You can take the next step toward getting your book published by requesting our free video author training course at hybridbooks.com forward course at F. Today we're going to be discussing why business competence matters to God FS. And we're joined by Dan Maylon. Dan is the national sales and marketing director of a Kansas City-based interns company, a business coach and consultant. And he's the author of the book The Compound Effect. And what he teaches how to combine business competence effects with spiritual maturity to achieve kingdom impact. Welcome to the Theology of Business podcast, Dan.
SPEAKER_00Good afternoon. Appreciate the opportunity to be here, Darren. Thank you.
SPEAKER_02Absolutely. Well, we recently got connected. I've been really excited about some of the things that you've been teaching around the country, around the world, and uh and it's not just coming from theory, but it's it's coming from practical experience in the marketplace as you've been partnering with God in your own business in the insurance industry, and we're just excited to hear what you're going to be sharing with us today. But as we get started, I just shared a brief background about you. But tell us a bit more about your background in business and in the church and how these experiences have contributed to shaping your views on business.
SPEAKER_00Well, Darren, thanks very much for having me. Um, just as a matter of background, I've been an insurance professional for 42 years. Uh I acquired my first insurance agency in 1973. I was just married, just out of college, and I want to be a banker. And the bank that I was in acquired an agency and they made me a partner. And uh I discovered fairly quickly that that there was more money to be made selling insurance than there was working as a teller in a bank. Um and that really kind of created a career shift for me. Uh my wife and I uh then we moved from that small town to another small town and went to work for a second bank agency. And then at the ripe age of 27 with uh two small children, I started my first own insurance agency from scratch, and I was profitable in 18 months. Um from that point on, uh, you know, I have bought and sold multiple insurance agencies, um, have been involved in, first of all, the a production capacity and ownership capacity, um, senior level management in some very, very large insurance operations. Today I'm the national sales director for a health insurance company based here in Kansas City. Um, and with the advent of the Affordable Care Act and uh the dislocation of the marketplace with health care and health insurance uh being the hot topic that it is, uh this is a very interesting place to be. That the Lord has really kind of uh brought me down a path and brought me through a whole series of trials and tribulations that really lends itself to uh uh an incredible life lesson laboratory of what goes on in the business world and also in the insurance world. And one of the things that's vital to understanding who I am and why I do what I do is in the course of my insurance career, I virtually insured every kind of business that there is, from you know, farmers to contractors to uh restaurant chains to manufacturing. Um I have a hands-on experience with many, many of many large variety of types of business. So uh when I come and I start coaching business from a uh from a biblical perspective, um, I bring 42 years of hands-on business experience with that coaching and training.
SPEAKER_02I love that diversity that you have. And so tell me, tell us a little bit about your background in the church and and at what point in that journey did you become a Christian? And and while you were in business as a Christian, did you see yourself as being in ministry also in the marketplace? Or or was that something that came later?
