Transcript 

Welcome to the Hundredfold Business Podcast where Christian men learn the principles, strategies, and tactics to grow their businesses top line, bottom line, and finish line. I want you to discover the secret to applying biblical truth to business growth for the greatest kingdom impact. So in the end you hear from your Heavenly Father, well done.

Welcome to the Hundrefold Business Podcast where Christian men learn how to grow their businesses top line, bottom line, and finish line. I'm your host Josh Fonger, founder of Forceful Ventures, and today we have a very special guest, we have Mike Sharrow. Mike is the president and CEO of C12 Business Forums, a global network of peer advisory groups for Christian CEOs and business owners.

He assumed the CEO role in 2016 and under his leadership the organization has grown to serve more than 4,800 members across the United States, Brazil, Malaysia, Singapore, Taiwan, South Africa, Ukraine, Canada, and Kenya, supported by over 250 full-time chairs. All right Mike, welcome to the show. Thanks Josh, excited to be here and have conversations that are close to my heart.

Well Mike, I'm excited especially talking to you beforehand about your leadership experience as being CEO of C12 and also some of the core teachings of the program and so I think that the men listening here are going to get a lot of benefit and learn how to apply their faith to their work. So to start Mike, can you share with the audience a little bit about your story, how God has directed your path to get where you are right now? Sure. Thumbnail sketch, I'm joining you from San Antonio, Texas where I'm raising my two girls, but I grew up in Alaska, and ironically if you'd met me when I was 12 years old, in fact I was at a church planning retreat when I was 12, and my pastor said, hey Mike, what do you think you're gonna be when you grow up? And I said, yeah, I'm 12, Pastor Ken, I don't know what I'll be, but I'm pretty sure two things.

I'll never live in Texas, and I'll never work for a church, and in 2006 my wife and I moved to Texas, and 2008 the church we were attending actually asked me to come on staff for a couple years, so it shows how prophetic I was as a 12 year old. But I grew up in Alaska, fell in love with Jesus at a young age, it just transformed everything about my life, and I knew from a young age I wanted to be all about kingdom things. I just wasn't sure vocationally what that looked like, and went on a journey, kind of this gnawing sense of like, why am I here? This Ephesians 2 10 yearning of like, I want to be only the best steward of what I can do and be God, and what is that? And that led me to kind of bounce around through a bunch of different things.

In fact, I found myself in business in Chicago in my early 20s, really wrestling with vocation and identity, and really wondering if, in fact at one point I was having success in my day job, but feeling guilty because I'm like, I'm just making widgets. And like, man, should I leave here and go work for a nonprofit? Should I work for a church? Like, get me out of here? And I literally felt like the Holy Spirit met me at my desk one night and was like, why are you not being who I made you to be? And I'm like, well because I work for this big company. He's like, well if you have to change where you are to be who you are, then maybe you don't understand who you are.

And so why does your vocation define your identity? Shouldn't your identity transform your vocation? And I was like, ah, I know the answer is Jesus and yes, but I have no idea how to do that. And when I confess, like, I don't know how to do this, God. I feel like God is like, then why don't you start asking me? Like, that's a great, it's okay to not know, but like lean into that.

So I would say I'm a, so I'm married to Jackie for 24 years, a girl dad to two extraordinary young ladies. And I've been following Jesus since 1989. And I've come to understand that my purpose in life is to be a catalyst for people to live their destiny in Christ while trying to build platforms that advance the gospel in a sustainable way.

And I've done that in big corporations and startups, nonprofits, for profits. And for the last 15, 16 years, I've been involved in C12 as kind of a superstructure of that. But all those are just kind of manifestations of God fathering me in this question of purpose.

So does that answer your question? Yeah, no, that's a great, great background. And I think we can just jump right into to why C12? I mean, there's a lot of organizations out there that teach people how to do business better, teach you about sales and marketing and leadership. Why does there need to be a distinctly Christian version of this? What problem are you solving? Great question.

So I got involved as a customer originally, so I didn't found the organization. I'm the third leader. It was founded in the early 90s in Florida.

