family, like I haven’t been [00:40:00] able to has been really rewarding, but I really look at this as a refiring, not a retiring.

Part of my life, and I want to be a vessel that I can be used until he says, job well done, come home. And um, so that’s where I’m at. Um, and I’m, I’m excited. I’m losing my voice, but I’m excited.

Joey Honescko: That’s how you know, it’s good. It’s exciting time. Ricky, thank you so much. Such a joy to have you. We’ll, uh, we’ll make sure to get the right email for Justin to send all of his requests about his chocolate covered cherry ice creams.

We’ll get that after, uh, after the show. But Brackets coming, brackets coming next year. It’s coming, it’s coming. Awesome. We’ll see y’all next week.

Ricky Dickson: Thank you so much.

Recent Episodes

In this episode of the Faith Driven Entrepreneur Podcast, Dr. Bryan Loritts joins Joey Honescko and William Norvell to discuss the importance of deep, long-lasting friendships in the context of entrepreneurship.

Pulling from his new book, Enduring Friendships: Sticking Together in an Age of Unfriending, Dr. Loritts emphasizes the need for what he calls “soul friends.” These are the people whom we can bear our souls with and who can provide guidance and support in our journeys.

He also highlights the challenges that entrepreneurs face in maintaining lasting friendships, such as being productivity-driven and lacking time for people. He provides practical advice on finding and nurturing these enduring friendships, including putting oneself in the right environments and being intentional about prioritizing relationships.

For more from Dr. Loritts, check out his new book: https://www.amazon.com/Enduring-Friendship-Sticking-Together-Unfriending/dp/1514008440

Episode Transcript

Joey Honescko: Friendship can be a touchy topic. Even the author of Proverbs addresses this in chapter 18, verse 24, when he writes, one who has unreliable friends soon comes to ruin, but there is a friend who sticks closer than a brother. So that means that friendships have the power to build us up or terrace down. And the challenge is in finding and sustaining those friends who stick closer than brothers. A lot of the times, it might even feel like this is actually an impossible task, especially for entrepreneurs. We are often busy. We’re tired. We’re up to our neck and obligations and responsibilities. Why would we prioritize the hard work that goes into a long lasting friendship? That’s the question at the center of our episode today with Doctor Brian Leyritz, a pastor and author of the new book, Enduring Friendships Sticking Together in an Age of Unfriending. He joins me and William to unpack the challenges and the beauty of finding those friends who stick closer than brothers. I’m Joey Ionesco, and you’re listening to the Faith Driven Entrepreneur podcast. Let’s get into it. Welcome back, everyone to the Faith Driven Entrepreneur podcast. I’m your host, Joey Nasco, alongside today’s co-host and a familiar voice on the show, William Norville. William, it’s been a bit. Man. How you doing? Give us an update on Forte. What’s going on, man?

William Norvell: Man, it’s. It’s good to be back, everybody. How’s everybody doing? Y’all have stewarded things well, but, yes. Took a little break to go, grow a company. It’s been going well, man. It’s been super fun. I’d say the, the biggest update of, this year is we’ve just found a lot of really fulfilling work working with franchise owners, serving the hourly workforce, and also serving pastors, which, is a great lead into the show today. We’ve, found a sector there where pastors are just lonely and burnt out, and we’ve been able to provide guides to come alongside them in their journey that they’re going through. And so, it’s been really fun. It’s been really fun. And a lot of, what I’ll call good work. There’s a lot of bad work sometimes in startups. But this has been a lot of fun. Good work, where we’ve got a lot to do because there’s a lot of people to serve.

Joey Honescko: Yeah. That’s awesome. Yeah. You’re talking about coming alongside people in that Segways perfect into this conversation, because we’ve got Doctor Brian Lorenz with us, and he’s the teaching pastor at Summit Church. He’s an author of numerous books, including his most recent Enduring Friendship Sticking Together in an Age of Unfriending, and that’s out now with InterVarsity press. And you can find it at the link in the show notes. But Doctor Lorenz, thanks for joining the show. Thanks for being here.

Dr. Bryan Lorrits: Always good being on platforms like this. And good meeting you all for the first time.

Joey Honescko: Yeah, awesome. Well, hey, let me dive in. Because as our audience knows, we talk a lot about community at Faith driven. We have these groups that meet in coffee shops, boardrooms, churches, zoom rooms all around the world. We’ve had more than 15,000 people go through these groups, entrepreneurs specifically, and they’ve been able to find community. They’ve been able to find those relationships. We know that right now there’s an epidemic of loneliness. We need friendship. We need each other. And in the book, Enduring Friendship, you focus on a particular aspect of community and relationships, which are these deep, long lasting friendships. And I like that you use the metaphor in the book about the happy few who join you for the whole marathon. So I want to just set you up, give us a little intro to the book, and talk about how those kinds of relationships differ from just kind of your basic guy who goes to lunch with you every once in a while, or these other elements of community.

Dr. Bryan Lorrits: Yeah. The class called What we’re Getting At your. And I’m curious what they meant by that is your soul friends, social scientists will tell us that, any study reveals that we only have the capacity for three, no more than five of these kinds of friends. So we’re not just talking about someone, you know, you take in a ballgame with, or someone you talk to every now and then. These are like people you bare your soul with. I mean, if you’re familiar with the Bible, this will kind of be David and Jonathan kind of stuff. And so this is really what I’m pointing to, how to nurture these, if you can find one, if you can find a handful of these, you’ve kind of hit the lottery ticket of life, but inevitably because of the reality of sin. And we can get into this in just a few moments. People have shadow sides. And so no matter where you may come from on the spiritual spectrum, you get to know anybody. You’re going to see the not so pleasant side of who they are. The Bible has a word for this. We call it sin slow, three letter word with eye in the middle. And so if every time someone does something to disappoint you, and because I’m a sinner, I’m bound to disappoint you, you’re bound to disappoint me. And if every time I do something to offend you, or you do something to offend me and I cut you off, I throw up a boundary. I’m going to go through life lonely. But if I want to kind of maintain healthy friendships, I really need a guide in how to have these enduring kind of friendships. And that’s what I tried to provide through the book.

Joey Honescko: Yeah, when I hear that, I think of another book, Anne of Green Gables, which is usually not one that comes up a lot, but she talks about, bosom friends, these lifelong kind of tight knit friends. I might get some razz from folks for calling out of Green Gables, but great book, but not my mother.

William Norvell: She’s going to love that.

Joey Honescko: That’s good.

William Norvell: I think a lot of my mother’s favorite books of moms. Listen, she’s going to love that one.

Joey Honescko: Perfect. All right, well, Doctor Lorenz, I’m thinking because you give this really good example of a successful entrepreneur you were in contact with in the book. And when you’re talking about, you know, sin, these challenges with friendship, you point out that how it’s uniquely difficult for people with a certain degree of influence or a certain degree of power to maintain those lasting friendships in the way that maybe power or influence doesn’t push us to the kind of vulnerability that’s often needed for friendships. Could you just kind of talk a little bit about that? Because a lot of our audience are they’re CEOs, they’re entrepreneurs, they’re founders, they’re leading high capacity teams. And so they often have that kind of challenge with offering themselves. Vulnerably and they feel like they have to protect themselves a lot. So what are those specific and unique challenges people like them face?

Dr. Bryan Lorrits: Well, yeah. So if I can take it out of a power box, I just think entrepreneurs in general have some unique challenges to them that make it really, really difficult. And I can really identify with entrepreneurs, having started a church from scratch and seeing it grow to a couple thousand people, I can tell you the work that is involved in that. I think one of the unique challenges in the area of friendships for entrepreneurs is we can be so productivity driven that we don’t leave much margin for being people driven. And so the classic mistake I made in my 20s and 30s especially, I was I was so focused, so type A personality. So, you know, let’s charge the hill that I didn’t have much room for people. I didn’t have much room to nurture deep relationships. And, look, I’ll just be honest and vulnerable. I would say I didn’t do well even in my own marriage. I mean, I in that quarter of time we had a decent marriage, but, I mean, I just felt all this stuff any entrepreneur would feel. We’d moved to Memphis, Tennessee with 26 people. You know, I had to raise a bunch of outside capital. You know, I was trying to get to a place to where we going to build this thing up so I don’t have to raise any more money. We’re self-sufficient. And that’s just all where my mind was. And I had, at the end of the day, accomplished a whole lot. The Lord used me to build this megachurch thing that was getting national attention. And here I stood at the top of the mountain. But the problem was I was standing alone. And so that’s where, you know, later on, David Brooks his book The Second Mountain, where I just kind of made up my mind, I need to do a pivot, and I want to spend kind of the second half of my life really investing relationally. I can tell you right now that I’m 51 years of age. I can tell you right now, every entrepreneur that I’ve interviewed, every older leader that I’ve interviewed, when you talk about their regrets, all their regrets are relational. Wish I would have spent more time with the kids. Wish I would have spent more time with the spouse. Wish I would have nurtured more friendships. The entrepreneurs that I know who really had a moral implosion. At the end of the day, if you do the autopsy on it, their main problem was that the moral challenge, their main problem was they were living in isolation, in secrecy. So I just think everything goes back to relationships. The Christian worldview would say relationship with God and relationship with others. But if you look, even non-Christian researchers say you can draw a straight line, not between productivity and happiness. That’s the crazy maker of it. You can draw a straight line between relationships and happiness. And so relationships. That’s where it’s at.

William Norvell: That’s good. Doctor Lorenz I’m sure you get this all the time. But you’ve been a big impact on me and my relationships even though we’ve never met. Two of your other books insider Outsider and Right Color Wrong Culture, just one of my enduring friends and I had just it’s been life giving to us to.

Dr. Bryan Lorrits: Have thank you.

William Norvell: Conversations about that and go deep about that, about who we are and how we see the world. And if you haven’t picked up those two, we’re selling you a lot of books here today, but they’re short and they’re amazing. And I think they’ll give you a view of the world you didn’t have before. One of the things I want to dig into for entrepreneur audience is when you speak of the enduring friendships, what are the characteristics? What’s going through my head is so I’m an entrepreneur. Do they need to be entrepreneurs? Do they need to understand my world in a certain way, or do they need to just be there and be amazing men and women of God? Right? Or there’s some mix of the two. I’ve struggled with that throughout my life. Sometimes I go, wow, I’m so blessed, but I just keep talking about things. I don’t think they get it, you know? Anyway, just curious if you have thoughts along those lines.

Dr. Bryan Lorrits: Yeah. You know, I think what you bring up is a crucial point in Chris Lewis actually spoke to what you’re talking about in his book, The Four Loves as he’s talking, I think it’s specifically about Forleo, which is a friendship kind of love from which the city of Philadelphia gets its name, City of Brotherly Love. C.S. Lewis says that the very essence of friendship begins on the note of you two, right. And I think what he’s getting at here is this idea of affinity. And I think there’s something to be said for that. Obviously, I don’t think cloning each other into our image is what he’s talking about there. We’re different people. But I do think, especially in the formative years of that friendship, having some affinities is really helpful. Now those affinities can go in a million different direction. It could be work. Affinity can be kind of an affinity built around a hobby. You love golf, I love golf, whatever it may be. Yes, there is something to be said for affinity. I also think, you know, it’s good to kind of layer or stagger, ideally what those friendships look like. So I would say, you know, I have an a friend or two who can nod their head in solidarity about what it takes to be an entrepreneur. I think there’s some great stuff to that. I also see some great stuff, and having a friend who not only doesn’t get it but could care less. But there’s other points of commonality there, so I wouldn’t put all my eggs in one basket. But yes, I think there is a place for affinity and that affinity of some sort is essential.

Joey Honescko: You mentioned something just a second ago about even going upstream for things like moral failures, and the fact that those can be rooted in isolation. And I want to zoom in there for a second, because we talk a lot about community. We think it’s important. Obviously, we already mentioned Epidemic of loneliness, but I feel like this sense of community has become such a buzz word. And when we talk about relationships, it’s one of those things that a lot of people feel like, oh yeah, I should get some friends or I should be in a community, but I’m so busy, but I’ve got a lot of this. And when you talk about something like moral failure is being rooted in an isolated lifestyle, you’re really taking that up a level that this isn’t just a nice to have in the world. This is something that, like, shapes us, informs us. So can you talk just a little bit more about how valuable and how necessary? Not just a nice plus, but an essential part of being human. It is to be in these kinds of relationships.

Dr. Bryan Lorrits: Yeah, I almost think I need to give you some indicator lights and how to determine what I’m getting at here. So the kind of friend that we’re talking about is, is a kind of friend that you have level four, level five communication with. And what I’m getting at here is the classic communication pyramid popularized by Doctor Timo Hoff, PhD and communications professor at Baylor University. And in essence, it says there’s five levels of communication. So the very most surface level of communication is. Number one. Good morning. Good morning. How are you? You’ve communicated, but you really haven’t communicated. Levels two and level three or where most guys hang out. Level two is facts. Who won the game? How many points did Steph Curry have? Level three is opinion. who’s going to win the NBA finals. But then level four and level five are the deepest levels of relationship. And it’s a good grade to determine your relationship. If you’re married with your spouse or if you really have a friend. Level four is emotive. It’s sharing how I feel, and level five is transparency. It’s sharing who I am. Granite level five is a little bit hard to quantify, but you know it when you experience it. We’ve all had those moments where after some interaction, we’ve left saying something to the effect of I experienced them. So you’re and I’m Caras, as the Celts call it, your soul friends. Yeah. You might get into level two, you know, facts and get level three, but at some point you get down to level four, level five. Let me give you a biblical example of this. Jesus, when he’s going into the garden. Gethsemane. At this point, Judas had already betrayed him. So they’re down to 11. They get to the garden. Jesus leaves the eight on the outside of the garden. He takes the three Peter, James, and John. And then the gospel writers say, it’s at this point where Jesus began to be sorrowful. So they are now seeing a dimension of Jesus in that moment that the other eight didn’t see. And what they’re seeing is emotion. They’re seeing transparency. So how do I know if I really have kind of these soul friends? These are people that I feel safe enough with that I’m willing to confess. Sin two that I’m willing to confide and confess struggles to because I know on the one hand, they’re going to embrace me. They’re going to accept me, but on the other hand, they’re going to also challenge me. Let me give this final thing, okay? I just want to give you some indicator lights to help you determine if you have these friends. So there’s a communication pyramid. But then psychologists say that all true deep friendships kind of rests on kind of a three legged stool. It’s what they call the R acronym a r e. Number one. Your true friends are accessible, which I think it’s a real challenge for entrepreneurs and especially entrepreneurs who are men living in a cell phone, smartphone, social media age, right? Busyness for the entrepreneur is a serious thing. But you make friends. Let me say this way you make room for accessibility with your friends. You’re there for them. The R is you are responsive. So when a friend has a need, you’re able to respond to them and their need. And the E is engaged. So there’s a sense in which, my true friends, there’s nothing you can tell me that will make me turn my back on you. And they feel that from me and I feel that from them. Right. So these are kind of good grids that will let you sift through whether or not you’re experiencing true friendship.

