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 Hundredfold Business Podcast, where Christian men learn how to grow their top line, their bottom line, and their finish line.

And I'm Josh Fonger, founder of 4th Soil Ventures, and today we'll be talking about the fifth essential out of 12 essentials, all about how you can grow your Hundredfold Business, a business that honors God as it grows. During these 12 essentials, we'll be sitting under God's Word and having it inform us of how to grow and run our business, because we know that God cares about us, He cares about our business, He cares about why we do what we do and how we do it, and we know that our work can be a spiritual act of worship, and of course, it's going to matter for eternity. And if you need help with any of these 12 essentials, you can always reach out directly to me at 4thSoilVentures.com. Now, for this episode, we'll be talking about the importance of developing your company culture.

So if you want to attract and retain the best employees, you want to engage them and help them reach their peak performance, this is going to be the episode for you. To start this episode, I'd like to share a story about what happens when you don't have good company culture, what it looks like. I had a client years ago in the elder care industry, and I've had a number clients in this industry, but one in particular, where it was a family passing down their business to a son.

And when the son took over the business, he started to grow it rapidly. And on paper, things looked pretty good. He was opening up new locations, these were group homes, and he was modeling that after the locations that his parents started making, and it was starting to grow rather quickly.

But as he grew, the problems were getting worse and worse. Even though he spent his time training his team and documenting the operations and trying to dial in how the work actually happened, the problems kept getting worse. And that's why he was reaching out to me.

But the problems like the residents were not happy. They were not happy with the customer service that they were receiving. They were leaving bad reviews.

The employees weren't happy either. Low morale. They were coming and going, difficult to find them, difficult to engage them.

There was gossip going on. There was theft going on. There was destruction of property, the equipment, the facilities were getting run down, a lot of problems.

And as the problems increased, obviously, as you can imagine, it affected the top line, the sales and the bottom line, the profit. And for those who've never managed multiple locations that are running seven days a week, 24 hours a day, when things like this are happening and popping up all the time, life's no good. And this is very different than what it was when he was growing up because when his parents managed the business, they cared.

They cared a lot and it was a lot smaller. And so things were much closer to where they were and they were always there. And so they cared about the customers.

They cared about the facility. They cared about their employees. They cared about growing a business that they could pass down.

And though it was small, the culture was strong. But again, when he took over, the culture shifted and the company started to scale and grow and things got ugly. And I've seen this play out a hundred different ways.

And what I want to do in today's episode is really prevent these problems from happening to you. Instead, enable you to have a great culture that's going to be a blessing for you, your family, and of course your customers, your employees, and everyone that works within your business. I want to empower you with a biblical framework for growing and developing a good, healthy, virtuous company culture that's going to shine a brighter and brighter light in the marketplace.

And of course, like I said in the beginning, this is going to help you attract the best employees, keep them, and it's going to empower, enable them to do their best work at your business. So today you'll be learning what the Bible says about creating a great company culture, and they'll be talking about how to actually implement it. And the passage today comes from 2 Timothy 3, verses 16 and 17.

Let me go find it. All scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness. At the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work.

So Paul was writing this letter to Timothy, and he was a leader in the early Christian community, and he was helping establish churches in Thessalonica, and Philippi, and Ephesus, and Corinth. And as we know from reading the Bible, Timothy had his work cut out for him. Improving the company culture was a very difficult task that he had for him.

So Paul has given Timothy some very practical advice in this passage. And what we're going to do is draw three points that I think we can directly apply to our businesses as we're trying to improve the culture of our businesses. And the first point being that we should teach our team some profitable things and we're going to find those things in scripture.

So the first point is scripture is profitable. So we need to go there. The second thing is that we actually need to teach, train, disciple, mentor, coach.

A lot of things we need to do to actually get this into the hearts, minds, the brains, the actions of our team. It's not going to just happen by default. And lastly is that we're going to be equipping them to do good work.

And the opposite is also true. If we don't teach them these things, they're going to be doing bad work, which we don't want. So let's spend some time with the first point, which is that all scripture is breathed out by God and is profitable.

Now, I spent a lot of time over the years helping companies improve their culture. They have a culture that's not going so well and they want to improve it. They want to develop it.

They want to be intentional about making a difference. And what we'll do is first write down what they actually want the culture to be. And that usually comes out in terms of values and principles.

They want the people to embody in the culture. And what I find is that virtually never will someone go to the Bible first and look at the values there, the principles there. Instead of what they do is they just dream up whatever comes first to their mind, what they read in the recent business book, AI, some marquee large company has a certain values, the Google it, and they'll generate their list that way instead of first going to God's word.