When a buddy first invited me to actually check it out in 2010, I'd never heard of it. And I didn't know. I know you're involved in CBMC, Trail Life.

There's a bunch of great organizations out there doing all kinds of good stuff. I didn't know about either of those organizations. A friend said he was getting involved, Mike, you should check it out.

He said, I know you love Jesus, and I know you love business. Wouldn't it be great to bring those two things together? And I was like, yeah. I mean, ironically, I was the poster kid for who they'd be going after.

But I had great business consultants and coaches and advisors and courses. And I found that oftentimes Christian ones were goofy, wacky, cheesy, sometimes obnoxious about faith symbols, crosses and Bible verses, but then maybe not so great around like excellence of execution and systems in or were naming claimant kind of goofy theology stuff. And so I had actually kind of grown a almost like an allergy to Christian business groups and things because I felt they were almost opposed.

And he he literally drew a Venn diagram on a napkin for me. He said, don't you feel the tension? And this is what I'd say we exist to do now. So this is not our language.

It was his language. He said, as a business leader, don't you feel the tension of wanting to build a business and know that God would say, well done, that you did a good job? If Jesus says, you know, Colossians says, do all things as unto Christ. What does work as worship actually look like when you're a CEO beyond just like, don't do bad things? And I was like, I think I'm doing as good as I can.

And he said, and then second, if we're all called to be ministers of the gospel, is our only ministry giving money? Or could our businesses actually be the context for ministry? And what if we're accountable for how our businesses impact the world? And I went, I resonate with that. I still quite know what that looks like beyond maybe some awkward evangelism stuff. And he said, third, when you're leading a business and trying to change the world and do all these good things, who actually holds you accountable to have a life in order that you don't lose your relationship with God, your marriage, your parenting, the fruit of the spirit in your life, St. Augustine would say, misordered loves are the root of a lot of our dysfunction.

And, and he said, don't you feel the tension that maybe you're in a small group, you're in other things, but they don't get the tension you're in in business. And thus you live compartmentalized in three different worlds. And I was like, yeah, totally.

Anyway, this is a group that's gonna try to pull those three circles together, integrate them and challenge you to excellence in all three. And that was intriguing enough to make me join a meeting. And then I've been going to groups for 15 years.

So something about it resonated, but I think we're solving the issue of how do you help? Like, it's hard to build a business. It's really foreign to most people to know how do you build a business with honest greatness that would glorify God, but do it in a way that actually is a biblical worldview, Christ centered and fulfilling an eternal perspective. And then to not disconnect that from the fact I'm a human being with a marriage and family and life and soul to tend to not just someone who's like, I'm like, God doesn't need my money.

So I'm not here to make a bunch of money for God. I'm here to build something that reflects his character. So we help the isolation challenge, the overwhelmed issue and help CEOs figure out how do you build a great business, but do it for a greater purpose and get really practical about all those things.

We're basically trying to help people like me 15 years ago. And I'm a customer of our business today. I'm in a group for the last 10 years as a member because you don't it's I say it's like joining a fitness program for biblical leadership in business.

It's not a program. You don't like graduate. You just keep staying fit.

You got to keep working the program. Well, that's great. I mean, just for all of us here, maybe you could explain some of the core teachings of C12.

What are the things that you all really focus in on? Yeah. And I think, Josh, from what I know about you're probably like going to be saying amen to half the things I say, because like, I think we're wired for like, systems and strategy and process and excellence and all these things. One of our big ideas would be business as a ministry.

And so I think there's a natural, the technical term people fall into, I didn't know back then is dualism. We tend to separate sacred things and secular things and be like, okay, go to, you know, accounting and marketing. In fact, I've talked to deans of business schools that are at Christian colleges and said, Hey, what about your business school makes it uniquely Christian? And they'd be like, well, we pray in our classes and we have chapel, but I mean, it's accounting and marketing and sales.