SPEAKER_00Well, there's there's there's interesting things that happened in the course of our lives. First of all, I'm a first-generation American. My parents immigrated from Switzerland, and uh in my in my lineage, my great-grandfather, who after whom I am named, was a Calvinist pastor in Lausanne, Switzerland, and uh in from in the mid-late 1800s. And so it's interesting I have that in my in my lineage, but my parents came from Switzerland in 1946 and I was born in 1951. And uh in the first 18 years of my life, um I uh was raised in New Jersey and I went to church on a fairly regular basis. My mom was a teacher in a Methodist school. I never really had a born-again experience, but when I came to college, uh I went to a Baptist school in in the town of Ottawa, Kansas, and in my senior year I got saved through a series of events and gave my heart to the Lord. My wife and I got married and I led her to the Lord before we got married. Um and we for 26 years we raised three kids and we went to church on a very regular basis. But I in that period of 26 years, I also started, bought, and sold multiple insurance operations and agencies and various businesses, including trucking and airplanes and real estate, a bunch of other things. But uh up until the year 2000, I separated uh my my ministry for my business. In other words, my business happened from Monday through Saturday, and I went to church on Sunday, I tithed, gave, you know, attended the church, I was active, uh, but I never really saw my business as ministry. In 2000, I was in a men's group in a large church. We moved to Colorado Springs, we were in a church of 15,000 people, and I got involved in the men's ministry there, and through that process, I read a book by Ed Silvosa called Anointed for Business. That essentially changed my paradigm. I mean, at that point I recognized, you know what, Dan, you've been looking to try to do ministry outside of your business. Your business is your ministry. And it set in motion a whole series of things. My pastor just did a uh is doing a session called Dream Acceleration about our dreams, and the Lord gave me a dream uh that that involved the marketplace, and I came to realize that that I had to walk through a series of transformational processes, and one of them was getting my own spiritual house in order, which I did over a period of about three and a half years. Then we created a class in the church I was attending where we taught people how to run business according to biblical principles, and that evolved into what is now our ministry, which is called Weavers, where uh we we have a fundamental teaching curriculum that we use to teach people some some of the granular issues of what does it look like to run a business with competence, the honor and glory of God. And that's really what my book is about. We'll talk about that a little later. But um my wife and I have grown, we've we're we've been married for 42 years, we have three children and six grandchildren. We pray every morning together. Um we've uh we have gone through several fortunes backwards and forwards. We've made money, lost money, and have had to recover from some bad mistakes. And so we have a a wide variety of experiences, but as we look at them in retrospect, the Lord's been in every single one of them. Um and he was in the ones that didn't work, he was trying to teach me a lesson, which at the ripe age of 60 some, I am now finally learning the hard way and starting to gravitate and understand it, but he's also using those things to teach other people.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. Well, Dan, there's kind of an interesting and somewhat controversial statement that that you say in your in your teaching. I've had the the privilege of being able to watch uh one of your workshops, but but you say that there is no grace in the marketplace. What do you mean by that?
SPEAKER_00Well, let's understand grace as God designed it, and that is it's a gift. Okay. If you and I have a relationship, I can extend grace to you, and you can extend grace to me. However, the marketplace is not God. The marketplace extends no grace. Um in the marketplace, you are required to you know um perform with competence, or the marketplace will basically render you irrelevant. Um I'll give you an example. Um in my insurance career, I had a plastics manufacturer that was a client of mine, and they were employed about 120 people. They were in in a small town of about 4,000 people in Nebraska. Um they they were the cornerstone industrial industry in that particular community, and they were plastics, they did plastics extrusion, but their primary product was cassette deck, cassette tapes, the plastic cassette. And some of you who are the DVD generation won't know what those are, but at the end of the day, you've probably seen them. But uh the reality is the marketplace took that business and rendered it irrelevant by virtue of the fact that you know it replaced them with other things like DVDs and now with MP3s. The marketplace doesn't care. You can have the most beautiful set of DVD players today, and they're virtually worthless because technology has rendered them irrelevant. There's no grace in the marketplace. The marketplace cannot, you have to continue to constantly update and improve yourself. Um I can put that at a personal level. You know, I've been a property and casualty guy for 40-some years. I'm now working for a health insurance company. I understand agency distribution, I understand how agents think and act. I don't understand the health insurance business, and I'm it I'm an executive in this company, but they don't pay me to understand a health insurance policy. What they do is they pay me to train agents and to find distribution. So my skill, my expertise is in distribution, it's not in health insurance policies. But guess what? I have lots and lots of people in this company that know that way better than I'll never know it. And I but it I am forced by virtue of this position to continue to educate myself and learn. And if I don't do that, guess what? I won't have a job. Okay? It is more complicated than that. The the the the marketplace is dynamic unless you adapt to the marketplace on a on a regular basis and constantly challenge yourself, you you're gonna watch the marketplace go by. And it will render you irrelevant, your family will have no food, and you will be not valuable to anybody unless you continue to improve yourself. That's what I do when I say there's no grace in the marketplace.