And of course, the problem is they're missing out on first prayerfully considering where are the best values, where are the best principles, where is the best character traits described, where I can draw from that knowledge, that wisdom to then develop the culture of my own business. And of course, that's going to be found in the Bible because the Bible is written by God himself. And we know it's profitable, but also God has created business.

He created commerce. He created culture. He created community, created communication.

And so, of course, we're going to find that he has a lot to say about this if we just go and look. Because you don't want to get in the trap of, let's just say, looking to a billion dollar company like Amazon and saying, well, they're successful. They're making a lot of money.

So, whatever they're doing must be working and it must be good. And so, you'll see that they have a value, one of the top values, which is we want to be customer obsessed. And so, you will think, well, I guess I should be customer obsessed as well.

And that is the wrong way to make decisions about how to run a business in God's eyes. Running a business in a way that seeks him first, that desires his will first, that wants to glorify him, if you're just looking to the world first, you're going the wrong direction. Now, there's another example of another billion dollar company that has a very different first set of values.

Let me read them. Honoring the Lord in all we do by operating in a manner consistent with biblical principles, offering customers exceptional selection and value. So, you can develop a company culture that makes a lot of money by following God and by not following God.

But in the end, if your goal is to bring God glory, you're going to have to seek him first, follow his ways first, and build a culture that's built on his name and his word. I suggest to implement this first step, and we'll get to a lot more detail at the end of today's episode, that as you're reading your Bible, that you have a journal next to you, that you're taking notes about the character of God, the attributes of God, about some of the godly characters in the Bible, the Proverbs, specific direction to the early church. You're going to find a lot of wisdom in there that's going to help you as we get to the implementation towards the end.

And also, you're going to be able to easily see where other more worldly perspectives on principles and character, they just don't match up. And so, the fads of the week and the influencers of the day won't distract you and take you off track. Again, this first point is that all scripture is breathed out by God and is profitable.

So, if you trust in God, you trust in his word, you believe him, that he's not lying, then if you want to be profitable, if you want to do work that has a high return on investment, you're going to seek his word first, and you're going to find, and we know that God is a rewarder of those who seek him. The next point is for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness. There's a lot here, and we'll take them one at a time, but needless to say, if you just write a list of cultural values and you say, here you go, taper to the wall, it will not work.

I've seen this done. There's actually some work that needs to happen. You need to actually roll up your sleeves and be a part of implementing these cultural values into the workplace, and that's what we'll be talking about next.

Okay, so the first point is teaching, and so teaching is what I'm doing right now. It is teaching you business theory. It's what would happen at a university.

It's an important component to improving your company culture, so your team will need to know what is integrity, what is diligence. You'll have to actually explain it. You'll have to teach them.

The second one is to reprove or to rebuke or admonish. Less fun to do, but equally important. So if someone is outside of the cultural values that are going against them, they need to be addressed and to be reprimanded.

They need to be admonished. They're going to possibly need to leave work early. Maybe you need to write them up, possibly even fire them.

The third one on the list is correction, so this is giving constant feedback when someone is missing the mark to get them on track, giving that constructive criticism, and an example of this would be like an engineering firm where you have a senior engineer and a junior engineer, and the junior engineer is producing some work, and it's sloppy. There's some mistakes, some obvious things, and he passes it to the senior engineer. The senior engineer, as opposed to just correcting it and moving on quickly, he's going to go back to that junior engineer and explain, hey, it looks like you made these mistakes, correcting them, and not just correcting the mistakes to make the improvement happen.

He's going to be going back to the cultural values and say, hey, at our firm, we have a value of excellence where we double-check our work, and based on that value, you didn't double-check your work, and so you're trying to move them closer to those cultural values to produce that work beyond just the work itself, and the last one on the list is training in righteousness, so if teaching is more theoretical, the training is going to be more practical, and the way to think about this would be just think about the traits. If you're a carpenter and you have a senior master carpenter and he's training an apprentice, you might have a cultural value that has to do with quality work, and that's something you can talk about theoretically, but in training in righteousness, what would happen is that master carpenter is going to be actually showing this apprentice carpenter what does joining wood look like, you know, these different joints, how do you do it in a way that actually shows this quality that actually exudes this cultural quality in the work we're actually doing. Now there is a qualifier to everything I've said so far with regards to teaching and reproof and correction and training. And that has to do with the right heart, right? A heart that loves God and a heart that loves your people.

And out of that is going to be the right tone. You're going to say this in a kind way, in a loving way, you're going to be inspiring and encouraging them, showing them the vision and how they're going to get there. And it's going to be an opportunity to build them up as you're going about doing this hard work, because if you are doing a lot of reproving and a lot of correcting, and you do it with disdain, frustration and disgust, your team is going to lose heart, right? They're not going to be very happy there, even though you're following the Bible, but you need to follow the Bible in terms of love, right? In terms of actually caring about them.

