Transcript 

Welcome to the Hundredfold 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 4th Soil Ventures, and today we have a special guest. We have Rick Box.

Rick loves helping leaders connect the dots between Monday morning and their God-given vocational purpose. As founder and CEO of Unconventional Business Network, he's equipped more than 700,000 leaders with practical, faith-centered business principles that actually work in the real world. His daily Integrity Moments broadcast reaches 2 million leaders across 200-plus radio stations, and he's written seven books because he can't help but share what he's learning.

All right, welcome, Rick, to the show. Thanks for being here. Well, thanks, Josh.

All right, very excited to have you on the show. We've been talking a lot back and forth, and you've been teaching people for decades now how to integrate their faith into their work, and you've written a number of books, the broadcast. You've done it, and so really looking forward to mining that wisdom today and sharing it with the audience.

So to start, Rick, could you share with us how God has directed your path to where you are right now? Yeah, well, my path was kind of windy in that, you know, I originally started as a CPA in public accounting, took a run at being an entrepreneur for my first time. Soon after that, and then went into banking and spent many years in running commercial lending departments for different banks. But along the path at one of those banks, I met a bank president that was different than any boss that I had ever worked for because whenever I would try and get decisions out of him, he would oftentimes quote me a proverb or tell me a parable and how I could apply it to my problem.

And even though I'd been raised in the church as a teenager, I kind of went more to the wild side and was really hiding out from God. And so to have someone pull the Bible out and to start directing me was very intriguing to me. And I began watching as it worked and it kept working over and over again.

And we were asked to turn around a troubled bank. We turned it around in about half the time that they thought that was possible. And so I watched as God really was doing something special through that.

Over time, that kind of moved my heart, changed me. Over time, I began a journey of wondering, are there any ministries out there helping these business leaders learn these principles that I learned from that bank president? And I really back then wasn't finding hardly anything out there. And so my last career step before the ministry was really, I was helping to lead and part owner in a small community bank and we decided to sell it to one of the major holding companies.

And so as I prayed about what was next for me during that period, I just felt like the Lord was encouraging me that you keep asking why aren't there any ministries teaching this stuff? I need you to go do that. And so I just launched out not knowing what it was going to look like or how I was going to get it there, but kind of launched out 30 years ago. And God's been faithful to just help us to really impact a lot of business leaders over the years.

Wow. Well, that's an amazing, amazing story. And 30 years is a long time.

And so I want to hopefully hit the high points of what that's been like. Well, let's just start from the beginning. So here you are, you wanting to impact business leaders.

That was your experience being a Christian. How did you go about doing that? And what is Uncanny Business Network do now? What's been the arc of that? Yeah. So, I mean, first of all, whenever I left banking, I didn't know how to go about it really.

And I only had experience in for-profit businesses, not non-profit. And so initially I started a consulting practice and I developed a business planning model using the book of Nehemiah as a guide. And so I would go into small companies and help them develop a plan for the future of their business that was based on these biblical truths and wisdom from the book of Nehemiah, which gave me the opportunity to share about other biblical principles and things like that.

That started to morph dramatically over time as I had the opportunity to start counseling business leaders from all around the country. I was teaching a business by the book workshop for the old crown ministries around the country for them. And I'd written my own first book at the time.

And so it started morphing until the place where in 2001, my board of directors kind of woke up and said, you know, Rick, God's doing some cool stuff around here, but it really doesn't look much like a consulting practice anymore. Why don't we form a non-profit and embrace a different business model because it'll be a better fit for what we're doing. And so we did that.

And so today there's kind of three primary focal points of Uncommissional Business Network. First of all, we are heavily involved in conferences and events. So we host a national conference every year here in the Kansas City area towards the end of April, where we bring in top Christian CEOs, authors, people to share about their faith at work journey and some wisdom in how to do business God's way.

We also do local and regional luncheon events throughout the year in Kansas City and also in Des Moines. And so of conferences and events have been a tool that we've used that early on, Josh, we realized that a lot of business leaders and owners may go to church, but they've never really thought about God having any involvement in their work life. And we've discovered that if we can bring people that have actually modeled and lived it, then these people will come to the events and they'll find out that God actually does have a purpose for their vocation.

And so that can jumpstart a lot of people into the conversation. And so conferences and events have been an important way. And then content has been huge for us.

