Welcome back to the Christianity and Business Podcast, an initiative of the R.G. W. Dunham College of Business at Houston Baptist University. I'm your host, Darren Shear, and this is the show that helps Christian business leaders to integrate biblical values into business. On this episode, we're gonna replay a presentation delivered by Houston Baptist University alumnus Tina Boaz Murray, president of Mind Dance Marketing Incorporated. If you're a Christian entrepreneur wondering how you're gonna make it through any adversity you're facing right now in your business, listen to this and be encouraged. Tina Boaz Murray is the president of Mind Dance Marketing Incorporated, which is a marketing and brand management agency she started at 26 years old. So those of you who feel like you're too young to start something, let that be uh an encouragement to you. It's headquartered in Houston, Texas. MDM specializes in supporting franchised brands across the country. And most noteworthy on their client roster is the 21 years of support MDM has provided to Chick-fil-A markets nationwide. To date, MDM provides brand management for 15 Chick-fil-A markets. And also want to mention she is a proud graduate of Houston Baptist University. Tina, thanks for coming to share some of your entrepreneurial journey and lessons learned with us today. And I'll go ahead and turn it over to you.
SPEAKER_02Well, thanks, Darren. And um good morning or afternoon, depending upon where you might be out there. Um it's just an honor and a privilege to uh come to you today. And I can't see you, which makes obviously this so uh challenging sometimes when um when you're talking about your heart and you're talking about a journey that you've been on. But um hopefully um through this webinar, you will hear a little bit of my story that might inspire you to um just think differently about where you might be in life or where you might be going, despite the path that you have behind you. And that's really where I want to start this morning about why failure is not an option. Um it's it failure's not an option is really a battle cry for Tina Murray. I think um I want to tell you why it's my battle cry. And then I want to show you like where I'm taking the battle cry throughout my journey as uh a wife and a mom and um you know a business leader. Um and this battle cry really starts all the way back to when I was in third grade. And I worked with a coach about two years ago to try to um maybe help me understand the pace at which I want to work, the woman that I want to become and how I want to get there. And um, she dug really deep on the fact that failure is not an option for me and what does that mean, and how passionate I was about it. And one of the things that we uncovered in Failure's not an option is a story that goes back to third grade. And it is a hard story for me to tell. And I've only actually told uh you're the second people that have ever heard this story. But um, it is it is this it was Hurricane Alicia. And coming off this uh snowmageddon or ice pond, that however you want to freeze and whatever meme you want to use about what just happened to the city of Houston. But um back in the 80s, Hurricane Alicia hit the city of Houston, and it was a devastating storm. And um, this was really before the massive storms that we've experienced in the last five to seven years in Houston. Obviously, this was you know many years ago, but Hurricane Alicia was coming to the city of Houston, and it was the night that it was going to hit, and my mom was actually at work, and my dad was at home with me and my brother and my sister, and we are all 18 months apart. I'm the baby of three kiddos, and so we're all in elementary school, and the phone rang, and back then phones were connected to the wall, or they had a really long cord that you could kind of carry around the phone. And I picked up the phone at the exact time my dad did, but the clarity of phones was not what it is today, and he didn't know that I had picked up the phone. And on the other end of the line was a woman, and she said, Richard, where are you? The kids and I are scared, and we need you to come over to our house. And my dad replied to this woman and said, Pat's at work and she wants me to stay here with these damn kids. And I remember thinking on the phone that I was one of those damn kids that he was talking about. Now I don't remember what happened after. I don't remember processing, I don't remember my heart wanting to go tell my mom what I heard, or I don't remember that. But I think what I do remember was this call to achieve. I I remember it bubbling up in me to not want to be one of those damn kids. And so I went on to junior high and high school. I'm a graduate of Sci-Fair High School here in Houston. And throughout my junior high and high school, and even going into college and HBU, um, I played sports and participated in clubs. And I people often said things to me like, you're so good at everything you do. You're such a natural athlete. You're they gave compliments to determination and the sheer sweat equity that I was willing to apply to