Proximity with Ken Joslin

Coaching with Ken | Money Mindset Mastery

• Ken Joslin

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The way we view money fundamentally shapes our business decisions and outcomes. For faith-based entrepreneurs, understanding that we don't face a money problem but a management problem transforms everything about our approach to finances.

When I realized that God doesn't reward hustle but instead rewards faithful management, it completely shifted my perspective as a business owner. Luke 16:10 tells us "whoever can be trusted with little can also be trusted with very much" – a principle that has guided our company to seven-figure growth in just three years.

This episode unpacks four critical pillars of financial stewardship: creating and sticking to a budget, achieving targets before their scheduled time, tracking your spending daily, and maintaining consistent cash reserves. Each practice isn't just good business sense; it's biblical wisdom applied to entrepreneurship.

The story of how tracking our numbers transformed our business is particularly powerful. As a visionary, I initially resisted detailed financial tracking until a friend reminded me that I would ultimately give account to God for how I stewarded what He entrusted to me. After seven months of building our daily cash tracking system, I now review our exact financial position every morning – a practice that has revolutionized our decision-making.

Ready to make your own stewardship shift? Download our free 21-day Physical Fiscal Fitness challenge at growstackdrive.com/challenge or email support@growstackdrive.com to request our daily cash tracking template that transformed our business. Join 2,300+ faith-based entrepreneurs who are learning to manage God's resources with excellence!

The Stewardship Shift Introduction

Speaker 1

Hey guys , welcome to another episode of as the Leader Grows . I am your host , ken Jocelyn , super excited to continue this series we started a couple weeks ago called the Stewardship Shift . Now the entire month , we're talking about a couple big ideas . Number one is that we don't have a money problem . We have a management problem . As faith-based entrepreneurs , we understand that what season that we're in financially is just a trust test from God , because we don't have a money problem , we have a management problem .

Speaker 1

God's word is very clear . As a matter of fact , luke 16 10 says whoever can be trusted with little can also be trusted with very much . So those of you guys that are faith-based entrepreneurs , I'm sure you're well aware of the parable where Jesus talks about the talents , the one , the two and the five and the three different people , or stewards , if you will because as faith-based entrepreneurs , we understand we don't own anything . Everything that we have belongs to God and what we're called to do is be great managers or stewards of that . As a matter of fact , I was on the call , probably about two weeks ago , with somebody and they said something about paying their tithes and I just stopped her and I I just said can I redirect or kind of maybe change your thinking just a little bit , reframe that if you will . And she said sure , and I said , if I pay you something that indicates that that money that I have belongs to who Me ? Now , if I return my tithe , that means that what I have , I understand , belongs to God and all I'm doing is returning to God what belongs to God . Now I don't want to get a theological discussion on tithing and Malachi , chapter three , or any of this stuff that Jesus talked about in the New Testament . That's not the point today . But in this we understand biblical truth in the New Testament that if we steward well , if we take the two talents or the five talents or even the one , and we steward those well , that God promised us to give us more to steward . So if we don't have a money problem , we have a management problem and , like I said just a moment ago , god doesn't reward . And , like I said just a moment ago , god doesn't reward . God does not reward hustle , he rewards faithful management . So I want to talk tonight biblical foundation Luke , chapter 16 , verse 10 . Whoever can be trusted with very little can also be trusted with very much . Small faithful practices prove our readiness for greater responsibility , and God honors consistency in every area of our life , specifically especially in our finances .

Biblical Foundation of Money Management

Speaker 1

So there's a couple of books I want to recommend to you . I've actually got some kind of what we call wisdom integration moments . One is the Complete Works of Frances Scoville Shinn Not sure if she's a believer or not . The book was written in 1925 . But it's about your mindset around money and there is a ton of scripture in it . And it's not again , guys , not money from a standpoint of a prosperity theology . God wants you blessed and Bentley and all the stuff . Again , I don't think God's concerned with what you drive . It's just whether or not you're stewarding and handling what he's entrusted you with the right way . But what I want to do tonight is I want to talk about we're going to hit eight pointers over the next couple of weeks .

Speaker 1

I had a good friend of mine , carrie Van Meter , from All Access Accounting . She does books for about 180 different businesses . She's a phenomenal CFO . She handles all of our stuff as well . But I wanted to go through these eight things . I'll do four today and we'll do four next week .

