Episode 250 - How this Entrepreneur Helps His Employees Bring Faith to Work with Brock Bukowsky
Do you ever find yourself afraid of going through with a spiritual integration plan because you’re not sure how it will be perceived?
It’s okay if you do. When you look at the state of the world today, there are plenty of reasons to be skeptical. On the surface, it seems that Christians are forced to be less vocal about their faith in the marketplace, and in many ways, that may be true.
But today’s guest, Brock Bukowsky shows that it is possible to bring your faith to work and to help others to do the same.
Brock is the co-founder of Veterans United Home Loans, which specializes in helping veterans and service members obtain a home loan by taking advantage of benefits they have earned. Today, the company has over 3,000 employees, yet Brock has still managed to find ways to care for the spiritual lives of each of them, regardless of their religious background.
He joins the show today to talk about the practical ways organizational leaders can implement these structures in their own businesses and share some of his own powerful story.
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All opinions expressed on this podcast, including the team and guests, are solely their opinions. Host and guests may maintain positions in the companies and securities discussed. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as specific advice for any individual or organization.
Episode Transcript
Transcription is done by an AI software. While technology is an incredible tool to automate this process, there will be misspellings and typos that might accompany it. Please keep that in mind as you work through it.
Rusty Rueff: Welcome back, everyone, to the Faith Driven Entrepreneur podcast. When we look into the state of things today, it's pretty easy to get discouraged. I mean, on the surface, it seems that Christians are forced to be less vocal about their faith in the marketplace. And in some ways that might be true. Today's guest, though, Brock Bukowsky, shows that it's possible to bring your faith to work and help others to do the same. Brock is the co-founder of Veterans United Home Loans. They specialize in helping veterans and service members obtain a home loan by taking advantage of benefits they've earned. Today, the company has over 3000 employees and Brock has still managed to find ways to care for the spiritual lives of each and every one of them, regardless of their religious background. He joins the show today to talk about the practical ways organizational leaders can implement these structures in their own businesses and share some of his own very powerful story. Let's listen in.
Henry Kaestner: Welcome back to the feature of not from our podcast. I'm here with William and Rusty. William and Rusty, it seems to me that God seems to have chosen some of his finest to get out there and be in the mortgage business. Of course we know, Casey, but there are a bunch of examples. And, you know, few people have had to scalel as today's guest.
Rusty Rueff: You know, in some ways it makes a lot of sense to me because what are you doing when you're in the mortgage business? You're helping others, right? You're helping others realize a dream, a dream of a home or a business in particular, you know, a home for a mortgage. And what does a home mean? A home means a family. What does a family mean? A family means, you know, the joy of bringing God inside of it. And yeah, so a little bit of servant leadership going on here when you're in the mortgage business.
Henry Kaestner: Yeah. You're with people at a real special moment in time, right? I mean, I think about, you know, I get married to Kimberly and then we thought, gosh, you know, we're really and maybe this is just us buying into the American dream. It's like I just getting married is a big start. But, you know, if we can have a home and then we can raise a family and then we're rooted in a community and it's kind of a special thing about buying a home. I don't know if that's uniquely American or not, but I'm grateful.
Rusty Rueff: And it's the beginning of generational wealth, right? The chance for generational wealth. If you don't have that home, it's pretty tough to think that you're going to be able to put something aside for another generation.
Henry Kaestner: Yeah, indeed. William
William Norvell: Yeah, I mean, and so you guys know sometimes my esoteric Bible knowledge takes over. So I was trying to think what God would have to say in a scripture about home buying. The only thing I can come up with is I know it's a place where lots of people don't understand because it's a large purchase that a lot of times you only do once. And so the opportunity to step into that transaction is a place that I think is so life giving because so many people don't understand large contracts in their stories or stories. With the housing crisis we've all lived through where people didn't understand what they were doing. And so when I see redemptive outlooks on an industry that matter so much and can get you in so much trouble, if done poorly to have faith driven people leaning into that is something that's really fantastic. But I'm also going to ask Brock for some random esoteric Bible scriptures to lead his practice of mortgage lending.
Henry Kaestner: I bet he's got them I bet he's got them.
William Norvell: I know, I know. I'm giving him a little early window into what's coming.
Henry Kaestner: Well, without further ado, Brock, it's great to have you on the program. Thank you for spending time with us. Thank you for the the heart and the mission you have of bringing that dream of homeownership to a segment of society and beyond. But that's really important. I mean, those that have served their country, helping them to get out there and experience that joy of homeownership, the opportunity to build generational work, to start the family, to be involved in the community and all those things. It's an incredibly important contribution and marketplace. And we're grateful for you spending some time with us. Thank you.
Brock Bukowsky: I appreciate you guys have me love what you're doing. Thank you.
Henry Kaestner: So just want to get into what you're doing a bit and there's something really important about where we going to get to today, which is can you have a spiritual integration where you can bear witness to your Christian faith in a business that has achieved some level of scale, some a number of people that we talk to or entrepreneurs at scale are thinking, well, gosh, when I have five or seven employees, I can be a little bit more open about my faith. But at some point in time, you know, when I get up to a couple of hundreds or in your case a couple of thousands, that's going to break down because somebody is going to take offense and I'm going to find myself compromising my ability to do my work well. So maybe I need to tone it down. I think you've taken a different tack and we're going to explore that today. But I just want to get into it a bit here. I know you brought in a chaplain. You do book clubs and faith forums and you do all this in a space where people have different beliefs. We'll, dive into some of the details, these initials later, but start us off by telling us a little bit about why you thought these were all important. Explore. You're running your company. You're a Christian. What made you want to create this kind of culture for your employees?
