The uncomfortable reality of Christian entrepreneurship

When I was 14, I walked into church and encountered Jesus for the first time, and it changed my life forever. 10 years later, I ended up starting a business with a friend I met at church, and we sold that business for nine figures just a few years later. And this is the video that I wish someone would have made before I kind of became a Christian entrepreneur. There are a lot of harsh truths that I had to learn along the way, and I wanna share these with you because I think these are lessons that every Christian entrepreneur needs to hear. And to tell you the first lesson, I wanna tell you a story about my first week in Silicon Valley. See, I grew up in South Carolina, and if you're not familiar with the U.S., that's considered the Bible Belt of America. Almost everyone I knew went to church every single week. In fact, growing up, my family was kind of the weird one because we didn't go to church. But of course, all that changed when I arrived in Silicon Valley. And I remember my very first week, I was in San Francisco waiting at the bus stop, actually headed to church. The buses in San Francisco come like every 20 minutes. So I was sitting there, there was another guy, and we started chatting. And it turns out we were both working in tech at the time, and we were chatting a little bit about what I'm doing, why I'm in Silicon Valley. And somewhere along the way, he said, oh, by the way, like where are you headed? And I said, oh, I'm actually going to church. And I'll never forget what he said. He looked at me and he said, oh, that's so strange because you seem really smart. I can't even like begin to explain how loaded that statement is. Hopefully you understand. And this is one of the harsh realities of being a Christian entrepreneur. If you really want to play at the highest level in these rooms, people will just assume you're not that smart and it's not meant to be mean. They just associate being a Christian, reading your Bible, going to church with something that lower IQ people do. So my first lesson is actually very simple, which is if you are a Christian entrepreneur, I believe that you are called to operate at a higher level. I genuinely believe that if you were an atheist and you were working on a business and it didn't work out, people would say, ah, it's not too bad. But if you're a Christian and it doesn't work out, some part of their mind, either consciously or subconsciously, will wonder, was he willing to make the tough decisions? Was he willing to make the hard calls? And so I always took this to heart. I said, if I'm going to operate this business in a way that's public that I'm a Christian, I'm called to operate at the highest level, which means I need to put in extra reps. I need to go the distance. I need to be willing to make the tough calls. That does mean firing underperformers. It's a sports team, not a family. You need to actually run the business at a high level of excellence because you're not just representing the work that you do. If you are an atheist, you're actually representing on a subconscious way. the work of the lord and i believe that if you operate with integrity and honesty you can represent the lord very well and he will give you favor and this isn't meant to be like a sermon about favor or how the lord's going to give you prosperity i'm just saying that if you are a christian ceo you're representing what's in his bible and so you better make those hard calls now my second point i know is going to be controversial i can already see the comments but i believe that you should actually not build a christian business and let me explain when i was running my company i made no attempt to hide the fact that I was a Christian. I met my co-founder at church, my first advisor I met at church. A lot of the people that were involved in the early stages of the business were Christians, but it wasn't because I was building a Christian company. It's just because those were the people in my network. I was going to church. I was new to Silicon Valley. So that's where I recruited from. And we were very clear not to build a Christian company because I think what happens with Christian companies is one, you are competing against the entire market that you're in and so everyone else let's say a non-christian company can recruit from the entire market but if you say we're going to be a christian company we're only going to hire christians you only recruit from like a subset of the market so i think that automatically puts you at a disadvantage and unfortunately i think it also limits your testimony i think if you're a christian ceo called to excellence, you should be recruiting from the widest net possible. And that means also being very accepting. Like in my company, some of the people that we hired were Christians and I didn't even find out till after the fact, but we also had people from all sorts of religions. We had Muslims that would get down and pray multiple times a day. We had a special room dedicated for them so they could do that. We were accepting of everyone and people knew that I was a Christian, but it was not a Christian company. This is just my opinion. I'm not a pastor. I'm not giving you a sermon, but i believe that the best example you can set as a christian is