Speaker 1

Number one is create a budget and stick with it . Create a budget and stick with it . And here's the deal as faith-based entrepreneurs , a lot of times we're moving . We're going so fast . Sometimes it's hard to be able to stick to a budget . But I believe that one of the first things that we can do as great stewards or faithful managers of what God's entrusted us with is to create a budget . Now , carrie , when she was on our Zoom call a couple of weeks ago and then she actually flew in for a proximity event the one thing she shared about the budget she goes there's two types of

Create a Budget and Stick to It

Speaker 1

budgets that you can create . Number one is you can have this projection , this faith budget of last year . We hit this , we've grown this . So let's say we hit a million . We know we've grown 10% a year . So this year's budget we're going to do at 1.1 million . That'd be 10% of a million , to be a hundred thousand , so that'd be a decent growth path . And then she said this then you can do a budget . A different kind of budget is based off of what are our monthly expenses in full ? Basically , what's our nut every month ? What do we have to come up with to be able to break even every month ? How quick can we get to that number every month ? So then we can exceed that and then we allocate the resources that come in after that . So create a budget and stick to it .

Speaker 1

I want to encourage you guys this you can go to growstattdrivecom forward slash challenge , growthstackdrivecom forward slash challenge . And there is a stewardship challenge that we did called Physical F-I-S-C-A-L Fitness . It's a 21-day challenge . If you download that ebook , you can sign up for the challenge . If you sign up , you'll get an email every day . But inside of that digital workbook , day one is a link Every day has a link to it for you to do something to become financially fit over 21 days . And day one is downloading a Dave Ramsey 10-minute budget creator . Super easy to create a budget that way and then literally monitoring your money .

Speaker 1

That's one of the other eight . We'll get to that in just a little bit . So create a budget and stick to it . Number two achieve targets before time . Like if I'm , if I'm wanting to go after , like I think this year our budget is going to be right at right at seven figures , right at a million dollars . That's how much revenue we'll have come in .

Speaker 1

We're trying to consistently outpace what we did the year before , and so what that does is that tells our sales team . Hey , we've got to make more calls , we've got to , you know , is there another way that we can run our Facebook ads ? Is there another way that we can market ? Is there what ? What are , what's the pain points of faith-based entrepreneurs out there and how can we solve their problems ? Because if you solve the problems that are out there , I promise you you'll blow all of your projections away , all your numbers away , and you'll never struggle for having enough cash flow but be able to achieve your targets before their time . And I'm telling you , guys , when you really get locked in and you've heard from God Psalms 46 , 10 , be still and know that I'm God . Number two you've you've heard from him , you've been still before him , you've heard from him , and then you've written the vision down . It's amazing at how quick things begin to happen .

Speaker 1

So one is create a budget , stick to it . Number two is achieve targets before their time . Number three is track your spending . Track your spending . Now I'm going to get into the second half of this kind of talk , if you will . Next week I'm going to hit talking about financial reports . But when we talk about tracking your spending , here's one thing I encourage you to do , and I heard Grant Cardone say this five and a half years ago at the 10X Bootcamp I went to in October of 2019 , when not very many people knew who Grant was , but this is what he said . He said money is like a woman If you don't pay attention to it , it will leave you . So what I did in this process for me inside of GSD and we hit three we hit seven figures in our third year . We did 1.18 million in revenue in our third year and I was having a conversation

Tracking Spending and Knowing Numbers

Speaker 1

a year ago . This would have been June in 2024 .

Speaker 1

I'm in Costa Rica with RMI , the Regenerative Medicine Institute , the number one of the top stem cell companies in the world , who's one of our top sponsors , and I'm getting stem cells and my good friend , troy Hoffman is down there . We're having breakfast . Troy looks at me and he says , ken , he goes , what's your budget for Create ? I'm like I don't know and he goes you know what your budget is and I'm like , well , so-and-so cost me $85,000 . So-and-so cost me $85,000 to come speak . The building is $29,000 . My caterers were $35,000 . The band was $14,000 . The tech team was $11,000 . My swag was was 11,000 . My swag was 8,000 . I just started spitting off all these numbers . And I said and then I only have to sell this many CEO tickets , this many executive tickets or this many general mission tickets . And Troy looked at me and he goes , bro , he goes . You know you can't scale if you don't know your numbers correctly . Then I said Troy , I'm a visionary . I'm not very good when it comes to finances , but I can tell you what I got in the bank . I can tell you what I've got coming in Just off my head . I can do that . And Troy looked at me and he goes Ken , you're going to give account to God one day for what he's called you to build and what he's given you to steward . And I was like cool , you're right , he goes next week . We're going to start . I'm going to meet with you for a few weeks . I'm going to give you . Now Troy is the CEO for foundersio , so they invest , scale and help businesses exit Three to five year plan on each of those businesses . And so this is what Troy said he goes , I'm going to meet with you and I'm going to take some of the financial forecasting spreadsheets and models that we have and I'm going to give those to you . We're going to create one for you .