We have a daily broadcast email and radio program called Integrity Moments that's on a couple hundred radio stations, as well as emailed out sometimes as many as over a couple million people in different languages. And so that's been helpful as well as the YouVersion Bible app that many people have on their phone. Actually this weekend, I believe we will surpass half a million subscribers just through that one app alone to our reading plans.

So content's a major piece as well. And then third is our community groups. And so we have what we call our unconventional business forum groups.

Those are designed for business leaders, regardless of what level they may be in business. And they meet once a month. We have provided them some great video training content with discussion questions.

And anybody that wants to lead one can lead a group each month and have a little bit of networking time, the opportunity to watch our video content. And then that group leader can facilitate a conversation to help them apply it to their business life personally and practically. So kind of those three areas, the content, the conferences and events, and the community groups is a lot of what we do on a day-to-day basis.

Wow, you guys have reached a lot of people. And I'm curious to hear about some of these transformations. So what is the typical business owner come in thinking about faith and work, and what do they end up leaving with maybe after going to one of these community groups or conferences? Sure.

What does that transformation look like? Yeah, great question. So what I would say is, Josh, a lot of people, especially if they're business owners, go into this having a fear. Can I do this? Am I going to get sued? Can I actually talk about this stuff in my workplace? And so a lot of times they have to be encouraged that other people are doing it successfully.

And that it is legal. And that the law actually has more benefits than most people realize for us to exercise our faith in the marketplace. And so that's a big hurdle to overcome for people because they oftentimes will shy away.

Or other people shy away because they've been brainwashed to believe this separation of church and state concept, that they believe that that applies to their workplace. Therefore, you know, hey, I'm in business to make money and everything else needs to set off to the side. And so that's where a lot of people start.

And we call those compartmentalizers usually, but they've kind of compartmentalized their life and their business life is completely separate and different from their spiritual life. And so once we get them in, you know, we have like a leading assessment tool that we use. That it's a free self-assessment tool that people will take.

And it usually surfaces for them ideas that they never dreamed that you could do and things that challenge them. And so that will help pique their interest in saying, oh, well, maybe God does care about my work. Maybe there's more I should be doing here.

And then we can provide content that kind of drips on them every day with our daily devotionals that helps them hear and see practical workplace examples of applying scripture to practical business problems. And so we'll help people move along. And then the groups will help them have some accountability, have other people that are like-minded come around them and really help them engage in how do I go back and actually do this stuff.

So I like that word compartmentalizers, you know, that would say that's probably, I mean, you probably don't have a percentage, but it's probably most, and I work with men specifically, but probably most men in the marketplace, that's probably their category where they start until they see things differently. Yeah, actually, Josh, Barna Research several years back actually researched this and they surveyed Christians, lots of questions, and they kind of boiled down and put people into three buckets. The first bucket were compartmentalizers, like we've already talked about.

The second bucket were onlookers, people that have head knowledge that they should be doing this stuff, but their heart hasn't gotten there yet. And then the third bucket is really for the integrators, those people that truly are integrating their faith in their work. And it was interesting that 72% of Christians fall in either the compartmentalizers or the onlookers category.

So we really only have about 28% of Christians out there trying to integrate their faith. Wow. Well, it's sad to hear that number, but it's also a huge opportunity for, I guess, both what you and I do is to wake people up and give them a path, a roadmap to follow.

No, that's great. But what are some of the pillars or foundations of your conferences, content, community groups? Are there certain things, like is it money and relationships? What are the kind of foundations to an unconventional business? Yeah. It usually starts with the concept that God owns it all and that we're just stewards over the business or the work that God's called us to.

And that's one of those things that I would say a lot of Christians would quickly agree that, oh yeah, I know that. But most of them know it at a head level, not a heart level. And so that's a really hard step to take is whenever you start relinquishing control and really trying to ask God to join you in this work that he's called you to.

And so there's some foundational principles like stewardship instead of ownership that we oftentimes start with people. And then there's just a lot of other principles that apply. So relationships is huge naturally.

So the people side of business, because so many people believe that the only purpose of business is profit. But if you actually examine scripture, you'll realize that the true purpose of business in God's view is actually to glorify God. And so if you truly believe that you're going to approach business differently.

