Avodah Talk w/ Matt Walton

Integrating Faith with Entrepreneurship: Partnering with God for Business Success with Matt Walton

• Matt Walton • Season 1 • Episode 3

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This episode focuses on how to align business operations with spiritual beliefs, emphasizing the importance of partnering with God for success. It covers practical aspects of strategic planning, ethical decision-making, and the impact of relationships in the workplace. 
• Discussing the foundation of partnership with God in business 
• Encouraging reflection on how to represent God well 
• Highlighting the necessity of clarity in vision for business success 
• Outlining the difference between vision and strategy 
• Setting measurable goals and tracking KPIs for growth 
• Emphasizing ethical and relational goals 
• Drawing insights from biblical narratives related to business challenges 
• Inviting listeners to embrace their calling in business

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Speaker 1:

What's up guys, welcome back to Avoda Talk with Matt Walton, and this week I am going to break down the vision, strategy, goals and game plan portion of the video I did last week on creating your annual strategic business plan. So if you have not checked out that video, I encourage you to go one video back and watch the annual strategic business plan video, because that is one of the best tools that I have used in my business to prepare for the year to come. So let's get right into it and I want to first talk about the scriptures that we're going to back all this up in and then, down the road, I'll break down that scripture and talk about a little bit more in depth. But Genesis, chapter 1 through Genesis chapter 11, specifically talks about partnering with God. There are so many stories within that that is all about partnering with God, or that's one element of it is partnering with God. So that is kind of the underlining purpose of this video is what does it look like when we partner with God and what are the things that we do when we decide that God is the owner of our business and we are stewards of our business? How does that actually look in real life. The other thing is Psalm 127, where it talks about those who labor in vain. Those who build the house without the Lord labor in vain. So my encouragement there is to surrender everything over to God. If you feel like you've fallen away from that, just fall back down on your knees and give everything over to God and just start pursuing him and let him take over everything. Let him drive the business, let him drive the ideas and the vision behind things, and you just rock and roll and move at the pace that God has for you to move. So I want to start with a question before we get into it, and then we'll hop right into the meat of the video and then we'll talk about a few things at the very end of it. That I think will add some value as well.

Speaker 1:

So do you want to represent God and yourself well to others? There's a lot of people that I think would answer yes to that, but then how does that look for you? How do you think about yourself represented to others? So what I mean by that is are you focused on representing God well and advancing God's kingdom, on making sure that God smiles whenever he looks at you and how you interact with people. Are you concerned with making sure that you, by the way that you handle things, are advancing God's kingdom, and how you handle relationships, how you nurture relationships? Are those things that will point others to you to the glory of Jesus Christ, or are they going to point people to you? Are you creating fans or are you creating friends? This is one of the things that I have learned studying John Maxwell is he talks about those things all the time. Are you creating fans or friends? And we're trying to create friends here. I'm not a big believer in creating fans. I want to create friends and create people that we can grow with and create this really tight-knit community that is all geared towards advancing God's kingdom.

Speaker 1:

So, on the heels of that question, ask yourself that. It's something that I ask myself through every interaction. A lot of times I'll ask myself that at the end of every single day, and I want to remind y'all of exactly who I am and where I'm at in business. So I am in the middle and I am in the thick of things. I am one of those guys that I am still in the game and I am seeing some tremendous growth within my businesses, but I am right in the middle of things. I've been doing this, not even for three years now with the businesses that I have now. I had businesses before that, but with where I am at now, I've been doing that for about a little bit over two and a half years. And so I am right in the middle of things and I'm learning, but this stuff fires me up. This is where God's called me to be, and God's called me in business, and I believe he's called you in business as well. He's called you to be the ones that make the money, that go out and advance God's kingdom, that go out and fund God's kingdom through your business and that fund maybe not even God's kingdom, but that funds other businesses as well, or other nonprofits, or even that goes and funds, though, that are on the street through maybe providing food or resources or a number of things, and actually I would say that that is advancing God's kingdom.

Speaker 1:

So that's just a reminder. Is I am right in the middle of things, I am right in the thick of things with you guys, and so this stuff that I'm talking about is stuff that I'm actively doing, stuff that I've seen some progress with, stuff that has worked for me. We're not going to talk about things that haven't worked, unless I start the video with that of, hey, this didn't work and here's what I've learned. This has worked very, very well for me, so let's get right into it. First thing.