SPEAKER_02Well, there's uh a verse that comes to mind from Ecclesiastes says, if the axe is dull and he does not sharpen its edge, then he must exert more strength. But wisdom has the advantage of giving success. And so I think by uh another word for updating, as you said, is is sharpening and and constant improvement, because and that's a very biblical virtue, is is that uh wisdom it will lead us to become more competent, it will lead us to be more disciplined about being the best we can be in our particular field. But Dan, what would you say to somebody that would say, well, I'm not under law, I'm I'm under grace. And so when I'm in the marketplace, um I have supernatural favor and advantage that other people don't have that just work by the sweat of their brow.
SPEAKER_00You only have supernatural favor and grace if you're in communion with the Lord and it has to do with your thoughts and your decisions and your actions. Okay? You cannot go to the marketplace and ask the marketplace to extend you favor. You can go to God and ask God to extend you favor, but I don't uh I I can tell you that's not a really great strategy for making payroll next week. Okay. That's not a really great strategy. It might be a good strategy for understanding where to dig, okay, but it'll never do the digging for you.
SPEAKER_02Right. I wonder, would it be more appropriate to say there is no grace from the marketplace than to say there is no grace in the marketplace?
SPEAKER_00Well, uh you you could say it either way, but you you might be able to say there's no grace from the marketplace. Another, let me give you another for instance. Sure. I fly Southwest Airlines all the time. Okay. The the the requirements of the pilot sitting in that left front seat are pretty exacting. I do not want the marketplace to extend him any grace. He either is competent or he doesn't fly the airplane because he's got my life in his hands. Okay? And that's the same way with any business owner. You literally have the life of the people that work with you, for you, and around you. And you can't use grace as a strategy to survive. Right. Okay. It just isn't going to work. You got to make payroll. Our company's got to make payroll every two weeks, you know? Yeah. You don't make payroll with grace.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. So we have a responsibility to be competent in our field. So, what are the nine core business competencies that that people need to have in business?
SPEAKER_00Well, first of all, the genesis of this is I kept being challenged by my students. So to Dan, this is too complicated. Make it simpler. And the one thing the Lord has given me is the ability to visualize things and present them in a simple manner. Consider this as like a roadmap of the United States. But in the center of the map, you have your core deliverable. And the core deliverable is whatever your skill is. You happen to be a publisher, so you I would assume that you're competent at your core deliverable. And so that's the central item that you need to be competent at. And there, if you go to my website, you'll see that there's a diagram that explains all this. But the core competency includes your products or service, it it's your value proposition, it's your differentiation in the market, it is a technical skill, it is your vendors and suppliers, and the people that make your business unique. If you can't, you don't know what it is. You know, McDonald's, Chick-fil-A, you know, um Wendy's all have the same core deliverable. That's fast food. Okay. The question is, how do they differentiate in the marketplace? And you know, your core deliverable is publishing. How do you differentiate yourself in the marketplace? Now that's a different conversation, but you have to be confident of your core deliverable. So consider that the hub of the wheel, right? Around the outside, there are there are eight other competencies that are that work with each other in context and and work with one another. And we don't have time today to get into it in much detail, but these are the eight planning, sales, marketing, leadership, finance, administration, human resources, and systems. And if you look at my diagram, you'll see that there's some subsets to that. We actually have an assessment tool where I can go into most small into virtually any small business and I can evaluate their competence in each one of those areas in about 90 minutes and evaluate what their strengths and weaknesses are. So you know, you ask a question, you asked me a question in an earlier thing, which one of the competencies is lacking most often? Yeah. Depends on the size of the business, but typically the one that's missing the most often is planning. Okay. Um, typically that is the one that is the biggest hole in the ground because very few people do good planning or then they know how to follow through on their plan. Okay. But I will tell you that your business, any business can fail because it's missing any one or more of the eight categories that I just mentioned. Yeah. So it's not just planning. Um, you know, I've got a client currently that I'm working with that his biggest challenge is human resources. He's not been willing to go out and spend the money to buy the talent that he needs to get it to the next level. And he's not going to get it to the next level until he spends the money for the people that he needs.
SPEAKER_02What's the best way to learn these core competencies? And does somebody need to go to business school to learn them?
