Transcript 

Welcome to the Hundredfold Business Podcast where Christian men learn how to grow their businesses top line, bottom line, and finish line. And I'm your host, Josh Fonger, founder of Fourth Soil Ventures, and today we have a special guest. We have Andrew Crapuchettes.

Andrew is the CEO of Red Balloon, America's number one talent acquisition and HR tech company, connecting serious job seekers with serious employers who won't force their employees to compromise their faith or values. He has founded several tech-focused companies and is widely considered a global pioneer in the development and use of labor market data analytics, an industry he helped found over 20 years ago. All right, welcome Andrew.

Thanks for being on the show. Well, thanks for having me, Josh, and nice to be here. Very excited about this.

We've talked a lot in advance of this and what I really hope that the audience gets to hear is not only all about Red Balloon and the exciting things you're doing in the industry, but just the story of you being open about your faith in an industry, the tech industry, which is not always the safest place to be. So let me kick us off by saying, you know, Andrew, can you tell us how God has directed your path to where you are right now? Yeah, well, God always does it in lots of different ways. I'm blessed to live in Moscow, Idaho.

I actually grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, did the dot-com thing down there, got tired of kind of living in the middle of that. We didn't have a great church community that we wanted to be part of, so I thought, you know, why not Idaho? I moved up here when I was 22 years old, and at 22 you can kind of move somewhere, and if you like it, you stay, and if you don't like it, you go somewhere else. It's not that big a deal.

It's not that big a decision, and we landed up here in Idaho. Absolutely loved it. My wife up here, we've had five kids.

I live on 60 acres, ten minutes from the office. We're plugged into a church community, Christian school community, just really, really blessed life, and I can see God's hand working through all of this. Not only did I get the great business experience in the Bay Area and kind of got to meet people and do things that would have been hard to do if I'd grown up in Idaho in the way that I am now, but also a lot of godly Christian men that have been around me.

I remember my first job where I was working for a Christian man who just really encouraged me and mentored me in a lot of different ways. So, you know, you can point to a thousand different things that God has done to direct the path, and probably the biggest one is I married the best person in the whole wide world, and of course other people might disagree with that because they married someone else, but I am absolutely thrilled to be married to Elise, and she has been my helper and guide through all of this, and it's been quite the adventure. That's awesome.

Well, I'm excited to kind of unpack some of this story. Let's just start from the Bay Area, Silicon Valley. What was that like to be a Christian there, and I believe you were an entrepreneur.

You're involved in starting up companies. What was that like? Yeah, so obviously the Bay Area did not have a strong Christian culture at any level. I started by just doing shipping and receiving, then I got involved in these tech companies, got to start them with other people.

One of the businesses I was involved in, on this one I wasn't on the executive team. I was right below the executive team, so I get to watch everything, which is actually sometimes a better seat. We raised 32 million dollars of venture capital money back in the late 90s when 32 million dollars actually meant something, and I got to see a business that grew very, very rapidly.

Even at that business, I was blessed to work for a Christian CEO who was not afraid of, and this is always part of everybody's story, the CEO was born in Christian and was not afraid to talk about it. The CFO was a Catholic Christian, not afraid to talk about it. It wasn't a requirement, it wasn't a prerequisite to work for that business, but it created a culture where people loved being there, and I got to see that firsthand as a teenager, an early 20 year old who was a hotshot for that business, getting to fly around the world, but getting mentors like that in my life was amazing, and I was very, very grateful for that.

So grew that business quite a bit, but unfortunately when you take VC money, sometimes it's kind of like steroids for a business. You grow really, really fast, but not in a healthy way, and that's what happened with this business. We grew to a very large business in a very small amount of time, and turned out that we blew through all that money and ended up laying everybody off, and that's part of the reason I left the Bay Area, is I saw this is the dot-com bubble.