What do you expect? I'm like, oh my gosh, a whole lot more, like a whole lot more than that. So we think God cares about what you do in business. If you're an engineer, if you're a physical therapist, like God actually cares about the process and bidget, the widget of your business.

He cares about how we do it, the process of our business, that the way we do business matters to God, our motive matters to God, the impact it has on the world matters to God and who we're becoming the process. And so those, all those ideas kind of merged together for this thing we call business as a ministry, where it's not go run a good business so you can fund ministry, but actually viewed as your act of worship as your dojo of your own discipleship and begin to think about, then we take the balance scorecard paradigm of business, which just challenges an owner to look at a company and say, every business has got your revenue operations, how you make and sell stuff or how you sell stuff. You get your operations, how you actually deliver services.

You get your financial management side of the business, and you've got org dev and we'd had a fifth dimension of deliberate ministry efforts, kind of gospel initiatives in the business. And we'd say, if you look at those domains of your business, we should be constantly asking as a steward, what is best practice? Like what is excellence in sales, marketing, accounting, HR operations, but what is not just best practice as Harvard business review would say, or as is common in our industry, what would be a distinctly biblical approach to that? So what would be different because we're followers of Jesus that would glorify God in terms of it reflects his character, his values, his kingdom agenda. And are we stewarding those things well? And then how are we demonstrating the rule of rain and love of Jesus in those areas of our business to our team and their family members, our customers, vendors, suppliers, our industry.

And basically all those things become arenas where frankly, I have to constantly be scaling up my leadership. I've been learning and I get a chance to have to wrestle with God because candidly, when I talk to someone about, Hey, how are you honoring Jesus in your marketing? A lot of times they're like, uh, I mean, we're honest. We don't lie.

I'm like, well, that's great. Um, what else? And like, ah, we're trying to be fair in our pricing. Like that's cool.

What else? Like what else would there be? I'm like, Oh, great question. I think what if we view every dimension of the business as a, I think that's actually demonstrating who we think we are and who's we think we are. So those are like big belief ideas.

And then we get super practical into the actual execution. Well, let's, maybe we can dive deep in one of these practical ideas because I'm sure for those listening and they're thinking, okay, it sounds great. Uh, big idea, but I do need to, you know, put some advertising out this week, or I do need to make that sales call and I'm like, work's happening and I got to get out of the theoretical and the real, um, when, um, what would be an example of how your approach or, or strategies, tactics, you know, training would, would, uh, come at odds with the, with the world strategies, techniques, uh, tactics where you'd say, Hey, here's a kind of a pretty obvious difference.

They would say do this and we're saying, actually, do you do something different? Can you think of any of those? Oh, tons. Yeah. And I think that's the, that's the fun part.

You know, we'd start all the way down to the strategic planning level of business and down to the very identity mission, vision, values, and culture. But let me take an example where I had a buddy who ran a, um, a motorsports business, super lover of Jesus, good father, good husband, super generous in the community. Um, but someone called him out of the fact that while his business was, you know, performing really, really well, their industry has an advertising playbook where you'd see ads of like, you know, girls in bikinis on bikes or, uh, kind of just sexualized messaging.

They said, Hey, do you think God's honored by that ad strategy or those, you know, the ads on local magazines? And he's like, well, that's, that's just what our, the franchise system we're a part of that's the playbook they use. And it's just kind of what our industry does. And I'm like, yeah, but don't think God would care about how you make money, not just what you do with it.

And he's like, what do you mean? Like, well, if you believe in human dignity and image of people create the image of God and God's moral ethic, shouldn't that be guardrails for how you even do marketing? And he's like, well, we'd have to like totally rebook our whole, like we'd have to redesign our whole ad strategy. Like maybe that'd be a cool thing to do. And it took him a year.

It wasn't like an easy, you know, easy buttons, put a fish on something. We went back to his director of marketing and this is like a 30, $40 million company. So he's like, okay, how do we maintain that level of sales? But how do we begin saying our messaging is going to reinforce human dignity? And we're not going to lean into sexualized ads and messaging or, um, you know, corruptive ideals that even our branding and our marketing should be advancing biblical truth and beauty.