William Norvell: Oh, I love the practical communication grid and the acronym there. As our audience knows, I’m the crier of the groups. I cry a lot. But now we’re going to talk about my best friend, so this could get awkward for everyone. A practical example I want to walk through. I’m just thinking, man in my life that I’m just lucky to have, and I’m a people pleaser. I get really frustrated when I can’t solve people’s problems or show up on time. And one of my best friends like clockwork, if I have to text him, I’ve got three small kids. Hey man, I’m going to be late. Or in a rare case like I can’t make it at all. I’m so sorry. And it’ll be this ridiculous apology. He always responds back, it’s okay, I love you, I don’t care. You are loved anyway, even though you didn’t make this event. And it’s a small thing, but it hits me like a rock every time he does it because he knows the level of disappoint. I feel like I’m disappointing him and I can’t help him. He’s like, I know you feel that, but I love you. Let it go. I know you tried and it just means so much to me, you know, even a silly example. So I’m curious. I feel like we’ve spent a little time culling the group, saying, how do you identify if you have these people? Well, there’s going to be some group listening, going, maybe weeping on the other side of, I don’t have those people. And I’ve now realized it. Where do I find them? How do I find them? Do you have any thoughts on especially, you know, in an entrepreneur’s life, like where do you start if you’re sitting here going, I hear you and I’m convinced, but I don’t know what to do.

Dr. Bryan Lorrits: Yeah. And, you know, that’s becoming more and more common. It really, really is. You know, in a sense, you know, I think loneliness has been a problem since day one, but I think. Is even more pronounced now. You know, it was an MIT professor. Last name is Turkle. She wrote a book called Alone Together, and she says, we are as connected as never before and as lonely as never before. So I definitely I would want that person to hear, first of all, you’re not alone. You may feel alone in your aloneness, but there are a lot of people who are feeling exactly what you’re feeling. The key is, listen, you can’t program or manufacture your relationships, right? And I think that’s one of the most frustrating things in the church world with small groups, because people enter into small groups, sometimes with the expectation that that’s going to be the place that they find their friends, and it just doesn’t happen. And I’ll just say this tangentially, one of the most frustrating things my wife and I have ever done is date other couples, right? Just, you know, in the hopes of just, man, if we can just find that couple or couples, we can just vacation with stuff. And this is what always happens. Like we’ll come back after a night out with another couple hanging out for the first time, and my wife’s like, oh, love her. She’s amazing. And I’m like, never want to see that dude again or vice versa, right? So that’s really a challenge. Here’s what I would say. At the end of the day, put yourself in the right environments, be prayerful about it, but put yourself in the right environments. You’re probably not going to find what you’re looking for in a bar. You know, I’m not anti bars or whatever, but that’s going to be a hard sell. But I would try going to church and if it’s a big church, trying to find pockets of that church that really shrink that church down smaller. At our church we have this thing called young professionals. That’s a great environment. Some churches, you know, they’ve got young married saying they got a marriage thing, a singles thing, small groups, whatever it may be. But I would just put yourself in the right environments. I can’t offer any better advice than that, and just be prayerful about it and just see what happens.

Joey Honescko: It makes me think there needs to be some role of vulnerability in this as well, right? I think of a friend, a dear friend that I have that couple months ago. We’ve always been pretty good friends. And he came over and he sat in front of me and he pretty much said to me in so many words, I would like to be soul friends. Can we try to make that happen? And there was a version of it that it was so shocking. And he’s a person that I’m very close to, and it was such a vulnerable moment for him because he was like, I’m not great at making friends. We have this connection. And I was so impressed and astonished and like, honored that he would ask me that. And we’ve become very closer and closer since then. But there was that kind of cognitive switch, and there was that vulnerability, right? Walking into a faith of an entrepreneur group or a church small group, without knowing anybody coming in. It’s a you’re vulnerable. Right. And so what is the role of maybe it’s humility, maybe it’s vulnerability of walking into those spaces, saying, I’m open for what this is going to be, and I’m going to step into the risk that it takes for this to be accomplished.

Dr. Bryan Lorrits: I love that, and I think you hit the nail on the head. Right? So I’m a big proponent that every friendship as it progresses over time, I don’t think we do this right away or even early on. So don’t be weird. But I think every friendship should have what I call a DTR moment, right? So some people, you know, I’m an old guy. I remember the I kiss, dating goodbye kind of era, and everybody had drank the Kool-Aid. And I just remember all these guys just going on their first date, just going. Hey, I just want you to know, my intentions are we’re doing this, we’re working towards marriage, and these girls would get freaked out, right? So I’m not saying have the DTR upfront. It may even take you a year to get there, but here’s the biblical principle in First Kings chapter 18, right after David has killed Goliath, he meets Jonathan. Like I imagine David is just holding Goliath’s head still, right, blood running down his arms. And it says that Jonathan made a covenant with David, made a covenant. Like there was this thing in which there was an affinity there. Both of them are leaders. Both of them are warriors. It’s almost at that moment. They’re just like, listen, we don’t want this to just be random. I think we’re headed in the same direction here. And let’s just kind of have, what are we doing here? Kind of a talk. I did this, some years ago. About ten years ago, with a group of guys we had met years before. We were part of a small group. We got together, I pulled them together, and we had, what are we doing here? Kind of a moment. And that’s turned into an annual retreat. We live all around the country, and, you know, we text and call all the time. But I do think even though friendships oftentimes are formed organically, they are. Are nurtured and kept intentionally. So I think that’s the principle we’re talking about here. There’s steps of intention. And once it gets to that intentional level now I can know how to prioritize things. Here’s the last thing I’ll say in regard to what you’re talking about. Most entrepreneurs, if not all entrepreneurs, the struggle that you have is you’re going to have to switch from having calendars that are task driven and to having calendars that are priority driven. Most people, their calendar philosophy is the classic the tail wag the dog and you just you’re just so busy going and blowing that you can wake up one day and just realize I’ve done a lot of things, but I think I’ve neglected a lot of things, and you got to sit down and figure out what are your priorities. And one of those priorities should be time and margin for friendships. And your calendars have to intentionally make room for that. And all of this is the intentional steps that we take to really nurture good friendships.

William Norvell: That’s good. I love that priority driven versus task driven. That’s good for life, work and everything in between. To think through that. One of the big moments for me was when I had children. I’ve got a six and a four and a two year old and, you know, there’s a lot of people in your life and then they’re kind of becomes less people in your life. And I remember just really thinking about who do I want raising my children with me. And it became those 3 to 5 people, you know, for the most part. And there are people that if my children grow up with, I want them to emulate them. I want to emulate how they love people, how they’re kind of people, how they show up for people, and I want them to see them. So that was a big filter for me. And then the second thing I want to I want to switch to a topic that may be more uncomfortable than where we’ve been so far is confrontation and difficult conversations, because I think we all know you can’t make time for difficult conversations with everyone who you may have an issue with, or you get a little sideways with, but I’m guessing with these people, it needs to be a priority. And I’m curious how you think through those second, third, or however level you deem necessary conversations with people that really matter.

Dr. Bryan Lorrits: Yeah, well, look, here’s the weird thing about your question, which is spot on. The weird thing in the context of a group of entrepreneurs is confrontation is just kind of part of the job description, isn’t it? But it does become more difficult when you take off the boss hat. Right? And you’ve got this peer friend hat on, but nonetheless, it’s something you have to do. So here’s a couple of just big principles that I think we have to abide by as we’re trying to. Look, I’m a center. You’re center, which means if we’re friends, I’m going to inevitably disappoint you. You will inevitably disappoint me. If we want this thing to endure, we’re going to have to have consistent conversations along the way to sharpen one another. Right? And so when that happens, there’s a verse in the Bible that I think really needs a lot more unpacking than what it gets. And that’s that verse that says, speak the truth in love. I want to put a big caution on that, because when something happens to me, I don’t have truth, I have perspective. It’s very important. And because when my friend does something that disappoints me and I’m like, oh shit, I gotta have a conversation. When I keep in mind I don’t have truth, I have perspective. Then that changes the ballgame. That means I go in not making statements. I go in asking questions, and that posture lowers the blood pressure on both sides. I’m not saying it makes confrontation easy. It makes it easier. And by the way, no one should love confrontation. If you love confrontation, you’re a freak. All right, so none of us should love it. But when I come in, just going. Hey, I’d love to have a conversation. Okay? When you did this, I kind of took it this way. I could be way off. Can you just explain that to me? That’s a totally different posture than me just coming in guns blazing and just, you know, firing my 12 gauge at a mosquito. And so I would just say, come in with questions and not necessarily statements. Give the other person an opportunity to really talk. Don’t do the typical macho thing and act like it didn’t bother you. And then here’s the genius to go back to the communication pyramid. Use level four kind of language as you are trying to get to the truth. Here’s what level four says. Level four says, hey, when you did this, I felt this. It’s level four. At the end of the day, people can argue with statements. They can never argue with feelings. Right? And so I highly encourage those little techniques. And I think again, it won’t make it easy, but it will make it easier.

Joey Honescko: We’ve talked about truth. We’ve talked about vulnerability. There’s one other portion here that I want to talk about because you mentioned sin, and I want to talk about grace because the book is full of these little pieces of just grace being extended towards the other. And I think even the way you’re talking about confrontation and ultimately reconciliation requires the grace of thinking better of that other person on the other end of the confrontation. And you have this phrase in the book that says, horns don’t fit us perfectly, and neither do halos. And you’re talking both about the individual that is harmed and the individual that has been doing the harming. So talk about just that tension that we all face that we aren’t as right. I think it’s the killer quote too. Like we’re not as good as we think we are, and we’re more love than we could ever imagine or something like that. But that idea of the horns don’t fit us perfectly, and neither do halos. Just talk about that topic a little bit.

Dr. Bryan Lorrits: Listen, all of us are incredibly nuanced and complicated people. We’re complex individuals. Absolutely. You know, Paul gets to this in Galatians chapter five when he talks about, if you’re in Christ, we have the flesh and we have the spirit. It doesn’t get more complicated than that. I’m a nuanced person. There’s parts of me that I think people will really enjoy. There’s parts of me that they won’t necessarily enjoy at all that I have to trust are and lean on the Lord to actually sanctify. And here’s the problem. We can be downright hypocritical. There’s a psychological principle called fundamental attribution error. And what fundamental attribution error says is that when I do something, when I make a mistake, or when I do something wrong, it’s because I just made a mistake. When you do something wrong, no, it’s your character, right? So let’s say I show up late to work. When I show up late to work, it’s because, man, the alarm clock went off late. There’s all kinds of traffic. There’s all kinds of stuff going on with my kids. But when you come late to work, it’s because you’re lazy, right? And so what that means is we are very promiscuous in giving grace to ourselves, but naturally celibate and giving grace to others. And so when you have a right kind of biblical worldview that says, even on my best day, my righteousness is as filthy rags, that I am a sinner desperately in need of a Savior. When you stay in touch with that, that allows you to leave nuance in other people, and it closes the door to me demonizing other people, and it leaves the door wide open to say, I need grace. Now, let me also extend grace to you. We all need it.

William Norvell: I love that, I love that. Okay, I’m going to jump back to one. I loved the beautiful way you summed up truth in love. However, I’m going to presuppose. And as you told me, I ask weird questions. That’s fine too. If you don’t like the question, you can reframe it. I’m going to presuppose the in these enduring friendships, there are. Let’s say maybe three standard deviation outcomes. We’re speaking the truth is possible and is needed. Where you know the feeling language just isn’t getting there. But you are so close to this person that you need to cross that line because they are going down a path that you don’t believe is a good path for them. And you’ve tried the communication, you’ve tried this way and that way, and it’s just not working. And you love them so much that it has to be done. I’m curious, am I off there? Am I right there? Am I wrong there?

Dr. Bryan Lorrits: As far as cutting off the friendship.

William Norvell: No, I’m not dumb. I go on that far. But just really like. And maybe I’m just misinterpreting what speaking truth in love means. I have had a friend kind of go, hey, I’ve spent a couple of hours with you. I don’t think you’re getting it. I’m going to lay it out there now. Right? Like I feel like I’ve tried to come at it from a couple angles, but I’ve seen your actions, man. You’re not changing. I’m actually here for the hard conversation. Right. I can think of a good friend of one of my best friend in the world. An alcohol problem. A lot of our audience knows that. He didn’t cut me off, but he kind of came at me like, hey, I’m done. You’ve said this is important. You’ve said you’re going to change. I’m tired of picking you up. I’m not doing it again. If you’re not serious about it, I’m not serious about it. And it changed my life. Right. Like I remember that moment where he said. You said Jesus was important to you. Now you said you knew the harm you were causing people, but you haven’t changed a thing. Fix it.

Dr. Bryan Lorrits: Yeah. So believe it or not, what you’re saying is directly tied to not just the truth conversation. It’s really tied to the grace conversation. I think we have very incomplete teaching on grace, right? We only talk about grace from the vantage point of give it, give it, give it, give it, give it right. We don’t talk about it from the standpoint of receiving it as much. And the only way you know that that friend has received your grace is that it is changing their behavior. Right? So Paul says to the Romans, shall we continue in sin that grace may abound? No, absolutely not. Like the way you know that you are receiving grace is not that it makes you perfect, but it’s changing and reforming your behaviors. And if I am giving grace but the other person isn’t receiving it, it’s not really changing them. They’re still lying. And by the way, you know this better than I do. The nature of any addiction always pairs well with not being a truth teller, right? And so when I have a truth encounter with you, don’t hear me saying, use feeling language. Don’t hear that as code for don’t be clear. We’ve got to be clear as it relates to what we’re trying to get at. I just think there’s a way to get at it that may not necessarily be as confrontational and for sure is it mean? But for sure, the greatest gift we can give people is clarity. Now, this is the other thing that I talk about in the book. Yes, you need truth and grace, but you got to have repentance. And so truth is a risky thing. It’s me sitting down with you, initiating the conversation, giving you truth. Let’s get to the truth. But what you do with the truth is on you. And you know, we call a person who hears truth but doesn’t but doesn’t change their behavior. We actually call that an abuser. Right? And so I make it very clear in the book, this book and this conversation is not about continuing your relationship with a person who is manifesting abusive tendencies. It’s not that at all. So whenever I have a friend and we’ve had truth encounter, truth encounter Matthew 18, maybe I’m bringing someone else. Maybe we’re doing a good old fashioned intervention. If that person fails to respond, it’s not me cutting off the friendship, it’s actually them cutting off the friendship. It’s them choosing the behavior over me. And at that point I just say, hey, listen, I don’t think you’re ready for this. I’m going to leave the door open, but we can only pick this back up whenever you’re ready to walk. In truth, this is First John chapter one. By the way, all this stuff is in the Bible. If we walk in the light as he is in the light, not only do we have fellowship with God, John says, we actually have fellowship with one another. I can’t have a friendship with you if I’m walking in the light and you’re walking in darkness or vice versa.

Joey Honescko: Yeah, you’re bringing us to the Bible, and that’s always where we go to, to the close of every episode. But I love what you’re saying about it being rooted in grace and not just the giving of grace, but the receiving of it. We have to have our own identities shaped so that we can offer that to others. I think of a group called. Mosaic that I was a part of in seminary briefly, and they talked about that idea that we have been reconciled so that we can be reconciled to others.