We were either going to go public, and I was going to be worth many, many millions of dollars, or what actually happened is we went out of business, and I was worth zero dollars. So, you know, fun adventure, you know, I got to play rounds of golf in Tokyo with Japanese businessmen, and traveled the world as a teenager, turned 21 on an expense account. God was really good, kept, you know, kept me faithful through all of that.

It was a fun and heady time, but we did blow through all that VC money, and then went out of business. When I moved to Idaho, I thought, well, I'm a Bay Area, you know, hotshot. I'm just gonna grab myself a job here in little Moscow, Idaho, where the University of Idaho is.

Turns out there aren't actually jobs here in town. There was, you could work for Walmart, or the University, or the hospital. There was just a small, sleepy college town, and so I thought, well, God's given me skills and abilities.

I should use those to bless other people, and if I want a job, I bet other people do too. So, I started building businesses, and I thought, you know, why not? And we created a 3D printing business that we ended up selling to Stryker. We started a student information software business that I ended up selling to the employees.

We started a book publishing business that I sold to the other owners, and then I started a labor market data company. I know this sounds kind of funny, but we talked, you talked a little bit in the intro about that. Labor market data sounds really boring and dismal.

You know, they call economics the dismal science, but labor market data is actually really helpful for everybody's lives, and let me tell you why. Basically, if you have a phone right now, you could use that device to decide where you're gonna go to dinner tonight, where you're gonna go on a vacation next summer. Can you afford a mortgage for your house? You can do all these things, but if you want to find data to drive some of the really big decisions of your life, like what should I study in college, or what college should I go to, what professor should I go to? If I'm a professional already, what are the most lucrative skills that I should add to my skill portfolio as an individual that will have the highest economic returns in the labor market? Well, that kind of information simply is not available, and so I thought, well, if I could create jobs while also creating information and data so that people around the world could make better decisions about their career, then I'll be driving prosperity for individuals and maybe, in the meantime, get myself a job.

So we did that. We built a labor market data company, and our original goal was 50 at 50. We wanted 50 people earning $50,000 a year here in little Moscow, Idaho, and basically, I've always had this passion around how do we create jobs for people, because you don't want a welfare state.

You want people who are working really hard. God gave us work to do, and so if I can create jobs where people are making enough money to go out to dinner, to go on vacations, to really thrive, then I will die a happy man. So we created this business.

50 at 50 was our original goal. We obviously blew by that. I think when I left the business, there was about 250 employees here in town, many of them earning heavy six figures on a huge business, and it was just a real blessing.

We ended up selling that business multiple times, both to private equity, to strategic buyers, etc. Really great experience along the way, but when I got to 2020, my board, at that point I had less than 2% ownership in the business because I'd sold it a number of times, but I was still the CEO, and the board basically sat me down and said, look, if you could park your Christianity on the weekends and just be effectively a CEO who does not try and be distinctly conservative Christian, then you are welcome to keep your job, but if you're not willing to do that, we're gonna need to go a different direction for a CEO. This was kind of a slap in the face, obviously, because I had spent the last really 15 years building that business and trying to be distinctly Christian in the way that I ran the business.

I had the example of the people in the Bay Area that I ended up working with, and just seeing what that was doing to the culture was amazing. We had many people who were not Christian at all, loved working there. I had multiple people, you know, kind of grab me at work and be like, hey, you're really joyful, and all you people are really joyful.

Can you tell me why? And I'm like, well, I'd love to grab a beer after work and talk you through that, and was able to lead a number of people to the Lord. But we also had a high-functioning culture, so this is a business that was growing 25 to 40 percent a year with a 40 percent margin. So we were just crushing it on a SaaS business.

We were innovating in the marketplace. We were winning on every business term, and part of that was we just had a very strong, distinctly Christian culture. And I would sit down with every new employee and say, look, this is who I am.

This is what I believe. It's not a prerequisite. You don't have to, you know, convert or anything like that.

