At the helm of a broken company, with no operating capital or viable product offering, Patrick Colletti set out to rebuild an organization with loads of debt and no clear product or market presence. Patrick shares the story of this incredible turnaround and what it means to have a “refounder” mindset.

Episode Transcript

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

William Norvell: That explains it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brian Roland: How did you find it?

Rusty Rueff: Yeah, that's pretty awesome.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brian Roland: Standard text messaging rates.

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

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

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

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

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