Well, let's continue on. There's a lot of content I want to cover, but I know that a lot of it's built up in the books you've written. And is it seven books you've written? Okay.

So there's a lot of books out there. Let's start with maybe the most popular one, The Unconventional Leader, a leadership parable for today's demanding workplace. So that was the fiction book all about Nehemiah.

Tell us about the inspiration for that book and some of the key takeaways. Yeah, actually, it's about Daniel. So kind of what happened with that one, Josh, is I'm not one that reads a lot of fiction unless I'm on vacation.

And so for me to write a fiction seemed kind of crazy. But I was on a vacation many years ago. And boy, just in my prayer time on that vacation, God just kind of came crashing in and gave me this idea that he wanted me to write this fiction book by taking the story of Daniel and making him a modern day business executive with challenges that may parallel the challenges that Daniel faced in his day.

And so there's six biblical principles woven throughout the fiction story that we can glean from the story of Daniel to help people apply it in their work life. And so it's a quick read. It's a fun, engaging story because it is a fiction story.

And so it's just a way that business leaders can actually engage with that story differently than they might by reading it out of the Bible. So if you have it memorized, what are those six things putting on the spot? Oh, yeah. Yeah, I don't know that I'm going to come up with them off the top of my head.

I mean, I know that one of them is well, actually, I use an acronym called LEADER for it. So the first one really is is loving God. And so loving God and loving others. And the E is for excellence. You know, Daniel was known for his excellence, and that's why he got to rise to the being the number two person in the kingdom. The A is for appreciating others.

And so Daniel looked out for others, even whenever it wasn't always in his best interest. And then D is really driven by a divine purpose, a higher calling. And then E is for ethics, just having high integrity in the way that he conducted business.

And then finally, the R was for being resolved. In the very first chapter, you know, we read that Daniel was not going to defile himself by eating the king's food that has been sacrificed to idols. And so it says that he resolved himself not to defile himself.

And so that resolution and that resolve of holding on to God's principles is key. Oh, that's great. And good job with memory on that.

That's the use of acronyms. Well, just to stick with this concept of resolve, this idea of living different in Babylon, how, I mean, how do you see the modern day Christian, and we're talking to business owners here, so the modern Christian business owner who's a man, what does that look like? I mean, how does that, maybe your conference speakers talk specifically about that, but how does that, how can Christians, the non-believers in this modern era? Yeah, I mean, I think that, you know, it's usually simpler than what we make it. That's the way Jesus taught was, you know, when they asked him what the greatest command was, he just boiled all of the commandments down.

I mean, if you imagine the group he was talking to were Jews that knew, you know, that there's 612 laws in the Old Testament they're supposed to follow, or whatever the number is, and Jesus boils it down to love God and love others. And a lot of times that's at the core, that as business leaders, it's easy for us to get wrapped around trying to make money and cut corners, abuse people, abuse resources. But if we truly are followers of Jesus, we need to be looking at how do we love people instead and work with them by loving them and loving God in the process, then the relational side of that equation will usually end up leveraging the talents of people around you better, because now they trust you, they're willing to follow you.

And so there's a lot of, you know, scriptural wisdom, but it usually does boil down to loving God and loving others in some form or another. Simple to remember, but difficult, very difficult to put into place without the right heart, especially. Well, I wanted to hit on some other topics.

I think this is going to be key for business owners, which is one of your other top books, which is Unconventional Business, Business God's Way. So what are those keys? What are the keys to growing a business God's Way? Yeah, once again, it's been a while since I've written that book, so I may struggle to come up with all five keys. But, you know, basically, you do have the different disciplines of business.

All can be using scripture in a practical way. So in that book, Josh, I try and make it real relevant and practical. So we talk about developing a plan, using really kind of principles from Nehemiah as to how to be a great planner that maps out a strategy, but involving God in that plan, making sure that you're actually following God's plan, you know, rather than our own, that then we ask God to bless what we came up with, you know, so we try and turn that around the other direction.

And then, you know, even sales, marketing, finance, you know, all of those disciplines of business, we all have to struggle through. And so the book actually covers principles and keys that will help us do those different disciplines in business from a more godly way, and actually looking at scripture and determining, well, what are the principles that maybe apply to the way I manage finances in my business, for instance. That's great.

Well, I'm going to pick that book up because that's what I love talking about. That's what I did. This podcast was to mine out from scriptures.