to welcome everybody regardless of religion regardless of sexuality you name it everybody comes in they're welcomed and actually treated as equals and then you as a christian leader set examples and that is your testimony you're not giving sermons every day it's in the little decisions that you make and the big ones frankly that show the team hey this is how i operate as a christian and that becomes your witness to them not by like locking the doors and only allowing christians in now my third hardest truth is actually a time when being a christian cost me a 10 million dollar deal so let me give you the back story in silicon valley there are these sort of accelerators that will connect you with higher up execs and when we were kind of a pretty early stage company. I think we were about 12, maybe 15 people. I ended up getting connected to the board of Mercedes-Benz. And as an early stage company, that is massive because normally if you were trying to sell to Mercedes-Benz, you know, you'd start with like the lower regional rep and then you go to the national and then you try to work your way up. But I started at the top. I was able to somehow get a meeting with the board of Mercedes-Benz. And I showed them what we were building. We were building the SAS for car dealerships. And they loved it. And they said, listen, we want to put this in our Mercedes-Benz dealerships. We're going to put you in touch with the national guy. And I want you to fly out to Mercedes-Benz headquarters in Atlanta, meet with them, show them what you've got. So I did just that. Flew out to Atlanta, pitched the team there. They said, we love it. We want to put this in all the Mercedes-Benz dealerships. But then they said, listen, for us to do this, we have to send you an RFP, request for a proposal, fill it out, tell us all about the company, give us more details on the contract, and then we can put this thing in our dealerships. So I flew back to San Francisco, met with my team, super excited. Guys, this is going to be it. At the time, we would have been maybe, maybe $1 million a year in revenue. And this is like a $10 million deal. And so I was like, this is going to make the company, guys. This is so big. So we immediately dove into the RFP and we started just writing everything. I think that thing was like, 100 pages when we were done. The whole team was just huddled in the war room working on it. But there was this one section that really caused some drama. It was the section from Mercedes-Benz and said, list out your support. Who's on staff? How many people are on staff? How many hours of support do you have? What are the overlaps in coverage? So on and so forth. And at the time we had one, maybe two people on support. And I remember at the time my COO pulled me aside and said, hey, can we go for a walk? And so we went outside and said, listen, if you write the truth on this doc that we have one or two people in support, they're never going to do this deal. They are going to walk away and you're going to lose what could be a life changing deal, not only for you, but for the entire company, for your investors, for your employees, for everybody. So we got to bump this thing up if we want any chance of winning this deal. And in that moment, he actually convinced me. I was like, you're right. Like we can't pass up this opportunity. And so we lied. We wrote that we had this big team of like 40 people on support and how they were going to be ready all the time. And then that night I got a call. And it was actually from my co-founder, Marty, who I'm really grateful for this call. Listen, man, we can't do this. I've been praying about it. We can't lie and say we have this big support staff. It's just not true. It's not representing us well. We need to go back. We need to change it and represent honestly. That's the right thing to do. And as soon as he said it, I knew he was right. and i'm really grateful for that call so marty and i pulled up the dock we changed it we we put the right number of people in and we sent it off to mercedes-benz and this is the part in the story where i'm supposed to tell you that mercedes-benz came back they were totally cool with it we got the deal high five company crushed it but we didn't in fact we never got the mercedes-benz deal once they passed on that opportunity we never again saw the opportunity it went to a competitor and it made them tons of money And that's the harsh truth. I wish this story had a happy ending. You know, we did sell for nine figures later, so we didn't actually need that deal. But the reality is I could have easily lied and probably gotten that $10 million deal. It was basically in the bag, but it would have represented us poorly. And because we were very publicly Christian operators of our business, I can only imagine what our employees would have said behind our backs. I'm sure they would have at least thought these guys claim to be Christian CEOs, but when it comes down to it, they're just like everybody else. They're willing. to bend the rules. They're willing to lie to make an extra buck. And at the end of the day, it gives me a lot of peace knowing that I can make a video like this, be honest with you about the downsides of what actually happened because we were honest, but be able to stand firm on the decisions that we