Speaker 1:

First is the vision, and this is really where I start with every single thing. I don't care if it's a new department within the business or if it's a new hire within the business or if it's a new business altogether. I start with the vision for that, and so what that can look like whenever I start a new department or maybe start with a new company on doing some things is what is the vision behind that? So, as a company that sells a product and I sell the product all across the country what is the vision for sales? Are we solely in it to just sell a bunch of pools? Do we want to provide the best value for the dollar? Do we want to provide the best customer service experience along with the best products? Do we want to advance God's kingdom through our business? Do we want to be faithful stewards? What is the vision for the business? Or let's break it down. Maybe you just started doing meetings with your leadership team, and so what is the vision behind that? Why are you wanting to do this leadership meeting? Or why are you wanting to meet with your department heads every single week? What is the vision behind that? That is the first thing.

Speaker 1:

I start a lot of meetings like that. I don't start every single meeting like that, but a lot of meetings are started with the vision, just to get everybody on the same, on the same page and running at the same pace. And you want to have people on your team that buy into the vision, that believe the vision and that are there to implement whatever strategy or system that's in place to see the vision come to fruition. You also want to dream so big. You want to have such a big vision that you fit everybody else's dreams into your vision, and so that's an encouragement. So God has given me just this incredible vision, not only for each individual department, each individual job, but for the business as a whole, and it is one thing that everybody's vision fits with inside that as well. So all their dreams and goals, especially when it comes to certain things within business and service, it all fits within that, and so, so make sure that you're dreaming big and that when you're creating these visions, you're very detailed of what that vision looks like, then that allows for you to get to the strategy. So these two things are different.

Speaker 1:

When we talk about strategy, I pull my vision and I keep my vision in mind and I create a strategy so that a lot of times can be just a paragraph of maybe I want to be the number one home service business. I want to be the number one window cleaning business. I want to be the number one provider of health insurance. I want to be the number one provider of therapy for red light therapy or a number of other things that can be in the service industry. That would be a good starting point, but that is not the full strategy. So how are you going to be the number one? What is the idea behind that?

Speaker 1:

So if your idea is to be the number one, or maybe you want to, maybe the strategy is this year I want to do 44 jobs. It's actually my strategy, for one of my businesses is to do 44 jobs this year, and I came up with that through tracking KPIs and through implementing what works and then taking away what didn't work, and then that allowed for me to come up with at least that first sentence of the strategy. So I want to build X amount of jobs. I want to. While I'm building these jobs, I want to create raving fans within my clients. I want all of my clients to generate reviews for me, because I know that's going to help with my score. So there's a number of different things that we can apply to our strategy.

Speaker 1:

But then, on the bottom side of that strategy, we want to detail how. So, going back, I want to build X amount of jobs this year and here's how I'm going to do it. So I am going to increase my leads by maybe three times. I am going to bring on a secretary, an assistant, maybe a call center, to be able to handle some of these calls. That way they act as like that secretary that is then used to schedule calls for the sales team. So that would be one part of that strategy broke down.

Speaker 1:

Or maybe I want to go to all the B&I. I want to go to networking. I want to generate relationships. I want to start generating relationships with realtors, maybe with developers something that fits within, again, the first sentence of that strategy and you basically just want a game plan of exactly how you do that. So I always keep this to about a paragraph. I don't get extremely granular with this, because these other categories are where I get granular with my goals and my game plan and exactly how I'm going to accomplish the strategy which is tied to the vision, how I'm going to accomplish the strategy which is tied to the vision. So, once we get down from there again, we want to be number one, or we want to build X amount of jobs, or we want to be the most well-known and sought after service company in the business. We want to have nothing but raving fans, and then here's how we are going to do that, and then we create our goals from there. So our goals is again derived from the strategy and I put goals, objectives, which will be the same things, and then your KPIs.

Speaker 1:

So here's where I detail all of my KPIs and I go in and I break it down by department. So, for me, I have a finance department, I have a purchasing department, I have a sales department, and then within those there's different extensions of those. So I have an operations department. So I'll take the sales department as an example. So that is a full-blown ecosystem in and of itself, right? I have a lead generation guy. That is my fractional CMO that generates my leads, and since I brought him on, my leads have tripled, plus minus. It just depends on what month we're talking about, but I've averaged triple the amount of leads from before.

Speaker 1:

And then here's the things that I'm tracking. So the goal would be I want triple the amount of leads from this state over here. I want to start. Instead of getting 30 leads, I want to get 90 leads. And then here's the KPI that I'm going to track, and then here's how I'm going to do that.