But I just, you know, I'm unafraid to tell you what I believe, and it's gonna have huge ramifications in how I run the business. We're gonna have a no-gossip policy. We're going to, you know, we might have a kegerator in the office, and you're welcome to grab a beer, but don't get drunk at work.

That's not the right thing to do. I'm gonna have zero tolerance for sexual harassment. You know, there's just a variety of things that are outworkings of my Christian faith that are going to define our culture.

And Ben Horowitz says, culture, company culture, is what the employees do when the CEO is not there. And so I just had spent a lot of time, how do we build a strong Christian culture? And then my board thought that was a terrible thing, even though they were making a ton of money. And so that's when I got fired in kind of late 2020, and I started Red Balloon in 2021.

So I'll pause there. Sorry, I just monologued for way too long, but there's a little bit of my story. No, that's a great story, and a lot of segues for questions there.

I'm curious, you know, so the culture was part of the reasons why you were successful, but there must have been something about the way you were acting that was, or living out your faith, that was causing some kind of heartburn for your board. What was, what are some of the things that were triggering them that said, hey, you know what, we like this part of Christian culture, but we don't like this part. What were some of those things? They wanted me to start getting very active on social media.

This is 2020. They wanted me to put a black square on our company website. They wanted me to make a statement about George Floyd.

They wanted me to make a statement supporting COVID vaccines. They wanted me to require employees to wear masks or work at home. They wanted to basically, you know, they were looking at what was happening out in the world, and they wanted me to basically jump on all those bandwagons.

And I said, well, two reasons. First, so I run a data company. Why would I jump into some of these political discussions? Because, you know, let's say I only ostracized 20% of my customers.

Why would I do that? It's a terrible business decision. So, no, I'm not going to jump into some of these political or ideological discussions online. That really made them upset.

And I said, and secondly, even if it wasn't a terrible business decision, I wouldn't be willing to do it because I don't believe it. And so I'm not going to just play along. I'm not going to get along to, you know, go along.

I'm just not willing to do that. And they actually at that moment were like, hmm, and they decided to dig in further. And they actually paid a law firm out of Boston to do a dossier on me.

And the law firm came back and said, you know, he's really a committed Christian, goes to church, you know, is part of his kid's Christian school, you know, all these other things. And so we think that's fairly toxic in today's environment. So it was that dossier that they had on me that that's when they sat me down and said, okay, you need to dial all this back.

And I'm like, okay, if we had any employees that have complained, they're like, no. So if we had any customers who have complained, no. But we want you to be pushing this left leaning ideology in your public persona.

And I'm like, that's something I'm just not willing to do. And they're like, okay, we think that the reason that you are standing on what you believe is because you're a Christian. And we need you to not be a Christian CEO, but just be a CEO happens to be a Christian on the weekends.

And I'm like, well, at least you see me as a Christian CEO. So I'll take that as a compliment. But no, I'm not going to pull that part of me out, because it sounds like you want me to not bring my whole self to work.

And that's just something I'm not willing to do. So those were kind of the big drivers. And that's when the discussion really got ramped up.

That's amazing. So it wasn't necessarily for you, I don't know, loving your employees or loving your customers or actually living out. It was because you were not willing to not even park your faith, have a different, you know, go along with a narrative that was anti-Christian.

That was a problem. And what, you know, we had kind of three principles that we tried to drive the business, and it was bless the customer, bless the employee, and bless the shareholders in that order. So we said we want every customer to be better off because they work with us.

We want every employee to be a better person because they work here. And then if those two are done well, we want to bless the shareholders with great returns because we're under authority, you know, all that stuff. That was another sticking point for them.

They're like, look, blessing is a distinctly Christian word. I'm like, well, it's actually a very complicated and descriptive word of what we're trying to accomplish. And they're like, yes, you're pushing a religious ideology by using the word blessing, and you need to drop that.

And I'm like, look, if I drop this, you're going to ask me to drop something else. It's just going to be a never-ending road. So I'm just going to say no now and not going to move.