SPEAKER_00Well, I I have a particular bias. The best way to learn the business competencies that you need to learn to run a business is go work with somebody in the business that you want to run. You know, the the the there is a universal reality. We go from knowledge. Knowledge is is important, but knowledge is irrelevant without context. I can go to business school all day long and get the best MBA in the world, but till I go out into the world and apply it in context of a business, I really haven't learned anything. Okay. That's right. I've learned how to think, I've learned some ideas and some structure, but every business is like it's like a person. It's got its own unique set of rules and regulations. Every industry is different. There's a culture of the company that you're working for. So we we you go from knowledge to context to application. So let me follow this through. In school, the academics expound on knowledge and they do test cases and studies based on some real life experiences. But the only way you can learn to run a business is go run a business. It's a little bit like flying an airplane or riding a bicycle. You ain't gonna know how till you do it. And guess what? There's a day when I go out to fly the airplane when the wind's blowing across the runway and it's raining and it's snowing and it's a really crappy day. Well, you in the business world, if you haven't flown the airplane of your business in on a bad day, you really haven't learned how to fly yet. Okay? Right. Not all days are good when you're in business. And it's not the good days that are the test, it's the bad days. It's when it gets difficult and tough. And it and and one of the things about being a business owner is from a Christian perspective, is it's really easy to lose your salvation running a business because you have to compromise a lot of different ways in order to keep that business thriving. Yeah. And sometimes to survive. And that's one of the big challenges that whether you're a Christian or not, business is more often than not about compromise, and you have to be able to understand enough about the alternatives and the ways you're going to do things so as not to compromise. And I can tell you from a personal experience, when I've compromised, it's cost me. Okay. When I've adapted God's truth and moved it forward, then ultimately it has endeared itself to some success, but not always how I thought it should or when I thought it should. Right. Because God's about this wonderful thing called perseverance. You're running a business, you just bought into that whole concept of perseverance because not every day is a good day in business. That's right. Absolutely. We go from you're you're not really competent at running a business until you've been doing it for five years. There's something out there, Malcolm Gladwell wrote a book called Outliers, and in there he talks about the 10,000 hour rule. 10,000 hours, 40 hours a week, 50 weeks a year for five years. And you're not competent at anything that you're going to do that's meaningful in life until you've been working at it for a minimum of five years.
unknownRight.
SPEAKER_00The older I get the older I get, the more I understand that that fact is a reality.
SPEAKER_02One of the things that that you had mentioned is that we have to be careful to not compromise our values. And and I think a lot of that has to do with the way that we are trained in business, the way that we're educated and who we choose to learn from. And I love what you said. If you want to learn business, go find somebody that's doing the type of business that you want to do and uh and go go learn from them and and basically be that protege. But how important is it uh to make sure that you're learning from the right person that has the right values?
SPEAKER_00Okay, so let me let me blow it burst your bubble, okay? Everybody is everybody you're gonna encounter in business at some point has their weaknesses and their strengths, okay? Uh-huh. And what the Lord showed me, first of all, let's take this to the whole concept of mentors. Okay. I have accumulated a vast array of business talents and skills, and it all came from about 25 or 30 people who have been my mentors over a course of a period of time. Some of them had the net the ethics of a snake, and you and you learn things. Things from them, even though they had marginal ethical values, they still taught you something that was vitally important. And it's it and God uses things that other people want to throw away. Part of what the Christian problem is we have a tendency to create, want to create a sterile environment to learn only from those people who are our brothers. Well, guess what? That doesn't it's not doesn't always hold water. Now, and to give you an example, um, I worked for a gentleman that was an agnostic and an atheist, but he was also my boss, so I had to respect him because he was my boss. And the man drove me absolutely insane, making me do budgets. He was an analyticals analytical. I can do budgets in my sleep because of that man, and because he he gave me a skill set that I would not have acquired any other way except that he pounded into my head. Okay. And I got very, very good at Excel spreadsheets and very, very good at budgets. I can now do a budget in my sleep. Okay? And and so you you don't want to qualify who you learn from. Okay. Now, many of the people that I learned from were great Christians and great ethical business people, but I did learn a few things for some people that were less than ethical. Okay. And and and part of the being discerning and having wisdom is to not only understand what works, but also understand where you don't want to go and why and what doesn't work. Because running a business is about choices, and and the older I get, the more I see where people are headed down the road that's gonna it's gonna be a train wreck. And I can tell them, here's what's gonna happen, here's where you're headed. Yeah. It's a combination of lots of experience, lots of it pain and anguish on my own part, and also uh a lot of discernment and wisdom. And what's been amazing to me is the Bible. I can virtually go back, and as I started reading the Bible with a business lens, I'm going, wow, there's the lesson I missed. And there's another one that I missed, and there's another one that I missed, and there's another one that I missed. Okay. So all the lessons are there. It's a question of prisms, especially with how you look at it.