And if they feel cared for, they're going to do better work. And we'll be talking more about how to actually do this in a future module on caring for your people. And I'm also going to throw in one bonus to this list, which is you need to be the example, because Paul also told Timothy in another letter that he needed to be the example, set the example for the early church.

And of course, it's very obvious if you are spending your time teaching and approving and correcting and training, and these are all good values to improve the culture. And everyone is excited about that, but instead you personally are going against those cultural values. Nothing you say is going to actually stick.

So since you are living embodiment of these cultural values, the cultural values should always be on display for your team to see. So as they see you come in early to work excited about the day, maybe you're going to roll up your sleeves to finish a project on time and make sure the work is excellent and be encouraging. They're going to see, okay, these are the cultural values and I can see them.

But if you're showing up late to work and you're trying to leave early, you're not happy to be there. You're frustrated, you're belittling your customers, producing sloppy work. That's going to have the opposite effect because again, you are going to be the one displaying these cultural values.

So of course, they need to read them and need to be documented and be taught them. They need to have the reproofs and corrections and training, but also they need to see you. This is why as a business coach, I don't just focus on business strategy and the tactics to help you grow and drive projects forward.

I also focus on the character of this owner, the leadership of this owner, because I know that if he is growing in these areas, it's going to improve and give him an ability to be a better leader, better mentor, better coach, better discipler of the people that are underneath him, which are his responsibility. And of course, if the culture is improving and thriving, it's going to impact the business. And to restate these first two points, all scripture is breathed by God and is profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness.

And as a bonus, be the example. And now we can get to the final point, the third point, which is that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work. So even though in this section, Paul is writing to Timothy about the church.

So this whole section is for believers, for Christians. We can still see that there's a lot of application for non-Christians because we know that if these things are taught, it's going to produce a more ethical, a more fair, a more honest, a more trustworthy, more industrious environment by teaching these biblical principles in your business, even for non-believers. Think of a Christian school versus the public school.

Now, generally speaking, the culture of the Christian school is going to be more conducive to learning for the children to thrive than a public school. And that's going to be because the teachers are teaching biblical truths, the character, the values, the principles from the Bible are going to be taught there. So even though not all the students there are Christians, obviously, it's a better environment, better culture for learning.

Obviously, when you are teaching, you're training, equipping, you're helping your team grow in knowledge and wisdom of these good values, equipping them to do good work, it's a good thing, right? There's a benefit there. And God will then weigh the hearts. He's going to weigh the hearts, the motivations for why people want to follow his ways, his precepts.

Because we all know that just following morals, following good character traits, it's not going to save anybody. Ultimately, trusting in the finished work of Jesus on the cross, dying for our sins, and resurrection from the dead for our new life is going to do that. Hopefully, this last section about equipping your team to do good work is motivation for you, because you wanted to do good work.

And now you see what are the steps to empower your team to actually do good work. Because developing your culture is not just something that HR people talk about. It's not just fluff.

It's not just something that a business consultant tells you to do. There's a purpose, there's a reason behind it. And that's why it's one of the essentials of a hundredfold business.

The reason you should develop your company culture is because out of a love for God and obedience to him, and a love for your employees and your customers, you want to do good work. And you know that God will smile upon good work that's done in his name. So, in summation, all scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for correction, for reproof, and for training in righteousness, so the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work.

And so, therefore, as you're trying to develop your company culture, you're going to want to first go to scripture to find those profitable things. And second, you're going to want to teach and reprove and correct. And you're going to want to train and be the example.

And then third, you're doing this all because you want to produce good work. You want to produce the work through your own efforts, but also through your team's efforts. So, you're going to be equipping them so that they can produce good work.

And the bedrock for all of this is faith. Faith is the foundation to this fifth essential of 100 Full Business. Faith that God's word is true, that it is profitable, and that by following, taking these action steps, you know, taking the theoretical, making it practical, is going to produce something.

It's going to produce good work. And so, this essential is all on faith. So, this is the choice for us.

Are we going to build our business on worldly wisdom, or are we going to take God's word, and we're going to apply it and build our business on a firm foundation that will last forever? Not ashamed to share where we got this wisdom from. Now, let's get to some action steps. And as always, prayer precedes progress on any of these steps.

And the first step being, you're going to want to list out those character traits. Ideally, have a journal next to your Bible, and look at the character traits of God. You're going to want to look at some of the directions that Paul has given in the epistles about how to live a godly life.