not fail. And I feel like in that journey of not wanting to fail is where I really came up with my battle cry of failure is not an option. And I want to just share, I'm gonna flip over here to um this quick deck of slides and just share a little bit about where I am now. So obviously, we're talking about failure is not an option, but I want to just let you know that God has sent me the most incredible husband you see here. Um, Darren mentioned that we just got back from Disney World in Orlando. Um, we had not planned that because of the storm, but it actually did work out so well that we did that with the storm because um we were there last week. And so my husband Greg is on the right, and then you see Marley, my 13-year-old, and Maddie Kate, my 11-year-old, and then Macy, my 15-year-old, there um at Disney World. And this is where the story gets to gets good and gets away from the hurt and kind of into the build. Because after the hurt happened, um I went to Sam Houston State University for exactly one day. When I graduated high school, my mom had the expectation that we were going to go to college. Now, keep in mind that my mom had lived through um this uh, I guess, lifestyle with my dad and chose to divorce him after my dad um had had all these indiscretions with other women. And my mom was a single parent. And her determination for leading our family resulted in my brothers and sisters and I working nights and weekends at my mom's printing company. And we would turn our paychecks over to my mom because she needed those funds in order to make our family function correctly, um, because we didn't have my dad or my dad's income at the time. So the struggle for our family included things like um at times we didn't have electricity, um, at times our telephones would get turned off. Um, at times we had to um borrow money from people in order to buy groceries. There was a period of my life where the struggle um was real and might have motivated the journey. And when I enrolled into Sam Houston State University, um I was dating a boy. It's not Greg. So um he doesn't like this part of the story, but it's not Greg who I was dating, but I was dating a boy, and I really thought that I wanted to marry this person. And so I decided not to go to Sam Houston. And then my mom said, Well, you have to go to college. So um she'd marched me down to the University of Houston and said, This is where you're gonna go to college. And so I enrolled in HBU. And at the time that I, I mean I in U of H rather, and at the time that I enrolled in University of Houston, I wasn't really an active um uh student. Um, I certainly wasn't attending class on uh an active basis, and I wasn't really participating in the education. And I think this is the period where I would say, um, especially to any young people that are on the uh webinar this morning, um, my story was not over. But I think if you looked at me at that period, you might look at me and say, wow, she really took a turn for the worst. She was actually gonna maybe be something. I saw potential in her and now she's stalled out. She's not going to college, you know, I'm not sure what she what her plans are for the future. But my mom told me, um, go get a job in the career that you think would be most interesting to you. If you're not gonna be in college, and I was still in college, but I just wasn't excelling. She said, go get a job in a career that you want to uh to be in. So I went and got a job at 104 KRBE. And back in the day, in that time frame, 104 was uh, they were a happening station. They were the number three radio station in the country, and they were doing some really amazing things with loyalty cards and magazines and things that actually probably sound really silly today, but this is, you know, 25 years ago. This was really cutting-edge marketing that was happening at KRBE. And through my relationships at KRBE, there were two people that really impacted my journey. One of them was Mark Schechterly and the other one was Pam Kehoe. And these were people that really poured into me and said, um, get your act together. Pick the design that God has for you and go towards that. And I didn't know what that meant. I think about now, about when when my daughter asked me, do you hear God talking to you? And I'm like, well, it's not like a voice. I'm not hearing him speak directly to me like a phone call, like Tina, here's what I need you to do today. But they, those two individuals actually helped me move my journey from stagnant into motion. And whether or not it was the right motion was a little bit irrelevant. But the fact that I was moving in a direction, I think was probably um the forward movement that they at least, as my mentors, wanted me to be in. I went from KRBE over to the AM side in radio to work for 740 KTRH. And some of the older generations on the phone here today will probably recognize 740 KTRH as being one of the radio stations that's hawk radio where you might be getting your news. Um, in that time frame, my boss at the time, Pam, said to me, Um, you really need to accomplish graduating from college. She recognized the