The Human Element w/ Steve Grissom | Ep. 70

In this episode David and Gary chat with Steve Grissom, Founder of Church Initiative. Steve and the team talk about the human element of startups and infusing heart and good listening skills into whatever you endeavor to create.

Links:

Steve Grissom LinkedIn

Church Initiative Website

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David Baxter - CEO of Big Pixel

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The Podcast

David Baxter has been designing, building, and advising startups and businesses for over ten years. His passion, knowledge, and brutal honesty have helped dozens of companies get their start.

In Biz/Dev, David and award-winning Creative Director Gary Voigt talk about current events and how they affect the world of startups, entrepreneurship, software development, and culture.

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Transcript

David: 0:05

Hi, everyone, welcome to the biz dev Podcast, the podcast about developing your business. I'm David Baxter, your host, and I am joined by famous traffic cone collector. Gary Voight didn't you know, that is way too much power for one man to have, you cannot carry around all those cones, it's just too much. There's a company here in Florida. I don't know if maybe they're nationwide, I don't know. But the only business name I ever see on traffic cones or barricades is Bob's barricades. And every time I'm like, This guy is making a killing. Because he's the only barricading cone guy like around there every my family and I have a joke that that's the superpower is the guy that creates traffic cones, and he could do anything. I mean, imagine where you put down a traffic cone, you can do anything you want. So you can stop people. No one ever argues with a traffic cone is just law, once it's put down, and you just put it that anyway, my mother in law likes to run them over. But you're not willing to do that, you got to be careful, because if you hit one of those things, some of them are full of sand, and then it's all over. We are joined today by Steve Grissom, who is our guest, and we are going to talk to him later, he is a founder of church initiative. But before we find out about his company, I did want to ask I'm doing a little series here, Steve, of time management. I'm asking the CEOs we're interviewing for the next few weeks, what they how they handle time management. And I will give you a brief primer as to where this became interesting to me as, as a founder of a company, I found a unique I don't know problem, I don't know it. Something unique about time management is the fact that my job is to give away my job. Right? It's the only job on the planet that you can't get fired from technically speaking. And if you give away your entire job, you've done your job well, right. That's what's strange to me. And so if time management of that as you give away your job, whatever your core job when you started the company and all of that, as you give that stuff away, what are you doing with your time? How are you spending your time? How do you manage your time? These are the questions that I've been pondering a lot. And so I've been asking my guests where that, where do you fall on that? How do you manage your time? What are you doing on a day to day basis? I am a terrible time manager, I am perfect serial entrepreneur by nature. Probably add never been diagnosed with that. So I struggle with that. I have to systematize it to use calendars and reminder tools and online notes that that sort of thing. But be assured that it's not a requirement for you to be a brilliant time manager in order to be a CEO. That's good. Yes, that's good, because I'm not. Now the other thing you mentioned is really big on my mind at this point, giving away all of your work, which is exactly what I've done.

Steve: 3:03

I'm a little bit older than you guys. Not much more than Gary. Yeah, I'm the I'm up there. And so, as of December 31, I gave away virtually all of my work. I'm still involved. I'm still the chairman of the board, and I'm still involved in an advisory role. But I don't think it's much fun to give all away all your work, especially the stuff you'd like to do. Sure. I'm sure that's where it gets tough. Yeah, yeah. And that's what you need to be giving away. So that's a real conundrum. So let me clarify that you because I have a friend who's done something similar.

David: 3:46

You, it's your company. And we'll get to more about church and initiative in just a minute. But it's your company, you founded it, you built it up. And now you are taking a step back. You have a new CEO. So you're Is that right, you're no longer in charge. Right air quotes there. But you have now moved as to elect chairman of the board kind of advisor. Is that? Is that correct? Yes, yes. And the way we work, we are actually a 501 C three nonprofit. So I don't own the company. Technically, the government says the people own the company. Fair enough. You guys have a share in it as well. But so it's a nonprofit ministry organization.

Steve: 4:33

But yeah, giving giving all that away is weird, David.