made rather than getting caught in a lie or anything else that could have ended up in massive lawsuits, actually, who knows? All right, my fourth lesson is a very simple one, but it's one that I just saw happen so many times in the business that I need to talk about it, which is... God's plan is greater than your plan. And I'm really stubborn. I probably forgot this a thousand times running the business, but I can't tell you how many times we basically said, listen, we've got this master plan. Here's how it's going to go. We're playing 3D chess. We've got all these things figured out. And the whole thing just blows up in our face. And what would always happen is I would freak out, not publicly in front of the team. I would actually leave the office and just be like, it's over. This is not going to work out. We're going to go bankrupt. We're going to have to fire everybody. And in those moments, actually, my co-founder was always my rock. And he would be like, man, God's going to work it out. I know he's got good things for us. And I believe him and not believe him, if that makes sense. I'd be like, yeah, but like, this is really bad. But then every time somehow we'd get that lucky term sheet, that lucky deal, whatever would happen to save the company time and time again. And it seemed like it always came whenever. our efforts were completely exhausted we had no more resources in the tank and then god shows up and so this is just maybe a reminder for you in those moments god shows up but not in the way that you hope but in the way that you need and so i hope this encourages you through the ups and downs of entrepreneurship my fifth and final point but probably the most important is do not underestimate the actual business wealth wisdom in this book. If you're watching this, you've probably heard of Tony Robbins and how he's a billionaire. He's like the self-help guru of the presidents and the world's most successful people. But his original teacher was actually Jim Rohn. And Jim Rohn was a man of God. Jim Rohn constantly quoted the Bible and pulled everything he taught basically from the words in this book. And I can't tell you how many times I'm just going through my daily readings. or even in a sermon at church and there'll be something in this book that is so punchy and potent and helpful to me as a business person that you would swear it's like the latest trending youtube video this is a book that you should go back to time and time again as a christian entrepreneur and so with that i'll leave you with two pieces of biblical wisdom that i think will really help you along your journey and encourage you as you go down this path So first is 1 Kings 3. This is where the Lord appears to Solomon in a dream and he says, I will quote it, ask for whatever you want me to give you. And Solomon thinks about this and he can ask for anything, money, wealth, fame, you name it. And you know what he asks for? He asks for wisdom. And I want to read you what the Lord says here. The Lord was pleased that Solomon had asked for this. So God said to him, since you have asked for this and not for a long life or wealth for yourself, nor have you asked for the death of your enemies, but for the discernment in administering justice, I will do what you have asked. I will give you a wise and discerning heart so that there will never have been anyone like you, nor will there ever be. Moreover, I will give you what you have not asked for. This is huge. Both riches and honor so that in your lifetime, you will have no equal among kings. And I love this because Solomon doesn't ask for it he asks for wisdom and by seeking wisdom first he gains everything else that you might want and this is also really important because as a christian ceo maybe you might feel like it's wrong to pursue money or chase success but here the lord actually shows that the wise receive these things and it is of the lord it's a whole different topic Maybe I'll make a video about it. But the point here is you should be seeking wisdom from the Bible. It's such a treasure trove of wisdom. And with that, I will leave you with my favorite verse of the Bible. It's Proverbs 29 and 18. Without a vision, the people perish. I love this. It's your job as an entrepreneur to set the vision, to encourage your team. And it's right there in the Bible. It's so freaking cool. Now, at this point in the video, what I'm supposed to do is direct you to another video that is mine. That's what a good YouTuber would do. But that's not what I'm going to do. I'm actually going to send you to someone else's video because... I came across this yesterday and I listened to the whole thing. I just loved it. It's actually this really calm, soothing voice reading the entire book of Proverbs. I threw it out while I was cleaning my house and it just, it set my day so straight and I had such a wonderful light heart throughout the day. So I'll put a link, check it out, give it a listen. I love this video and I hope this one helped too.

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If you're new here my name's Michia (Muh-ky-uh). I'm a serial entrepreneur and investor. Since selling my last startup for 9 figures, I'm investing my own money into the next wave of founders at my VC firm, L7V. 

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