Dr. Bryan Lorrits: Was this a Trinity?

Joey Honescko: It was. Yeah, yeah.

Dr. Bryan Lorrits: Oh, yeah. Yeah yeah, yeah. Ted’s that mosaic group is legendary.

Joey Honescko: Absolutely great. Yeah, yeah. Very incredible. But I always love that little phrase that we have been reconciled so we can be reconciled. And so it’s that kind of receiving it and giving it out. And you brought us to the Bible. That is where we like to end every show that we have. And we just love asking our guests, what is the Lord been teaching you recently in your own study and in the quiet times you’ve been having? Just something. Maybe it’s a verse, maybe it’s a specific passage. Maybe it happened this morning, maybe it happened a week ago. But what are those things that you’ve been seeing through God’s Word in your own life?

Dr. Bryan Lorrits: Oh, it’s a great question. There’s one passage of scripture that I’ve just been really feasting on over and over again. If God told me, Brian, there’s only eight verses in the Bible that you can take with you on a deserted island. It’s John 15, verses one through eight, where Jesus says, I’m the true vine. My father’s a vine dresser, and he talks about abide in me and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit unless it abides in the vine, neither can you unless you abide in me. So just really trying to focus on that abiding, intimate relationship with Christ and being fruitful, that really the essence of my life, the reason why I’m alive today, it is to bear fruit. And the whole idea of fruit. You know, an apple tree doesn’t exist for itself. It exists for the benefit of others. In fact, fruit that eats itself is rotten. So I’m here today, to make people better. And I think that’s what every Christ follower is here. So, yeah, I’ve been spending a lot of time just kind of marinating in John 15.

Joey Honescko: That’s incredible. Thank you so much, Doctor Lorenz, for joining us. Thanks, William, for jumping back on. It’s been a great conversation, listeners. Hope you enjoyed it and we’ll see you next week. Thanks for listening to the Faith Driven Entrepreneur podcast. Our ministry exists to equip and resource entrepreneurs just like you with content and community. We know entrepreneurship can be a lonely journey, but it doesn’t have to be. We’ve got groups that meet in churches, coffee shops, living rooms, and boardrooms around the world. Find one in your area or volunteer to lead one and bring this global movement to your own backyard. There’s no cost, no catch, just connection. Find out more at Faith Driven entrepreneur.org.

Recent Episodes

It’s our 300th episode!

In this conversation Joey Honescko, Henry Kaestner, and Justin Forman celebrate the growth and evolution of the podcast and the entire Faith Driven Movement.

They reflect on all that God has done over the past five years and dive deep into the importance of community for faith-driven entrepreneurs.

The three wrestle with the challenges of finding reliable sources of community and reflect on their own entrepreneurial journeys and examine how God has used other entrepreneurs to form and shape them into the leaders He is calling them to be.

They also share stories from entrepreneurs around the world who have seen the power of locking arms with other entrepreneurs.

Learn more about groups here: https://www.faithdrivenentrepreneur.org/groups

Episode Transcript

Joey Honescko: At this point, you’ve probably heard how important it is to find community. But come on, let’s be real. Friendship is hard. Community is difficult, especially for entrepreneurs. Calendars fill up. Trust is easily broken. Business obligations keep our hearts and minds occupied. And none of that even includes how the responsibility to our families carries its own priorities outside of our businesses. How the heck can we really prioritize community? And is it even worth it? These are the questions at the heart of our 300th episode of the Faith Driven Entrepreneur podcast. I’m Joey Nasco, and I’ll be joined by Henry Kissinger and Justin Foreman as we riff on the real practical value that comes from locking arms with other faith driven entrepreneurs who are on a common mission. Let’s get into it. Welcome back, everyone to the Faith Driven Entrepreneur podcast. I’m your host, Joey, and let’s go alongside Henry Kastner and Justin Foreman. And guys, this is officially our 300th episode and I think that’s fun. Henry, I feel like sometimes the way you talk about numbers, we might have been on the 300th episode a couple different times, but this one actually is the 300th episode. And I was just thinking back, I mean, it’s been, you know, over five years of podcast content, community, things like that. So when you go back and you think about those first recordings, episode one, the title’s origin and it’s still one of our most played people, go back and listen to it. So if you haven’t, go back and check that out. But when you and William and Rusty started this all those years ago, did you really think, like, hey, we’re going to do 300 of these, or what was going through your mind? What? How did that happen.

Henry Kaestner: When it started? Through investing in Sovereign’s Capital, I’d come to know 10 or 15 stories that I thought were really compelling and that got it. Different issues that an entrepreneur was wrestling with and be helpful for other people to hear. And so when we got started, the thought was that there might be ten, 15, 20 or 30. And I remember thinking, gosh, you know, what happens when we run out of ideas and we haven’t. Now, to be clear, there have been some things we’ve gone back and we’ve touched on several different times. We’ve talked about some things that are really helpful in terms of partnership or customer acquisition, or just some of the struggles with identity or faith. And there’s been things that we’ve come to understand that hold us back from being really productive, like sexual brokenness, that I didn’t think that we’d talk about, that we wade into. But as we started talking more entrepreneurs, we found out that there are other issues because we came to understand that faith driven entrepreneur wasn’t just about helping an entrepreneur run their business better, it was about helping a group of individuals come to know the God of the universe more fully, and then to just wrestle with what does it look like to accept his invitation to participate in the work that he’s doing and what might otherwise hold us back from doing that? So, while we always have this lens through being an entrepreneur, getting out there and trying to sell something to somebody and just creating and feeling lonely, there’s something that unites us together as a group, as a community. And yet the things that since the biggest thing is us knowing God and enjoying him forever, there’s so many different things that we can talk about through the lens of having guests on that get us, get our journey, and what makes us unique in the struggles that we have. And we just continue to explore. And it’s been a beautiful it’s just been a beautiful, wonderful journey where I’ve learned so much and that’s why it’s fun. Infrequently. Am I the guest? I’m mostly the host. I get to learn from these guests that we have on. It’s been awesome.

Joey Honescko: Yeah, yeah, it’s really cool to see just the longevity of this. And I think you make a good point that at the early stages it might have felt like, yeah, there’s a couple people doing this, but now we’ve really seen the growth of this movement and just how wide and deep it can go. And one of the things that I think is really cool is, you know, this started with you and Rusty and William, and obviously some of the formatting has changed in the last year, and we’ve mixed some of that up. But it’s cool to see the way that Rusty and William are still involved. And just a huge shout out to them for leading us through so many episodes in, you know, rusty was we borrowed some of his insights for the last episode. We did, and in a couple of weeks, William is going to be co-hosting again with me. So some really cool ways that they get to be involved.

Henry Kaestner: And rusty is so good. You know, he has not only this great spiritual debt, but he’s got a voice made for radio. And I remember the joke we had was that I have a face made for radio. And then we realized that once we had me on the radio, on the podcast, and I had a voice made for print journalism, and I write like I’m a TV anchor, it kind of goes full circle here. Rusty’s got this voice from having been a deejay. That just helps. Just these topics come alive for all of us. I think in a great way. It’s it’s great that he’s still involved. And yet I love what we’re doing, some of these new topics. And, joy, I love the fact that you’ve gotten out from behind the editing booth, so to speak, and coming in as you’ve lived this out now as an entrepreneur yourself. So you start off as a creative, just helping to, you know, bring the guest, putting together all the different show notes. But really, as you’re coming into the entrepreneurial journey yourself and just the ups and the downs and even over the last couple weeks is I know some of your story. It’s so cool to have you involved in this more fully. And then, of course, for Justin to do the same.

Joey Honescko: Yeah. I think one thing that as I’ve been going on my own entrepreneurial journey, as I’ve been writing with and for and on behalf of entrepreneurs for eight years, and one of the most obvious things that I have felt as I’ve entered in my own is that these things are real. You know, I’ve written the words entrepreneurship is a lonely journey, but it doesn’t have to be so many times working for faith driven. And now I’m in this space where I’m actually experiencing that. And that’s what we’re going to talk about today. Just that need for community, that need for other people to come around you and just and I want to throw it to you here for a second because, you know, this did start faith driven entrepreneurs started as a podcast and a blog way back when. But over time, we started seeing this need for community. And it’s not that we’ve stopped emphasizing content, but I’ve heard you describe it as a, you know, there’s two engines, there’s the content, and now there’s that community element to so what is it that faith driven entrepreneurs needed that wasn’t being met in just content alone?

Justin Forman: Yeah man, what a great journey to think back on and to have that moment to reflect and see how God, God works. You know, I think there’s certainly something about community, but I think sometimes, as you alluded to, it’s stories that can sometimes often bring us together. I mean, we probably shared this on the podcast before, but it’s how Henry and I connected is we were on a search for stories. We’d filmed stories of Hobby Lobby and Chick fil A at Right Now Media. As we were building that, we were desperately searching. What are the other stories? What are the untold stories that are out there? And through a book that we’d picked up, we learned about what David and Henry were doing it bandwidth. And it was through that story that we connected. We filmed the story of bandwidth and what David and Henry were doing back then. And it’s amazing. I think, as Henry alluded to when the podcast was started, there’s a question of cash. Are we going to run out of stories? And I think one of the biggest things we’ve seen is that there is not only a depth of story, but it’s a global story, and it’s a global story that was going on for decades. And we see that over and over and over again. But I think it’s the commonality of when you see those stories that you feel understood and you see something in a way that you haven’t been before. You know, I think that there’s ways that when people see stories, they see themselves in the story, that that’s a good story is when you can all of a sudden see yourself, feel it, think it, and you can have that kind of like taste and smell nostalgia kind of conjured up. And when you do that, but like you alluded to, you know, the Texas phrase of it, we’d say around the team is like, there’s no pep rally without a football game to follow. And I think there’s often times that we get hyped up in about things. And one of the dangers of content, there’s so many beautiful things about it. But inspiration, one of the dangers is that you can get so hyped up about it, you can be a consumer and that you can’t move that into action. And that’s when, you know, probably about three and a half years ago, we said, what does it look like to gather people together? And, you know, I think one of the fun things about the entrepreneurial journey of faith driven is that it was born in a time and community, was born in a time when we couldn’t gather in person. There’s so much power of gathering in person, we know that. But we had to adapt. We had to figure it out. We filmed the Faith driven entrepreneur course. Literally. Henry was filming some of that. I think the day before that, they shut down travel as Covid was hitting. And so we would Henry had filmed that and we filmed those segments with JD in North Carolina, flown home. And and it was just a point when lockdown hit. And so not only did we film it then, we produced it then and we launched and beta tested it then. And in many ways they gave us this an alternate view of like, what does it look like to do this? And it was, you know, necessity is the mother of all invention. And it certainly was. And it changed kind of how we did community to start now, today people meet online, they meet in person, they meet in church. But it was really fun to see amidst a really difficult time. It pushed us to innovate and think about community just in a different perspective.

Henry Kaestner: Yeah, and I’d say, selfishly, I’ve enjoyed being part of so many of these veteran entrepreneur community groups myself, and it’s wonderful to see we all know the maximum that, you know, whenever 2 or 3 are gathered there, the their goddess as well for the revelation for me to see that that actually happened through Covid, that that’s also true in virtual groups. Now, so many of the feature nonprofit groups meet in person and is wonderful when it’s done, particularly in a local church or something really powerful about a community of people coming together. To be clear, in a local church where you’re sitting under the teaching of the same pastor, your kids are going to the same type of youth group and you see each other. That is very, very special. But it’s also really special to be able to be a part of some of our virtual groups where you get to know feature of not draws in many cases from around the world coming together. And just as you interact with some of the content, we have some of the storytelling we have for the first 15, 20 minutes and then just process. How God is moving in our lives as we wrestle with identity, or we think about being faithful versus well for stewardship versus ownership and not worshiping work and just loving on our families while all those different things. There’s something really special about sharing that with 10 or 12 people and just hearing how God is working through them in each case, without fail. I leave that hour that I spent knowing God more fully, and his love for me in a way that is harder for me when I just listen to a podcast. And yet, I also love podcasts, and I’m so grateful for so many of the people that listen to our podcasts. And yet there is something I think that is a little better in some ways, which is coming together in community and just processing the content that we see and how God working through that. And it’s oftentimes a perspective that somebody else will have in a community group that will help me to understand something that I was wrestling with, and I didn’t even know it.

Justin Forman: Indeed. You know, I think that if we step back from home, it’s fun to think about the entrepreneurial journey that God brought us, along with faith driven groups. But if we step back and just say what’s happening in the church today, I think what you’re alluding to is stepping into trying to invent and build into a solution that the church has been facing for many years. I mean, when you think about church growing up in the church myself, there’s a case that could be made that assimilation, the kind of the process of getting somebody that’s visiting a church, seeking the church connected to the church, has maybe experienced some brokenness. There’s been some gaps. There’s been some shortfalls. You know, you could go as far as to say, maybe today it is broken. And when you talk to small group pastors and over the years, it’s a it’s been a struggle. Like, how do you really make people feel connected. And so much of the past few decades it’s been based on, you know, two factors. What’s your zip code and what’s your life state your kids. And so you look at the people to your left and to your right. And certainly there’s beauty to that of sharing the same neighborhood and the same overlap there. Maybe you have kids in the same grade and the same overlaps that aren’t same sporting events and teams. But I think what you’re talking about is, is like, there’s an innovation that’s happening where people are saying, what if you really align people by a calling and a shared calling? And when you walk into a room with another entrepreneur, you just get each other. You understand risk. You understand seasons of work. You understand like a craziness of schedule. You understand shared passion for the mission, calling for what you’re do it. You don’t see it as work. You don’t see it as office hours or in 8 to 5. You see it as a crusade, a mission that you’re on. And I think there’s an opportunity here for the church to really say, man, what does it look like to get together? I mean, Sree and I were talking about this the other days. We’re driving church on Sunday morning and we’re passing the car, and it’s kind of coming from the same direction that we are in. We look at the car and got the same bumper sticker for, you know, same school district, the same football team, Baylor, that we passionately are about. And we’re thinking, man, I would love to know who that family is as we watch them pull into church in a different part of the parking lot and had to go a different way. And there’s that affinity, like when you can come around with so many shared affinities that you can accelerate this feeling of community and just a powerful way. And it makes you just wonder, is there a chance to really do that in the church? I mean, imagine if, like at the end of a church service, if the pastor said, hey, you know what? Nothing special, but we’ve got a group of teachers gathering in the back in the church today. And then right before you head off to start the school year, we’re just going to get everybody there together so that you can know each other, pray for each other and just be known. The affinity, the acceleration for somebody that’s visiting for the first time or has been on the sidelines of this big church and hasn’t been able to get connected, it suddenly accelerates. Now think about doing that for doctors and dentists and entrepreneurs. I wonder if.

Henry Kaestner: Mothers of preschoolers.

Justin Forman: And wonder.

Henry Kaestner: Wait, no, that’s done.

Justin Forman: But what an opportunity. I mean, I think we’ve just it’s something we haven’t explored yet.