Brock Bukowsky: Yeah, I would say so. It started off we started the company 2002, so 20 years ago. I grew up in the church, but I would say looking back, I [...] Christian. When we started the company over those first five years of the company, this my brother and I, we started growing slowly and we were a point where I hadn't any kids yet. I just get married, but I had a lot more time, you know, it was work. And then we could hang out with people at work. We'd go to Happy Hours, we'd have golf events with our employees, we'd do both. And eventually we just got to know employees real well and became friends with our coworkers. Right. And it was a thing where we just cared about them. They cared about us, and we were loving where things were going. And then about five years in 2007 and I could share more about this later, but I had a process that really changed me. And I would say when I became a Christian five years in and when that happened, it really changed the way I looked about things. And I had seen this big change in my life. I mean, it's complete change to where now I saw myself, Hey, I'm going to be in heaven someday. I'm going to be in heaven with Jesus. And it gave me this just this lasting peace I never had before. And it was something that I wanted for all my friends and all my coworkers I'd spent the last five years with. I want heaven for them, right? I want this lasting peace for them. We need to make something happen here. Mortgage world fun, we're doing a lot of great things here, but that's really nothing in comparison to the big picture. Right. To heaven. And so that's why I said, Hey, we need to get something going here at Veterans United and I'd like to get some things going. And we started it real slow, but it was out of a just a love and care for my friends. My coworkers wanted them to have what I had.
Henry Kaestner: So it happened five years in.
Brock Bukowsky: So the experience that happened, that kind of changed everything for me. Yeah. So again, I grew up 32 years of my life going to church. My grandpa was a pastor, went to his church. You know, I probably said I was a Christian, but I was really just going through the motions and I don't think I didn't get it. I didn't see my need for Jesus. Church was, to me, more about just going in and learning how to be a little bit better person and trying to follow these rules. I was learning, but I think I missed the big picture. I missed the Gospel and 2007, one of my coworkers, we were hanging out at happy hour and she said, Hey, why don't you come to church with me and my husband? And I said, Well, you know, I go to church once in a while and I said, No, why don't you just come with me to our church? Okay? So I gave it a shot. Different church than I had been to in the past, was enjoying it was good message. I thought it was a pretty good sermon and everybody gets up to sing and I see the song we're going to sing and it's titled I'm So Sick. I was like, I'm not sick. You know, I'm this. We got this good business. We're taking care of people. I'm not going to stand up here and say I'm sick. Let's kind of gave them a dirty look like I know why you got me here. They sing. I'm not sing I just got to stand there, go home. But something hit me there at church that day that was different than the first 32 years. And she invited me back about midweek.
Henry Kaestner: Despite the dirty look.
Brock Bukowsky: Despite the dirty look. Yes. Let's be back. Okay. I guess I'll go back. I'm not even sure why I went back with them, but went back to church with them that next week and then started going regularly with them. And a lot of scripture was being presented, a lot of scripture up on the board there. We'd read through and it's just more than I had seen in the past. I realized 32 years growing up, going to church, I'd never actually read a Bible on my own. I mean, maybe picked up a Bible and read through a verse with people at church or maybe in Sunday school. I've never like had my own Bible sat down and read through a chapter. And so one morning before work, grabbed the Bible, went to a Starbucks and said, I'm going to I'm just going to read a couple chapters. Starting the book of Matthew. And as I started reading, I read through all 28 chapters, [...] before work. It took me about 2 hours or something. But as I was just going through that, it just sort of hit me. Yeah, I'm reading about Jesus, reading about his life, and it hit me that way. I am sick, right? I don't live this life that you live. I've got lots of problems. I mess up all the time. I don't have a lot of boundaries for myself and I need Jesus. I need to be a lot more like Jesus than I need him. I need him. If there is this heaven, the only way I'm getting in is through what he did, not through this mess that I've made of my life. And that's kind of, I'd say, right, really, that I don't know if it's a moment or more of a process, but now that was this big switch in my life. And then there was over that next few months, it was like I got more into it, more into it. Committed to getting into my Bible every morning before work, committed to trying to really start doing a little bit of prayer, which I never really done. And then I just felt this draw like, I want my coworkers to know about Jesus. I want them to see what's been going on with me and tell them about Jesus.
Henry Kaestner: So when you talk about realizing that you hadn't had a lot of boundaries, is that a way of you saying that there is some amount of confession going on?
Brock Bukowsky: Yeah, I would say I think I was always we were our parents raised. We were good to other people who weren't going to like, you know, dump on anybody. We took care of people. But it was yeah, a lot of stuff, a lot of boundaries for myself. I'm not hurting others. I could kind of do whatever. Yeah, yeah. You know, went out and party too hard. But look at this guy. Murdered somebody. I'm okay, You know, selling drugs. I'm okay. I'd take a few too many beers, whatever it was. And so I can always just kind of make excuses, you know? I'm okay. I got this, and I really didn't see this. This need for Jesus, right? Yeah. 32 years of my life. And until I, like, read all about him and how he lives and how he thinks, and you know what he did. And then I was like, wait, I am way off for that.