David: 4:39

It's weird. It's uncomfortable, because you give away the things you like first, to make sure that they're done well. And for me personally, that left me mostly as an operating mode. And that is not my wheelhouse. I can do it. But it's just draining for me. So I think that's a classic conundrum for somebody who's going to be a CEO for a long time, unlike me, who was creating a succession plan. And I think the key is to carve out areas that feed you that fill you that fill your soul. So that your you don't get sucked dry by whatever it is that's coming at you, whether it's administrative, or personnel, anything that takes away from your entrepreneurial spirit and creative fire. So now as the chairman, what are you doing with your time? Or maybe you're still too new at this to figure that out? Right? You're only a couple of weeks into this. So yeah, yeah. Three weeks to be exact. And I'm still advising the organization and the new leadership. And we'll continue to do that for a season. I'm a resource. Why did we do this? What do you think about that, and the man who is now running the ministry, a guy by the name of Sam Hodges has been with me for 20 plus years. So we can complete each other sentences. The CE O 's also been with us for 20 plus years. So it was as seamless a transition as you can get easier probably on them that on me, because it's like being in an airport on a moving sidewalk. And you're walking on that sidewalk or maybe running if you're trying to get to your play. And all of a sudden, you hit the stable ground. And it's like a lurch. And I think anybody who has gone through this has those kinds of feelings. So but I do have grandchildren. So that's part of the plan. I don't play golf. And I'm not idle, I am unretire horrible. And so I will be doing consulting, I will be doing other projects, I might start a business. I'm in the process of figuring that out. That was gonna be my next question. So because usually, when someone is taking that step back, the company can run itself, which is a testament to you. So congrats there. But your job now is to, or you now have time on your end, let me say that either way, you have time on your hands. So some people will say, Well, I'm semi retiring, or I want to start something new. This one's a turn in and go in. That's good. I want to do something new. So I want to step back. And it sounds like you're the latter, you're, you're gearing up for something else. I'm a starter and a builder. And I can't take that out of my DNA. It's funny, we interviewed a wonderful lady named Patty Brasilia the other week. And she started, she's a serial entrepreneur as well. And she's like, I sold my first company. And I play golf for one week. And then I got bored. And I started my next company. And she's like, I did that four times over my career. And so that's just a bug, right? It just bite you and you you creating is what you do. That's what I do. At my age, I have to be cautious about hitting physical limits. And so I have to be wise, you guys are much younger than I am. So I have to be wise about that. But we have a president who is older than I am. And we have other people who want to be president again. So it is possible for seasoned citizens to keep on going and that's my goal. Okay, so let's back up. So, first, I want to ask what is church initiative? Tell me a little bit about that. And then the next following question is how did you get there? So let's start with what what it is in general, church Initiative is a as I said, a nonprofit organization that equips churches to minister to people who are going through a life crisis. And specifically, our main focus is helping people who are going through grief, and also people who are going through divorce. So we've created curriculum, we'd look like, we look a lot like publishers from the outside, we've created curriculum to help churches run weekly support groups, grief, share, and divorce care. So a person going through a divorce would go to a church and sign up for this weekly, ongoing divorce support group. Did Oh with grief share. Obviously a topic is different. The format is the same. So with each week, three parts through our design. The first part is a video that features some The world's leading experts either on grief or on divorce, talking about how to deal with that issue. And then we have woven in with that producing them in a really interesting to watch magazine style. The testimonies of people who are either in the middle of grief or divorce or are who are going through, have been through that and who have healed. So all of that is woven together. So there might be a dozen experts appear in the video, and then many testimonials as well, all in about a 30 minute window, each covering a different topic. For instance, in divorce, one week we talk about anger. Next week, we talk about depression. And we talk about loneliness. We get around to when am I ready to date? How does divorce affect my children those kinds of topics. So after the group views the video, they then talk about what they've seen on the video, and relate that to what's going on in their lives. And then the third component is a Participant Guide or workbook that we equip them with, that they take notes in during the video, they have exercises to complete during the week to keep the material alive. And so our job as church initiative is to equip and train churches to run these programs either divorce care GriefShare, we also have divorce CARE for Kids. And we have a program for single parenting. And we equip lay leaders to do that work. It's not the pastors or staff, typically the lead these groups, it is motivated lay leaders. And so a big part of our job is training and equipping them and then supporting them in an ongoing basis as well as providing selling to them the materials they need their renewable, such as the workbooks on an ongoing basis.