SPEAKER_02Um there's a book by Leonard Sweet, Eleven Indispensable Relationships You Can't Live Without. And one of those people is he says that you need to have a Jethro in your life. And he's referring to Jethro, uh Moses' father-in-law, and of course, where he he was the one that told Moses that he needed to start delegating some of these judicial responsibilities because he was burning himself out. Well, well, Jethro was not uh one of the children of Israel. I mean, he was he was kind of uh a Gentile, you know, he was he was kind of an outsider of the of the faith, but his point in that book was that you need to have unbelievers in your uh as as you need to have some unbelievers as advisors. Um of course you need to make sure that they're walking in and wisdom and everything, but you know, by the same token, Larry Briquette in his book uh Business by the Book, he said that he's not saying that you shouldn't have unbelievers as your advisors, as your teachers. And I went to business school in New York City, which is you know it's certainly not a Christian place, and I don't really have any idea of the of the faith of many of my professors, but I learned a ton, as you said, about accounting. Like my accounting professor taught me how to do the basically the accounting practices that I use in my own company today. And and so but but Larry Briquette, he said of having unbelievers as your advisors, the difficulty isn't the advice they give, it's the advice they don't give, specifically the lack of spiritual insight. So it's it's kind of a it's kind of a both and but I don't know, for me, I think it it really comes down to making sure that the majority of the advisors, of the counselors in your sphere of influence are believers. Would you agree with that?
SPEAKER_00You you for at a personal relational level, yes. Okay, okay. The the it there are times when you hire people for their competence, not for their Christianity. Because there are times when it's necessary that their competence have a is of higher value than their Christianity. Because they're gonna and that that's a very controversial statement, but uh I give you an example, um, you know, um very, very good friend of mine, uh, he's been a client for a number of years, is Jewish. Okay, and I understand his faith, I understand exactly how he behaves, um, I understand where he's coming from. I don't pound him over the head, he knows I'm a Christian, I know he I know he's Jewish. That's just the way it is. But there's some aspects of things that I do for him that are very valuable to him. Now, the and here is why business's ministry. I have earned the right to be respected by him. And there may come a day when he turns to me and says, Dan, tell me about Jesus. Right. Okay, that's really the crux of business's ministry. Jesus went to the marketplace to find the people who were in trouble. And he didn't go there in condemnation, he went there with an open mind and an open heart. And all of the miracles and the things that he did, for the most part, were done in the marketplace. And every time he got near a church, he got in trouble.
SPEAKER_02Right. Yeah, that's true.
SPEAKER_00And and and so and so I'm looking at this and going, you know, the marketplace is such an I mean, I fly all the time commercially. You never know who you're gonna sit next to.
SPEAKER_01Okay.
SPEAKER_00And and they are interested in talking to me because I'm in the insurance world. I can't tell you how many discussions I have about you know the Affordable Care Act and health insurance, and what does it mean, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then I get somebody's card and I get phone calls later on, and I all of a sudden have a relationship because of what I do. Business as ministers, people are everywhere.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. I guess I'm wondering, it it seems like the biblical model is that the believers are the ones who are supposed to be advising and influencing the unbelievers in these different spheres of influence, whether it's like Joseph and Daniel and Esther in government uh or or in a business setting or wherever else for that matter. So it it, you know, Jesus, he was always in command of what was happening. Like he was always people were looking to him for answers. It wasn't necessarily like he brought uh you know brought in some unbelievers to to help to make sure that he was doing the right thing. You know what I mean?