What does God's word say about sales and marketing and finance and I.T. and leadership? Because there's a lot of books written, a lot of people talking about those things, but very, very few going first to God's word to see what that says, and then use those principles as the top, and then making sure their strategies and tactics fall beneath those principles, as opposed to, like you're saying, I'm going to do it my way, and then God bless it, is the founding of him and his word. So I love that. I'm going to check that book out.

It sounds great. Well, Rick, on a personal note, I know that you've not only taught this, you've lived this. What has been maybe some of the ahas or moments throughout the last 30 years where you've had some revelation, and not new revelation, but just revelation like, wow, I didn't ever see it this way before, or paradigm shifts that you think would be helpful for the Christian listening to this that took you maybe a few decades to learn, but maybe you could speed up their journey.

Yeah, you know, I think that things like having courageous faith, you know, starting a nonprofit from scratch with no experience in nonprofit really had me on my knees, especially a lot in the early years, wondering, okay, how am I going to feed my family? How's this going to work? But God giving me a plan, and then just following the plan, and seeing him show up over and over again, and oftentimes in just miraculous ways that I've just learned over the years that the things that I try on my own strength have not worked very well, but the things that God kind of dumps on me, and I really wasn't even looking for it, have been some of the best strategies and things that we've done. And so whenever I look at the marketing that we've done over the years, almost all of it has been things that God brought I would have never thought of doing, and it just took off. I mean, let me give you an example.

So probably 20 years ago, Josh, I had a radio executive come to me out of the blue. I'd never met this guy. He came to me and said, Rick, I think there's a void in the marketplace.

I think somebody needs to do a radio vignette on integrity in the workplace, and I think you should do that. And at the time, I had just started in ministry, and I'm like, why are you asking me? I've never done radio. I don't know anything about it.

Why would you come to me with this? And he said, well, I just know what you're trying to accomplish, and it seems like a good fit for you, and I just wanted to challenge you to consider that and pray about it. And so at the time, I remember telling him, you know, God hasn't called me to that to my knowledge yet, but I'm open to praying about it. Why don't you join me in prayer, and let's see what God does.

Well, before the week was out, I had a second radio executive from a completely different station came and asked me the exact same thing, and I'm not real bright, but I'm like, okay, God, if you keep whacking me enough, I think I can figure this out. And so I ended up going back to them saying, okay, if I agree to do this, what do I need to do? What do you need from me? And they said, you know, we don't want to carry it until we know that you can sustain it. So why don't you go write about 90 days worth of material, and then once you have that, come back, and we'll produce the radio program for you.

Well, so I did. I started writing this content. Well, I had some friends that said, hey, if you're writing these daily devotionals, why don't you email them out? And I'm like, well, okay, I could do that.

Well, I had a very small list at the time, and so I began emailing out these devotionals, and all of a sudden, I started getting emails in Portuguese and Spanish asking me questions about these devotionals. I'm like, I sent this out in English. Why are you asking me questions in Portuguese? And I started looking around and asking questions and found out that a large international ministry was rebroadcasting those emails.

And so I called them and said, is this true? Are you guys rebroadcasting my emails? And they said, oh, we're so sorry. We meant to call and get permission, but we forgot. I'm like, well, I'm fine with what you're doing.

I just need to know who are you sending it to. And they said, well, actually, we translated into seven languages and sent it out to over a million people. And that began our email devotional version that has reached millions of people that we would have never dreamed of.

And then later, and it turned out, both of those radio executives surprisingly resigned from their positions. And so the radio program didn't happen for another three or four years. But three or four years later, one of those radio stations called me and said, we love your daily devotional emails.

Would you mind if we took those and turned those into a daily radio program and we do it for free? I'm like, okay, free is good. We can do that. And so that's just an example of how walking in faith and trusting God whenever it doesn't always make sense, how he's kind of led this ministry over the years.

Wow, those are amazing stories. And so for those of us who are praying and praying and waiting on the Lord to answer, he hears our prayers and things are coming. And it sounds like in this case, even when you thought, okay, I'm doing a radio program, it still took another three years until it started.

But you being faithful, you being faithful to proclaim God's word and to get it out there reached a lot of people. And you didn't really need to, in some cases, spend anything to make it happen. Just being willing to be a vessel for God.