Gary: 12:16

You mentioned videos, and then you mentioned having corresponding like exercises, no taking workbooks, or the videos and everything that you're or these all digital is this a digital platform, like an educational platform, or are the workbooks and stuff in person and like, you know, handouts, or whatever that you give as well.

David: 12:35

The design was entirely physical until March of 2020. Yeah, we were working on and testing and studying digital design. But then COVID hit. And I am so proud of our team. In a matter of two weeks, they had a digital version up and running. So our groups hit a standstill when the COVID locked down said no groups were meeting because they couldn't go in per person. Two weeks later, we were able to offer groups to be able to resume meeting through digital technology. And in retrospect, it might sound easy, but behind the videos and behind the workbook. We have an entire digital infrastructure and app if you will, and manages registrations that magnet manages functions for the group that is tied into our CRM and all other sorts of systems. So all of that had to be woven together. Now, as you can imagine, based on my understanding of your business, that wasn't real clean at first. So it's interesting. You said I didn't know before you came on that you guys created divorce care. I had a friend of mine years ago who went through it actually he became a it helped him so much in his divorce that he actually became in my church years ago. The layman like you were talking about this, the guy running it at the local level. And he was it became his kind of passion to help other people's get through that horrible process, right? I mean, it's difficult for me, right, of course. And so it's interesting to see how these all these things connect. Because I think that's really amazing. Well, that's my personal story, my personal experiences, I went through a divorce. And it was an awful experience. I wouldn't, I wouldn't wish it on anybody. After a season of healing, I remarried. And I went to my church and I said, we've got to do something to help people go through divorce. And they said, Well, maybe we created a support group. And I said, Let me lead it. Let me do it. And so I started down that road and very quickly realized that there were absolutely no resources available to help somebody like me, I'm not a pastor, I'm not a counselor. I am a layman. And I come from a business and a journalism background. And so I cobbled a book here and the tape here and we started meeting and it was working even in that ragtag in that ragtag fashion and I said, God, why doesn't somebody create some material to help people like me, lead these groups? And animals, you know, sort of grumbling about that. And ultimately, I got the metaphorical tap on my shoulder and said, Well, Steve, why don't you? Nice? And obviously, after some additional grumbling, I had remarried. By that time, my wife and I are agreed that God Auntie indeed was guiding us to do that. And that was the beginning of divorce care. Okay,

Gary: 16:11

so Steve, you mentioned that a lot of the resources you're giving to people are videos, and then workbooks. And I was wondering how much of that is digital? How much of that is physical? And for the digital side? Putting putting this business together? How much of your tech background Did you utilize the shape, the way all these pieces and parts fit together?

David: 16:34

Gary, we are on a quest to stop shipping atoms and deal only in the electrons. Nice. I like that. And I'm stealing that somehow. I don't know how, but I'm stealing that. The sooner we can get there, the better. Because that's impeding international growth. Everything we create is manufactured by companies. And that includes DVDs that includes workbooks leaders guides, all the marketing materials, brought to our headquarters, and then kidded by us and shipped out of our headquarters here in Wake Forest, North Carolina. We've equipped 25,000 Plus churches, so we're shipping a fair amount of product. And we'd like nothing better than to be digital. And so we've been working in thinking on that for a long time. But along comes March of 2020. And it didn't matter that we were physical, because nobody could meet. The doors were locked to churches, everybody had to stay home, groups stopped. And so our tech and IT team rallied. And they got us up and running with a digital version in two weeks. And so many groups went back into action. While people were home, the videos were available digitally, the workbook book was available digitally digitally. Challenge being of course, you could write in it, but it was available. And that allowed ministry to continue allowed us to continue to support our staff financially. And but the most important thing, obviously was we were able to continue to help people. And it was rough, it was ragged, but it worked. And it interfaced with our other systems and our other technologies behind the scenes. And we've just built it out from there. And that's becoming a platform. And that has become a platform in and of itself. And we have online only groups, we have physical groups. And interestingly, we have hybrid groups where some of the members are in person, and others are online.