Joey Honescko: Well, and I think there’s something to that, Justin. And I’ve heard both of you guys talk about this idea of the role mission plays in generating friendships in community. I think the quote is aim for mission and you get friendship. If you aim for friendship, you may not find a common mission. And there’s something about being a faith driven entrepreneur, particularly where you are on mission together, even if you’re not necessarily working in the same company or even in the same industry, there is this shared affinity that even goes deeper than just like, oh, we have this thing in common. But there seems to be this opportunity to unite and kind of lock arms in this mission of what it’s like to try to redeem the world, bring redemption through businesses. So I’m wondering if you guys have any thoughts about that idea of the unique way that uniting around entrepreneurs can also kind of ignite your own mission and ignite the mission of those around you as well.

Justin Forman: I think that’s a great quote. I mean, my quick story of is we went to for our 20th anniversary, we took. A trip with our church to Israel and it was a phenomenal, amazing, incredible experience before all of what’s happening broke out a couple of years ago. And we had a reunion night a couple months later. We walked into the building there at the church and there’s, you know, fun conversations or some conversations at varying depth. But then all of a sudden you come to the table with another entrepreneur and you just ask the question that you would normally ask somebody, walk into the church, how are you doing? And cutting through the surface level stuff? I remember him saying, man, I just wish somebody would tell me what par is for this course. I want to know, like, am I below par? Above par? Like what? And how am I doing? My family, my kids, my business and team, the culture, the business, the scorecard of life as an entrepreneur. It has so many different KPIs that are playing each other. And I tell you what, that moment, that feeling of being understood, like I can’t tell you just the ways that I felt connected in that moment. And as I was talking to Sree about that, there’s just something there that like when you can talk about things, I mean, it’s the same equivalent of like if you’re got a struggling teenager and you’re going through something and a parent going through the same things, you feel understood. And I think that that is so much of what the life of the entrepreneur is. So I don’t know what it looks like, all the programing of it and the opportunities, the matchmaking connect. But you can just tell there is something deep when you get to entrepreneurs together.

Henry Kaestner: There’s no doubt about it. And the story that God told just put back on my mind right now is just the Japanese guy who was a soldier in in 1974. Philippines is still fighting World War two. And you can do that if you’re on mission. You can just just focus on the battle that’s in front of you. In just the loneliness of the existence juxtaposed the incredible camaraderie in the fellowship that we see in the movie or the TV series Band of Brothers, and being together and going through basic training together and being there, and the joy in the bonds that that creates because people understand where you are, you’re doing this together. And as you come together, community and you’re able to share and just like, gosh, I’m just really trying to figure out how to renegotiate with my bank about the covenants on this revolver that I’ve got. And somebody is able to process that with you and like, here’s how we thought about it and here’s how we did that. And then what ends up happening is over the bond that it creates over the next six months, nine months. And just, you know, now I’m a part of your story. I could go out on my own. I could be that guy who’s a Japanese soldier out there and ends up having to have his commanding officer, who’s like, 95 years old, fly from Japan to finally relieve this person of his duty 30 years after the war starts. Or I can be in a spot where I’m in this kind of like. And you can do that. It’s just very lonely. Or I can be a part of this knitted community of people and know my story and I know theirs. And while I don’t have all the responsibilities of all the things that they’re doing, I am a part of that. I was able to help that person think through how to negotiate covenants with a bank, or how to think about, gosh, how do I wrestle with culture? My company has grown from 2025. We all had the same culture. We all knew each other’s wives and we had barbecue. And now we’re 75. And some of these employees, I don’t even know their names. How do you just even navigate through what that looks like? Or, gosh, I’m feeling like I’m just on this growth trajectory just for growth sake. And is that the right thing when other people participate in that? Not only am I the beneficiary of that wisdom, but when the tables are turned and when I can go ahead and just contribute to what somebody else is wrestling through, I’m now a part of their story. And that inner woven tapestry is this beautiful thing that makes for this Technicolor life, that gives me joy and gives me that type of energy. When I go back in on Monday and I’m doing my own thing again, I know they’ve got a bunch of people who’ve got my back. I know that while. There’s going to be just dragons to slay that week that I can pick up the phone with other people who care about me, and I care about them. Something really, really special about that. I really think that that’s the way that God design things. The enemy would love to separate us out. The enemy would love for Justin to never meet that person who shares their passion for Baylor football and have them completely separated out. He’d love for the teachers that are part of a congregation, or the accounts that tax time to never know each other and to pray for each other. But I think that the church in particular has this great opportunity to lean into that and say, you know what? To further the discipleship of those in our congregation, let’s bring those together. And of course, we care about entrepreneurs the most is where God has called us, and it’s where we’ve experienced loneliness. And, you know, you know, not that entrepreneurs are any more important than teachers, but the teachers do have the staff room, right? They can come together in community during breaks. Entrepreneurs don’t have that same type of thing, but churches can bring that together and help foster that level of community in a way that will enrich the local church and also bring in other entrepreneurs that are longing for that community and say, gosh, that’s a church that I might join and find that fellowship that I’m looking for.

Justin Forman: Yeah, that’s so good. You know, I think it comes back to one of the quotes that we were talking about earlier is like, if you aim for mission, you get friendship. If you just aim for friendship, rarely do you get mission. And that’s been something that missional communities on missions, small groups, whatever you might call it in the church, it’s been a language that’s been there for the last 20 years. It’s been talked about in small group ministries. I think the thing that what you’re hitting on there is, is like, what is our felt need? I think most entrepreneurs, if you’d asked and you’d survey them to list it out, 1 to 10, 1 to 20, whatever it is, what are your top priorities? They’re probably not going to always say like discipleship. Sometimes they might say community, but I think it’s like what you’re talking about is like, if you talk about the pain point, if you talk about the problem and you engage in the problem with somebody that gets you, then it does lead to community. And it’s one of the things, you know, candidly, that we’re wrestling through. When you think about, like inside our conversation as a team is we love the fact of how many people that God called us to serve. But when we think about inviting others into it, sometimes a place where we need to meet them is not just like, you know, another announcement of are you lonely? Are you disconnected? Do you want community? It’s actually probably starting a conversation around one of the things that are fueling in that pain point today is I think about, as you said, staff debt financing, whatever it might be. That’s a place where you start the conversation, but it leads to community, not just starting with community, because then we only get the people that are already at the place of awareness, already at the place of knowing that they need it in their lives. And really, God’s called us to maybe invite so many more into that conversation.

Joey Honescko: I’m wondering what you guys think about, you know, we’re talking about community, and I think that there’s a sense in a couple weeks we’re going to have Doctor Brian Lauritsen and talk about friendship, and I’m wondering what the relationship here is for y’all, because I have found that, very practical example last week in my young entrepreneurial journey was already the hardest week I’ve ever experienced. There were all sorts of challenges. We don’t have to get into them necessarily, but there was a moment that another business owner who has been doing it for a long time, walked by me and I was like, man, this was really hard. You know? I can’t believe the fire trucks had to come because the fire alarms were going off. And he looked at me and he goes, oh, that’s not a big deal. And it was such a freeing space to have somebody that has been there who has done it. Now, me and this gentleman are not friends like our families may not get together, we may not go on vacation together. But there was something really unique about having that kind of relationship. And there are friends that I have that are entrepreneurs that have spoken into it as well, and that means a lot. But I’m also wondering, you know, even when we think about groups of it being something that is just getting in that room with other people who get it, it may sometimes spark lifelong friendships. It may sometimes be those moments where you just are like, yeah, someone else understands. And so I’m wondering is you guys think about that, that relationship just between a community of people who get you and it maybe not necessarily producing the deepest friendships of your life, but giving you something unique and meaningful. How do you all see that relationship?

Justin Forman: I think you know you’re hitting on it so often times. I have struggled with some Bible study experiences that we’ve had in our church, and I told Terry and we were talking about this and she said, man, what is it? She was trying to drill down into it. And I said, it’s because it’s fill in the blank. It’s fill in the blank, it’s prescriptive. It’s if this, then that type of thing. And I said, man, I need a safe place to wander now, not wandering off the reservation. Why not wandering into some crazy kind of alternate direction? It’s like you need a safe place to talk about the pain in the same way that like, and you think about it from a marriage. Not every time when you bring something up you’re not always asking for. Resolution. You’re just asking to be heard and to be felt, and to see the pain of what kind of what’s going on. And I think that’s so much like what you just alluded to, Joe, is what it unites entrepreneurs, is shared painful experiences, shared pain points. God is so much more in control of our lives than we ever realize. And he’s going to direct our steps. And if we’re seeking, we will fight. But it starts with, I think, just that moment of saying like, what is the pain? Talk about it, sit in it, understand it. And I just think that we need safe places to wander.

Henry Kaestner: Joy, I’m going to challenge you a little bit. You said you’re not friends with this guy in Uber. In the same way that a lot of us think about friends. But in just 10s, he was able to say something that united you at a spiritual level and spoke to you in a way that was profound enough for you to mention, of course, on a podcast. And I think that when I look, you know, gosh, I’m not the end of my life. I’m only 54. But I get nostalgic for the types of the riches that I’ve had in my life are all interpersonal. And when somebody is able to meet me worth my need in a way that I felt that nobody else got me, there’s something powerful there. And I think that that’s one of the things that happens in these community groups is that if we’re not spending a tremendous amount of time with some of these people, and yet they’re able to minister us and us to them in an efficiency of time. And as entrepreneurs, we love that efficiency, right? I want to have that rich spiritual fabric. And yet I don’t want to have to maintain friendships with people. I don’t want to have to play 18 holes of golf with each one of them every week. And there’s something about the way that entrepreneurs are wired to be able to have meaningful community to hit, where we’re struggling right now with a word of encouragement or a collective prayer, or just knowing that somebody else gets me, that hits me on my need for community and fellowship to see God in them. And it also hits me on my need for efficiency to. And I almost hesitate in saying that because you almost want to say, can I? Are there any shortcuts to discipleship? And he shortcuts to friendship, you know. What’s the hack into having meaningful friendship? But you found that a little bit by finding somebody who gets where you are on the journey. Yeah. And you had a meaningful interaction with somebody that lasted probably seven seconds. And the entrepreneur army loves that efficiency.

Joey Honescko: Well, and to your point, some of what made it valuable. Now, if you know, even if it was a dear friend of mine who’s not an entrepreneur came up to me in that moment and said, this isn’t a big deal. I would have been like, get the heck out of here, dude. My life is falling apart right now. But because of this shared affinity and because I trusted that this other gentleman who has experienced a lot more entrepreneurship than I have, for him to say, hey, this is not a big deal, was actually much more meaningful. And that efficiency was skyrocketed. And I think it goes back to that mission saying, because I know this guy and me are on the same mission to create businesses that do good in McKinney and that care about the people down here. So when he tells me it’s not a big deal and this stuff happens all the time, I can rest a little easier than even if a dear friend who doesn’t understand these experiences was like, hey, chill out! I would have been like, dude, right now’s not the time to tell me to chill out. So there’s something again about that mission concept that I think does unite us.

Justin Forman: I think this beautiful scene, these conversations, converge. It’s the missional side. Now, we’re not saying seven seconds takes away the need for a dear, close friend knowing all the things about you and build speaking things in your life. So to be clear on that. But you’re talking about like entrepreneurs are having all of life converge at the craziest moments, right? Like starting a family, kids, their activities levels start growing off the charts. It’s the same time businesses scaling. You’re feeling pressures. You’re feeling time. You’re always feeling behind in everything at some level. And there is just something about even just like what Henry talks about is like, how do we make sure that we don’t overlay different stages of life and what community might look like at different stages for this stage? Like, how do we find the uniqueness of maybe like what entrepreneurs are going through? Like how do we find the uniqueness of like, how powerful those short words are, those short conversations that like, again, it doesn’t mean that we trade being known on a deep level, but how do like when we think about taking the gospel to a foreign place, a place where it hasn’t been? We study the culture, we study everything about it language, hierarchy, communication styles, family dynamics, whatever it is. And I’m wondering, just like, what does it really look like to do that? Same for this people group. For the people group of that, we are part of that. We get to serve. What are our strengths? What are weakness? What are the challenges? What are the opportunities, and how do you just not glance past those and think that it’s all cookie cutter?

Joey Honescko: Well, in Henry, you mentioned earlier, just like the potential of the church to be this place and to be this haven for faith driven entrepreneurs to come together. And we dreamed a little bit about that. And just and I want to throw it back to you for a second, because I know we have the church conference coming up later in the year, and that our desire as an organization, as faith driven entrepreneur, the way you guys have led this organization is not to be something that happens away from the church, but actually something that is in the sidecar of the church, right? Who’s right there alongside the church? And so even though we’re mentioning some of the challenges with church assimilation and the relationship that fate driven entrepreneurs might have. Talk a little bit about the hope that you both have, and the reason why the church is in a central, not even important, but an essential partner for a community like this.

Justin Forman: Yeah. Great question. You know, at the risk of sounding like, you know, pitching something or pushing something back, I want to really back up to say, I think this has been a shared prayer, a shared hope for the movement, for thousands of business men and women that have been a part of this conversation for decades. And it’s come out in different forms. Sometimes it’s come out in a place of frustration. Sometimes it’s been a kind of place of walking past each other. Sometimes it’s a place where the entrepreneur doesn’t feel empowered, sometimes a place where the pastor doesn’t feel supported. And we want to create a safe place to wonder, a safe place to have a conversation, to say what are the issues? And not just like in an attitude of like, what are we thinking and feeling, but one that’s also guided by data. And so, yeah, this fall, as you were alluding to, I think it’s a really, really unique thing that’s going to bring together conversation of pastors and entrepreneurs. And we know the busy lives that both lead, and it’s difficult to hop on a plane, fly to the other side of the country and meet about it. And so we’re trying to merge this dynamic of community and conversation, as well as the convenience of shopping online. And so it’s going to be a two hour conversation that people are going to join into a group of pastors and entrepreneurs that are going be a part of that. We hope that many pastors will bring a business leader from their church to engage with them, so that they can both see the opportunities, the blind spots that we’re walking through in this. And it’s been really fun to see how this conversation has come. I gather from some pastors like Nikki Gumbel and Derwin Gray and David Platt that are really just seeing and sensing the need to say, you know, we were never designed to do it all. It was never the case were designed to do this together. And that sense of how people are waking up to realize this is not another program, this is not another budget. This is really about starting with an empowering conversation of, say, what more can we do together? And we have been able to travel to some unique places, whether it’s in Taiwan, whether it’s in England, to capture stories in a non prescriptive way of the different ways that pastors and entrepreneurs are coming together. It looks so different, so different scales depending upon your setup. But our hope is, is that these two might come together and we might realize we’re a lot more alike than we’re different. That were driven by mission we’re always on. We’re oftentimes sacrificing at great expense to sit there and push forward something we feel God has deeply called us to. And if we can get those conversations in the same room, we’re really encouraged to think what might happen, because we know for far too long darkness has tried to prevent that from happening. Evil is trying to keep these two from being more connected.