It doesn't have to all be Bible verses and, you know, fish symbols, but how does it stand for truth and goodness? And so that, you know, that reformed that or a healthcare company where their, uh, corporate contracting strategy would oftentimes have these kind of sneaky phrases built into the contracts that allowed for, um, unexpected costs and kind of kickbacks and different pieces. And so what it looked like to have high integrity contracting where you'd be like, man, first John one, six or 10, let's walk the light. He's in the light.

What if there's a spotlight on every aspect of your pricing schema in your contract terms? And you had no shame, no awkwardness, no hesitation about anything of your pricing strategy to be disclosed and unpacked. And well, that would mean that kind of radical integrity and transparency is just not not common in our space. Like, well, maybe that's where you get to do Matthew 516.

You actually get to do business differently in such a way that people would ask you like, man, why are you guys so not shady, so above board, so high integrity in this, and you actually get to give an answer for the hope you have as the motive for it. So I think from ad strategy, the messaging you're doing, pricing strategies, those that gets into differences where the gospel would have us approach something different. That being said, we also believe every business is accountable for creating economic value, creating team value, and creating spiritual value.

And so we believe the tension we have to live in is we're called to build great businesses. And we believe in good margin, good sales. So how do you bring excellence to that and serve as many people as possible? While integrating not compromising, in fact, even perhaps influence the world.

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Life is too short and eternity is way too long to build it any other way. Those are great examples. And so would you say that people are part of C12 because they're working and living out this way? And you mentioned they're not just putting crosses and Jesus fishes everywhere on their symbolism.

They're living differently. Does their communities, employees, customers see and know a difference? Or is it so subtle that just the owner and his wife know that they're doing it differently? Yeah, great, great question. So we serve thousands of companies and from small businesses to mega publicly traded companies.

So how it looks will look different based upon how concentrated and homogenous and all those things are. We again believe we're accountable to show results in everything we do. So typically, a mature C12 member will actually be twice as likely to be on like an Inc 5000 list or a fast track business journal list as their competitors would be.

So we typically have better performing companies with better financial disciplines, better balance sheet management, less debt, more cash and things that just make their businesses more resilient. They typically have 50 to 75% better employee engagement and create better workplaces. When you begin to look at your people as a stewardship trust to care for, that's not just a biblical imperative, it's actually a good business driver.

So oftentimes become the best places to work. When I was a leader in San Antonio, literally 40% of the best place to work award winners by the business journal were C12 companies. And people are like, what's the like, what's the deal here? When you view business as worship, it actually makes you better at it.

It actually makes you care more intentionally about it, less haphazardly. And then people getting saved, people getting discipled. So whether or not everyone would know that's a Christian company, the closer you get, you'd undeniably know it's different and likely the owner is probably expressing even things like their mission, their vision, their values, their policies, their employee handbook, like, hey, I'm a follower of Jesus.

And that is a driving of the operating system for this company. We would employ diversely, but they would undeniably, as you get closer going, but there's, there's just something different and they're likely stating it somewhere, somehow. What kind of impact has this had on their employees and those, those who are close to them.

So those are that they're, you know, you know, functionally discipling each and every day. Can you think of any stories of what it's like for them to be underneath a Christian CEO? Done right. They should feel uncommonly loved, respected, cared for, and challenged.

You think that like Jesus had a remarkable way of calling up, whether it's the adulterous woman or the tax collector, like he, he would call out and call up with such redemptive dignity. We think that would be the hallmark of a good management. So I was talking to an executive for a company where the CEO is a member, but the executives are not Christians.

And this woman, for instance, had was not at all involved in church. And I asked her, what's it like working for, you know, say Joe. And she said, you know, he's, everyone knows Joe's a Christian.

He talks about Jesus a lot. We know he's a praying man. I was actually worried to work for him because I'm not, and I wasn't sure what that was going to be like, but I've actually never experienced someone who respected me so much, spoke to me as such like care and dignity, seemed to genuinely care for me.