Henry Kaestner: Yeah. So we had very similar paths. I grew up in this anomaly Christian home. We went to church, but it wasn't until 28 that I came to faith. I was coming to faith through reading the Bible and through the grace of God is the person who ended up answering a lot of my questions on that. He said, Listen, super important. So, you know, it's been a desire to read the Bible. This brought you to faith. Don't stop, do it every day. And so I continued to do that. And our audience knows enough to know that I talk about the Nicky Gumbel, Bible one year app, but it was just on a run this week and I was listening to it again and I just thinking, This is the most amazing book ever. And it's either the most incredible outlandish work of fiction ever, which is. Worthy of reading it just because we read other incredible fiction, or it's the word of God in either case. And I thought, you know, I need to challenge more of my non believing friends to just read it. Yeah. And it just in a non presumptuous, prescriptive way, it's like, listen, I'm not trying to convert you. This is not how it all works. But this whole thing I base my life on is all based on this book. And, you know, I'd humbly submit to you that it's worth actually like opening up. So you did that for 2 hours. Like, I actually need to read this. You read the entire gospel, You know, it only took you 2 hours, right? I mean, it just. Is that an appropriate challenge for us? And you've done a whole bunch of different things. I'd like to hear how you explore this, but so you come away from this feeling like I had this weekend, which is some number of my friends don't know Jesus. And I want to share that and I want to do it winsomely. But how do you think through that at the business and in light of the key part of you coming to faith were just saying, you know what, I'm going to read this and try to figure out whether it's true or if God speak to me or not.
Brock Bukowsky: Yeah, I certainly don't think we did perfectly. I do feel like God was leading us and just put this on my heart. So let's start introducing it slowly. So at the time we weren't thousands of people. You know, there's maybe, I don't know, maybe 200 people at the company. And it was just this slow invitation. It wasn't like, Let's put something out to the whole company. Hey, let's go. Let's either read the Bible, but it was, hey, I'm going to invite just eight people that I think might be interested. Hey, what do you think? We get together and just we'll read a passage in the Bible the other and talk about it. What do you think the prep of this thing around? Let's just get together and read. Read that. And we got together, about eight of us, and started doing that. And that was just a slow kind of just start slowly, not go to the whole company. And let's just that was initially where we started. That was going real well. And then I think just we read it. I think we're going through the New Testament. I don't know where we even started. I think we might have started in Matthew. I think we did, because that was what really had an initial impact on me. Get through that. What do you want to do next? I think somebody throughout I heard the C.S. Lewis guy has some really interesting things. And so we picked up mere Christianity and the eight of us read through that. We're meet once a week now for that and we can write some more people. Yes, I'll have somebody, you know, that maybe would want to come and do this. It's again, it wasn't some big company broadcast, but it was just through relationships that had already been established and the 8 people I invited, were people I knew real well. I feel like it's important that we have a relationship with someone they really know. We care about them before we just jump right in and this doesn't work. So invited them. And then we had a bigger group and out of that we decided to, hey, some of us have had these conversion stories through our spiritual journey. Let's why don't we share this with a coworker? So we started doing we would share our testimonies. One person for a week would share their testimony and we'd have about 50 people come in and listen to somebody else hear their testimony, which is I thought that was a really neat way to get going. There was no pressure. Hey, you can play this. You don't want to hear, you know, life transformation that one of your coworkers or one of your managers has had. And let's listen to it. So that was kind of I would say that was the progression throughout that first year.
Rusty Rueff: I come out of a lot of years of working in the human capital. HR space, right? And so as I listen to you, it's very encouraging because you're basically laying a roadmap out here for other entrepreneurs or people who have businesses or even groups to think about, Hey, how can I bring this conversation about faith into the workplace? It's not an easy thing to do, by the way. Right. And I want to talk to you a little bit in a second about those of other faiths and how they feel about this as it's going on. But I heard you say you started with scripture, which obviously can never go wrong with. Right. You know, you start with scripture. Then you transitioned into, well, let's explore a piece of literature or writings around Scripture with C.S. Lewis. And then you came back around and said, okay, now let's have people talk about their experience, which is a pretty good little formula. Right. I can see that flywheel, you know, going there and feeling very inviting for people to come into that. There would be people who would say, you know, yeah, perfect. I don't want any other interpretation, but I'll listen to the Bible. And then there's going to be other people go, Well, I don't find it there, but I like this idea of, you know, a C.S. Lewis or somebody else interpreting and giving their spin on it. I like that. That's intellectually curious. And then there'll be people who go, Well, I don't want either one of those, but I like the stories. I like the stories that people tell about, you know, what their faith does. So I don't know, am I missing something? Is there another step in there?
Brock Bukowsky: You know, I think that was right. I mean, it wasn't really planned out. That just kind of happened through like that. I do think that the testimonies when we were giving testimonies, people want to hear those stories, but it also they could just come and listen. They could say, oh, this is garbage. I don't believe it, but I still want to hear. And then maybe you see this quantified or see it as water and just getting people exposed a little bit, realizing, hey, it's okay to talk about faith at work. It's okay. We don't have to be so scared. You know, for a lot of us here, faith is our number one priority in life. For us to say we can't talk about that or we spend most of our time with 40 hours a week, that sounds kind of ridiculous. So, hey, let's let's talk about faith. Let's have an open culture where we can talk about it. Let's also be very respectful to others and make sure we're always doing a loving, gracious, gentle way.