Henry Kaestner: A good friend of the movement is a guy named Nikki Gumbel, who does a Bible one year podcast with his wife, Pippa. And, he did just a great video for us about the opportunity of the church coming together with Feature of Nonviolence. And of course, we’ll show at the conference. And actually, you can see, I think online right now on our website. He had mentioned something, though, in a daily devotional that I had earlier this week that I think is really helpful. He quoted a guy named Josh Wilbur, I think was his name. He said, ultimately, there are three conversions that happen, and I think that these three are important. Simple but kind of profound. One is you’re converted to Christ. Number two. You’re converted to the church. Number three. You’re converted to his cause. I think the ordering there is really important. The most important thing, of course, being understanding that Jesus Christ is our Lord and Savior and the value, the gift given us. Then being tapped into a body of local believers committed to the ongoing discipleship and the advancement of his Kingdom. But then that’s where that cause comes in, is about advancing God’s kingdom under his power, for his glory. But I think it comes against this foundation of having been converted to Christ and then converted to the church being a part of a local body and then off of that foundation. What’s the cause? Where might God have us as entrepreneurs, making redemptive products, services, loving on communities in a redemptive way, in a completely different way? And it starts with the partnership with the local church. Or it comes against a foundation, with the partnership with the local church. With the first one, of course, knowing Jesus is our Lord and Savior.

Joey Honescko: Yeah. That’s great. Well, we’re coming to a close here and I want to think about this. You know, we’ve done 300 episodes. Faith driven entrepreneur has been around doing content in community for five years now. As you think about the next five years. And we’ve had, you know, maybe 17,000 plus people go through these groups. You think about.

Henry Kaestner: 10,000.

Joey Honescko: 18,000, but.

Henry Kaestner: Who’s counting?

Joey Honescko: Henry is, 18,000. So as we’ve had more than 18,000 come through these groups, where do you guys see if we could just have a second just to dream of what would community look like for faith driven entrepreneurs five years from now? How would their loneliness be different? How would they be in that band of brothers kind of locked down mentality? What would that look like? You know it. Episode 600 if you will.

Justin Forman: Good question. Quick thought I’ll add here before Henry jumps in is you know I think it first starts with us walking through some of the same challenge the church has face. It’s like they’re trying to match people. Maybe they’re looking to match teachers and they’re looking to match entrepreneurs or doctors and to think of what could happen. I think that God has this in a place that we’ve been able to serve entrepreneurs, as you said, 18,000 of them. And we realize that even inside of those 18,000, there’s a lot of difference. The solopreneur is living a different life and a different challenge. There’s a guy on LinkedIn that some might be familiar with, a guy named Justin Welsh, and I don’t think he comes from a faith perspective, but he really advocates for like, hey, this is the life of a solopreneur. A solopreneur oftentimes is looking for comfort, convenience, looking for a little bit of freedom, looking for flexibility, looking for that chance to say, man, I can do x, y, and Z so that I might not have to work as much. I think in many times, not in all times. There’s a difference sometimes where an entrepreneur has an idea, thought, a ministry of something that they’re business, that they’re going to build, that they say, man, the world, gosh, is just a better place if we can figure out how to solve this problem and get this out. And so they are not necessarily looking for the flexibility as much as they might be looking to solve a big, big, big problem. And they just can’t wait to get back into the office. They can’t wait to be surrounded by a team. They think that their office is the center of the universe, of everything that’s happening. They’re so committed to that mission, and I think that we face an opportunity here to say, what if inside of this entrepreneurial conversation, you could match people? What if you could say, hey, you’ve got a real estate office and 20 or 50 different agents? You might not have competitive overlap with somebody from Michigan to North Carolina. But what if you compared the same notes, same thoughts, same challenges of an industry and brought that together? And I think we have an opportunity to do that. I think online gives us a chance to do that. So my hope would be that it starts there but obviously goes so, so much deeper. But I think that the stickiness of the connectivity of it, if we can get some of that stuff right around a mission and around a stage, and you can do both of those instead of one or the other, if you can bring shared mission and shared stage, maybe some of those communities will be that much more sticky, that much more deep, that much more effective and shaping change. So, you know, we often talk about recency bias, but Henry and I talk about things maybe we’re talking about going through and how that shapes us. And and I think that’s just a big recency bias we have is what could it look like to for for this.

Henry Kaestner: Yeah, 100% I love the way that you just answer that. You know, I’m going to borrow a phrase that’s used a lot or an expression is use a lot and say that an entrepreneur tends to overestimate what they’re capable of doing in one year and underestimate what they’re capable of doing in ten years. So five years, maybe this is a prediction. That’s right on. Maybe not, but maybe so five years from now. So we’ve come to see the value of entrepreneurs being in community together. To be able to expand on that beyond our local circle. Justin said we might be able to find community on people that share our affinity, our industry, our stage, the different problems we’re wrestling through. But then also entrepreneurs are problem solvers and we live in a fallen, broken world, and we live in a world in which there’s 7.5 billion people who do not live here. What does it look like when you’re able to bring together a faith or an astronaut that cares about orphans? And that’s Whitney with the faith driven entrepreneur from Brussels, who cares about the same in somebody from London or Johannesburg or Akron, Ohio. And they think, gosh, oh my goodness, I thought I was the only person who cared about this particular issue that is broken in the world. And these are people that get me because we’re all entrepreneurs and we’re working together on a squad to solve this problem. We’re coming out with a new initiative over the course of the coming year called Solving World’s Greatest Problems Under God’s Power for His Glory. But what does it look like when the body of Christ comes back together to make God famous and work on some really, really cool projects? Kind of a redemptive story of the Tower of Babel. But so our sort of who runs our communities is fond of saying the reclaiming this kind of C.S. Lewis call that, you know, friendship is really just cemented when you say, well, I thought I was the only person that cared about this. Well, as we bring together a larger community, as we focus not just necessarily on our own businesses, which are incredibly important where God’s called us, but then think outside about some of the world’s greatest problems and find others that God has put a calling on. And if we can figure out a way to bring that broader community together. Wow, how God might use entrepreneurs to solve this broken world in a way that brings us closer to knowing God and then advancing his kingdom in this battle. Because it’s a real battle where slain dragons slain dragons together in a way that makes God victorious.

Joey Honescko: Yeah. That’s beautiful. It makes me think of that Nicky Gumbel quote or quote of a quote I guess, that you mentioned of. Really, the hope is that people would find their identity in Christ, that they would be on mission with the church, and that they would be for the call that Christ has for us. And what that looks like will vary. It’ll look like different things. It’ll look like different problems to solve. But really that’s the hope is that three fold framework. So excited about all these initiatives. They’ll be more about the church conference and about solving the world’s greatest problems coming up later. But the groups, we have those on an ongoing basis. You can go on to the website, learn more at feature of entrepreneur. Gorgui. Groups will link to all these things in the show. Notes. Thank you for listening. Thank you Henry. Thank you Justin, and we’ll see you all in a couple weeks. Thanks for listening to the Faith Driven Entrepreneur podcast. Our ministry exists to equip and resource entrepreneurs just like you with content and community. We know entrepreneurship can be a lonely journey, but it doesn’t have to be. We’ve got groups that meet in churches, coffee shops, living rooms, and boardrooms around the world. Find one in your area or volunteer to lead one and bring this global movement to your own backyard. There’s no cost, no catch, just connection. Find out more at Faith Driven entrepreneur.org.

Recent Episodes

One of the hardest realities in the life of every Faith Driven Entrepreneur is that things often don’t go as planned.

Unforeseen circumstances can cause all sorts of issues in a company, and sometimes those circumstances affect the people we employ.

In this episode, we’re going to look at layoffs. How can we think well about these difficult situations? And how can we love our people, even in the midst of these unfortunate, massive changes?

We’ll highlight three perspectives starting with Vic Ho and Rusty Rueff, two leaders who have had to implement layoffs in their own careers.

The third perspective comes from a round table discussion that William, Henry, and Rusty had with Daniel Fong, the CEO and founder, who made a choice not to lay off anybody in his company.

As we’ll see in all these conversations, there’s not a clear cut answer to these complex questions. Not everyone agrees and that’s okay. We just want to present different viewpoints and encourage you to consult the Lord about how he might be calling you to run your business differently.

Lean in, get inspired, get challenged, and consider how you might have these kinds of conversations with other people in community who can push you closer to where the Lord is leading you.

Episode Transcript

Joseph Honescko: One of the hardest realities in the life of every faith driven entrepreneur is that things often don’t go as planned. Unforeseen circumstances can cause all sorts of issues in a company, and sometimes those circumstances affect the people we employ. Over the last few episodes of the podcast, we’ve highlighted an entrepreneur in the Philippines who has implemented a no firing policy. But today we’re going to look at layoffs. How can we think well about these difficult situations? And how can we love our people even in the midst of these unfortunate massive changes? In this episode, we’ll hear three perspectives that unpack these questions and more. The first to come from Vic Ho and Rusty Rueff, a couple of phenomenal leaders who have had to implement layoffs in their own careers. The third perspective comes from a roundtable discussion that William, Henry and Rusty had with Daniel Fong, a CEO and founder who made a choice not to lay off anybody in his company. And as we’ll see in all these conversations, there’s not a clear cut answer. Not everyone agrees, and that’s okay. We don’t want these episodes to be prescriptive. We just want to present different viewpoints and encourage you to consult the Lord about how he might be calling you to run your business differently. So I hope that you would take this time that you would lean in, get inspired, get challenged, and consider how you might have these kinds of conversations with other people in community who can push you closer to where the Lord is leading you. I’m Joey Honescko, and you’re listening to the Faith Driven Entrepreneur podcast. Let’s dive in.

William Norvell: I want to switch gears a little bit Vic to something that I know you’re open to talking about, but maybe a difficult season of your five star journey. You know, you mentioned some of the success points, raising a ton of money and 14,000 customers and some of those things. But I know there was a time where you had to let go of some people. Then that hits businesses and different stretches and the faith and go video, which will link to you share a bit about this. And so if you might just share what that was like for you and the company.

Victor Ho: Yeah. There was a time in 2016 when we had to do a layoff of around 50 people, which was a pretty big portion of the company at that time. You know, we were going from maybe 225 down to 175 or something like that, and I was very distraught. You know, I felt like a failure. And I did my homework. I called at least 20 other CEOs, lots of other peers from Y Combinator and elsewhere, and asked them, and we’ve got to do this large reduction in force. What are the best practices, you know, how do you do the lay off the best? And I got I took all these notes and I interviewed all these people and they got all these best practices about, you know, how you should do it as quickly, as cleanly as possible. Then you give this inspirational speech how you should shield the people who are going to be left from the Thrasher role. And so ideally, you take all the people who are going to be let go. You have them pack all their stuff. You do it quickly. You have them leave the floor. You minimize the emotional turmoil caused on the people remaining that at this point in time, obviously you’re terrified will also just run for the hills, and then you give them this inspirational speech about the mission and why this is overall good for the company to leave in a better spot and all sorts of stuff. And, you know, I mean, that seemed like good worldly wisdom, you know, let’s say it’s not a bad idea. All that stuff makes sense. So I’m wandering the streets in the middle of the night trying to write this inspirational speech, you know, trying to sort through my own emotions. Also just distraught, also just kind of trying to pray through and make sense of it all. And I come home and I write this like almost journal entry. And I’m not the type of person that journals. And in this journal entry, I start by just kind of talking about how much I feel like I’m a failure. I screw things up. I’ve screwed up the lives of these people that are going to be let go, but it also continues to transform. As I write into a realization of just how Five Stars was never built on my strength, but by the work of what God was doing and how I really believe that it’s hard, but the small businesses we serve are worth fighting for, and how that mission is hard, and so no one else does it. But that’s exactly why we do it. And if no one else, then who? And how excited I really still was at the very core about what we were doing. And I also kind of realized that so much in my feelings of layoffs as a failure was just me succumbing to the worldly definition of success. You know, where the world tells you success means you’re growing faster, you’re making more money, you’re doing all these things. But that’s not why God called me to start five stars ever in the first place. He called me to start five stars to serve our business owners, serve them well, serve our employees well. And, you know, whatever rate we grow at when we do that really well, that’s determined by God. You know, we’re not meant to artificially move a bunch of numbers in ways that distract us unduly from the core mission. And I also had always thought this, but come to realize that when you take a kingdom winning perspective, you know what is God invested in? When he invested all this money into five stars, I realized it was foolish of me to be able to. Categorize that myself, you know, and Judgment Day. I’m not going to stand in front of him and say, hey, God, look. 14,000 merchants, 50 million consumers. Here’s what I did for your kingdom. I’m going to rattle off my resume. No. Over the course of a millennia from now, how could I possibly know if the greatest thing five stars had ever done wasn’t one of our support reps having the right phone call with the right merchant at a time they needed it, and over a thousand years of reverberation, it turned into something. That part of God’s plan was so much bigger than what I could have ever pointed out myself. And as part of that layoff, like a number of other experiences I’d had previously with the company where something unusual, emotional, difficult happens often turns out to be one of the most fruitful things that a company can go through because it causes people to band together, it causes people to reevaluate their lives and all sorts of different things. And it causes me as a Christian to be able to speak with, I think, an authentic voice that is truthful and provocatively different. And so I came to realize that, you know, the entire lifespan of five stars. I mean, things are going great now by worldly means, but maybe the most impactful thing we ever get to do is this layoff that impacts all these people. And so as we approached it, I just felt an unction to do something very different. And so we first off had our people absolutely mingle with the people who are being let go. I sent an email out to the whole company telling them that I screwed up. I led them into this. But we have these team members who contribute extremely meaningfully and we want to help them pack their stuff, help them. We’ve helped them transition. You know, we want to help them find a new place, you know? And I, of course, also followed some of the best practices I brought the people who were being let go all together to be able to address them cleanly and be able to have a lot of time with them. But then I let them go back upstairs, you know, afterwards to meet with the rest of the company and spend time there. And we did things like pay for their Lyft rides home and, you know, a lot of them went to bars nearby and build a database of resumes and help them with all, you know, all the typical sort of best practice things. But when time came to deliver, sort of the follow up speech to the company, you know, I had sort of the rah rah best practices speech prepared. I just felt God say, no, you’re not supposed to read that one. You’re supposed to read your journal entry. And that was a terrifying thing. But I got up on stage, I ended up pulling out my journal, and I read this thing to people and, you know, doing so I was crying sloppily in front of the company. It’s not like the Obama single tier strong leader cry. It’s like there’s snot coming out of your nose because you’re having a real deep moment of vulnerability, cry. And at the end of the day, I felt it sent a message and the whole thing came together in a way that was, yeah, just so much more powerful than if it had never happened. And I’m frankly so grateful that we had to go through that. And the result of all that was the company. We track cultural engagement, all sorts of things. Our external reviews didn’t go down or internal engagement scores all went up. The company banded together, and we accomplished a number of very key milestones over the next couple of years to bring us back to where we needed to go. And yeah, praise be to God that he saves me from doing stupid things, that he gives us these opportunities.

William Norvell: Amen. Amen, Amen indeed. It’s amazing how God uses things differently than we see them sometimes,

Victor Ho: Yeah, all the time.