need for me to finish. So I enrolled in Houston Baptist University. And I hate to say it because I know Ernest is on this webinar, but I think one of the main reasons why I enrolled at HBU was because they would accept me. And so, with that acceptance, I went to HBU and that came with a lot of accountability. Um, I had professors calling me, um, asking me, you know, hey, are you showing up for class? Or hey, you made a C on that exam. Can we help you through this? And let's talk about the grades. I'm so grateful for the accountability that walked me through my years of HBU. But I got to the last semester HBU and I could not graduate. And you want to know why? It's because I had been in school for seven years. And at some point, the government, with my grants and loans and tuition assistance, I believe they thought, well, this girl is just not gonna make it. Like, so um, in that time frame, um, I had to go to my sister and her husband, and they were newlyweds, and I had to say, look, I asked mom for the money and she said no. And quite frankly, I don't blame her. I've been living off her uh, you know, her paycheck for quite some time, off her gas bill, um, off her, you know, paying my car insurance and things of that nature. And what happened in that timeframe is that my sister, even as a newlywed, agreed to bankroll $5,000 for me to finish my education. Now, I mentioned all of this to you because again, if my story had stopped at any point along what I'm telling you, you you might have a much different opinion about me or the way my journey was going. But at that point, when I graduated and I went to work for a PR firm, um, I really began to understand that failure is just not an option. I I really, as a young adult, began to understand the sacrifices that people had instilled in themselves to make me successful. Um, from my mentors to my parents to my sister and her husband giving me money. And that's really where this battle cry of failure, not an option, began to take flight for me. And there are things along the way that I feel like have absolutely changed my course as a Christian. Um, but definitely changed my course as a leader in my business. Um, I went from the PR firm and started my own agency at the age of 26. Now that's a that's a risky um move. I don't know that I would recommend that to everybody, but it's definitely a risky move to start your own agency at the age of 26. And here's why it was risky for me. I'm not sure I knew everything about business or leadership. Um, I don't know that I knew a lot about entrepreneurship. But my first clients were Chick-fil-A, BMW of North America, and Marble Side Creamery. So I had a really good lineup of clients coming out of just reputation management that um I was doing. And I realized really quickly that the industry that I had been working in, the media industry and the advertising industry, whether it was in my radio days or my PR days, um, was really much like a family. And I really believe that in those instances, that the reputation, as it says in Proverbs, that a good name is better to have than all the riches in the world. Um, I really believe that that is an important tool to instill day in and day out because I went to my family and I asked them to help work on my reputation. I asked them to help me by um uh referencing me to their clients. I asked them to help me by sending me people that I could talk to that might be an opportunity for me to gain a client in a business. And in my first year of business, I had 13 different clients in my client portfolio. Um, as Darren had mentioned, Chick-fil-A was my very first client. I remained to be a client today. I was so fortunate to be on this journey with that brand. Um, and in that journey, I think this is really really where I would get into the nuts and bolts of what I believe is failure is not an option, is that it's okay to fail. I'm not saying don't fail. I'm saying it's not an option to stay down when you have failure. And one of the things that has helped me along that is just to know that 40% of your daily actions are actually not actions, they're habits. And so, in order for me to figure out how I wanted to go about and build this business at 26 years old called Mind Dance Marketing. And the fact that my mom had said, I'll let you try this for six months, you're 26. I was really fresh out of college, despite the fact that I was 26. And my mom had said, I will bankroll you for six months. But at the end of six months, if you don't have your business up and running, I want you to move home and I want you to kind of start over in your career path. And that's when I realized that, you know, Duke University did a study and it said, you know, when you rise in the morning, nearly half of your day will be determined by patterns that you either intentionally create or you passively allow. So when you rise in the morning, 40% of your day is already crafted for you on an autopilot of the things that you have intentionally created in your life, or if there's no creation that you're intending, that it would actually passively take its own course. And these are