You're going to look at the Proverbs, and even just study the character of some of the godly people in the Bible. Like, Paul was steadfast, and Noah was diligent as he's building the ark. You know, all these different people in the Bible, they're reliable, they had issues with sin, but the Holy Spirit was working inside of them.

And you can draw some character traits, like Peter was bold, that may be effective for you in your business. Next, you want to spend some time praying, asking God to reveal to you, for you and for your business, and for what you're trying to achieve, what are the traits, the values, the principles that God is actually highlighting for you that you need to have for your business. And then you're going to want to tie scripture back to these values, so they're anchored in God's Word.

And then lastly, you're going to want to define what these words actually mean. So, what does honesty mean in the context of your business, and what does integrity look like? You want to actually define these words, not just use a dictionary, but to define them yourself, because these are going to be way more powerful, memorable, and actually stick. Now, for the next step, this is where we get to the teaching, reproving, correcting, and training righteousness, and being the example ourselves.

And I would flip the order and say, first, you want to grow in your ability to be the example. So, as you have your list of values, your cultural values, you want to actually have your business, read it, and read it again, and meditate on it. And then start to take notes about yourself when you are following the principles and values, and when you're going off track, and start to move yourself on track.

Now, spend some time with us, because it's going to matter a lot as you are trying to lead and teach others these values for you to explain your own personal journey towards obedience to them. Next, I move on to teaching, and teaching can be done one-to-one, one-to-many, it could be recorded, it should be structured, it should be planned, and ideally should be happening often once a week, once a month, there should be some regular cadence to teaching. And then, of course, you're teaching your people the words and the values, and why they matter, and what they look like, and it's best to be done through stories, so you can actually share stories, what does honesty look like, what does integrity look like, and share stories of actually in your business when people are following these values, and when they're not following these values.

Here's what I mean. So, if you have a used car dealership, and I've had several of these as clients, you might have a cultural value of honesty. Then you'd say, well, honesty looks like telling the prospective buyers what the actual defects are of the car that we know about, so they can make an informed decision.

And purposely deceiving them, hiding these defects is actually a form of lying, and so we're not going to do this. So, there you're actually explaining what does this value of honesty actually look like with regards to a typical work environment situation. Next is rebuking and correcting.

And ideally, these should happen real-time as the work is happening, as the situations are happening, where people need to be brought in line, you want to act, you want to respond, and do it in real time. But we both know that it doesn't happen nearly as often as it should, and typically only happens when there's flagrant problems, really abusive situations, then people act and they respond. But the little things tend to not get responded like they should.

Therefore, you need to have a touching with everybody that you are overseeing on a weekly basis, where you can bring up, hey, here's the things I need to correct or admonish or things that you're going off track. You want to do this on a regular basis, so you don't keep long histories of problems, and they get on a track where they're going the wrong way, don't even know it, and you start getting frustrated. Instead, you want to have an opportunity on a regular basis to correct these problems.

Now for training. And the ideal here is that the leader or the managers, whenever they're training the subordinates, hopefully they bought into the cultural values, they're embodying them. And so as they're teaching and training, or training the technical work that needs to actually happen in the field, in the office, they're infusing the cultural value into how they actually teach the work.

When we get to essential 10, which is manager operations, we'll be talking in more detail about how to infuse your cultural values into the operations, the day-to-day work in a way that's written, that's scalable, that sticks. But for now, the key thing is that if you're going to come up with cultural values like honoring your customers, you want to make sure your team knows that that's not just something that we say and floats outside the work. As a theory, honoring our customers actually is infused into how we are delivering our products and our services.

And now for the last step, I highly suggest you take some time to pray. Pray for yourself, pray for your team, and pray that you will be able to embody these cultural values, these principles that are based on God's word. And because of that, it's going to make an impact.

It's going to be a light in the marketplace. It's going to impact both everybody who's working in your office is going to enjoy the work more, be more productive, but it's also going to impact your customers and it's going to impact anyone associated with your business. And because of that impact, people are going to get drawn to the name of Jesus.

They're going to be curious, they're going to wonder, and you're going to have opportunities to share the gospel and lead people to a relationship with Jesus. And pray that God will bless the work that you're doing, that it will be good, it will be profitable, it will be pleasing in his sight. As always, if you need help developing your company culture, you can always reach out directly to me at fourthsoilventures.com and I'd be happy to help.

Now stay tuned for next episode, which is going to be essential six of 12, all about how to grow your 100 fold business. It's called expand your marketing. So if you want to reach more people and you want to do it God's way, I suggest you check it out, especially if you're trying to go for that 100 fold increase.

Finally, if you like this episode, make sure to like, subscribe, leave a review and share with others so they can also learn how to integrate their faith into their business. In this case, develop their company culture. I appreciate you brothers.

And until next time, grace be with you.