And she said, his faith has been a blessing to me, not a burden. I've never felt judged by, I just felt like it creates an uncommon, I've never felt a leader so committed to what is right for us and what is good for us. And so we see that manifest in all kinds of ways.

And it's, it's why we've got higher employee engagement, higher employee retention. These become attractive places, whether someone shares our faith, I think to a, there's a business owner who ran a print shop and was actually getting sued. I mean, had some civil issues municipally because of his faith and an LGBTQ member of his staff went to his defense at a hearing and went, listen, boss and I have wildly different views of life, but like, I've never met a more loving, caring, kind boss.

And so while we know we disagree on things, he's not discriminatory at all. He's just passionate about his beliefs. And so I think that's, we're doing it well.

It should be a blessing to those we lead, not a burden. That's great. Great stories.

Well, now let's turn the, kind of the magnifying glass on you a little bit. So, so you as, as a CEO, you've been leading this organization and having some, some great success. So maybe you can walk us through a little bit, you know, how you have, you know, personally ingrained your faith into the organization you're leading.

Yeah. So, and for, so for context, we're a privately held small business. When I stepped into leadership in 2016, we had about 12 employees and we were serving about 70, 75 chairs.

We have full-time professional facilitators who run our forums as their full-time job. Today, I've got about 39 employees and we serve about 250. And so in that journey, you know, I said, I'm a member of C12.

I'm a member of C12 because I need it, because frankly, at every level of growth, I've felt the consternation, the frustration of having great mission, great intention, but man, it all rises and falls on how well I actually lead. And so I have usually not struggled for big ambitious goals and direction, but wrestling with change management and communication and how well I, you know, know myself to lead myself and develop the team that it's going to take to go there. I have paid a lot of stupid tax along the way on working those pieces out.

So one of the things we say that is a challenge, we say we promise to be an example of what we promote and accountable to our members. And so wrestling through how are we going to hold ourselves accountable to do business this way, not just sell business this way is a constant accountability check for me. So whether that's wrestling through when we were crushing it in the market, but frankly, we did our own culture surveys.

We loved to partner with the organization called Best Christian Workplace that does these rigorous employee engagement surveys, but have a faith bias to questions. And it came back and was like, hey, you're growing out there, but your own employees are not well led, not being developed well, got confusion and clarity. So I've had to do massive work on improving that, not because it necessarily sold more in the market, but because I'm accountable to honor God and how I do what we do, not just the impact it has in the marketplace.

And then down to how we handle other things. Like we have protocols in our employee handbook and our covenants, our franchise agreements around how we handle disputes and litigation. I think 1 Corinthians 6 and Matthew 18 would say, Christians should not rush to courts to solve our problems.

We should embrace biblical conflict resolution and arbitration and mediation. And so we've, you know, I've, I've walked the line of that, done painful things where I was like, just lawyer up, do this, or here's how you can get away with this. And like, no, we have to honor God and how we handle even, even when you're being sued, even when you're being persecuted, how do you, how do you honor God in those? And so, I mean, I'm the biggest limiting factor on our business.

Like I have to constantly figuring out how to like, what needs to be better about how I'm leading the business so that we can actually accomplish all the great things, our mission, vision, my spouses, but it's, it's in all parts of our company. Well, what about a, maybe a specific decision? So, you know, as, as a Christian CEO, what is the decision you had to make as follower of Jesus that maybe you would have made differently if you were just like, Hey, let's just follow the world's strategies. They seem to work pretty good.

Is there any time where you had that tension? You're like, well, I need to actually make this. Maybe it was one of those lawsuits, but it wouldn't be an example of that. Hmm.

Maybe a radical one would be, um, okay. So think those, my, my business is the, my business operates by creating forums of groups of 12 C 12 groups of 12, 12 business owners who meet in person every month in about, there's about 640 of those every month, somewhere around the world with a full-time leader, 2020 happens. Everything we do is in person.