And that eventually ended up costing me my job. Wow. I mean, so any regrets? I mean, so for those who are on those kind of situations right now where they're feeling that kind of pressure and they're like, what should I do stand up for my faith? Any regrets in doing that? Was it worth it? It was really hard, and it was absolutely worth it, right? And it was funny because I was talking to my wife about this recently, and we're like, you know, it was really hard.

It was really fun to have a big fat salary and a job that I really enjoyed doing and working with people I really enjoyed, but it was clear that God was kicking me out, because every time I was at a decision point, I had complete clarity. And that's something I often pray for, is not, you know, God, I don't want the easy road, I want the clear road. I want to make sure I'm following your will.

And so I will often just be praying, Lord, give me clarity in this so that I know that I'm doing the right biblical righteous thing in this moment. And I had real peace on that front. There were also some really interesting things that I kind of learned spiritually through this whole thing.

Again, very, just to be honest, very painful process. And I also realized that a lot of my identity at that moment was I'm the CEO of this company, right? We're the biggest employer in town. A lot of respect.

The mayor would call me up and, you know, want to take me out to lunch because I'm running this huge business. We just built a 70,000 square foot headquarters in town. And I realized, no, I need to have my identity in Christ, not in this CEO job.

And that was surprisingly difficult. Even when I could articulate it, it doesn't mean that it was easy to do. And so do I have regrets? Well, I wish that I didn't have to go through the refining fire of that, you know, career transition, but I am deeply grateful that I did.

And in fact, my wife, who is, she's Dr. Krapischutz, I'm like sub-GED Krapischutz, so she's the smart one. She wrote an article in the Federalist about that time, about the time I started Red Balloon and started kind of blessing people all over the country. She's like, you know, my husband was given a hard decision and he did not get fired.

He was redeployed. And if the king tells you to go take a new hill, who are you to push back and say, I'm not willing? So it's like, okay, it's not what I wanted to do, but praise the Lord, yes. So do I have regrets? No.

Was it totally difficult? Hundred percent. Yeah. Wow.

Well, thank God for giving us wonderful wives, right? Yeah. Amen. Amen.

Yeah. For support during those hard times. Well, so tell us about, I don't know if it's your newest business, but one of the more popular businesses right now that you're running, Red Balloon, how did that get started and what has that experience been like? Again, same guy, still you, but you're going through and again, doing it as under the Lord, you're doing it in a God glorifying way.

What does that look like and how has it been different? Yeah. I'll just say it was an accident. I didn't mean to start Red Balloon and this is, you know, serial entrepreneurs.

This is the kind of accidents that we have, I guess. So when I left my last business, I was running a housing development. I was on the board of a number of businesses and nonprofits.

I had a bunch of commercial real estate. I had enough to say grace over and I was planning on taking a year off, maybe playing a little golf, hanging out with my kids. I didn't need to jump back into a career.

I was given a lot of job offers because when you run a business and sell it for half a billion dollars, which I did, people tend to want you to do that for their business. So as a known quantity, but I said, you know, I'm not really ready to jump right back. And do another job. And a lot of those job offers were from left-leaning private equity firms who saw what I did and they wanted to make money. But I'm like, I'm gonna run into the exact same battles.

I mean, it's still 2021 and we're still gonna be fighting over all this stuff. So I'm just gonna say no for a while. It was kind of around that time that I think a friend of mine said, you know, you were just given a choice between your job and your values.

And you had the financial wherewithal to shrug off losing your job and stick with your values. But for a lot of conservatives and Christians, that's a really hard decision because they're really not just like, hey, I'm gonna give up this hobby for this hobby. They're saying, I need to stick with my values and it's gonna cost my ability to feed my kids and pay my mortgage and be a meaningful member of society.