Speaker 1

So I started in June of last year . I went back four and a half years , all the way back to December of 2019 , when I established GrowStack Drive Ken Johnson Group Incorporated . I went all the way back . We went through every line item in QuickBooks , every single transaction in any of our checking accounts , all of our credit cards , our PayPal , our Venmo , everything . It took us four months to go through everything . I hired a guy . We walked through everything . Every day . I'm looking for about 30 to 40 minutes at transactions and , for whatever reason , my mind works oh , that money goes here . This money goes here . I just knew where it went . Mind works oh , that money goes here . This money goes here . I just knew where it went . And so it took us about six or seven months to be able to create what we call our GSD daily cash sheet .

Speaker 1

And so if you'll email support at gross that drivecom or if you go to gross that drivecom forward slash free there's a lot of these financial spreadsheets that we give you now for absolute free . It probably costs me close to 20 K to create for us , but you can look at it . You can . It's obviously it's a blank , doesn't have any numbers in it . You can look at it and then you can take that and formulate that or fix that . However , you need it to be fixed for your specific vertical or your company and where you're at .

Speaker 1

So now , every day , um , at 5 PM , my my fractional CFO team they go in , they look at all of our credit card accounts , the balances . They go in and they update all the balances from credit cards , from our checking accounts , our cash accounts and then all of our business loans or anything that we have like that . I've got one business loan that's complete . There's no balance on it . There's a pretty high credit limit . There's another one that's almost paid off about a 20% credit limit . But I look and even in those business loans that I have , on that GSD daily cash sheet it says , let's say , this one is like $55,000 , and I think we owe $12,000 . So it'll tell you what the percentage of your debt utilization is .

Speaker 1

Everything I get everything . Then I have one little graph inside of it that says weekly expenses and I've got this is how much our weekly recurring revenue is . It's coming in this week and this is how much our average week for second week , third week , fourth week of the month . These are our average expenses and then I get a positive or a negative number now , so I know automatically , going into this week , we're either positive or negative for the week . Then I have our monthly recurring revenue for our community circle and our corner . So I know what our monthly recurring revenue is and I know what our monthly expenses are . So I get to look at that every single day . So I'd encourage you if you don't have something like that and you're a faith based entrepreneur , you need to know your numbers . So when you track your spending , that's the third thing you need to know your numbers .

Speaker 1

Number four maintain a consistent cash reserve . Make sure you've got Dave Ramsey's very simple , I think emergency fund is a thousand . The next baby step is three months of savings or reserves in the bank that will cover all of your expenses . So if you're a business , you want three months of whatever it costs you to operate every single month . Personally , you need three months of all of your bills and your expenses in there as well . So maintain a consistent contract cash reserve .

Speaker 1

One of the things that we've done early is when I set up our relay online checking accounts . Anything that goes through Stripe or goes through our QuickBooks dumps into our relay accounts different ones , I think we have five or six set

Maintaining Cash Reserves

Speaker 1

up and then inside of those our fractional CFO team will go in . Let's say we deposited yesterday . We deposited where are my numbers $6,231.74 . So $6,231.74 got deposited yesterday . My team will go in and they'll take $623.17 , 10% and they'll put it over into our kind of a cash savings account and that money just sits . We take 10% and it goes over there every single time we have money that comes into GSD .

Speaker 1

So four things I wanted to start with today create a budget and stick to it . You can go to Dave Ramsey he's got a 10 minute budget creator . If you go over to um gross , that drivecom forward slash challenge , you can do that 21 day physical fitness physical fitness challenge absolutely free . Sign up for it . It'll download the digital workbook and then you'll get an email every day for 21 days , kind of walking you through that process . Achieve targets before it's time , track your spending . And , number four , maintain a consistent cash reserve .

Speaker 1

Also , if you need a copy of that GSD digital cash sheet or GSD daily cash sheet , I'd encourage you to just email support at growstatdrivecom or go over to growstatdrivecom forward slash free . We have about 2,300 faith-based entrepreneurs that are a part of that free community . All those resources , guys , are absolutely free . So here's what I want to encourage you right now You're listening to this podcast . Make a commitment today when you get up every single day .

Speaker 1

If you don't have one of our GrowStatDrive planners like this , you can get one of these super simple GrowStatDrivecom forward slash free . You can download a digital copy of our planner absolutely free . You put that into an iPad or some kind of a digital tablet . You can literally write on there . One of your morning routine items needs to be it's my very first one I do every day needs to be going in there and checking the balances you have in your cash accounts and then your credit accounts . What does that look like ? You should know those numbers every single day . So super excited

Challenge Invitation and Resource Overview

Speaker 1

for this entire series about the stewardship shift . Today we're talking about eight things that we need to do with our finances . We hit four today . We'll hit four next week . Again , thanks for joining us on as a Leader Grows . I'll see you next week .