Everything we do is physical when suddenly a pandemic strikes and it literally becomes illegal to do gatherings of 10 or more. It's a problem for your business. Like not only are my, is my market suddenly disrupted because CEOs are a little distracted, but like my fundamental business model is suddenly in question.

Um, I had big plans that year and all my plans kind of went out the window. You know, we learned how to zoom all kinds of stuff. Well, we had not had a great cash policy.

We have a no debt policy because of our biblical convictions. We have, um, a big emphasis on long-term planning, et cetera, but we found ourselves pretty constrained for cash. And the question was, we take PPP money, the, uh, the bailout.

And I'm not against, you know, tax credits and maximizing shrewd plays there, but we, as a board really wrestled with, do we, do we just bunker down and do we just try to survive this moment? And we take a government bailout and we wrestled with two things. We felt one, um, we, we searched scripture, we spent 30 days searching scripture in prayer, fasting, journaling, collectively wrestling through God. What would you have us do again? We think it was a morally neutral thing in general, but specific to us, was it right? And we felt for us, um, taking government money in that process would be a shortcut from learning the lesson of how do we just push through this and get scrappy and make sure that we can endure.

What if this lasts for four years? Like we've got to figure the problem out. Um, a one-time bailout won't solve the problem. Two, we didn't want to create any hooks that could create federal liability that because we had taken federal funds with that in any way impair our future boldness for Christ and the things we do.

Um, there's always, there's always trailing strings attached to, uh, taking government money and how would God have us lean in and serve, not just try to survive. And so that year became a radical, like weekly cashflow forecasting. We scrutinized paperclips and everything we could for expenses in the business.

And frankly, we served more that year. We grew more that year. We had more kingdom impact than any year we'd ever seen before.

More people came to Christ through our network that year than any time before. And I really think God was using the discipline of desperate prayer accountability and wrestling through stewardship to actually make our business stronger and forces to really not, not push the easy button. Um, and they give us some immunity from future backlash.

Wow. So that, that, uh, testing made you stronger. It, uh, perfected you in the ways it should have.

That's awesome. That's a great story. Well, um, you know, since you've been in this, the, you know, the Christian faith at workspace, you know, over 10 years, I think over 15 years at this point, um, for those who are new to this space, you know, they're just catching up on the podcast right now.

What are some of the most, maybe one or two of the most transformational, transformational messages that you've heard that were paradigm shifts for you? There's so much in this space. Um, when I was first wrestling, actually prior to C12, I was wrestling with my own career in a big publicly traded company and a mentor pulled me aside and he said, Hey Mike, I think you're, I think you're over-complicating this whole Christian at work thing. And I think you're also making it too much.

Like you're making it into boxes. He said, can I just encourage you to put your career on two rails? Could you focus on being excellent? What you do excellent in your craft, be above reproach and seek to glorify God and just the utter goodness of whatever you're called to. And then second, be in such uninterrupted love with Jesus where you're actually like abiding in him, connecting with him throughout the day that you're not trying to figure out how this insert awkward programs or weird moves, but literally it just becomes an inseparable part of who you are and how you are.

And you will find yourself doing ministry and having more opportunity than you ever imagined. If you could just do those two things, focus. So he's like, just excellence, be in love with Jesus.

And, and then a pastor gave a talk at a church that was attending where he said, it drew my attention to in numbers, 15, 37, 39. Have you ever seen a Orthodox Jews that they have those tassels hanging from their pockets? So that comes from a little passage where Moses was telling the Jews that they're about to enter the promised land. And we think about it context-wise, they were, there was no big corporations.

There's no government jobs. The average Jewish family can have, you know, six to 10 kids work six days a week, sunup to sundown. Like that was an intensely rigorous life.

And number 15, Moses says, be careful. You're about to enter the promised land. You're about to be busy.

You're going to build houses and build jobs. You will get distracted and you will forget who you are and whose you are. And your heart will, it says whore after other things.

And God's correction is not don't work so hard, spend four hours a day in prayer, chill out, spend all that church. He says, no, put tassels on your clothes that you would look at them in the middle of your daily work. And remember, I'm the Lord, your God, I brought you here and who you are.