And so if I can just make these little compromises here and there, then I will get to keep my job and continue to be a meaningful part of society. So I'll just do it. So it's very tempting for conservatives and Christians to compromise lots of little compromises on things they hold dearly if their job is at stake.

So I thought, okay, well, why don't I create a job board with a thesis around freedom and focus on finding employers and employees who value meritocracy, who value hard work, who value capitalism and are unafraid of living their faith and their values out loud. And I'll just create this job site. I'll call it redballoon.work. And I did .work because I thought .com sounded a little like communism and I wanted hard work in the world.

So redballoon.work. So create the website. Literally my brother and I went to our basement, to my basement and spent a weekend and knocked out a job board because we're both tech guys. We're like, ta-da, we did it.

Now I can put some videos on LinkedIn, let people know about it, and then I'm done. Like I did my thing, I helped people out. Now I don't want to have to focus on starting a new business because I'm still in my year off and I'm like two months into having left my last business.

So, and it started to work, right? You started to have employers kind of find it and you had job seekers kind of find it. And all of a sudden you had like 20 employers and maybe a thousand job seekers that are interacting. It's kind of paying for itself, you know, for the technology to sit on a server.

And I'm like, ha, I did my thing, now I don't have to worry about it. Then I get this call from Fox and Friends and they said, hey, you have the nation's leading job board that for businesses that don't have a vaccine mandate. And for background on that, I just put on the website, cause this is kind of the time that the vaccine mandate was hitting.

I said, look, if you are going to treat your employees like adults and as free adults, then if they want to get a vaccine, they should. They should go do whatever they think is the best thing for them, but they should have a conversation with their doctor, not their HR department about what they put in their body. And so businesses on Red Balloon are not allowed to have a vaccine mandate, right? Seemed like it's just a normal level-headed kind of thing.

And turns out nobody else wanted to say that out loud. So Fox and Friends calls me up and says, hey, is there any way that you could come on our show and talk about this? And I'm like, sure. And I'll be honest, I have found the news deeply boring for many, many years.

So I actually didn't even know what Fox and Friends was. I thought it was a kid's show. And I thought this is a weird topic for a kid's show.

Turns out it's kind of a big deal, new show. And so I go on Fox and Friends at like seven o'clock in the morning, East Coast time, and I'm on the West Coast, so I was tired. And interview went great.

I'm like, oh, good. And I go back and my brother calls me. He's like, hey, the server just crashed.

Luckily I set up a backup, so users are still using the site, but we have 40,000 people on the website right now. Signing up as employers, signing up as job seekers, starting to find each other. And we had 1,000 employers sign up that day from that interview.

And I'm like, oh no, I just started a business. Because people are like sending notes. They're like, hey, where's the customer service line? I'm having trouble with something.

I'm like, there is no customer service line. Look, there's no employees. What are you talking about? Anyway, so God is good.

And now we've got a thriving business. But so Red Bull just started as a job board on accident. Now we do recruiting services.

We have applicant tracking system, hiring automation software, and have about 40 employees and are having a party literally every day. Wow, that's an amazing story. And obviously huge need, huge need in the marketplace.

So what would you say, because I was skimming through the site and it says that it's a pro-freedom job board. What does pro-freedom mean? I guess, how does that compare to other job sites? Because there's a lot of them out there. Yeah, there are a lot of them out there.

And the big ones, Indeed, ZipRecruiter. I'll be honest. So Indeed, during the kind of COVID era, Biden era, canceled a lot of employers.

So if you know the company Answers in Genesis, they have an ARC encounter, they have a magazine. Indeed canceled them and said, you're not allowed to post jobs on indeed.com because you're a terrorist organization because of your stance on a variety of issues. And so they were basically pushed out of the marketplace.

I had a huge construction company in Texas call me up. They're like, hey, I just got permanently banned from Indeed because on my job postings, I say that we are a God-fearing, freedom-loving employer. And Indeed said, that's a violation of the community standards.