William Norvell: It turns out he’s got a bigger plan going on than we do most often. Vic, I just thank you so much for sharing this story. I’m sure it wasn’t easy to go through. It’s not easy to share. And even though God’s giving you the wisdom of what he was doing through those times, I’m sure this still is not something that’s fun to broadcast and talk about. So I just thank you for sharing that. I think there’s going to be so many people blessed by this. I think there are going to be so many people that are going through, whether it’s a specific layoff or just a very difficult decision that lean to God now and say, God, where am I being a coward? What do you want from me? What do you want for this company, and what do you want? What is your will in this situation as opposed to what mine is? So thank you.

Victor Ho: Yeah, I think at the core of it, maybe it actually even ties back to your earlier question is just are we working with the posture of God? What are you doing? You know, instead of God? This isn’t going according to my plan. You know, I’m going to pray to you to make my plan happen. And yeah, maybe God’s will was there was a few people’s lives he wanted to transform. And, you know, the rift was the way it was going to happen. I don’t know, but I think the anxiety and distress I felt and, you know, still feel really come from misplaced personal value. And I, I think maybe are a yellow flag to me that, yeah, there’s lots of areas where I’m still not so. Of submitting to seeing where Azlan is moving and letting that be what I’m trying to move along with. But you know, still running in my own will against my own goals in certain places.

William Norvell: So the last thing you do want to close within, one of the things just comes to mind. I just want to say it is I feel like you’re doing an incredible job of submitting and making God the hero of the five star story, and you’ve put yourself as not the hero. And Matt, who I know your co-founder, just I think that’s just such a shift for our Christian entrepreneurs to be thinking about that. God is the hero of their story, and he’s authoring something that we we can see glimpses of, but we don’t always have the full picture of. Yeah.

Victor Ho: Yeah. I mean, I think if you’re an entrepreneur and listening to this podcast, being the hero is a crushing weight that none of us were ever designed to live up to, you know? And when you are the hero, the result is anxiety and identity issues and a rollercoaster that takes your life up and down. The result of God being the hero is. An easy burden and a light yoke. And, dad and boss, who we get to spend time in the workshop with.

William Norvell: Amen. Amen.

Henry Kaestner: So we want to shift gears a little bit now in the experience of one of our co-hosts, Rusty. Many of you know he’s been on the talent side of building businesses at Frito Lay and Pizza Hut. Pepsi and EA, and help get off the ground. Many startups in the human capital space like Glass Door, Rusty. Share first about some experiences you’ve had on this topic of letting people go. Oftentimes when we think of having to let people go and make tough decisions of big companies, they can sound really, really cold. So called it George Clooney had a movie centered all around that was young, but using something different.

Rusty Rueff: Yeah. And you really want me to follow Vic? You know, this is, we we co-host this together. You’re not supposed to put me in these tough situations. I love this. That was beautiful. I’m just so impressed by him. Right? And, you know, his genuineness and his authentic way of going about things. And he hit on the beginning of sort of the philosophy that I take when he said, you know, hey, I, I told everybody I screwed up, right. You kind of start there as a leader. And I think that that movie that you referenced there, Henry, you know, the side of that that is the sad side is that there was no feeling anymore. And George Clooney’s character about what he had to go do. And, you know, the minute that we lose that feeling of we’ve either failed or this really, really hurts, then we need to question whether or not we should be a leader or not. Because if you ever become that callous, you ever become that insensitive. You know, I think you’re in a pretty bad place. I think as you go into these reduction, enforced layoff situations. And Vic alluded to this as well, that transparency is really part of your persona as a leader, your message that you’re sending people, if you can be totally transparent, then whatever you say can be believed. Yeah, but if you hide behind some veil of, well, I can’t really tell you why or I can’t tell you when or I can’t tell you what’s going to happen, then you’ll never build trust and you’ll never really believe in, and ultimately you’ll lose respect. And that’s where we have to be careful about our own witness as faith driven leaders, faith driven entrepreneurs. But let me take you back to a situation in 1991, long ago last century, I was making my way in the world of work as a young pup at Frito Lay in Dallas, Texas. And there’s an HR leader there, and we had gotten to the point where the business really needed to change. It needed to change significantly. And PepsiCo had brought a guy named Roger Enrico in to become our CEO. And Roger come from Pepsi, and Roger saw the change that needed to be made as well. And Roger had the courage to be transparent. And I’m going to put those things together. Transparency also aligns with courage. If you hide behind something, you’re hiding behind fear. But when you step in front to be transparent, you have courage. And Roger had the courage to tell the organization that we were going to change. He gave a very compelling reason why we needed to. And then he said, this is how we’re going to change. And he said, we’re going to have to have a reduction in force. What was so courageous about his transparency was he gave that message in December of 1990. We had the layoff in September of 1991. So he said layoffs were coming nine months ahead of time. In April, he came back and he said it will be September 16th. 1991. So now we’re months and months and a summer away. Everyone said he was crazy. Everyone said including all of us in the HR function said, you know, Roger, I know you want to be transparent. I know you want it. But look, we’re going to have a whole bunch of people leave. And he goes, well, wouldn’t that be better? Then having people who really wanted to leave. Stayed around and then they lose their position versus they went and found something else on their own. But we said, well, what if we lose people that we don’t want to lose? And he said, that’s just the price of it. That’s the price of it. We’ll be fine. We’ll be fine. And so at the beginning of September, we knew that it was going to be September 16th. And what Roger did and asked us all to do was to schedule everyone for that day and and say businesses closed that day. But you have a time. It was alphabetically where they would come in and they would have a conversation with their manager. And one of two things would happen. They would be invited to be a part of the new Frito-Lay. They were re recruited, if you will. Or they were told that they weren’t a part of the new Frito-Lay, and they were given a very generous severance package and great support services. And then we allowed those people to go home if they wanted to, and if they wanted to go in and clean out, they could. But if they wanted to go home, they could come back in on Friday. And we closed business on Friday, too, in order to give them a time that they could come in and not have to be worried about somebody watching and who’s leaving and who and who was staying. And the amount of people who thanked us for that approach was amazing. And again, that level of transparency is super hard. And it takes a lot of courage because you just don’t know what’s going to happen in that moment between. I’ve revealed what’s going to happen and when it actually happens, you know, because all kinds of bad things can happen and all the risk managers will tell you, oh, no, you can’t do that. Somebody is going to wipe the servers, somebody else is going to take all the furniture, somebody else is going to badmouth is in the press. You know, there goes everything on Glassdoor. But I believe that if you treat people like adults, they will act like adults. And if we treat people with respect, they will respect you back. And if you treat people like you want to be treated yourself, you follow the Golden Rule and done what you were supposed to do as a trusted leader. That’s good.

William Norvell: Words. Amen. Rusty, if I had one question to ask, it would be. You know, that sounds great. Sounds like you built a system. You executed it well. I’ve got a gut feeling that maybe some things didn’t go as planned. Or even there just were some really difficult conversations, even in the midst of a well-run process. Were there some difficult things that still just happened?

Rusty Rueff: Yeah, there were people who, even though they had been told, right. They weren’t surprised. They were mad. They were angry. They thought we made the wrong decision. And so that’s when all of the classic training of short conversations move people from your conversation to someone else who handles it. While you can, go ahead and do what you have to do. All of the classic training that you’re given to take yourself through these kinds of situations are really important because, yeah, absolutely. They were people that were mad. There were people. I mean, you would go back to 1991 at Frito-Lay because it was the first layoff ever. Believe it or not, we actually had as we came into work that day, we had a line of television stations and radio stations sitting outside our front door because this had never happened before. And everybody knew it was happening because we’d been that transparent. Right? So then we had to have, you know, our media people on the front line answering the questions. And we were the headline news that night, and the headline news can take you anyway. There were those that were. So, you know, we’re saying, wow, this was great treatment. There were other people who were saying, you know, what a failure, what a failure. The CEO should go, you know, the leadership team should go. And so you have to deal with all of those things. Human emotion will always be. I mean, because what you’re talking about is you’re talking about loss. And if any of us have ever had gone through any kind of loss, that’s not in our control, whether it’s personal or business, financial relationships, you know, some are more mature than others, but it it hurts no matter what. And you do run into a situation where people just, you know, are angry, totally angry. And we had that. And you’re going to have that every time. But again, you know, you can only be as integris as your own actions, and your integrity has to be that you have done the best that you can do and look yourself in the mirror and say, I’ve treated people like I wanted to be treated myself. And there’s not much more that I could do than that.

Joseph Honescko: Vic and Rusty both provide such helpful frameworks for what it might look like to perform lay offs lovingly, or at least as lovingly as you can. I know that I, as an entrepreneur, am just grateful for their transparency and vulnerability. It’s hard to share those kinds of difficult situations and just glad that they were able to do that. In this next in final section of the show. We’re going to keep that conversation going with the really interesting discussion that Henry, William and Rusty had a couple of years ago with Daniel Fong. He’s the founder of a large consumer brand called Million Dollar Baby, and we’re going to jump in with Daniel’s opening comments about his decision not to lay off anyone. And then we’ll listen in as the three hosts wrestle through that concept alongside him. There’s a lot of disagreement. There’s a lot of discussion, there’s a lot of debate. But it’s all done gracefully and with love towards one another and these different ideas. So here’s Daniel.

Daniel Fong: First of all, my intention is to stimulate not to advocate any duplication because no two persons have the same and no two companies are the same. What works at Million Dollar Baby will probably not work at your company if you simply copy what we do. It is not the doing that matters, but the being. The short term quality focus is based on my subscription to Matthew six 25-34, which is the do Not worry section in the sermon of the Mount. Verse 34 said, therefore, do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own for $1 million baby, I go with not about maximizing profit. That is not our reason for being I personally. Therefore, the company submits to the following doctrine. We express our love of God with our might, soul, mind and strength by being excellent in everything that we do and with every encounter. Yet our claim of excellence need to be confirmed, validated by all our neighbors, which includes our employees, our customers, and our suppliers. In that sense, our excellence is a reflection of how we love all our neighbors. It is what I call the rootedness of our being or the reason why we are in business. Profits or sales are just results. They are not our goals. Another significant difference between Million Dollar Baby is our attitude towards our employees. We do not have a human resource department. We do not treat our employees as resources that we acquire and discard. I coined the term talent management 30 years ago, and I am happy to notice that this term is becoming popular. Instead of paying lip service by claiming that our employees are like family and the most important asset of Million Dollar Baby at this time, we have a $10 million emergency fund that will allow us not to lay off a single employee for one year, even if our sales drop to zero. I do not believe it is morally, ethically, or biblically justifiable to use layoffs as a legitimate business tool. If we claim that our employees are truly our family members.

Henry Kaestner: So that’s fascinating. And I’ve been spending some amount of time thinking about this concept of never laying somebody off is fascinating to me. You couched it in this context of loving our neighbor, right? You’re very deliberate about that. And you talked about the suppliers and the customers and your employees, the people you come across. And you’re compelled to love your neighbor. And your sense is that if you haven’t planned appropriately and because of an economic downturn. You have to lay somebody off. You haven’t loved them. You haven’t loved them by having planning ahead. Now, that’s peculiar because it stands a little bit in opposition to your idea of not ever planning. Right. So those are two very interesting things that are kind of intention. One is always plan to make sure you have enough money to be able to make sure you don’t lay somebody off. And yet on the other hand, don’t overly plan. We don’t have a five year plan. I think that there’s a distinction here that you’re planning financially to have enough financial resources but not overly programing. What the activities are, you take it. Just unpack that a little bit. And then I think that William and Rusty, will pick up on this very novel concept of never laying anybody off.

Daniel Fong: Yeah, I think, Henry, you can see that I have been re framing the discussion of no laying off because I note that I’ve been practicing talking to a lot of people recently about this, and then a lot of people are having a lot of pushback. So I would say that the first is not a planning that’s not part of the doing. When I decided not to lay off everybody. I think that’s part of the definition of my being. So it should be part of the whole reason of actually running a business. Although that’s the theology behind the business. The challenge to everyone that I’ve talked to is that everyone, including Christian business people, would say that the purpose of a company is to maximize profit, right? So it seems like no one would ever even debate that. And that’s where I’m coming from, is that the rootedness of business is really not about making a profit. Profit is the result. So to me, the rootedness of the business is how I can express my love for God by glorifying with excellence and then loving my neighbor, the greatest Lord that Jesus Christ commands us to do. Should be to me the rootedness of my being and the reason why the company exists. And so with that as the rootedness, then what do you do with your employees? So to me, you can say it’s planning, but part of is that if you treat an employee just like a family member or whatever, then you have a different starting point. I understand the difficulty when I challenged people about the no layoff policy, because if you don’t think about that and then when the economy drops and disaster hit or something, yeah, then what are you going to do then? The Christian ways that you try to be as loving as possible to try to deal with and then use your laying off is inevitable because you never really sort of position the being of the company in terms of thinking that way. And that’s why you’re not prepared for that. So that to me is that I’m reframing is that we need to go back a little bit. You know, you can’t just now suddenly have no layoff policy when you’re not prepared for it. So to me, having the emergency fund is part of my being statement rather than my doing statement. It’s the being of the business.

Rusty Rueff: Yeah, I think it’s fascinating, Daniel. You know, if I reflect back and I think it was really the stock market crash in 1987, that changed some significant thinking about how companies thought about things, because prior to that, like I was part of the PepsiCo companies and Frito Lay, Frito Lay never Herman Lay would not allow people to be laid off. Right. And in 1991, we went through the first significant layoff in the company’s history. And it changed, I think, forever the tone and tenor of the relationship of the employee and the company, and not unlike Watson and how he ran IBM. Right. IBM was a lifetime employment company. People forget that he when you joined IBM, when we were coming up, you know, you were guaranteed lifetime employment. And then they they moved away from that. It changed the relationship. So I think it’s fascinating because in some ways you’re bringing back the past to the future and running counter to really this idea that profit is everything. Now, that being said, you know, let’s also remember, I think that when you take other people’s money, right? So if you’re an entrepreneur and you’ve taken other people’s money, whether that’s venture capital, who has an expectation from their limited partners for return, or you go public and now you’re a public company, you know, it’s much harder, you know, because they have expectations from shareholders. But what I am fascinated with is this idea of the emergency fund, because whether you’re a big company or a small company, you know, you could begin to think from day one about a cushion, the rainy day fund to say rather than immediately go to my labor line as my savings. I will draw on that fund first. And I see that as a very positive long term investment in the company. Right? You know, to have that and in some ways it really, you know. I’m sure when you talk to your employees and are they hear that you have that when you’re recruiting somebody, their first feeling has to be something like, you know, people must have felt from Watson when they talked about lifetime employment. It’s like, hey, you care that much? That’s pretty cool. That’s pretty cool. So I applaud you for it. I think it’s really probably hard for some of our listeners right now who are under the impression are under the influence of other people’s money. I’m on a board that would look at them go, are you crazy? But it’s really thought provoking. I really appreciate it.