the things that I really want to unpack for you today. There's there's five items that I want to chat about. And I'm gonna go back to this piece because I want to just kind of share with you my thoughts on the five things that um have helped me ensure that failure is not an option for me. The first one is writing handwritten notes. Men on this call, I think, uh, probably are gonna say, hey, it's not my thing. Young people, you're probably gonna say, why would I write a note when I can text or email or or you know, send a TikTok video? But here's why. Especially during COVID, we all need a little bit of happiness. And Truett Kathy, the founder of Chick-fil-A, actually would say, Do you know how you can tell if somebody needs encouragement? The answer is it's when they're breathing. If someone is breathing, then they need encouragement. And so my handwritten notes have always been part of Tina. It's part of my manifesto at Mind Dance. My team is required to write one handwritten note at the end of every week to lift somebody up. And during COVID, what I really love about that is that I love the opportunity to be able to send a handwritten note to somebody and leave a little happy gram in their mailbox, which um, you know, is probably you're enjoying mail a little bit more these days than you might have pre-COVID. But if you don't mind, I'd like to share with you one secret about my handwritten note strategy. And it is this. Um, I used to write notes. Let's take a thank you note, for example. I used to write thank you notes that said, thank you, Darren, for introducing me uh this morning. You did an amazing job at lifting me up right before I presented. I very much appreciated being on your webinar today. Warmly, Tina Murray. But then I started changing the way I wrote my thank you notes. And I would write things like, holy cow, pun intended on behalf of Chick-fil-A, my largest client. I was super nervous going into the presentation this morning, and your introduction put me at ease. Thank you for giving me that warm introduction. It was a pleasure to be with you this morning. Warmly, Tina Murray. And part of leading a thank you note or a handwritten note was something more than what you intend to convey. So my intention would be thank you. But what I wrote first was holy cow. Um, it really just grabs the reader in a different way and it causes them to have a different um reaction to what they're reading. And it shares a little bit of my personality. So I would just encourage you: the first thing that I do to instill that failure is not an option is that I keep up my relationships. And one of the ways that I do that is by handwritten notes, because eventually you're going to need those people that you're writing these notes to one day to help you, whether it's emotionally or physically or financially, if that happens. Um, I believe that God calls us into meaningful relationships with each other and with him. And this is one of the ways that I like to be in meaningful relationships with people. And I have written a lot of handwritten notes and I'm uh during COVID, and um I've gotten a lot of really great responses back from people about how that lifted their day. The second thing I want to mention to you about things that have really helped me in failure is not an option is to give everyone 15 minutes of my time. Early in my career, I would say if anybody really wanted to speak with me, that I would carve out 15 minutes on the phone for coffee, maybe we had lunch together. Um, I quickly learned that God had a different purpose for those 15 minutes than I would have intended. I thought the 15 minutes was because somebody wanted to pitch me an idea or ask me to spend advertising dollars with their television station. But I think if If I really slowed down, what I was learning is that Tina needed those 15 minutes. I needed those 15 minutes to hear from someone else, to fill my cup, to be educated, to be inspired. And I have to say that once I changed my relationship with time, I learned to lean into those 15 minutes with people. I learned to appreciate giving time to people. It is my rarest commodity. It's likely your rarest commodity, too. It's the one thing that you have the very least of, but it's probably the one thing that everyone wants from you. My husband wants it, my children want it, my team wants it, my friends want it. And I actually want it for myself. And so when I think about giving 15 minutes of time, I have to spread it out amongst all those people. And it's important not to forget yourself. It's important for you not to forget that your 15 minutes of time is actually for you as well. You need a moment to refresh, to dig deep in something that you're thinking, to go into the word and make sure that you're listening for what the journey is intended to be. But slowing down to hear other people and to hear their message and to hear their journey has actually really inspired my journey. And here's the part where it comes into failure is not an option. Failure is not an option to not be in a relationship with humans. And just lean into the moment actually produces