Rusty Rueff: Yeah. So talked about the practicalities and maybe you've run into a couple of these speed bumps where people of other faiths either feel excluded or not as important. And what do you do with that? Yeah. Then what do you do with those who are like, Hey, you know, I'm good. You guys go do your thing, but I don't want to hear about it.
Brock Bukowsky: Yeah.
Rusty Rueff: What do you do with those folks?
Brock Bukowsky: Yeah, I don't know that you've got the right answer there, but I think the people that say I don't hear about it. Yeah, we just. We leave them alone. Certainly. Right. We don't want to pushy, but hopefully they're still being exposed a little bit and maybe hear a conversation about it. But I don't believe at work and just continually hammering on somebody, Hey, you haven't come yet. You haven't come here, You won't come, you're gonna take more of it's just an invite. And then if they say no, we kind of leave it alone.
Rusty Rueff: But maybe you have to give them a little more space than that, right? Because let's say I work for you, but I'm not of your faith orientation, But two or three of my peers are, and they get together with you. But I don't Do I think that, you know, the old adage, you got to be present to win or, you know, you got to be in the room to be there, how do you give them space to feel like it's okay? You know, don't worry, I'm not going to promote my buddy because he comes to the right faith group. You're not going to be left out.
Brock Bukowsky: I can see that. I can see that certainly being a concern. Now, it's different, too, with the company, you know, being over 4000 employees. It's different because I can't know everybody. But back at the time, as we were getting this going, I do feel like I knew everybody, you know, spent time with others. And actually an example of this, like in that first year, probably maybe in the second year when we kind of had this where I was talking about Jesus a lot, you know, the our company Christmas party. And I would talk a little bit about my faith and, you know, Jesus, this whatever it turned out to be, to push you with it. But I had a friend ask one of their friends who was not Christian, but a believer in another religion. Isn't Brock putting Jesus in your face? Doesn't that offend you? And what this person said was, you know, I know Brock cares about me. I know he cares about me. And he's only doing it because he cares about me. And I'm not offended because of that. I do think that is important when people know that you love them and care about them. And you're not being too pushy. I didn't, you know, and with this lady, I hadn't invited her 17 times for the trip or whatever. Right. Maybe it was one invite.
Rusty Rueff: Yeah, I find the same thing can happen even outside of the faith space. Right? You know, there are the guys that all sit around and talk about sports. Sports, sports, sports, sports. And then are there are people who could care less about sports and sometimes they're of a different gender, Right? That's just not their thing. And they go, well, I am, but I'm don't feel included. And there are certainly ways to make them feel included. We just have to work harder at it. Right. And we have to be sensitive. And I think that that's what I hear you saying is, look, it's a big open tent. Anybody is welcome. But if you don't walk through the tent, it's not like I feel any less about you or that. But the tents. You're always welcome. You're always welcome.
Brock Bukowsky: It's good. That's great
Rusty Rueff: You know, so what we're seeing happen over the last decade or so has been these things called employee resource groups. And they're popping up in particularly in the tech space out here. And like Salesforce has a very large we've actually had we had to work on, didn't we.
Henry Kaestner: Yeah. Yeah, we did. Yeah. For Faith Force.
Rusty Rueff: Right. Who's the president of Faith Force And Marc Benioff, the CEO supports this and, and lots of different faiths have their own little faith force groups. Have you seen other things pop up inside your company because of what you've done to give voice for Christianity?
Brock Bukowsky: Yeah, certainly. So we saw the effectiveness of these small groups and also just in building deeper relationships, right, talking about deeper things. And so we then started this small group program where it wasn't all faith based. Certainly there are faith based groups, you know, hey, we're going to be reading through Philippians today, but then there's other groups that, hey, we're going to talk about bourbon, with our favorite bourbon, right. And in different groups. So that's evolved. So we started this seven when we.
Rusty Rueff: I'll admit. I would like to be in that group.
Brock Bukowsky: It's not like a group. Yeah, they're going to take the.
William Norvell: No one that reads Philippians with the bourbon. I just feel like this. Those two groups might combine in certain parts of conversation.
Brock Bukowsky: We should combine.
William Norvell: Putting it out there.
Rusty Rueff: I like that.
Brock Bukowsky: I think we have some members and that are in both of those groups. Yeah, for sure. But the small groups, as it has evolved, we've got more and more people to get involved and people can they can start a group, write anything they want and it'll have encourage more and more of different faith groups to, you know, not don't just want Christian groups or faith groups that want to Judaism and just world religions. We just want people talking about faith, but also want them in other groups where maybe they are talking about bourbon, just building deeper relationships inside the company. And it's evolved over 15 years now to where this launched this winter. We've had right at 300 different small groups at the company. I think 2400 people signed up for a small group and we made a big push. You know, this was put out to the company because it wasn't, hey, you got to join a Jesus group. It was like, Hey, look at all these groups. Find one that you want to join. We hope you would join one and you can you're.
Rusty Rueff: Who coordinates these things.
Brock Bukowsky: Well, yeah. So now our faith and community director does coordinate that stuff. I think we've mentioned that the chaplain earlier and so when we went out as the faith thing kept growing, I'm like, we need someone to really get their arms around this and be able to push it. It's something I couldn't handle and try to run the company.