William Norvell: I agree, the only thing William here I would comment is, you know, I had this conversation recently because a lot of my friends worked at Airbnb right before they went public. And, you know, as you might imagine, in Covid, at least in the very beginning stages, the business took a big hit, right? And they eventually laid off, I think it was 25% of the workforce. And then about three months later, they went public and the stock tripled. And, you know, Brian Chesky is worth $15 billion now. And the tension there though, right. Like I think the public markets were actually happy that they shared expenses. Right. So I think he actually got in some way rewarded for that. And I just think it’s a tough tension. I think it’s a profound thought because we had lots of conferences like, how is this guy that made $15 billion? Could have kept some people on stack because Airbnb is now, of course, recovered. Right. And the company’s doing incredibly well. And of course, people are going to start traveling again, like, how was there not a six month cushion? And I think he gave people six months severance. You know, it wasn’t just a horrific thing, but they did lose their jobs and they have to find a new one in the midst of a pandemic. And they work at a travel company, right. So I just think it’s a profound thought. And, you know, I just thank you for sort of going out and taking a risk. You know, I think we’ve talked Rusty and Henry a little bit about, you know, finding what Jesus would have for us in our business. You know, and I think you said it so. Well, Daniel one size fits one. Like what is Jesus calling you to do that is different right, than what the world tells you to do? I hope people think about that. I hope people think like, what could that be? Maybe it’s this. Maybe it’s an emergency fund for layoffs. Maybe it’s something else. Maybe it’s how to love them through having children or whatever it may be.

Daniel Fong: So comment on the emergency fund. It. Actually, we never really have to draw it down or we have to use that because we never really actually have to face that situation. But the funny thing is that we did actually have the fund use the emergency fund about five years ago. You know, when my son transitioned to CEO and I think she made some mistake in actually, doubling our inventory basically overnight by some glitch in the programing and the strategy. And that was helpful to have an emergency fund. And in terms of that, that I’m in. Right. It was pretty traumatic for us for about a couple of years. But so it it’s a that’s why I would say that sometimes, you know, when you do things with a different motivation, which is talk about the being, God will bless, you know, us because it was not really for a certain intention, but it can be very useful in other things, and it’s also very powerful. Last March, we were one of the, I think, if not the first company to actually shelter from home because my son and Mike, it’s just very, very protective of how about our employees and we really treat them as family members. So he said, why would I not do that if I’m very, very, you know, concern about the health issue? I should extend that to all my employees. And the first thing that we said, because we were anticipating at least a 50% drop in sales, at least because everything was shutting down and all that. So again, that was the time when we thought that we would have. So the first thing that we announced when we shelter from home is that there would be no layoffs. So just tell everybody just to be calm down and not to worry about that. And I’m just saying that you cannot believe how powerful that statement. Of course. And we’ve been repeating that throughout our quarterly meetings and stuff that I’ve been talking about. But to actually, right when the situation rises to say something like that, it’s really, really powerful to our company and to the morale of the whole whole company.

Joseph Honescko: So there you have it. Three perspectives on a very complex, difficult issue. And we don’t want to pretend that a podcast like this is going to answer all the questions you might have with something like this, and that’s why we really encourage people to get in faith driven entrepreneur groups where you can discuss and deal with these big ideas in community, with others who push you to seek the Lord in every decision you make. As a business owner, these groups have no cost, there’s no catch, and the hour long meetings start with a course of eight weeks and often extend beyond that. So if you want to find out more, go to faith driven entrepreneur.org/groups or visit the link in the show notes. Thanks for listening. We’ll catch you next time.

Recent Episodes

Why would a founder decide to never fire anyone?

Dylan Wilk, CEO of Human Nature, joins the Faith Driven Entrepreneur podcast to share the story behind the company’s no firing policy and to explain why he believes grace and forgiveness are the greatest HR policies.

He recounts a situation where an employee stole from the company and instead of firing him, Dylan chose to forgive and help him change.

This experience led Dylan to establish a written no firing policy and build an ecosystem of support within the company that is rooted in the belief that God does not give up on us.

Dylan emphasizes the importance of seeing the full person at work, understanding their struggles, and providing opportunities for growth and redemption.

Learn more about Dylan’s story in this short documentary.

Joseph Honescko: If you’re a frequent follower of the podcast, you might have noticed a bit of a trend week by week. We’ve been mixing up formats to try to show different elements of the faith driven movement. We love stories. We love roundtable discussions, we love targeted advice from experts, and we love interviews with people from around the world. So that’s why you’ve been getting a bit of all those things with a focus on particular topics. Recently we’ve been zooming in on company cultures. And last week we told the story about Human Nature, a company from the Philippines who has this wild no firing policy. We thought it’d be worthwhile to dive into that policy. How does an HR system based on Grace actually work day in and day out? And what can other entrepreneurs learn from this radical policy, even if they have no intention of implementing one themselves? I’m Joey Honescko and today on the Faith Driven Entrepreneur podcast, Justin Forman and I are going to unpack these questions and more with the CEO of Human Nature, Dylan Wilk. Let’s get into it. Welcome back, everyone to the Faith Driven Entrepreneur podcast. My name is Joey Honescko and I’m joined by Justin Forman and Justin. We’ve done almost 300 episodes, and I don’t think we’ve ever covered a no firing policy on the show. And we’re going to dive into it. We’re going to hear from Dylan, but I just want to address kind of from the start, that it’s a pretty intense policy. I mean, it sounds pretty radical to me. Justin, what do you think?

Justin Forman: Radical, indeed. There’s probably few topics that we’ve pushed into that are tough, painful, raw, emotional, so many difficult emotions swirling around it. But when you speak of intense, we have to also acknowledge that with us today is one take. Dylan. And I know that we say one take before, but when we were with Dylan, we had a chance to turn on the cameras, film their story. It’s the only interview I’ve ever done where I’ve asked one question and one question only, and then the guest takes you through a narrative. And so intense, indeed. Intense, difficult topic to wrestle with. But man a few better people that have thought more deeply about this and have lived it than Dylan. So Dylan, man, it’s great to have you here.

Dylan Wilk: Thanks so much, Justin. Thanks so much, Joey. Well, it sounds like I spoke too much on the last interview. Then you only got to say one thing, so I’ll try and keep my anwers is a bit shorter this time.

Justin Forman: No, it was great, man. It is so good to be with you again. For those of you guys who have not seen it, and this is just an early chance to point out something that’s obvious to Joey and I, but there is just an incredible story that our team put together, showing Dylan and his story. And we’re going to get into that today. But what a gift it is to being able to unpack that in a video sense, but also to kind of get the longer form behind the scenes here today. And so, you know, we’re going to hear, yeah, some of these topics that hopefully leaves you in a place as a listener just wrestling with this, that there is not a prescriptive way to land this, but there’s more of just a wrestling that we want to invoke in that today. Joey. I mean, I think that’s kind of what we’re getting at. We’re not really landing the plane, but we’re really kind of wrestling through the difficult nature of that conversation.

Joseph Honescko: Yeah, I think that that’s the goal for these podcasts, right. Especially these kind of conversational ones where we can dive deep into this thing and you might walk away listening to it and disagree or have notes. But our hope is that at some point you’re convicted, you’re challenged, and you’re provoked just in these ways of saying like, man, what is God calling me to do in my business? How might I think differently about this? And with this such a heavy topic and such a big topic? Let’s get into it a little bit, Dylan, and kind of just give us an overview in this story. You tell this kind of wonderful little narrative about a particular employee a few years ago who kind of the trade trust. And that’s sort of where you started talking about this no firing policy. So maybe just for listeners grabbing some context, just give us a little overview of that particular story and then talk about how that sort of no firing policy was birthed out of that, or how it was sort of confirmed by that. Just give us some context here.

Dylan Wilk: Yeah. Okay. So we didn’t start the company with this policy in place, but we’d been going about, I think 3 or 4 years. And one of our very first employees, we discovered they had been stealing. And the way that he was doing it, he was tasked to go out and buy small supplies for the company, you know, light bulbs, things like that. And he would only buy from companies where they would give a handwritten receipt. Over here in the Philippines, that’s quite common among smaller businesses. So they would give a handwritten receipt and he would change maybe an eight to a 0 or 0 to an eight, or add an extra zero, you know, and he would make it look as though the items were more expensive than they really were. And so when I first found out, I was really furious, you know, he was so trusted. He used to even take my kids to school from time to time. That’s how close he was to us, one of our first ten employees. And I was really devastated. So I could not see him for, 3 or 4 days. And I was just praying, Lord, what do I do? And the one word that kept coming to me when I would pray was just forgive, forgive, forgive, forgive. And I thought, what? That’s so unfair, Lord, you know what are you talking about? He’s not going to learn anything. He’s just going to get away with it. Is that how this ends? You know, but I kept praying and I kept just getting that word forgive. So I started thinking, okay, so. So what does that mean? How do I do that in a practical way? And so I called the guy in and I sat down with him and I said, I’ve been reminding myself that you’re a good dad and I’ve made a decision because he had a little daughter. And I said, I’ve made a decision. I’m not going to give up on you. I’m going to try and find a way to help you get through this. But I want you to explain to me, how could you do this to us after everything we’ve done to try and help you? And the guy looked at me and he started to cry, and he jumped up and he ran out of the room. And he was in his early 50s. He came back a few days later asking to see me, and we sat down again, and he confessed to me that all his life he’d been a thief. Every job he’d ever had since being a teenager. He’d stolen. He’d get caught, he’d be fired. And then he’d think, okay, I got my punishment, and he’d move on and do it again. And he said, this was the very first time when he realized he was not going to be fired. And I was appealing to his heart, you know, how could you do this to us? It’s the first time he felt shame and he said he went home. He couldn’t even tell his wife what had happened at first, even though she knew he was a thief, she knew he was doing this. He couldn’t even tell her what had happened. And he said he couldn’t look himself in the mirror. And so in the end, you know, he paid back all the money. We suspended him for, I think, a couple of weeks. We changed his role. He wasn’t allowed to touch the money any more. You know, you don’t let the alcoholic into the bar. So we retrained him. We taught him how to clean air conditioning units and things like that. And it took, you know, a while to start to trust him again. For a year or so. He wasn’t allowed in the office alone, you know, and we had all of these things. But ultimately he changed. Ultimately he changed. He’s still with us now, ten years later, I think 11 years now. And he’s a happy guy. He used to be a very grumpy guy. He was always moaning, you know, but now he’s changed. He’s a changed man. And that’s one less thief on the streets. And you know, what I realized was afterwards trying to process it the moment when you make your biggest mistake in life. And yet you realize God still loves you anyway. God still wants to find a way to transform you. You know, that can be the moment at which somebody’s whole life changes. And as an employer, you know, we find ourselves in that situation frequently where people mess up badly. But I read a saying once, you know, a bad leader blames his followers when things go wrong. And I think that temptation is very strong as business people, as entrepreneurs, as employers to do that, that when things go wrong, the immediate response is, okay, you messed up. You know, there are 100 other people that want your job. It’s time to go. But when we slow down, when we ask God what he really wants, we come up with something different. And this was brought home to me actually in a different way many years ago. When I first arrived in the Philippines, 20 years ago, I’d only been here a couple of weeks, and I was brought to the wake of a young man, a teenager, and he used to be a gang member. He used to even hold up busses at gunpoint and rob all the people on the bus. And he was in a very feared gang. And when my father in law, who was a missionary who worked with gang members when he entered his area, the guy decided to change. He laid down his weapons. He gave his life to Christ. And he got a job working in a candle factory. And in one day, he made a mistake and he got fired from his job. And so he went home and he was asking himself, what am I going to do? And he thought, okay, I have to go back to the gang. That’s the only way I can survive. Nobody else is going to give me another chance. And so rather than go back to the gang, he took a gun and unfortunately shot himself. And that always stuck with me. You know, losing your job for some people can be no big deal, but for others, it can be really, you know, life and death almost. And so my bottom line is, you know, if God doesn’t give up on me with all the mistakes I made in life, all the things I committed, then I shouldn’t give up on the people that he sends for us to take care of.

Joseph Honescko: Yeah. It’s such a powerful story, and it’s really talking about grace and mercy. And like you said, the way that your own faith and your own encounter with Jesus and the love and mercy of Jesus has kind of shaped the way that you engage with your employees. There’s a second part of that which is making this a policy and making this a stance. So you have this story with this one individual where you have that interaction, at what point does it become something that isn’t just a case by case situation? Or maybe it still is a case by case situation, but at what point do you decide to say, hey, this is something that we actually implement as a team, this sort of grace as the best HR policy. When did that become something that was solidified for human nature?

Dylan Wilk: Yeah, actually it was with that very first case, because when I was processing it afterwards and praying about it some more, you know, that’s what I felt that we should do, because my tendency is not to forgive. Honestly, my tendency is not to be filled with grace. You know, when someone steals, I don’t feel like forgiving them. I don’t feel like pouring my time, my resources into helping them. You know, the temptation is very strong to simply use my position, my power to to get rid of them, to retaliate. You know, but God says no. And he was so clear with me when I was praying about it that I realized, I’ve got to make this a public statement, because maybe if I didn’t have such a close relationship with that guy, I would have easily fired him. I would have just got rid of him. But it’s partly because we were so close, and I was so hurt that I prayed about the situation. And so when I did go through it afterwards praying, it was very clear to me that I have to be public with this. I had to talk about my team, and I talked to the other founders. At that time, we were still a small team and said, look, this is what I think we need to do. I think God’s calling us to put in place a written no firing policy, make that public. And so they were scared, you know, of the policy. I think almost every business person would be scared of that. I’ve never met someone, actually, who thinks that’s a good idea. Every business person I’ve met thinks it’s a terrible idea. But over the years, I’ve seen how it has really helped transform a lot of people. He was the first. But we’ve come across others over the years and, you know, so when you make that declaration, when you put that policy down and you say, this will be it, you can’t just say that and then hope everything will be okay. You have to kind of build an ecosystem around it. And so that led us down this path of really strengthening our HR team, really trying to hire people who also trained counselors who had dealt with maybe drug addicts, dealt with people with marital problems. You know, because when you say that, when you say to an employee, I’m never going to give up on you, that’s like a marriage. You know, it’s saying that’s no divorce and you’re going to uncover. So many issues that they’re dealing with that you’re not equipped to handle. If you’re just trying to do that on your own as a business owner. And so our next step was to really strengthen our HR team and look for people. Our entire HR team is now made up of people who are very committed Christians. Some of them are counselors. We have three pastors on our team. As chaplains. We have people who have dealt with drug addicts in the past, you know, and all of these issues. We try and look for people who are going to be capable of helping our people through the worst storms of their life, because when someone messes up badly in work, you know, there can be a number of reasons for that. It could be that they’re just no good at their job. You know, they haven’t been trained properly, in which case the correct response is to figure out how to train them. It could be that they just don’t have the skills. They’ll never be able to do it, but we still hire them. I still feel that, you know, we’re partly to blame for that situation. So we need to find a place to put them where they can thrive. And thankfully, our company is a lot bigger now. We can move people around, we can shuffle them and try them in different roles. You know, sometimes they were not treated well at work, sometimes they’re not getting on well with their manager, but often they have a family problem. They have something going on at home that’s leading them to perform badly. And those are the times when you really need to dig down and show compassion and build that trusting relationship where they can open up to you. So we have people on our team who are much better than me at this. I’m not usually the one to sit down with people when things go wrong. They’re going through problems. That’s not my strength I have. So we have others on the team who are good at that.