Speaker 1:

So, create your goals, create your KPIs, break down each department, break down your finance department. I want to track total revenue. I want to track cashflow. I want to track my average ticket. I want to track my profit, my gross profit, my net profit. I want to track EBITDA. There's all these things that you can start tracking. And you, as the business owner even if you have somebody in your finance department maybe you're like me, I don't have somebody that is printing off these reports, that is providing the strategy, providing the budget. So that's me, and I love to do that because I'm learning how to do all that so that when I get ready to hire a CFO, I know exactly who I'm looking for and the requirements that I'm going to be pursuing.

Speaker 1:

So I want to go back to the sales department. There's so many things within that that need to be tracked. I have going back to the call center. I have a call center that I use. That way I'm not bottlenecked with the increase in leads. I can take all these calls that are coming on and they can also make calls. They follow the script, which is a very tight script, that their goal is to get those leads to an appointment. So that way I can track a booking rate, show up rate. There's a lot of those things that you can track. So think through each department within your business and think through the things that you're going to track and then name how are you going to track those? You know right now I'm using QuickBooks. I won't use QuickBooks for long. I'll eventually go to a product like Intact and maybe even go to another one before then and maybe even go to another one before then. But we all need to understand that over the course of your business, if the goal is to continue to grow your business, then you're gonna change CRMs, you're gonna change accounting softwares. You're just gonna be changing things as you grow and your demands increase. So that is the goals, right there.

Speaker 1:

From the goals, you develop your game plan. So this is where I strategize over my goals here. So I create the game plan. So this is where I strategize over my goals here. So I create the game plan of exactly how I'm going to accomplish these KPIs. So again, the strategy. So I start with the vision. I want to create this ecosystem that is going to serve my clients, that is going to serve the underprivileged in the community. Here's my strategy of how I'm going to do that. I want to be the number one provider of these products here. And here's how I'm going to accomplish those, with maybe two or three or four or five bullet points of how you're going to accomplish those, all wrapped up into a paragraph. Then I get down to the goals that are built upon the strategy. So, so, in order to accomplish that strategy, here's the goals, here's all the KPIs that I'm tracking and here's how I'm tracking those. And then you get down to your game plan, to where you're like. Here's how I'm going to generate these leads by utilizing my SEO. I'm going to utilize pay-per-click on Google. I'm going to utilize Facebook and Instagram ads.

Speaker 1:

So there's a number of different things that can accumulate to a game plan of how you're going to accomplish your goals. That is a broken down portion of your strategy. That's a broken down portion of your vision. That is a broken down portion of your strategy. That's a broken down portion of your vision. This is the loop that I follow every time that I go to create something new and I detail it out in those ways and it has helped me be able to track things and be able to know where I'm headed. It has helped me stay on top of things.

Speaker 1:

I know exactly what I need, what I don't need, but I'm also learning. There's a top of things. I know exactly what I need, what I don't need, but I'm also learning. There's a lot of things where, when you start being a student of these things, you'll hear a million different KPIs to track and what I do is I go in and I just analyze those things and I think through what exactly fits my business and what I am going to need, and I keep in mind my goal is not to sell. I wanna grow this and keep growing this and buy businesses all across the globe to the tune of having a thousand plus businesses here soon and implementing these vision and these strategies and these systems of how exactly I'm going to accomplish that. But that is one of the reasons why I focus heavily on getting these things dialed in, because if your goal is to sell, there's all kinds of things that you need to start to work towards, because these investors are going to look towards EBITDA is one of the big things that they're going to look towards and it's just important to understand these things. It's important to get these things dialed in how you're tracking these things so that way, when you do propose to sell it, you have a full scope of things and you're able to get top dollar for your business for all the work that you put into it.

Speaker 1:

I bought a business before. I know a bunch of things that I learned. I did not do it perfectly by any stretch of the imagination, but as I buy more businesses, I will continue to grow and learn and I'll fill you guys in as we go. I want to break down a few more things, so this is a bonus three. That is something that I've been thinking a lot about lately, and these are three areas that I want us all to think about.