Henry Kaestner: One of the things I want to point out there less, it just be missed by some of our listeners before we move on to the next aspect of this to include chaplaincy. But when you do a faith driven employee resource group and you get to a certain scale like, you know well more than 4000 employees, you're going to have people of different faiths and some number of people it's like, Well, I don't want to go ahead and I want to have groups on Christians, because then people who are of a different faith that I don't think is right are going to come to me. And I'm have to say yes to them, too. I think that that's a hurdle we need to overcome. I think we need to be encouraged as Christ's followers that faith stands out in the marketplace of ideas and that we shouldn't feel like we need to shut down a conversation to include other faiths just because we're worried about that. Instead, I like to think that for a seeker that's out there to look openly and honestly, there are a lot of people on this planet that have a reason for why they think they exist and you need to be aware of them. And ultimately, I think the Christianity not only has the supernatural advantage, but it also is the faith tradition that has the most explanatory power. It's the one with the most hope and then circle back to the supernatural part, because it's true. And I just want to maybe Brock, you can before I hand it back to Rusty and William. Maybe you just comment on that a little bit, because I do think that that is a belief that people have is like, Well, because I'm a Christian, I don't want to create an environment in my company with a lot of employees that will talk about the faith conversation, because undoubtedly I'd have to say no to somebody whose faith system I disapprove of or I don't agree with. Yeah, How do you respond?
Brock Bukowsky: I think that's a great thought. And I go back to the 2007 thing. I do think I have certainly changed over the years. I think in 2007, I would be like, Yeah, we only want to have Christian groups. I mean, that wasn't put out there, but that's where I was. That was like, I don't want to have other faith groups, but as it's evolved, I am more and more pushing for let's get more and more different faith groups. A lot of people talking about faith. If you're strong in Judaism, we want you to be able to meet with people and talking about your faith, Right. I also think the more people are introduced to faith, more conversations they have, maybe they do hear about Jesus and ultimately more people will come to Jesus. Just the more faith comes we have. We won't have to be exclusive in a what small group we have. We can only. You read the Bible? No. Again, I think I've changed. I know I've changed over the years in that it's just become more and more open to everything. And I feel like it's working better that way.
Rusty Rueff: Yeah. Who doesn't want a company that has a whole bunch of people who are grounding themselves in values and principles that are good, regardless of what faith they've come through. I mean, your company's just going to be better right now. It'll just be better. I'm going to turn it over to William, but I'm going to ask the external question because we've been talking internally. So what about the external perception of shareholders or customers or your contractors or all of that? How do they look at the company and do they see all this stuff that's going on internally?
Brock Bukowsky: I don't think so. It's not something we are promoting on the outside. It's not. So I don't know that people would even know other than being in a, you know, deep conversation with one of our coworkers talking to somebody else that they might hear they were in a group or whatever it is, but it's not something that we are promoting on the outside. So I've never seen it be an issue again. It's just that if we do this out of care and out of love and in a respectful way, haven't seen it be an issue. You know, we went a couple of years in as we just hired our faith community person went and visited a large company that is a Christian. So we're not a Christian company. That's not like our mission. You know, we're not a Christian company, but we went visited this company that is a Christian companies in their mission statements, and they gave some real good advice, I thought, and they said, hey, you know, if you're going to do this stuff, that's your company. You need to be smart about it. But don't be scared. Be smart about it, but don't be scared. I mean, you got to go after it, but be smart about what you're doing. You probably don't need to promote that in the newspapers and magazines and, you know, just just be really smart about what you're doing. And so I think that line has stuck with me as we go through this whole process.
William Norvell: We've talked before on the podcast about this concept of one size fits one. And, you know, I would encourage, you know, entrepreneurs listening, right? I mean, your community, your people, your location, whether that's one location or various or remote or it's all going to look different. Right. It's really hard to take a blueprint from one organization. You know, we had Sue on from favorable Salesforce is a completely different organization than Veteran united both in number of people, HQ leadership, just all kinds of different things. And so we always try to think about that really hard to, you know, it's just kind of what is that appropriate approach for your organization, right? And the people that you've been entrusted to steward alongside. And so I'm going to switch gears just a little bit. This is like one of our favorite conversations. As you can tell, we very rarely have someone doing it at scale, so that's why we've had so much fun diving into it. But I also feel like and in one way, I want to go back to your entrepreneurial journey a little bit and hear about you as an entrepreneur. Brock and you, you've built this incredible business which we've kind of barely touched on. So I want to give you a more forum to say, Hey, where did you pick up entrepreneurship? And you started your first business in grad school. How did that translate into your second business? And tell us a little bit about the growth of Veterans United, how you decided to focus on that niche specifically and where the business has come?