SPEAKER_00I understand. Let me articulate or ask you this question. Was Jesus competent? Absolutely. Okay do people who have competence in what they're talking about, do you have a level of uh of respect for them? Definitely. Okay, so competence breeds respect. Respect breeds the opportunity to have influence, and you if if you're a Christian business owner and you put that business owner hat on and says, I'm a Christian, and you do not have competence, you will have no respect. And part of the problem is that lack of respect then reflects back on the Christian family.
SPEAKER_02Right. Well, does are we are we making the assumption that there aren't enough competent Christian people to be our advisors in the marketplace, people to learn from? And I mean that's that I mean that may or may not be the case. I think there definitely seems to be a general sense that um I mean when people think of who are successful Christian business people that come to mind, uh you know, they might rattle off Dave Ramsey and Truett Cathy and Michael Hyatt, and but unless they've really done the research to find out what somebody's worldview is, they they you know, they might not know of too many people that they could trust and say, okay, I believe not only the the the business competence aspect of this person, but also the spiritual maturity, which is what you talk about in the compound effect.
SPEAKER_00Right. What happens, and the purpose of my book is really to articulate in a in a matter of uh measurable behaviors, what does it look like to be competent in business and to be spiritual mature, spiritually mature, which allows you then to take your influence from the marketplace and have an impact, a transformational impact on lives. And the um there are not no, there are not enough, and there's a couple of reasons for that. And I'm a perfect example. I spent 26 years as a Christian in a marketplace separating myself, business, and ministry. I never looked at it as one whole thing. I looked at it as two separate endeavors, and and I had to go through a personal transformation in order to recognize that my business was my ministry. Then I started trying to explain it and teach it to others, and unfortunately, the church doesn't really understand what we're talking about when we talk about businesses ministry. And and part of the the intimidation factor is that for for every church, there's a hundred businesses, and the businesses touch their people six to seven days a week, which means the churches are going to have six thousand, I'm sorry, the businesses have six thousand percent more impact on culture than churches do. You ask yourself this question. Who who's had if you look at culture and the definition of of what cultural changes look like, who's had more influence in culture in the last 20 years, Bill Gates or the church? Well, Bill Gates has changed our behavior. Stephen Jobs has virtually changed our behavior. They've literally stopped the presses, and we now think and act and behave differently than we ever thought about behaving 20 years ago because of what they have provided to the culture. Now, it's good and bad, but at the same time, is the church influencing behavior in culture? The answer is no.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. I think a lot of that has to do with the the way that we tend to we tend to isolate and say, okay, the church is responsible for helping people with their private life. You know, that's their their personal, you know, mental health, their their family situation, and just sort of like their private life. But then where they spend most of their life is in is in the public, with um, you know, in the marketplace. And that's where the church, and and it might not necessarily be the local church's responsibility, but it's the responsibility of the overall body of Christ, especially those like us that are actually in business to be that voice, to actually walk in this compound effect that you're talking about, to where we don't have to rely on primarily on unbelievers to teach us how to do marketing. Because frankly, I don't necessarily want and I'm there are a lot of ethical unbelievers. I I believe that, and I've I follow many of them, but predominantly I think the ideal situation is to make sure that whoever is teaching me marketing has a biblical worldview to where they're not going to uh uh use questionable tactics to kind of convince people they need to buy now or this deal is forever gone, or you know, that that I need to go out and actually buy thousands of t of fake Twitter followers to make myself look like I have a better, stronger personal brand than I actually do. You know, like I don't want to learn from somebody that's gonna be teaching, and and that's not to say that unfortunately some Christians don't necessarily have uh the right value system in marketing either.
