God blesses those who reject the world’s ways and follow His righteous standards. This is not only the key to a happy home life, but a strong family economy as well (Ps. 144:11-15). In this message, Chad Roach will show how to build a thriving family business based on the practical wisdom principles found in Scripture. Sharing from his own experience, he’ll discuss what fruitful family economics looks like in practice. 

Good morning. I think Scott's right, there are a lot of young ladies here, which is fantastic. I know where all the young men are. They're over in the other talk on finding a wife. I just told them break early, come back over here.

There's a lot of good ladies to choose from. So gals, you stick around, okay? Okay, well, it's a joy to be here with you all today. I actually attended the first NCFIC Church and Family Life Conference back 22 years ago, and I didn't miss a single conference for about maybe 10, 12 years in a row. I got married, started having kids, missed a few of them in a row at that point in time, but it's a joy to be back here again now today with my five children.

That's us homeschooling out in the Denver, Colorado area here with my wife Becca and our five kids. And it's just a joy to come here today and talk to you about this fun topic of family economics. So, as I get started, we'll just start with a quick word of prayer and jump right in. Father, we come before you today to look at this topic of how to be fruitful as families before you. Pray that you would guide my words, open up our hearts and minds to receive your word and as we dive in may your spirit do its good work to bring this truth straight to us.

So come be amongst us we invite you here today in Jesus name we pray. Amen. I'd like to look at a text from Psalm 144. So if you have your Bibles and would like to join me, we're going to turn to Psalm 144, verses 11 through 15. Rescue me and Deliver me from the hand of foreigners, whose mouth speaks lying words and whose right hand is a right hand of falsehood.

That our sons may be as plants grown up in their youth, that our daughters may be as pillars sculpted in palace style, that our barns may be full, supplying all kinds of produce, that our sheep may bring four thousands and ten thousands in our fields, that our oxen may be well laden, that there be no breaking in or going out, that there be no outcry in our fields, in our streets. Sorry, lost my place here. Happy are the people who are in such a state. Happy are the people whose God is the Lord. I think Saul 144 is one of the most beautiful passages in all of scripture.

It's almost a Thomas Kincaid like painting, if you will. And if you were to imagine this passage being painted before you, there's so many rich and deep and beautiful themes. So let's just kind of look at that. Close your eyes for a second, just imagine the picture being depicted here and I'll draw out for you some of these concepts. Peace from outside threats.

It's one of the points of this passage here, from the deceitful oppression of others. See, in the U.S. We actually experience quite a bit of freedom. Maybe we would initially skip by the just, you know, immensity of this beautiful picture of peace, the wonder of blessing. I don't think in my life it was till probably 2020 when COVID hit that even contemplated what like a world without the baseline of peace that we've enjoyed for many decades in this nation would look like.

But you can imagine the contrast between say the chaos or the pain of a Corrie 10 boom situation and the sort of near idyllic setting of peace that we as Americans get to live in today. So peace, one of the promises of Psalm 144. But our children are then painted into this backdrop of peace. They're painted into this scene. Strong, healthy, beautiful, honorable, even royal, a robust, productive, growing, fruitful family at the center of this picture.

These aren't snotty-nosed orphans. These aren't little urchins running around. They're princes and princesses in a wonderful scene filled with purpose, Identity, authority. But it's more than that. It's also a picture of material abundance.

You get a picture of full barns here, just a variety of overflowing produce. I think of walking into a farmer's market in the month of August. It's just overflowing with produce of every kind. You get vegetables and meats and cheeses, breads and butters, every kind of provision imaginable. This isn't survivalism.

This is overflowing abundance. You also have a picture here of economic wealth. We see here that thousands and ten thousands of sheep and oxen are in the fields. So in ancient times, livestock represented wealth. Not just food, but productive labor.

An ox was like owning a tractor. It also represented reproductive potential. The herds were large and growing. Livestock in the ancient times had a monetary type of value. It was actually somewhat similar to what we would think of today as money.