Brock Bukowsky: Sure. Yeah. So my brother and I went to University of Missouri. Both wanted to be teachers. I was in secondary ed, teach high school math, coach, baseball, basketball. He was an elementary ed. He was two years younger than me. And we were we were loving college. I just was graduating, so ready to go out in the teaching world. So I'll stay around a couple more years. Brother was still there, so I went to grad school, going to get my master's in math. I was a teaching assistant at the time, so I had office hours with some other teaching assistants for grad school. I guess six of us shared this office and one day I came in to my office, sat down, and there's a missouri football ticket. Universities are tiger football tickets sitting on my chair. I get it. And I tell my buddies, I said, Hey, who's taking this this moment? But he said, Oh, it's yours. He said, I happened to be walking out of the office yesterday. I glanced in your trash can and there is a can of coke in your trash can with a big yellow sticker on it that said Free football ticket. Somehow I had bought this coke on campus, drank it, didn't see the sticker, threw it away, and he's kind of seeing it. And what had happened? Coke was doing a promotion with the University of Missouri, giving away free football tickets. They want to get more seats in the stands because of the stands were pretty empty back in the late nineties. So I look at this ticket I look at $26 value I already had an all sports pass my brother too. We were going into the game that week and brought it in and there was one of the guys outside has signed his I need tickets you know so I hand in the ticket and I said Is this 26 bucks? Will you give me four? And he said, ten bucks. Okay. I bought a 75 cent coke. It's now got ten bucks brother. And I sit in the football game and. Kind of a light bulb goes on like $0.75 for a Coke. You know, go buy another Coke, get another football, take another ten bucks. We go get some quarters, get a real quarter by $10 worth of Cokes, end up with three more stickers. It was like every third can had a sticker. So now we got three tickets for the next week's game. We go down to the stadium, same guy. Stand on that corner with the sign. I give him the three tickets, he gives us 30 bucks. So we're like, Hey, we. I think we got something going here. Well, it's kind of evolved by the end of the football season there. We would follow around the Coke truck. When the Coke truck would load up the machine, we'd be waiting. We'd have a bag of quarters. And we just. We'd unload the machine, take off the stickers, then just leave the sodas. The students would line up to take free sodas. And so it kind of turned in almost like this business, I guess. Well, I'm in grad school. He's an undergrad, and it was pretty fun. We didn't even have any attention getting into a business, just totally locked into it, but kind of grew it from there and from there introduced us to this idea of a ticket business. And my brother Brandt started really working on Google on search engine algorithm just launched at that time. And pretty soon we got a website and we were ranking number one on Google. For any ticket search. You could search for Lakers tickets, the Yankees tickets. And then we were our little Show Me Tickets website. That was pretty much garbage, but it was ranked number one on Google. So we would just connect buyers and sellers, kind of like a StubHub. And that thing grew and grew to where we had, I think that third year and we had hired about 60 college students that were filling orders for us online who would come in and we just have to call the had a ticket and have them send them to our buyer. So that was a lot of fun. But like we weren't building a business was say they would just go online, look for the cheapest ticket. And we wanted to get into a business where we could have a deeper connection with people and just happen again to kind of stumble upon the mortgage business. And as you guys mentioned, it's dream to own home. And so when they're going to come to you for home, you may talk to them eight, nine, ten times, build a relationship with these people and they could become lifelong customers continue to come back. Now you've got a business. You've got somebody that can, you know, take care of one time and they come back maybe five, seven years and again again where is ticket world. The ticket world wasn't like that. They were just going online and buying the cheapest ticket. So we had just stumbled into the entrepreneurial world. We're both going to be teachers.
Henry Kaestner: You got to wonder if who that person is. They came up with that marketing campaign for coke and if they've known what's ended up becoming a Brock and his brother and what they started.
William Norvell: That's amazing. Hey, it's amazing.
Rusty Rueff: This is Netflix, Pepsi. Where's my jet? I mean, come on. You were working a promotion there. That was good
Brock Bukowsky: It was fun, man. My friends thought I was crazy. They thought we were crazy, that it was good. And that kind of gave us a little bit of a bang because we had no money left. A little bankroll to launch this online ticket business evolved into this online mortgage business. So with Brand expertise and Google, we knew we could get people searching for mortgages to our site, to our website, but we wanted to find something that kind of separated us from everybody else. And we said, Well, we need to do people buying homes. We don't want to do the refinance stuff because that's kind of so cyclical. You know, rates go down, you've got a lot of revised rates go up, you've got nothing. Whereas hopefully in the purchase market, people are buying homes pretty consistently. We were doing that for about six months and then we end up we got a lead from a veteran and we looked into it. We'd heard you could do a VA loan that the government backs, that the veteran could do a no money down loan for a great rate. So we did this loan for the veteran. It took us a ton of time to learn it. Government, lots of paperwork, more than normal. But we got this veteran into their home and just saw the joy like no money down great rate and man, if we can get good at doing these V.A. loans there are a lot of work but we get really it make it simple for everybody and let's just focus on just doing these. Let's get better than anybody at the country and doing a VA home loan and let's just do that and keep our blinders on and just go after that. Nothing else. We acquired a VA home loan domain, and then from that point on, I started focusing more and more on Google and getting when people would search for VA home loan, we would rank toward the top. And that's been our since. And after that first year, about 2003, we've only done VA loans for for almost 20 years now.
William Norvell: Wow. That's amazing. My co-founder was a marine for a decade. So you're getting a lead after this for sure. And so I just have a special place that they're building this business with him for a couple of years just for what those families go through, you know, in these situations. And so I can see why that would just be a niche that really sticks and takes off. And also, you know, such a different place, to enter yourself in the mortgage business.