Therefore, you are never allowed to post on Indeed ever again. And I'm like, what kind of world do we live in? So I guess I would define the pro-freedom as most easily by describing the not pro-freedom, which was Indeed during that time period. So we want employers and employees to find each other based on merit.

We think DEI is insulting to everybody. We think it's insulting to everyone, no matter what your skin color is, to say that you should be hired not based on the skills that you have worked hard to achieve, not based on the experiences that you've had in work, but entirely based on some skin-deep definition of who you are. We think that's not a good thing.

So it's really pushing back against some of those kind of cultural things that creeped into the work world, whether it was vaccine mandates or DEI or ESG, those things creeped in. We said, look, we wanna be pro-freedom. And it's so funny because we had job seekers come from LinkedIn and they would sign up on Red Balloon.

But we also realized we were just getting all kinds of job seekers that weren't necessarily a good fit with a thesis of Red Balloon. And so we just put a big American flag in the landing page background from coming from Indeed or from LinkedIn. And it turns out all of a sudden, 60% of people started bouncing as soon as they saw that American flag.

Well, basically the American flag ended up being this weird filter for people because they're like, oh, you're those kind of people. Like, what do you mean those kind of people? We're all Americans. Like, what in the world? So when I talk about pro-freedom, it's really what used to be normal 10 years ago.

And unfortunately, you have to define it as pro-freedom today. Wow, that's amazing. Well, I think that obviously you're finding your market and your employees, employers are finding each other.

What, with your process, because I'm saying I work with a lot of business owners and that's a challenge for them to find good people. What have you found as an effective process to actually attract and screen for employees, because you guys do recruiting, employees who have the values that you're looking for? Yeah, so obviously on the Red Balloon side, we have called 100, 150,000 unique visitors a month at this point, but much of that traffic's coming from me being on podcasts or media interviews or radio interviews, also coming from partner pages like the U.S. Christian Chamber of Commerce and the Christian Employers Alliance. And so when all of our, a lot of our traffic comes from all of our friends in that community, you're automatically gonna have a certain segment of job seekers that's on the website.

But we do do a lot of recruiting. I think we started doing recruiting two-ish years ago, and I think we've done over 500 positions at this point. We do it slightly differently, partly because when I was a CEO of my last business, I used recruiters, I always hated the process because I would end up paying 40, 50, $60,000 for a new VP of sales, and I'm pretty sure that recruiter ran into the person for the first time 20 minutes earlier on LinkedIn.

I'm like, why am I paying so much for this? And I felt this kind of weird misalignment of incentives because if they were getting a percentage of the first year salary for the person they were placing, then their incentive was to get me the most expensive person possible. And so I thought, this is a weird model. So what we do today at Red Balloon is we charge a flat $9,000 per position, and we field everything from CFOs and iOS engineers and AWS gurus to warehouse workers and foremen for construction companies.

Because we built a great method where we can identify the skills. We're gonna use LinkedIn Recruiter plus our database, but we also have built kind of a rubric around how do we interview to make sure the person's a culture fit. And when we work with a business, we give them those questions.

Like, here's the rubric that we use. Here's how we do it. We're happy to share all that.

We want businesses to hire good folks. And so we're happy to share all of those details. But honestly, when you focus on values, when you focus on culture and make sure they still have skills, you end up getting employees who are gonna stick around longer because they're not just motivated by 50 cents more an hour.

They are motivated by being at a company that's going to protect their values and allow them to live their values out loud, right? And so it is amazing of the hundreds of people that we place using this recruitment process, the longevity, the stick-to-itiveness of those employees is much higher than many of the employees. And we hear this from our employers, many of the other employees they had because people are coming for that values alignment, not just for a slightly higher salary, if that makes sense. Yeah, no, that's great.