SPEAKER_00Uh just as an example, let me let me put it in perspective this way. Okay. I attend your I attend a really wonderful church. I have a wonderful pastor, he gets the marketplace. Uh he and I collaborate on a different number of different levels teaching people businesses and ministry. And in the universe of our church, which has about a thousand people, um, I probably have a strong personal relationship with probably three or four hundred. Okay. Now, let's go back to my business life. In my LinkedIn and and and Facebook and my role, my personal contact manager, I have about 2,400 contacts. Okay. We we have an insurance company here that represents 6,000 agents nationally. We have five or six other vendors that we use. Those 6,000 agents represent several million employers who represent several tens of millions of employees. My influence, by virtue of how I behave, has a much broader reach inside of my business than it ever does inside of my church. Okay. And how I behave as the as a senior vice president of a company in Kansas City and how I treat my employees, how I treat my vendors and my suppliers and my agents. I do training all over the United States. And it's amazing to me how many times people recognize that I'm a Christian, even though I don't say so. And I, you know, believers who understand who I am and how I approach things say, you know what? This guy's not your typical insurance executive. He actually gives me straight answers to the questions I have. And I love where I'm at. I think the Lord's put me here for that very reason. But my business is my ministry, you know, and I really enjoy teaching, I really enjoy coaching, and I do it not only at a professional level but a personal and private level. But my sphere of influence inside the marketplace is 10,000 times bigger than my sphere of influence in my church.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. Yeah, and I think that's I mean, if if for no other reason, it's because we we spend, you know, maybe two hours at church on Sunday, and about I think you were telling me that upward of 90% of the working population in the U.S. works in a for-profit company, and and that's that's where we're spending our time.
SPEAKER_00You know, I one of the things I'm accused of is I'm I am a I am a statistics nerd because I I say numbers tell stories. Well, if I go to church three hours a month, uh three hours a week, three or four hours a week, my wife participates pretty pretty often, but she's got her own ministry, and that's a whole different conversation. But say I'm three three and that's 150 hours in a year, um, you know, I will work in the marketplace three thousand hours in a year. And my my experience, if you put all of my insurance experience back to back on an hour for hour basis, I have a hundred thousand hours of experience in the insurance business world. Okay. God's gonna use what I'm good at. Right. Okay. What I'm good at I I go to church because I need to be fed by a pastor and I need to be subject to that individual. But my ministry is going to be where my passion is, not where, you know I I got myself in trouble a couple times by asking a group of pastors why they didn't go across the street from the nurse churches and and pray for the business owner that was across the street. So you don't have to go to the mission field in China, you got a mission field around the corner from you. Right? So it's uh, you know, yeah. My approach seems to be t tends to be a little controversial because I think it's a little intimidating in some instances, but anyway.
SPEAKER_02Well, I think it's I think it's necessary, and and I think we need more Christians that are walking in this compound effect that you're talking about, where we understand that the marketplace isn't gonna do us any favors. We have to we have to walk out our God-given wisdom and we have to sharpen that axe like Solomon uh talked about in uh in Ecclesiastes. And uh because otherwise we're not gonna be too effective. And is not just in terms of the the financial return on investment, uh, but also we need to ask ourselves, what is my eternal return on investment for the work that I'm doing in the marketplace? And and like you said, there's a whole lot of hours that we're spending in business. And you know, we need to we need to take an inventory and and see what kind of fruit, eternally speaking, are we are we producing? Because we don't necessarily need more Christian business people that aren't going to be walking out spiritual maturity and business that are just gonna kind of go with the flow and just do whatever the world is is doing and be silent about our faith and not apply biblical principles, not partner with the Holy Spirit. I mean, we need that spiritual maturity among business people in the marketplace. So, Dan, tell us uh what are you working on this month that you're excited about?