a better Tina. And I hope it produces a better you. The third thing that I've done to ensure that failure is not an option is develop a board of directors. And I have developed a personal board of directors and a professional board of directors. And let me just explain the difference between the two. My personal board of directors is a group of men and women. I would call them some of my deep lifelong friends. And we get together and we discuss these deep topics about what am I struggling with? Where are my fears? Where's my anxiety? How transparent can I be about where my marriage is, where my children are, where my business is even. And my personal board of directors are people that I intentionally went and asked them to serve on this board. Now it's not a formal board. They don't get paid to do it, but I do call them together once a quarter, if not more during crisis times. I do call them together and I ask them to support me in the challenges of my life. Because I believe that failure is not an option, I can't believe that I'm designed to do that only with Tina. I want the perspective around me of people that I trust and admire and people that I respect to help guide my life. Now, simultaneously, I would say, I'm going to take that into my professional board of directors. And I would say, on this one, I actually went a little bit broader. I went to people in my industry. I went to people outside of my industry. I went to a client that I had previously had, and I put together a team of people who agreed to serve alongside me for two years. And let me just share this. During COVID, that group of people was so important to me. Now, don't get me wrong. I have leadership at Mind Dance. I have people that I trust and respect to guide my business. But in the sense that I really needed someone that I can unpack a hundred percent of the emotion that I was feeling and a hundred percent of the I'm scared and I'm in uncharted waters. I had to let people go, I had to reduce salaries. And then I got to hire people back. I got to bring people's salaries back up. And in that journey, I wanted people surrounding me that were going to help me make really good decisions. And this is where my professional and personal board of directors came into play. And I would tell you, young people that are on this webinar today, it is not too early to develop a personal or professional board of directors. You don't have to have a professional job or a professional career, if you will, to have a professional board of directors. Surround yourself with people that see the greatness in you. Ask those people to lift you up. Plan and make time to go and visit with them. Bring them together over coffee or lunch as a group. These may be people that don't know each other, but bring them together. The goal is to make a better you. And in my time of doing this over the last probably almost eight years, I would say that I am a better Tina and that my struggles become lighter because of this group that I surround myself with. The last one that I want to leave you with before we get off this PowerPoint is just leave everybody better than you found them. This is actually something that we take very seriously at Mind Dance. And I would say, leaders on the phone, whether you're an entrepreneur or a worker, you likely interact with somebody in your office. And it's not terribly difficult to leave people better than you found them, but you do have to be aware and intentional to do the actions for that. At Mind Dance, here's the way we do that. I have 200 people that work for me across the country. My job is to leave each one of them better than I found them. So I work really hard to make sure that they know who I am. With 200 people, everybody might not know me, you know, um as well as the people that share an office next door to me. Um, but I work really hard to make sure it's a handwritten note, it's a text message, it's a quick phone call. Everyone on my team has my cell phone number. And everyone on my team is encouraged to reach out to me when they need it. But then I empower my leaders. There are times when you're in a meeting and you have real work to do. My leaders are encouraged to make sure that they carve out time to check in on mental health, to check in on how are you doing. Um, I also do things like had somebody on my team that um whose daughter wanted to take some advanced classes that they couldn't afford. And I stuck, I heard about that and I stepped up and covered those classes for her so that she could let her daughter take these classes. Now, to me, it's a couple hundred dollars, but to her, it could be a pathway to a new career, career for her kid. So it's it's being aware to make sure that not just am I not failing, but that the people around me aren't failing. The people around me are encouraged and inspired. And so we live in an environment at Mind Dance about leaving people better than we found them. But I want to speak for one second to the young people that are on the call and determine the age of how young you might be. Um, but here's what I would say to young people when choosing