Gary: 19:09

Yeah, that makes sense. And I can imagine that with the video aspect in the having, I don't know if maybe speakers or someone have a guidance. If you wanted to record a video specific to one topic within that realm of like divorce care, whatever. You can do it from anywhere, and then send it to anybody. So that seems like something you mentioned. The other aspect of your system. So besides the videos and the handouts and or the workbooks and stuff, what goes into the actual keeping this business running, as far as you mentioned earlier, like your CRM system and your memberships. And how did you put that together?

David: 19:51

Well, all of that was built custom by our our web team, because we couldn't really find any software at the time that connected all of the dots, we need to connect it. So take me back in history a little bit. You mentioned how you got started and where the impetus for the idea came from. But how did you practically get going? I mean, you just you wanted to share this, you wanted to help people through divorce and grief care, that was your heart. But there's a practical side of this right? How did you build a business from that? How did you turn that in from that ragtag of I found a video here and that to a business with customers, and, and you know what to say, walk me a little bit through that. I was classic Bootstrap, we didn't have any, any funding, we tapped our personal savings. And then we decided to market it. And fortunately, there was there was a market, there was an audience that kind of backed into that.

Gary: 20:58

So you've just been evolving ever since then, and just continues,

David: 21:03

we're on the fourth, we're on the fourth edition of DivorceCare. Now in the third edition of GriefShare. GriefShare is an interesting story. A couple of minutes, a couple of years into divorce care, we started getting calls from pastors saying, you know, this format is really working well for us. We need similar kinds of help equipping lay leaders to help us with grief. And we just said, Gee, that's, that's interesting. And we'll, we'll take that under advisement, knowing that we didn't in the early days have the resources to do that. But the calls kept coming. And finally, we saw the ability to fund the grief equivalent of the horse care. And so we created what is known as grief share and released it. And it was very enthusiastically received. And over time it has in it has evolved to be our largest ministry, interest, long time divorce care was, but now GriefShare is and when you think about it, it's pretty easy to understand that. So David, I know you and I live in Wake County, North Carolina. We have any idea what the mortality rate is in Wayne County, North Carolina? I do not Oh, wow. This can be interesting. All right. Interestingly enough, it's the same as Gary's County. What county Do you live in here

Gary: 22:41

in Brevard County?

David: 22:43

This is gonna be 100% is right, right. Yes. I saw it coming. So ever, everybody dies, all of us die. And then that leaves this huge circle of Grievers. less than 50% of all people get divorced. So it makes sense that GriefShare became our largest ministry. I want to pivot a bit because I want to stay in the practical realm for other business owners and stuff like that. But what's interesting about just the nature of what you do, is culture has got to be really interesting, right? You're dealing with the heaviest of heavy topics, grief and divorce. I mean, that's about as heavy as it gets. How do you maintain a culture in that environment? Where day in and day out? You're talking to sad people who are dealing with the hardest things of their lives? How do you keep that as a business atmosphere? That's not in the doldrums? That's a fair question, David. And I joke. When I talk to people, I say, Yeah, we're in the business of marketing, death and divorce. And it's heavy, it's heavy. What fires is, though, is to see people go through the program, come out with smiles on their face, hope renewed, and lives that are rebuilt after the devastation of one of those to like your friend, like your friend described. And quite often, those people are very passionate about turning around and helping others with the comfort they've received is actually scripture that describes just that in Second Corinthians. And so that that becomes almost it's better than word of mouth marketing. It's is a satisfied, healed user who says, I want to have other people find what I found through DivorceCare through GriefShare, or they might go to their pastor. I'd say, Pastor, why did I have to go across town to be a part of this group? Why aren't we doing it here? And oh, by the way, I'd like to help get one launched.