It just, it makes financial sense to do things the right way. That's right. So what does it look like, you know, for those of us who are running the companies and they just want to see like, you know, I guess, peek under the hood and see what is it like at your business now? What is the culture? What is the atmosphere? What does it seem like? What is it actually like to work in your business as you as a leader? Like, what is that experience like? Yeah, no, that's a great question.

Because as soon as I left my last business, they got rid of the bless the customer, bless the employee, bless the shareholder because that was toxic, obviously. So I'm like, fine, nobody else is using it. I'll readopt it over here at Red Balloon.

So that's what we talk about a lot. We want to focus on making every customer better off whether they give us money or not. We want them to understand how to do recruiting better, how to get great employees better.

That is our main focus. We want every employee to be a better person because they're here, not just for Red Balloon, but for their future employers. We want them to be a better person even outside of work because of that.

And that has huge cultural outworkings. And then we go through, and I'll give you a couple examples, but then we also talk about the type of people that we want. I got this from my friend, Patrick Linceone.

Dave Ramsey does this, the Hungry, Humble, Smart, where it's let's define the type of people that we want. We liked Hungry, Humble, Smart. And in fact, I think Dave Ramsey actually has named his conference rooms Hungry, Humble, and Smart.

So it's really important to what he does. We didn't think that was quite the right fit for what we were doing. So we said, we want people who are joyful.

We want people who are excellent. And the reason we talk about joyful is because we want them to focus on the customer's problems but not be self-serious about themselves. So we have a really good time here at Red Balloon and that's the joyful part.

We want them to be excellent because we were pretty sure early on that this whole parallel economy, alternative economy that Red Balloon's part of, that was gonna be a moment and it was gonna be a moment that passed and businesses are just gonna wanna buy the best products and we wanna provide the best products, which I like to think we are. And then the last one is courageous. So joyful, excellent, and courageous because we are on the front lines of a culture war.

I have received multiple death threats from people because I stood up for freedom in the labor market, which seems ridiculous, right? Like really, I haven't done anything really, really bad except say that you should be free at work and that is evidently very dangerous. So a lot of people have been very upset about that. They say mean things about me.

It doesn't really bother me. I have a last name of crappy shit so I've had mean things said about me my whole life. So I'm not bothered by that, but we need employees who are courageous because we are in the culture war.

We're pushing on this and we think it's important. So anyway, so what does that look like in our culture? We hold people to high standards, but we also tell them they need to be home for dinner because we don't wanna save the whole world and lose our families. We have a policy that if there is a girl and a guy in the office, that the guy needs to go work at a coffee shop until somebody else shows up because we wanna be above reproach.

We want to not be in a position where someone could say that we are doing anything inappropriate and so we are gonna hold people to very high standards here of righteousness. And we have a zero tolerance for pornography on company computers. If you find that, we will fire you on the spot.

So we can live that out. And what it does is it creates an environment where innovation happens because you know that where the standards are, you know that there's no gossip in the office and so you could say something that might be a stupid idea and we're all gonna laugh and have a good time, but we're not gonna use that to maneuver and politic that person into a bad position. And they say in business, every great idea comes from nine bad ideas.

And so I want a culture where people can talk about bad ideas, they know no one's gonna gossip behind their back and say mean things. They're only gonna say it right in front of them and say that was a stupid idea, but interesting because we might be able to build on that for something else. That's what the culture ends up being and we have a lot of innovation, we have a lot of fun and then by six o'clock, the office is empty because everyone's home having dinner with their families, which is the goal.

That's great. I appreciate all of the very specific, tangible, tactical applications of God's word. Here's what God's word says.

Now we just apply it and we apply in very specific ways that set the standards and everyone's blessed because of it, whether you're a believer or not, you get to work in a great place, which I think is great. So I wanna end with a question I ask everybody who comes on this show, which is what would you say to encourage someone who has not yet fully embraced integrating their faith into their work? Yeah, I'd say two things. First of all, probably 50 years from now, we'll all be dead.