What a great story. I wanted to talk to you before I get to the wrap-up question here a little bit about the Great Commission, because I think that a lot of times when people, Christians always think that they're supposed to integrate their faith in their work, supposed to live out their faith. They think, okay, well, I need to start evangelizing people because that's what I need to do.

How does your material, your teaching address that topic and how does it address that topic? Yeah, great question. So we kind of believe in our target market is working with people that profess to be Christians. Now they may be compartmentalizers as well, but they profess to be Christians.

So we feel more discipleship oriented than evangelistic. However, we do believe that that calling is for all of us, that we are to seize the opportunities that God gives us. But what we've seen over the years is sometimes you get a business leader that gets so excited and so focused on evangelism, but they're doing a terrible job of running their business.

And whenever they try and evangelize, they actually do more harm than good. And I witnessed that really early on in this journey that I was doing some consulting work with a business owner, and he was a fairly new believer. He was all fired up.

He wanted to tell everybody about Jesus. And one day when I was walking into his office, one of his suppliers was walking out. And I happened to have known this supplier, and I could tell that this guy looked angry as he was leaving.

As I stopped to talk to him, I said, what's going on? He said, can you believe this guy? He said, he hasn't paid my company in over 120 days, and he has the gall to preach at me and want me to accept his Jesus. Well, if that's what Jesus does for you, no thank you, I'm not interested. And so it was a great reminder to me that we need to help a lot of business leaders realize we're not expecting you to be perfect, but you do need to be trying at least to do your best in business or otherwise it's going to tarnish your evangelistic efforts.

And I believe that if you do your work with excellence as unto the Lord, just like you were serving Jesus himself, I believe you'll get plenty of evangelistic opportunities because people are always curious, how are you successful? Why are you doing it the way you're doing it? And that opens the door for a more open conversation about evangelistic efforts and why you're doing what you're doing. And so we try and teach, we do have materials that will help people with the evangelistic side, but we do believe strongly that we want to help people do business well so that their testimony is a strong testimony. Great.

What a powerful story, too, just to remind you early on that your personal witness does impact the message that you're sharing. Now, this is a question that I ask everybody who comes on the show. Just give them a chance to encourage the audience, and here's the question.

What would you say to encourage someone who has not yet fully embraced integrating their faith into their work? Sure. Well, I would say, first of all, examine yourself and your reasons as to why you aren't. If it's fear, don't let fear stop you because, first of all, the law really is on our benefit.

We oftentimes have had lawyers that specialize in Christian legal rights come speak at our events, and one of them is great about sharing the fact that he said, you know, I've been doing this a long time. We've won, you know, 95% of court cases we've ever tried all the way to the Supreme Court, never lost a case to the ACLU. He said, it's not the law that's your problem, it's usually your fear.

And so he encourages people, you know, go do what God's called you to do. If you get in call us and we'll represent you for free. And so if fear is a problem, you need to overcome that because that's not really a valid concern.

But if you truly want to live a faithful life as a follower of Jesus, God wants you not to be a compartmentalizer. He wants you to live a holistic life that all parts of your life 24-7 actually are integrated together and that people that see you see Jesus in the marketplace. And so we just really try and encourage people to be bold, step out, do the things that God's called you to do, and not live in fear.

Perfect. Thanks, Rick. And a great reminder not to live in fear.

And I appreciate you just sharing your wisdom. You've been at this a very long time, 30 years. And so I hope everybody who's listening will go and check out your radio broadcast, check out your books, and where can people go to find these resources? Yeah, so at unconventionalbusiness.org, you can find a lot of our resources.

I mean, I encourage you to sign up as an associate free member. You can get our daily devotionals that way and stay up to date with some of our events and things that are going on. And we also have our free leading assessment, that self-assessment tool that really is an eye-opener for a lot of people to take that assessment and discover where their strengths and their weaknesses are that may be able to help them.

So just visit unconventionalbusiness.org. Okay, very good. Unconventionalbusiness.org. And thanks, everybody, for tuning into this episode with me and Rick. We're talking about how you can glorify God in your business.

And if you need help specifically with your business, you can always reach out directly to me at 4thsoilventures.com. And Rick, thanks for being on the show. Thanks, everybody, for tuning in. Until next time, grace be with your brothers.