Joseph Honescko: So you’re talking a lot about this in a way. Again, it’s this making grace, this policy. It sounds so much like you’re seeing the full person at work. You’re seeing the fact that they have other factors that might be affecting their job, rather, that’s at home, or maybe it’s skills and just trying to adapt to that. And there seems to be an element of with the person you talked about in the original story, there was a retraining, there was a new job, there was a new role they had to step into. So talk a little bit about how that plays a part. If someone does maybe break that trust in a particular role, how do you then go about retraining them, refining that position where they might fit better or where they might? It might even be a step backwards in their career. But again, it’s this way of saying, we’re not going to let you go. We’re not going to trust you in the same direction, but we still will find these opportunities. What does that sort of retraining look like for you? Yeah.

Dylan Wilk: So, you know, ultimately it comes from a place of looking at ourselves as shepherds, not just employers. And, you know, there’s that verse in Matthew where Jesus says, you know, you can’t serve both God in money. You have to choose. You can’t have two gods, you know, either going to put the money first or you’re going to put God first. And if you put God first, genuinely, you know, that’s also very difficult when it comes to work. But when you’re able to do it, then you will feel him pushing you more and more towards loving your people. And that’s something that is also quite alien to a lot of business people. But I want to encourage you that you can love your people because God is faithful, and he will always put enough good people around you that you can put up with the one that you want to fire, you know? And so, yes, we start with that point as being a shepherd. And I learned something about shepherds, which is that when they have a wandering sheep, a sheep that keeps going astray, you know, what a good shepherd will do is? He will actually break the leg of the sheep and then carry the sheep around his neck while the leg heals. And that’s, you know, pretty difficult work for the shepherd. He’s carrying this wandering sheep around for a few weeks. But what usually happens is when the sheep is healed, he’s got so used to being close to the shepherd that he doesn’t wander off anymore. Now, I’ve never been a shepherd, so I can’t 100% vouch for the veracity of that story. But I’ve read it and it sounds to make sense to me. So that’s kind of the approach that we take with these people that we think of as wandering sheep. Okay, there has to be an element, first of all, of breaking the leg. There has to be an element where they feel the seriousness of what they did. And so we have to have the element of restitution along with and the retraining. And so that can take several forms depending on what it is. You know, there is generally some form of suspension if there’s money involved, of course, they have to repay the money, and then it’s usually a demotion of some sort of a move to another team where they’re starting at a lower level. So we had another one just recently, and this was a girl working in our finance team, and one of her roles was to count the cash and take care of the vault. And we didn’t have a strict enough policy in terms of handling the cash. So she got tempted, unfortunately, and she took around. $600, which, of course, we immediately noticed. I mean, the cash counts are continuous. So she thought she could get away with it. She knew part of our process. She didn’t know the whole process. And so she didn’t realize that it would be discovered very quickly. And so she was found out. And again, I prayed, you know, again, I was furious. I don’t want to give you the idea that I’m an angel when it comes to these. I still get, you know, upset. I still get, you know, angry from time to time. So we sat her down just the other day with our HR head. It was me and her. And so we explained to her that she can’t go back to the finance team. You know, that she can’t go back to that work. And we were going to look for other work. And I said to her, you’re at a crossroads with your life. You know, you can run away and you can probably start again in another company, or you can face this, and I feel like God is really reaching out to you through this, and he wants you to start again. You’re still young. You can still start again. You can still build your life again. And I want that for you so badly. I don’t want you to think of yourself as a thief. I don’t want you to think of yourself as someone who’s failed. We want to help you get through this. But you’ve got this decision to make. So are you willing to be a packer? If that’s all we have for you? And so she cried and cried, and then she said, yes, I’m willing to do it. I want to start again. And so turns out there was something better than that. There’s an opening for a trainee in our consumer research team. It’s very entry level. And so she’ll go there and she’ll start there, you know, and we had to explain to the head of that team what she’d done and asked the head of the team, are you willing to take her? And the head of that team also thought about it. She’s also a Christian. And in the end she said, okay, if this is that girl’s best chance, then I’m willing to take her in. And so, you know, this is a culture that we’ve built in the company of second chances. It’s a culture where the leaders in different teams know that from time to time, they might be faced with someone in their own team that they can’t fire, and they have to find a way of helping that person. Or it might be that they’re asked to bring in someone who’s messed up badly in another team. And so it’s something we can talk about with our leaders that this might happen. And, you know, it doesn’t happen regularly. I’d say it happens maybe once a year or less, once every couple of years.

Justin Forman: That’s such powerful story of what you’re alluding to and what you’re talking people through. And one of the many things that we were struck by filming with you guys was your HR director was talking about this idea of grace as one of the best HR policies. What I love about what you’re talking about, as you’re saying that it’s not an easy road back, whether people have failed in their personal life, in their marriage and different things and mistakes that they’ve made, there’s there’s forgiveness, but there’s still a road back. And what you’re talking about is that you’re outlining a path for people to choose your outlining, a path for people to take, and you’re walking them through that path and taking those steps. So the entrepreneur that’s listening to this is probably wrestling with the tension of saying, okay, wait a second, how do we balance this idea of like, if I get known for extending grace, will that grace be abused? And what you’re saying is like, there’s no limit to it, and you’re embodying a lot of the seven times 70, like multiple times. When you think about this, like, what’s that tension that you face of like being known for this? And at some level, could you be taking advantage for it?

Dylan Wilk: Yeah. So that’s a great question. And that is the fear of a lot of business people. You know, if somebody knows I’m not going to be fired, why will I work? That’s the fear. But what I found in reality is it’s the other way around almost all the time. You know, that if somebody messes up and then we say to them, your family is safe, we’re still going to look after you. The bottom line is we’re not going to give up on you forever more. That person wants the company to thrive. And actually, we work a lot with the poor people who haven’t been given a lot of chances in life. Most of our employees are from the poor, and that is life changing for them as well, because up until that point, they’ve always thought of themselves as disposable. You know, I’m useless, I’m worthless, I’m nothing. You know, maybe it’s not the same in the American context, but over here in the Philippines, that’s often the mindset of the poor. This won’t last. And so when we say to them, we will not give up on you. That is life changing for them. And those people want the company to thrive. Those people want the company to flourish. And so it’s often the opposite of what we think, you know. But of course, it’s not just as simple as we forgive you and you carry on. People do know some of these stories. People know what those people that messed up went through to rebuild themselves and their careers in the company. But I’ve found, honestly that it is one of the policies I’m the most happy about that we have in our company. And again, it’s not always the best for the bottom line. You know, it takes time. It takes effort. But if we’re called to be good shepherds and if we lean into that role, then God will show us, you know, give us the wisdom on how to make these difficult situations come out for the best. It doesn’t always work out. You know, there are times when people just choose to leave. They’re found out, they can’t face the shame, and then we never see them again. That’s happened twice. In both cases, we tried to look for those people actually, and at least have a conversation with them, and we couldn’t find them anymore. So it doesn’t always work out. Sometimes people move to another role. They’re not very good at that job, you know? But there isn’t a single time when I regretted this policy. And, you know, I remember the story of Solomon when the Queen of Sheba came to see Solomon, and she was impressed not just by his palace and his wisdom and so on. But one thing that impressed her was how well Solomon provided for his servants. And it says that she saw, you know, the uniforms of his servants and how they served and everything. And she, as a nonbeliever, was impressed because she saw how Solomon’s servants were treated. And that’s always stuck with me as well, that, if we are going to give good witness to the Christian faith, then there should be something different in our companies where people see, oh, you know, there is grace extended here, and it’s working. It’s actually working. You know, it’s not just a bleeding heart who is being taken advantage of. And, you know, we have other policies in our company as well to take care of bad behavior. So, you know, for example, if you come to work late regularly, we’re going to send you to the farm and you’re going to start work at 4:00 am instead of 9 a.m. for a week, you know. So we’ve done that a number of times and it’s always works. You know, people never come to work late again after that. So we’re trying to be intelligent in how we figure out how to solve behavioral issues. And I would say at least 90% of the time we figured that out with God’s help. It’s not our wisdom, but it’s God’s wisdom.

Justin Forman: Powerful story. So I want to come back to something you said earlier. You said something about this idea of like when you’ve made a decision to understand that this is about something more than money. It gives you a freedom to explore things that you might not otherwise have think of, and you might gives you a chance to turn things upside down. So this episode is airing right after a little bit more of the behind the movement, which is a wonderful way of looking at kind of the ins and outs of the video story of what we’ve produced, and Joey put together something in how I built this kind of radio labs kind of journey of telling this story. But in that story, I want you to just unpack and just kind of give a quick flyover of, like, personally, how did you come to this place of dethroning the power that money had on your life, on how you viewed money as a tool for one end and how it completely flipped. So give everybody just kind of a quick flyover of how you came to that place.

Dylan Wilk: Yeah, I mean, I was incredibly blessed because my first business became extremely successful when I was still very young. I was 25 years old when it was floated on the London Stock Exchange IPO, and it was actually the first dotcom business on the London Stock Exchange. So it flew very quickly. The business at one point had a valuation of over $1 billion, which to a 25 year old is ridiculous. You know, it’s crazy. But I remember lying awake one night and I was wondering why I had everything I could imagine. I had Ferraris, Porsches, BMW. I used to go to work by helicopter if I didn’t want to sit in traffic. Fly around by private jet. And I realized that even I had all this stuff. Life felt so empty and I felt very guilty about the life I was living. I was not raised rich, I was raised poor. And I realized I was not doing anything good with my life. I was just selling computer games, and I didn’t deserve all of this. And I got on my knees at the side of my bed and I started to pray, Lord, why am I rich? You know, you hear a lot of people praying, Lord, why am I poor? Right? But I was praying. Why did you bless me? It made no sense. And I got a very strong sense to leave that business. So I went around the world trying to find something I could help, and eventually came to the Philippines and gave away almost all my money over the next few years to help build communities for the poor in the Philippines. And so when we started this business, it was with that background. It was with that history of knowing that no matter how much money I had, it would not make me happy. And that was not the path to happiness. In fact, I realized this big difference between pleasure and happiness. Money will buy you pleasure. You know everything that has a price tag, a new car, new clothes, new vacation, bigger house. But whatever you buy, you become bored of that after a little while and you need something else. It’s like an insatiable fire. You always have to fuel it with more money, with more stuff. And happiness is very different. Happiness comes from fulfilling God’s purpose with your life and from the relationships that you build. And I understood that so clearly because of this first business that I had that was all built on greed and selfishness, and it led me to feeling empty, you know? And now in human nature, when we started this second business, we made that decision at the very beginning. God, we’re going to put you first. We’re going to put you first. It’s Matthew 6:33. Seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things will be given to you. And so that verse that you cannot serve God and money, that used to scare me in my first business, my computer game business, because it was all about money. But in this business, thanks to that experience, we were able to put God first. And we’ve seen how he has been so faithful. There have been times in the past 15 years of human nature that we were on the verge of bankruptcy, and during the pandemic, we had nothing left, literally nothing left. And I remember sitting in front of my laptop and I had a list of all our employees names, just looking at those names and trying to figure out because we couldn’t meet payroll, who am I going to lay off, you know, and I couldn’t do it. I could not pick a single name. And I was in tears in front of my laptop. And I just pray, Lord, you said in Proverbs that those who give to the poor are lending to you, and you will repay. Well, it’s time to pay up. Lord, you know that was my prayer. I’ve got to collect or we’re not going to make it. And we have this miracle that happened a couple of weeks later where somebody posted this random video on TikTok. We didn’t even use TikTok as a company, and this video somehow got a million views. We sold tens of thousands of our most profitable product, and we were okay. And I felt that God was saying, well done, son. You know, you stuck with me. I’m going to take care of you. And there’ve been a number of situations like that over the years where we were on the verge of bankruptcy, or we had a big cashflow crunch and God came through. And when you do put him first, when you do say to him, okay, God, I’m going to trust you on this. This is what you say. I can’t see how it can work from a business point of view. So you’re going to have to step in and help me. He will he will step in and he will fill in those gaps. And so, you know, money, no matter how much you have it, will never make you happy. You’ll never get to the end of it. But when you decide to put God first, when you’re able to make that leap and say, okay, God, this is not going to be easy, but I’m going to trust you. You get this freedom, you get this peace, even when these painful situations come, you know, bottom line, if you don’t give up on people, God won’t give up on you. I can just share with you that after 15 years of really making that decision to put God first, he has always come through and we’ve never, never regretted putting him first.

Joseph Honescko: That’s powerful. Dylan. That’s a great statement. I’m thinking about the way we’ve been talking kind of over this year on the podcast about this idea that the church is winning and that there’s wins happening in the church, and that the activity of a faith driven entrepreneur, even if things look countercultural or upside down, it’s a trading up. It’s a victory that we have by doing things that sometimes look like defeat. And just the way you just described that, of just the freedom you feel by stepping into the grace that God has given you, and that now is kind of a ripple effect that you’re offering to your employees and to the company as a whole. It’s really creating this whole culture of grace and lives are being changed because of that. And so that’s just an incredible story. And we’re just grateful for your testimony as we come to a close here. You’ve already brought up so many scriptures, but we love ending every podcast episode with just what the Lord is teaching our guests recently. So is there maybe a particular verse, or just something in your quiet time or prayer that you’ve found that has just really spoken to you at this time?

Dylan Wilk: Yeah one of my most favorite verses is John 10:10, where Jesus said, the thief comes to steal and kill and destroy, but I have come that they should have life and live it to the full. And I love that verse. I’m always trying to find new ways to put that into action in our work, for our employees, particularly in their lives. How can you be a good shepherd? How can you bring fullness of life into your employees lifestyles? Of course, there’s only so much we can do. But, you know, I’m always mulling over that verse, and we have a lot of policies that have come to us thanks to just meditating on that particular verse. Our God is a God of blessing. You know, I don’t want you to feel, by the way, that I’m on the verge of bankruptcy all the time. No we’re not. We’re a strong company. We’re a stable company. Now. I live in a nice house. My kids go to great schools. You know, we are not in need, but, you know. So I don’t believe God wants you to give up everything and be poor. Poverty in the Bible is always a curse. It’s never described as a blessing. So I don’t want you to get the wrong idea. So it’s fullness of life coming from John 10:10. How can you bring fullness of life? Don’t be afraid to love your employees. Don’t be afraid to get involved in some of the messy situations and just ask God for his wisdom. Lord, how am I going to bring good out of bad? How am I going to address this? So I really hope that helps.

Joseph Honescko: Yeah. Thank you so much, Dylan. Life and life to the full, abundant life. And that’s what we’re all desiring. And that’s what’s only found in Christ. So thank you so much, Dylan, for joining us. Thanks, Justin, for joining me again. And thanks to you for listening. We’ll, catch you next week. Thanks for listening to the Faith Driven Entrepreneur podcast. Our ministry exists to equip and resource entrepreneurs just like you with content and community. We know entrepreneurship can be a lonely journey, but it doesn’t have to be. We’ve got groups that meet in churches, coffee shops, living rooms, and boardrooms around the world. Find one in your area or volunteer to lead one and bring this global movement to your own backyard. There’s no cost, no catch, just connection. Find out more at Faith Driven entrepreneur.org. Episode Transcript

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