Most of the people listening to this, 100 years from now guaranteed, right? So what is your legacy gonna be? So, and it won't matter whether you made a couple extra bucks this year at that point. So I want you to think a little bit longer term than just this quarter, just this year, just this month, just this week. I want you to think longer term.

What am I accomplishing with my life? How is God going to use my talents to bless his kingdom beyond me, right? Okay, so put that in there. And then the second piece is, I want you to think of every great story you've read. Think of the Lord of the Rings or any of the C.S. Lewis stories.

Was the hero of that story ever asked to compromise on thing? Did they ever were offered an easier way that would have made their life a lot easier? And it would have been a terrible story if they had accepted it. Well, of course, like Frodo, like, hey, do you wanna go to Mordor? No, in fact, I don't wanna go to Mordor. But this is why it's such a great story because the hero did something very, very difficult.

Well, you as a businessman, as a business person, you are living out a story that your kids are watching, that your family is watching, that your community is watching, that your employees are watching. And think beyond yourself, the awkwardness of me living my values out loud. Think beyond that of what am I doing to affect the people around me when I do that? What story are they learning and are they watching because of how I'm living my values out loud? And when you think of other people, and this is gonna sound morose, but the people who survived the POW camps were people who had someone at home that they were doing this for, right? Maybe they didn't see them, but they're like, I need to survive so I can see my wife because I need to think beyond myself.

Whereas the people who didn't have someone else, why go through the pain and anguish of trying to stay alive and survive this horrible experience? You're not gonna do it. And so if you're an entrepreneur, if you're a business person, it's really hard to be a business person, A, and it's also hard to be a business person who's a distinctly Christian, live your values out loud type of business person. But remember, you're doing it for other people, you're not doing it for yourself, and God's gonna use that.

God's gonna use it to affect the lives of other people. We don't even know how always, but we know that it's true. And so kind of keep that in mind.

50 years from now, I'm not gonna be doing this. What's more important than this quarter's numbers? And what kind of story do I wanna be in? And who do I wanna be in that story that everybody in my community, all my employees, my kids, my family, they're watching, whether you know it or not, they're watching. Who do you wanna be in that story and how do you wanna be remembered? And if you keep those top of mind, it actually is not that hard.

Wow, Andrew, great answer to that final question. And hopefully everyone listening is taking note of that. I mean, think beyond yourself, think eternal, and think about the impact you're making, not just on your life, but on those around you.

All right, Andrew, so where can people go to find out more about you, your company, Red Balloon? Where should they go? Yeah, so redballoon.work. We also acquired militaryhire.com about four months ago. So if you're a veteran or you know someone who's a veteran who's looking for a transition to the private sector, you can go to militaryhire.com. But redballoon.work is a great place to go. The other thing I'd say is follow me on LinkedIn.

I try and put out one meaningful piece of content at least once a day, sometimes twice a day, and helpful advice on how to hire, how to look for a career, et cetera. So if you wanna follow me on LinkedIn, that'd probably be useful, or redballoon.work. I'm on all the other social media platforms, but I don't spend as much time there as I do on LinkedIn. So that's where I'd really put the focus.

And Josh, thanks for having me. It's fun to be part of other CEOs, other leaders kind of grappling with this. I'm just really encouraged that there's a revival happening in the business world in America today.

And I'm glad that you're part of that, and I'm glad to be able to speak to other people who are part of it. Thanks, Andrew. Yeah, appreciate it.

Likewise, enjoy the friendship so far. I'm looking forward to seeing what you do and how we can work together in the future. All right, well, everybody who's tuning in, just wanna let you know, stay tuned for the next episode where we're gonna be having another guest like Andrew, someone else who can teach us, who can show us how to grow that hundred-fold business, one that's glorifying God as it grows.

And if you need help specifically with your company, you can always go directly to my website, 4thsoilventures.com. Again, Andrew, thank you for being on the show. Thanks, everybody, for tuning in. Until next time, grace be with you, brothers.