And what I took from that was, Hey, my work is not an obstacle, but I need to figure out how to actually connect with God in the middle of every day and actually view like my identity intersecting with that work. And if I start asking him just a simple question of like, how do I love God and how to love people in this meeting or in this project? Hey, what would be God's agenda? How would God think about this it project or this audit I'm going through? Um, just that question, that awareness, that orientation begins to integrate my life. And it was really, I've been kind of at war with the compartmentalized life.

Let's just integrate everything. And that's disorienting. And if you're listening to this, like, um, it probably will raise more questions than answers, but I think the question is actually the invitation.

I think God loves us wrestling with how to be one person everywhere I'm at. And it's an invitation to greater joy. That's a great answer.

And, uh, it's a great opportunity for all of us to continue to wrestle with God, you know, you know, explore that the rest of our lives. So as a final question, I'd like to ask this to all my guests, before we wrap up, what would you say to encourage someone who has not yet fully embraced integrating their faith into their work? Maybe they kept it quiet, their employees, their customers, no one knows, but then what would you say to encourage them? I think there's a lot of myths out there that keep people from doing this. I think some people, um, are afraid that, you know, it would be odd for God and it's gonna, you know, alienate people.

Uh, there's plenty of market research says actually people appreciate knowing who you authentically are. It doesn't, this doesn't push people away. Some people think it's illegal.

It's not illegal. You got unbelievable religious liberty, even as an employer to express your faith and express your why. And we've got tons of resources to help explain all that stuff we can share later.

Um, I think people overcomplicate and I would just encourage people to take the first step of going. Um, if, if you are only a disciple of Jesus in the margins of your life, you know, evenings and weekends, then by definition, you are a marginal disciple. And I don't think Jesus ever called anybody to be a part-time disciple.

So if we are supposed to be a full-time follower of Jesus, whether I'm a plumber, electrician, doctor, technologist, then literally I'm missing out on the biggest part of my life. Like we'll spend 80,000 hours working. And if that's not an area of integrated question of how am I actually following Jesus in that part of my life, I'm living in suspended animation for the most profitable hours and days and years of my life.

And so this is not about you owe God more. Cause by the way, I think God owns everything. He doesn't need your money.

He doesn't need your business. He owns it all anyway. I think it's actually missing a greater level of joy and, uh, a walk with God that is more vibrant.

Let me begin just taking the next step of, okay, God, well, what would it look like to walk with you in this business? And then Google it like there's podcasts like yours, there's websites, there's blogs, there's great books. Um, uh, I love, uh, my friend Jordan Rainer wrote a book a couple years ago, sacredness of secular work. There's every good endeavor.

There's like so much resources. If you use Google, how do I be a Christian and a good CEO or in run a business and just start chewing on stuff and trying stuff. And I don't know if you ever, you said, who's not fully integrated.

I'm not fully integrated. I don't know who has fully integrated, but I'm hopefully more integrated than I was 10 years ago, 20 years ago. And I hope I'm more five years from now.

Perfect. Great. Well, Mike, thank you for sharing your wisdom on the show today.

This has been such an important message. Uh, where can the audience go to find more information about you and C12? Sure. Uh, if you go to join C12.com, um, that's a great spot where you can find like free articles, free eBooks, free tools, and you can find out where we're at.

So we've got groups in tons of cities. If you're someone running a business, your CEO, president or owner, um, if you're not, if you're a, you know, a manager, a director of some business, you're like, man, I resonate. We try to put as much free on there as possible.

And our YouTube channel has got tons of great case studies as well. People just demonstrating a real business issue and how as a Christian, they approached it. Perfect.

Well, stay tuned everybody for the next episode, where we're showing you how to grow a hundred full business, one that glorifies God as it grows. And if you need help specifically with your business, you can always reach out directly to me at 4thsoilventures.com. Thanks again, Mike, for being on the show and thanks again for all of you for tuning in and until next time, grace be with you brothers.