Brock Bukowsky: It's so incredible to watch and our coworkers as we get to help these veterans. Someone couldn't get into a home without the V.A. loan. Right. And the way they're taken care of. And then it just feels so good for everybody. You know, we can really rally around that. And I wish I could say, hey, we. To do this business because we wanted to help people reach their dream of homeownership and we wanted to serve veterans. But that's not it. We lucked into it, you know, But looking back, you know, I do believe, you know, God certainly had his hand in this. And just that has grown this, you know, again, just seems like total luck to me. We didn't have this great vision, but he took it is he's this platform and now it's more and more people. And for us to be able to be talking faith, to work more and more people hearing about Jesus. And it's just it's been so fun to be part of.
William Norvell: Amen amen and tell us just, you know, and then we don't have enough time to go super deep. But. Well, first of all, I love that you tell the story that way. Could you be shocked how many people revise the story to talk about the brilliant insight they had from day one and how they were the wizard that saw everything that no one else saw? And I think there's so many entrepreneurial journeys that are more like yours that, you know, hey, you ran into this corner and then you ran to that corner and then you eventually saw what was there. Right. But I think so many aspiring entrepreneurs think they need to see the whole vision before they start. Right. And so I'm grateful that you tell the story that way. And I just want to give you a couple of minutes to I mean, I'm just guessing here. I don't know the organization. I mean, employees in every stage that work like a typical mortgage business. And my question is, how do you manage a culture of people at that scale in all those different locations? And just how do you bring that heart that you clearly have for what you do to everyone in all those different locales?
Brock Bukowsky: Next, we are fortunate enough most of us are here in Columbia, Missouri.
William Norvell: It's amazing.
Brock Bukowsky: Yeah, so that's been fantastic, right? And that was even, you know, after the COVID stuff that the push to get everybody back to work, we didn't have a problem. We're all back at work. And it was one of those things like, hey, let's get back and be around each other. And everybody being in Columbia, Missouri, most of us, you know, that helped got a horribly long drive to get to the office, you know, maybe 20 minutes, 30 minutes at most. Did want to get back and be around each other. And it's just been that I think that culture that has been built, I mean, we haven't built it, but our coworkers are just people from the very beginning. We're hanging around each other, we're doing life together, and that's just been huge for our culture. Again, just getting people where they want to be at work. I mean, I really don't want to be at home unless it was nice to be at home because, you know, sure, it's done. But they want when people start to come back, like, man, we miss this so much, just being around these people that we love and care about, that's been a great thing. I think our values, I don't know how deep we want to get into like our values thing, but values have been a huge part of our culture. We've been fortunate enough to where people, I think really drive a lot of companies. You just maybe the values are up on the wall or whatever it is. You get them on the first day of work, but then you don't hear about them much where our values have really driven us. I don't think that much changed when I became a Christian. You know, the big thing that changed at VU is I wanted people to hear about Jesus. In the year before. It wasn't even a concept for me to talk about faith at work, So that was a big thing. But also, I think when I became a Christian, it also became this like, Why are we here? And my friends, why are they here? Are they coming here just for a paycheck or, you know, why are you coming through these doors in the morning? And so it was probably I think about a year after I had my faith transformation, I sent an email out to the company and I said, Hey, I want to hear from each of you. Please give me a response. Why are you here? Are you? Is it for a paycheck? I know you get to get your paycheck, but is it anything else? What motivates you to walk through the doors each morning? And so we got responses from. There was a few hundred of us at the company at the time, compiled everybody's responses. And then we took them and we had like an exec retreat. And we went through everything and pulled out the commonalities and created our company value statement. And I think it felt really good for everybody to know that they were the ones that created this value statement. It wasn't something that we just, you know, a couple owners or execs launched. And out of that, we had this big values rollout and then we hired someone to just be in charge of our values to make sure that they're in our face every day and that they're part of every review that you had. If you go meet with your boss, we're going to talk through our values. And those have, I think, really driven our culture in the mission that came out of that was enhancing lives every day. We want to have a positive impact on the lives of our clients, of our coworkers, each other and of our community. And that's kind of the mission that I think rallies everybody together. So we're kind of always thinking of those three groups. It's not just close on a mortgage, you know, we want to take care of veterans, but we want to take care of each other and we want to take care of our community. And I think that that. Values roll out that the employees were a part of. I think it's stayed over this how many years it has been out.
Henry Kaestner: That's a great example, establishing values, asking people to just effectively crowdsourcing it from your employees. Great way to set that up. Great lesson. We're at the point in time now on the podcast where we like to go through something called the Lightning Round. So Lightning Round is probably as it sounds. We're going to ask you questions. You have to keep your answers to less than 30 seconds. There is a buzzer that is in your chair that will go off. If you don't. It's a little weird. You can wonder how we got access to your office, but we're going to go through them real quickly. And then Williams going to close this out with a bit about what you're hearing from God as you continue to go through the Bible. Okay. Number one, you're in Columbia, Missouri. I've never been there. It sounds like you grew up there. You at least went to school there and you've chosen that as a place to grow your business, 30 seconds or less. What's the reason for me or anybody else? Listeners podcast to visit Columbia, Missouri.
Brock Bukowsky: The people. Just incredible people.
Henry Kaestner: Okay, There you go. All right. Number two, what's a charity or ministry that you and your wife like to give to you?
Brock Bukowsky: We want to give 90% of our money to organizations that are going to make Jesus know. Right. And one that we are really behind is Acts 29, which is launching churches all over the world.
Henry Kaestner: Yeah. Okay. That's a great one. Thank you.