It had a very durable, non-perishable value, and it could be traded or bartered similar as money. So when we look at an abundance and overflowing of oxen, it's similar in many ways to a full bank account today. And what's the sum of all this glorious picture? The scripture says that happy are the people whose God is the Lord. Happy are people in such a state whose God is the Lord.

Not surprisingly, we find that the creator God, the Lord of all things, who's presiding over this entire scene, this happy, satisfied people have one central identity. They belong to the Lord. They're the Lord's people. Their material richness and temporal blessing is subsumed in their identity as being the people of God who owns the cattle on a thousand hills and holds the world together by his very power. You may be wondering, why are you talking about a passage like this on the front side of a family business talk.

And the reason I bring this picture out and wanted to paint this picture for you a little bit is because we live in a time when the idea of business or financial success or economic wealth, these ideas are isolated from the biblical scene that was just painted for you. When you talk about being successful or being wealthy, it's almost always quantified just strictly in monetary ways, right? We just use a financial metric to talk about wealth or success. But that's not the biblical picture. Everything doesn't have a dollar sign that hatched to it.

In the Bible, people aren't just ranked by their net worth. Nobody really talks about, when you talk about broader circles, really talks about the bountiful, beautiful life led by the billionaires, right? In fact, it's kind of like a joke in our culture that money doesn't buy you happiness and not only does it not buy you happiness But oftentimes it's very likely that the more money you have, the more miserable your life is. The amount of family chaos, fighting, biting, backbiting, bickering, anxiety, personal hubris that happens around wealth and the acquisition of wealth in America today is staggering. Many wealthy people have very strained relationships with their children.

I remember one time we were buying a piece of property from a family and this family, the patriarch had kind of died, there were five adult children and Each of the five adult children had their own attorney Representing them in the deal and then the estate had a different attorney representing them so every thing we proposed had to get approved by six different attorneys on the seller side and interestingly enough what actually caused was like nobody could actually like cross the threshold actually even buy this property from so they ended up selling it to us at a significant discount because they were just so incapacitated from even being able to transact because of all the just backbiting in the family and just the dissension in the family. It was not only like very destructive to their relationships, you could obviously tell, it was actually destructive to the value of the assets that that father had produced over the course of his life. What a sad legacy to leave. In fact, I can actually tell you from personal testimony, we had a chance to work with two or three different billionaires over the last year, and I can tell you that in every one of these cases, I wouldn't want to trade my situation for their situation.

And I had a mentor come to me and say, challenged me at one point in time to think, he said, Chad, just try to think, like, try to imagine yourself, you know, switching places with someone with like all this money and just think through, is that really what the goal is? Is that what you're going for? Do you think you would live a happier life? And I could truly genuinely say like, no, I haven't ever met someone that had more in terms of material possessions than I did that I thought trading with them would be a happier life. And I would just suggest that peace and fruitful families and having to God as your Lord is far more fundamental to the scriptural narrative around happiness and prosperity than just money.

With that being said, okay so with that as kind of the giant caveat, Psalm 144 does talk about the economic abundance that God gives his people. It is my intention to unpack a little bit of that in this session. So I kind of wanted to start with sort of giant caveat. Money does not equal happiness. Money does not equal biblical fruitfulness.

And yet there is an aspect here in Psalm 144 that's very tangible and very physical, and I want to jump into that. And it's a term, I want to talk about family economics as an idea and a term. And it's something that the Generations Ministry has sought to highlight and define over the last decades. We've done some family economics conferences, and we did those all across the country for about 10 years in a row. We've done some webinars on this topic.

Much of my understanding around the concept of family economics has been informed by guys like Kevin Swanson and Scott Brown who have taught at these conferences. And so I actually want to start by just breaking down the word, what does family economics means? The word economics itself comes from the Greek words oikonomia, oikos or family combined with nomia with a root there of nomos or law or vision. So family economics oikonomia, economics would be the law or vision of the family. It's a family vision.