Speaker 1:

What are your ethical goals? What are your relational goals and what are your? I lost my train of thought. What are your success goals? And what I mean by that is ethical. What are the things that you're not going to compromise on? So I operate out of integrity, I don't lie Like are those things, ethically, that you do not want to deviate from and detail those things out? Get down to your relational goals. What are you willing to do? What are you willing not to do? What are you going to pursue? What are you not pursuing? Those are extremely important. How are you going to treat people? How are you going to handle conversations with people? Just those things. Are you going to make it about others being narcissistic and making it about you? This is something that I really struggle with A lot of times when I talk to people, I can just talk to people and share all the things that God's doing, and I can forget to ask somebody how they're doing but God's really working on that with me to be worried about or focused on the individual, rather than sharing what I am doing to that individual or what God's doing through me to that individual. These are just part of growing and becoming a better leader through that sanctification process that God takes us through.

Speaker 1:

The next is success. So what are the things that you will not compromise on? What are those things that you will do Me? I'm not compromising on my family, so I will not compromise on time on my family With my daughter. It's just not something that I will do Now. It doesn't mean I'm not okay with working 14, 16, 12 hour days, because you better believe that I am, but that is not a consistent thing that I am willing to do. I will not, for two, three, four, five years, every single day, work 12, 14, 16 hour days while my daughter is two years old and miss her growing up. What I will do, though, is I will do that every now and again, and I will time block so that I can get my 12 hours in every single day. So that's what I'm doing now is I've time blocked my schedule to give me another two and a half hours at the end of the day, two to two and a half hours at the end of the day, to where I can tack that on to my work schedule, and I can literally just crank things out, get into the flow state and get a lot of things done towards the end of the day. That allows for me to work and to be really optimized with my time. So I really hope that that helped you guys.

Speaker 1:

And I want to tie this back into Genesis 1 through 11 and say man, god is looking for people to partner with. We see this throughout scriptures. But we see through Genesis 1 through 2, with Adam and Eve, how God gave them opportunity to be obedient to him and to partner with them. And what did they do? They took matters into their own hands and gave into their own desires. We see this with Cain and Abel. You know we see when you dive into it it comes alive and you understand the purpose of that story. We get into the Tower of Babel of how they were trying to build something for themselves, all guys within building it to get closer to God.

Speaker 1:

I think of Noah and him being obedient and then, whenever he came out of the ark and what his sons did, he took vengeance into his own hands. We started to see things derail. He implemented a curse on his grandson. We just see this recurring all throughout scripture. We see Abram as being one that was obedient, that ended up and married Sarai, who was somebody very, very, very close to his family. And then we see him be obedient, we see God pull him away from his family, you know, which is very big at that time, because they operate out of a patriarchal structure within their family. And so if you're the dad and God's given you a plan, all of your kids are going to implement that plan until you're no longer with them, and that's literally their life. And so for God to call Abram away from his family was a very big deal. But Abram was obedient to that and he took them and gave them promises outside of that.

Speaker 1:

And then we see Abram take that into his own hands a little bit later and in whenever he the town, he remember he got into Egypt and then he was like, hey, just tell them, you're my sister. They had been traveling for a while, we need to re-up on some goods here, and then we'll escape at midnight and we'll get back to our purpose in Canaan. But then what happened? He got because of her beauty, pharaoh ended up and took her in, and then he's able he doesn't have anybody, he's able to take and own you, if he so chooses to Um. And so we start to see that kind of derail whenever Abram took it into his own hands. So what are you? What have you taken into your own own hands?

Speaker 1:

I know that I consistently find myself taking things into my own hand and I'm like God, I just surrendered that over to you. And God's like yeah, no, you didn't, you took that right back into your hands, or you never surrendered it over to me to begin with, you just gave me lip service. And so I want to be exposed to these things. I want to be partnered with God. God has given me a specific vision to use my business, or God's business, as the Israel, the city, set on a hill that transforms the way business is done, that changes the way business is done as a whole, and then we start implementing this process throughout the whole globe and we just see kingdom businesses popping up across this whole globe. So last thing is, just remember that God has called you into business and God has called you to operate out of excellence.

Speaker 1:

And what a better like, how incredible it is to partner with God and be a part of that great commission and to advance his kingdom and come up with creative ways to talk about Christ, to advance his kingdom throughout business and, believe it or not, a lot of that is becoming an expert, becoming a student, becoming the dumbest person in the room and just diving in in because you know that you're headed to something far greater than $300,000 in revenue or a million in revenue, because God wants to use you as a conduit to flow through you the finances that is needed to flow to somebody that is actually really, really in need of those. And what an incredible calling. So, anyways, hope this added value to you Tune in next week. My goal again is to add as much value as I possibly can minute by added value to you. I'm tuning in next week. My goal again is to add as much value as I possibly can, minute by minute per the podcast. Um, I love you guys and thank y'all for tuning in.