a career, choose to work for leadership that's invested and interested in you. I have to say, I've done this as a leader. I want work done. I want high output, I want high efficiency. I want great work at Mind Dance. But I can't let that stand in the way of investing in my people. And I'm not really great at it, I have to say. I have people on my team that are much better at this than I am, thankfully. But what I would say is, young people, don't just look for the job. Don't just look for the description of the job or the company name that you think is cool. Look for the people that are gonna be leading you and ask yourself: am I gonna be a better person when I stop working here than I was before I came? Am I gonna be invested in? And am I gonna be championed to be my best self? Likewise, leaders on the call. Um, I would encourage you uh just to double check where you are in guiding your people and leaving your people better than you found them. These young people that come to work for us or your new hires that come to work for us, um, I tell my people all the time two things. One, I tell them there's no crying in chicken. So from a Chick-fil-A reference, I would like to say there's no crying in chicken. And so I don't want people to come to work and get so stressed out that we cry over the work that we do. And the second thing that I tell people is leave people better than you found them and take a deep breath. And in every interaction you have, try to carve out something that inspires them to be their best self. Now, I want to share with you that my journey in all of these points is um it's not always consistent. I mean, as a leader in growing an agency, um, I don't always have 15 minutes. It looks different today. My 15 minutes looks like um a text message, maybe, or it looks like a quick phone call, or it could look like a midnight email conversation. Um, also, I think leaving people better than and then I found them might look a little bit different too. It might look like delegating authority to somebody else to make a move on a team member, or it might look like me walking into somebody's office and saying, Hey, I just want you to know you need to go home. It's five o'clock and you have a little kid that goes to bed at 7:30. And I want to make sure that you get family time tonight. So I think that it looks different, and I want to be open to that. I want to be open to failure is not an option for me. It shouldn't be an option for the people that I serve. Pardon me. Um, and I want to pass that along to the people that choose to spend their time at Mind Dance Marketing. That we're gonna rise to every occasion, we're gonna do our very best, we're gonna become human in doing that, we're gonna celebrate successes, we're gonna celebrate failures because there's a lot to be taught inside of failure. And at the end of the day, we're gonna make sure that we make time for ourselves. We call it white space at mind dance. In order to be a really good leader, um, we have to be really good at ourselves first. And so, if anything that I would ask you to take away today is um maybe not that failure is not an option, but how do you ensure that failure is not an option? What steps can you take? What pieces do you want to instill? Who are you going to surround yourself with? And maybe in that conversation, you ask yourself, what are you willing to let go of? Because if you're like me, you have a lot on your plate right now. I don't, I don't know really where you are in your journey, but I can tell you that society measures success by busy. And it's wrong. Time is not an indicator of success. Checklist is not an indicator of success. But when I think about not wanting to fail, I have to make sure I know what I'm not wanting to fail in and for whom I don't want to fail. My priorities have been steadfast since I started this business. Um, I'm a Christian first and foremost, and that's a filter that has to be applied to my everyday walk. I'm a wife second. I made a commitment and a vow to Greg to be his wife and to honor and respect him for the rest of my life. And I intend to do that, despite how hard it can be to be married for now what's going to be 18 years. I'm a mother that has its own challenges. And then I'm a business owner. All of those things set us up for struggle. But if I can remember what my filters are and keep my filters intact, my word for this year is simplicity. And I want to know that I'm creating good habits in that. I write handwritten notes. I inspire people to take good care of each other. I give people 15 minutes of my time. And I appreciate the opportunity, Darren and Ernest, that you've given me today in order to share my story. I hope it inspires someone along the way.
SPEAKER_01We hope you've enjoyed this episode. And if so, we would greatly appreciate it if you would leave us a quick rating and review for the Christianity and Business podcast on iTunes. You can get more information about HBU Center for Christianity and Business at Christianityandbusiness.com. Thanks for listening. And remember to keep integrating biblical values into your business.