It's what are you as a family unit gonna go do and accomplish, what's your vision, what's your mission, and how are you gonna go get that done? So family economics doesn't just speak to money in the small sense. It's not just your job or what you do for work. It also includes things like giving and tithing, serving others, including widows, orphans, and the poor, taking care of elderly parents, family worship or family piety, the discipleship and education and mentorship you do in your home, your family culture, missions, evangelism, savings, inheritance, generational stewardship of assets, just to name a few things. So that's when we talk about having a family economy, painting the Psalm 144 picture for your family.

It includes all those different things. And I think it's important to emphasize that because it's easy to reduce in our minds the concept of having a family economy to just what dad does for work to produce money. Maybe there's a father in the audience here today that's working a civil engineering job. You'll have to quit your civil engineering job to have a family economy. You can have a fruitful family economy with the job that you have today and you can start building out the ways that your family is fruitful without changing your day job.

So I'm not here to convince all of the men in this room that you have to go home and change your day job next week. You can be very fruitful and very productive in whatever place in situation God has called you and you can build this vision out for your family. In fact, I'm actually gonna share a slide really quick to show you this family economics conference. If you'd like to unpack this idea of family economics a little bit more than I'm gonna be able to do today, There's 25 sessions in each of these, volume one and volume two, 50 sessions total on the family economy. You can find it back at the Generations booth and that can sort of unpack a little bit more wisdom on the breadth of family economy than I'm going to get into today.

Today I'm going to jump straight into and kind of narrow in on the idea of the business side of the family economy. Okay, so we're going to kind of jump into that. I want to start just by sharing a little bit of my story, and hopefully you get a sense on how God can use an ordinary person to just start down this journey. This wasn't something my family was thinking about. I was homeschooled by my parents when we were growing up.

I was the second of five children. My dad made basically minimum wage for like a good part of like my early childhood years and you know we didn't have much money but my parents shared one car and my dad would drive it to work four days a week and then on one day a week my mom would get it and go shopping and we'd have to do all the shopping on one day a week and he'd take the bus to work. So like that was our growing up. My parents weren't setting out to try to raise like wealthier, successful children. They just wanted us to be faithful, to love the Lord.

I started my first business like raising chickens and eggs. Many of you young men out there, you guys have done something similar to that. I ended up deciding I think I can make more money mowing lawns than selling eggs. So I sold the egg business to my sisters. So it's my first experience with mergers and acquisitions, selling less profitable businesses to my sisters and trying to go for more profitable ones for myself that worked out well.

At age 14 my dad started teaching me sales and insurance sales. At 17 I started a business selling credit card processing to businesses that took that visa and MasterCard, we would set an account for them and so I kind of got off onto a sales track. I also kind of at the same time started a six-year mentorship with Kevin Swanson where I would go and live with him for three or four or five days a week and he would mentor me as we would do the work of Generations Ministry together. And I also started law school, spent some time doing some law studies. When I was 21, I started what would end up being like our first family business, which was a company called Cornerstone Bullion.

We bought and sold gold and silver coins and bars back and forth between mints and the investing public and I had ten thousand dollars in my bank account when we started this business and then all the rest of my money was like tied up in some other sales business that I had and you know the Lord blessed that business and was very kind to it. I employed both of my sisters in that business until they got married, so I was starting to run out of family members. That's one of the problems with the family economy. You build up this wonderful business and then all your employees decide they want to get married and then they go off and do that. So you got to find new employees.

So then I ended up hiring my mom and dad to run the business after my sisters got married. So that was kind of fun. I ended up transitioning later and doing some real estate and land development and then a dear friend of mine, a brother in the Lord, another homeschool dad, we started a car wash business. So we built a bunch of car washes in the Denver area. That was pretty fun.

We got up to like seven, eight locations, had about 70 employees, we're washing cars all over Denver. We ended up selling that business and going on doing some Bitcoin mining and steel building business and we do land development and just a number of other things. The Lord has kind of grown the variety of things. All in all, I started about 30 different businesses over about nine different industries. So what started out like kind of small and sort of had no clue what I was doing, the Lord, grew over time.

And just a couple things about my story as I share that. God has been much more kind to me than I deserve. I've had a huge learning lesson along the way, like very humbling. In fact, if you want like a radically humbling experience, like try jumping into the world of kind of entrepreneurism and family business. It is a wonderful, beautiful story, but it's also at points a very hard and trying story.