Rusty Rueff: How many mortgages do you think your company's made in its history?
Brock Bukowsky: Oh, we did over 100,000 last year, but we have to continue to grow. I should know that number. Maybe 500,000. Wow.
Rusty Rueff: Wow. And what's the furthest location away from where you are that a mortgage has been made to your company?
Brock Bukowsky: Hawaii. We do quite a bit in Hawaii. There's a lot of veterans in Hawaii.
Rusty Rueff: I love it. I love it.
William Norvell: What's the current price of a missouri football ticket?
Brock Bukowsky: Are they gonna up the price?
William Norvell: I know we got you in the FCC thing.
Brock Bukowsky: That's right. FCC has been fined like, 80 bucks now. It was 26 bucks.
William Norvell: No, no desire. You're done. No desire to get back in to the coke ticket business.
Brock Bukowsky: It was super fun. It was super fun. We'll stick in mortgages.
William Norvell: What's one thing you hope for for Veterans United here in the last eight months of 2023?
Brock Bukowsky: Yeah. I mean, you hear about these, you know, there was this revival that happened or was that at Kentucky or whatever at the university kind of, you know, Asbury. I want to freaking revival here in mid-Missouri, you know, in Columbia. I want a revival. And I want that to just kind of come through. VU veterans United and let's just have a revival where people are talking about Jesus, love Jesus and they would want worship.
Henry Kaestner: Maybe riff on that one. So one of the things you talked about in terms of you kind of faith was this kind of sense of not having boundaries. We talked about confessional a little bit. Some of the things you look at. Well, I didn't know much about revivals until about a month and a half ago when I started looking at the Asbury Revival and the Hebrides revival in the Welsh revival. And the commonality for those listeners who are listening to this, who want to understand, well, what is the recipe for I want revival in my community, in my business, in my life. What is the singular thing that you think I found or that you have found as you look at revivals? Hmm. I think I have an answer, but it's lightning round. You're supposed to answer the questions, but obviously I want to chime in on that because revival is something that we can absolutely pray for. It obviously transforms communities.
Brock Bukowsky: Mm hmm. I don't. I have no idea.
Henry Kaestner: So here's here's the thing. So I look into a little bit because all sudden I didn't know a thing about revival is I'm an elder in the PCA church. We don't talk about revivals enough. And so I got into it because I was asked to speak at a conference on transformation. I'm like, all these people talk about revivals. I want to look into it. The Hebrides revival is a great example. Three guys in a barn, Hebrides, 1953. They're praying for a revival and one of them who'd been in Scripture that day and Psalm 24 said, You can't approach the mountain unless you have a pure heart and clean hands. He said, You know, we had rain all day for a revival or maybe have been several days. Like maybe we should be praying about where our hearts not pure and where hands are not clean. And so they did that. The Asbury revival has started, according to some of the interviews that went on, is because at the end of the worship service, one of the students got up and confessed his sin in front of his friends, the people that are gathered worship service. And that's something it's really been impactful for me, maybe because I've got my son, my middle son's at the University of Notre Dame, which is a Catholic university, and we're talking about the different ways that Catholics versus Protestants tend to confess their sins to one another. But I'm like, however it happens, it seems that we need to be doing more of that as a community. Yeah.
Brock Bukowsky: That's really good.
William Norvell: If we don't give him the same 32nd time clock during the night?
Henry Kaestner: Apparently not.
William Norvell: But regardless, I am the person who has to bring this to a close, and that unfortunately, has to happen right now. So this has been such an awesome podcast. But what we do love to do, we always want to leave room for exactly what Henry was talking about is God's word and his scripture and how it can continually come alive each and every day. And so we would love to invite you to share with us a place that God may have you in His Word, whether that's something you've been meditating on for a while or a story that comes to mind as I ask you the question or something you read this morning on the way into work just to share God's Word and where it may be hitting you today with our audience.
Brock Bukowsky: Yeah, I'd say the last couple of weeks really been just this idea in my trying to please people or my trying to please God. And this was in Galatians a couple of weeks ago, and I think Paul said in Galatians 1 once we're trying to please people are God. And I'm just I know I'm wired to want to please people and I want people to think good of me. But I know that I should not be thinking that I just please, God, you, everything else will work out. And I even I've had a quote I've looked at for a long time, even before I was a Christian. John Wooden says, Let's be more concerned with our character than our reputation. And I think we've as a company live that way. Let's just not worry about reputation. Let's take care of our character and everything else will probably follow the same way here. I need my audience, the one I need to please God, I want to please God and everything else fall into place. Don't worry about what other people are thinking of me all the time, which unfortunately, I do all the time.
William Norvell: Amen, what a great word for entrepreneurs, too. I mean, just the people that have to stand up every day. Right? And, you know, you have to know where your identity is rooted or it will not go well. For most people, there are just too many nos in the world as you're trying to build a business. So I think about that too, is like, but if you have that singular focus on them, am I doing what God asked me to do today, well, then all the rest follows.
Henry Kaestner: Brock, thank you. Thank you for sharing the really important message about creating a culture that allows people actually bring their whole selves to work, to be able to talk about their faith and one that can just flourish the concept of the marketplace of ideas in a way that really points to truth. So thank you for that. Grateful for you in your time.
Brock Bukowsky: And I appreciate you guys. Thank you for what you're doing.
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