SPEAKER_00Well, I got there's several things going on right at the moment. Uh uh first of all, uh I'm a regular speaker here in Kansas City at various different events. I'm speaking again this Thursday before a business group of about 45 business owners in North Kansas City and talking about the core competencies, why you know why competence matters to God. And it's it's it's the second in a three-part series that I'm teaching the next one. Next month will be on uh the compound effect. And then we have a uh a course that's either 16 or 24 hours of classroom time that we're getting ready to kick off again here at sometime in the middle of July or August, uh, where we'll have 15 or 20 business owners that will sit through this class. Uh, that basically it's the calling stewardship and legacy of business. We talk about is is business really your calling? And if it is, what is the stewardship of that business look like? And ultimately, what do you want the legacy to look like? Um and what it is, it's basically a high-level course that takes you through a series of assessments about where you are with your walk in the Lord, walk with the Lord as it relates to your business. And what sort of skills are you missing? What do you need to do next? You know, should you really be in business? Um, you know, what do you how do you think about what you're doing strategically and tactically? And then what does it take to really leave a legacy in the business? Because it what we try to do is we start with a high-level course where people can come and then it breaks down into one-on-one coaching. Um, and we have uh coaching clients from the East Coast to the West Coast, uh, clients in Atlanta, um, in Massachusetts, and in California. Um, and we coach either over the phone or in person, depending on the situation. Uh but the um the things that we're working on also I've got a couple of books that I would like to write, but being gainfully employed full-time as an executive and insurance company, plus traveling, plus having six grandchildren, plus having a ministry, uh, there's not a whole lot of time for writing at the moment. But I have the outline of three books, but when I get ready to retire in about five years, um I will probably spend more time writing when I can afford to.
SPEAKER_02Well, I know a publisher, so let me know. These are the kinds of books that we like to publish. Sure, cool. Well, that's good. Awesome. Well, tell us where can people connect with you and pick up a copy of your book, The Compound Effect.
SPEAKER_00Well, then our website is weaversonline.org. And if you go on weaversonline.org, you can get the compound effect, you can order it, it'll be shipped to you, or you can get an electronic version. Um the uh I think it's $4.99, the hardcover book's $15.99. Um, but uh that you you can connect there. On the website, there's uh a number of short videos. Um and then they can connect with me and my email address is on the is on the um is on the website. It's Dmailin' at weaversonline.org. Um and uh you know the there are a bunch of uh charts and graphs and tests and things that you can take that are on the website. They haven't upgraded the website for a while. I um so we're we need to do that. But um, the the best way to get a hold of me is by email if you want to chat.
SPEAKER_02Excellent. Well, Dan, as we wrap it up here, would you please pray for our listeners concerning some of these things that we've been talking about that God would just help us to grow in the area of in areas of competency that we need to grow in, and that we would truly walk out this compound effect of uh bringing together business competence and spiritual maturity?
SPEAKER_00Sure. Heavenly Father, Lord, the marketplace is a vast and wonderful uh place that you have created. Jesus walked in the marketplace, and many of the listeners today are walking in the marketplace, either as active business owners or thinking about becoming a business owner, or struggling with the with the challenges of being a business owner or watching a business owner, Lord, that that is that is struggling. Uh Lord, there's all sorts of dynamics that happen, Lord, and I just pray that your spirit would be upon each one of the people that's listening to this podcast today at this moment as they work through the issues of the marketplace. If you've assigned them, Lord, I just pray that you would convict their heart to continue to persevere. Lord, if they're questioning whether they should be in the the marketplace, Lord, that you would give them wisdom, you'd give them discernment, you'd give them an understanding of what their role and their responsibility is, Lord. Running a business is not an easy task. Running a business successfully is even more difficult. Running a business successfully for 20 years is very, very difficult. Lord, I just ask a blessing on those who have committed to doing that right now in the name of Jesus, that you would prosper them, you'd give them wisdom and discernment about the decisions they have to make on a daily, hourly, minute-by-minute basis, Lord. That they've bought in, they've bought on for that responsibility and that they have the perseverance and the strength and the courage and the conviction and the commitment to follow it through for your honor and glory in Jesus' name. Amen.
SPEAKER_02Amen. Well, weaversonline.org is the website. Dan, thank you so much for taking the time to share your valuable insight and expertise with us to keep doing great things for God and with God in the marketplace.
SPEAKER_00Very good. Thank you very much, Darren.
SPEAKER_02That's all for this week. You can comment on this episode and get more information about theology of business at theology of business.com. And I'd love to hear your feedback about this podcast. So if you'd like to contact me to share a testimony about doing your business, or if you'd like to share this podcast,