Gary: 25:14

It seems to have had that kind of effect, because I'm seeing here that you have your church initiative is in over 24,000 churches worldwide. Is that correct? We

David: 25:26

haven't updated our website. I think we're closer to 31 30,000. But I don't know the exact number. Another exciting number is we've we have about 60,000 of these trained lay leaders that have have led groups or, or are leading groups, you might not ever go through divorce, but you're certainly going through grief. That's happening. No question. When it hits you, of course, will could be various, varied and a lot of different ways. But we're all going through it. And no one knows my mother passed last November. And I guess I should say previous November's because now it's been another anyway, thank you, when but my stepfather, her husband of 36 years, he has not dealt with grief well at all, like that's a side on my on my side of the family. That's it's just hard it and he has, you know, he doesn't have these resources. He's not going for those resources. So I can totally see the need. And, and I wish that everyone would find those kinds of things. But as a business of backing back up in my my lane here, I find that that heart issue is where business will thrive. I really, really do. In the sake of time, I want to jump to our question of that we ask every single guest of ours is if you were to talk to a new entrepreneur, and you've done this several times, we didn't get into your other ventures, but I know you're a serial entrepreneur. And if you had met yourself or someone who was starting a business running the business struggling today, in their business, what three pieces of advice would you give them to point them the right direction? Well, my first piece of advice segues back to what you were talking about before dealing with heart, you've obviously got to have a passion for what you're doing. But in my mind, that's not enough. There's got to be an identified need that overlaps with that passion. I can be passionate about something that won't sell. In fact, I have been passionate about things that won't sell. And in the church initiative warehouse, they're now gathering dust. It's funny, I was thinking there are warehouses all over this country that are full of passion that never sold. You have a role playing book I wrote that never it's still in my closet. No one cares anyway. So you often hear business experts say follow your heart, follow your passion. Yes, that's that's an important step. But then do the work of finding out if anybody else cares about what you're passionate about? And can you build a business around that, or a nonprofit organization, we still have to pay power bills, we still have to pay people. So we have to run it like a business. We don't get contributions. In our case, some nonprofits live off, live off contributions, obviously. My second suggestion is to plan and then manage cash. You gotta have enough money to get your product out the door. Even if you bootstrap, as was the case with us. It still took money. And so you have to know going in, that you can get all the way into the air off the runway. But then you've got to continue to pay expenses on a monthly basis. And a lot of us idealistic dreamers, entrepreneurs, don't pay attention to cash. So we don't make payroll, we can't play pay a vendor. And you've just got to, you've got to make yourself concentrate on that when you don't have to help doing it. And then ultimately, hire people who can do it for you. Because if you don't like accounting and you don't like finance, you better find somebody who does and learn to listen to them and trust them and let them guide you. My thoughts third piece of advice is one of the reasons we're still around today. And that is, listen to what your customers want. They will tell you, in all likelihood, if you talk to them if you listen to them. And when I told you about grief share, exemplifies that. That wasn't on our radar scope 30 years ago, and we launch DivorceCare. But we're about ready to release the fourth edition of GriefShare. And as I said, it is now our largest selling product, had we not heard from customers and had we not listened, we would have suffered at least attrition, if not been a much smaller organization. So it wasn't my smarts. It wasn't our corporate brilliance, the launch screen share. It was the wisdom of our tribe.

Gary: 31:01

Those are very, very good pieces of advice. We've heard some of them before, and a lot of overlapping from other entrepreneurs. But yeah, definitely good pieces of advice, the passion, and finding the people that actually care about it. That's a huge one. A lot of people bring that one up. Now, Steve, if anybody wants to reach out or see more of what you do find out how they can be involved. We have the web address of church initiative.org Is there any other ways that you would like them to contact you or get in touch?

David: 31:31

I'm on LinkedIn at Steve Grissom. And I'm also happy to give my email address which is Steve at church initiative.org.

Gary: 31:45

Okay, and we will make sure that these links exist in the show notes for where the video is posted, and

David: 31:49

your cell phone number shall remain that.

Gary: 31:56

Now, if anybody has any questions or comments for us about our podcast, or any ideas or suggestions for us, they can reach out to us at Hello at the big pixel dotnet. Or you can leave a comment below this video on YouTube or any of our other social media platforms. Once again, all the links for our guests will be in the show notes.

David: 32:14

All right. Well, thank you so much, Steve, for joining us. This has been great. I really appreciate your insight, your wisdom. It's always great to see people who are in various parts of their journey and you're on a really fun part there and start over again. I love it. Thank you, David. Thanks