God has used it in many ways to just highlight my own shortcomings and to really put me through the trials and refining fire of practical life. I also just mentioned we didn't set out on a goal to be wealthy. That was not my parents' goal when they were raising us. In fact, The reason my dad first took me to work with him to mentor me in insurance and sales as I was finishing my high school years wasn't because he thought, you know what, hey, I think mentorship's really going to transform my son's business experience. The reason was because I was disagreeing with mom.

We weren't getting along during the day. And one day she was like, okay, turned to my dad, she's like, okay, he's 15 years old, he's yours now. You can finish his high school and this is not working. So like, God had a Massive humbling moment in my life around the time when I was 16 17 years old as I was spending time with my dad as God Is working in my heart, but like even the origination of these things was just like some of the practical things I know that you guys as families fight How do you raise a teenage boy and the answer for my parents was that my dad needed to step in, and I'm so thankful that he did. But he didn't do that to go change the world, he did that to prevent a homicide at home.

So, and then God used that story. So hopefully that gives you some encouragement that Whatever struggles God has you guys in today, wherever you're at, that can still be a platform under which God can do a very sweet and amazing thing in your family. So I want to talk briefly today about eight principles for families and for a family business. So we're gonna move into just, I guess, a little bit of practical advice and practical wisdom on if you are looking at jumping into a family economy, starting some stuff with your family, maybe you're doing it right now, maybe you'd like to, maybe these are just some wisdom principles that can help as you guys serve others and do projects on evenings and weekends. So wherever the Lord has to apply this in your life, eight principles around a family business.

And I'm actually kind of curious, I'll do a quick poll. How many of you are currently working in something of a family business today? Okay So we'll go hands down and how many of you would like to transition more towards this direction or you're here to like learn More about it or you would like to be more involved in a family business kind of in the future. Okay, perfect. Yeah, very cool.

Thank you. Okay, we're going to start out with principle number one, be faithful in the little things. I draw this from Luke chapter 16 verse 10. He who is faithful in what is least is faithful also in much, and he who is unjust in what is least is unjust also in much." I would say that the best indicator of how truly successful and prosperous you will be later on in life is how faithful you are in what God has given you to do today. I think when we think of this word faithful, I think of like being faithful in little things, or the word faithful, we sometimes get the wrong impression of faithful.

We think of faithful as like, you know that Labrador retriever dog that's always just faithfully there by your side, and he's just always there, kinda tongue hanging out, kinda faithfully by your side, and we have this sort of like gentle, very kind of slow idea of faithfulness. But I think there's another side to faithfulness here, the side that is a robust conviction to walk in God's truth, no matter how hard or lonely it feels. You know, Some of you may feel like you're in a spot right now where it's not all that glamorous, you've not had a big successful moment, you know, everybody may not be talking about you and all the things that you've done, And yet God just has you in a spot and He calls you to be faithful, to excel, to be robustly excellent at exactly where you are right now. You know, I think of Joseph, you know, in jail or in Potiphar's house, pretty ignoble circumstances. But he demonstrated faith by being exemplary in wherever God had him and excelling there.

We have to have a singular focus in all of our work or if you're a young person, your studies. We have to have a singular focus on our income, our spending, our conversation. Everything about our lives must be first and foremost for Christ the Lord. If we can be faithful in that, God can use that to build on many more things. And if you're coming to this session with the idea that you'd like to start a family business, I hope you're doing so from a track record of being faithful in whatever you've done so far to this point in your life.

Because a family business will not save from a life of faithlessness, fear, or laziness. It's not a solution that transforms something broken inside to something prosperous. It is a platform by which those things that God is already doing in you can be expressed, but it doesn't change you or save you from who you are today. In fact, it only exacerbates some of those sin things. So I would say that, you know, just be faithful.

When God will open up that door for you, praise His name, but while you're waiting be faithful. Be faithful in the little things and God will add so much more to that. Secondly, do everything with excellence. Proverbs 22, 29, you see a man who excels in his work? He will stand before kings.

He will not stand before unknown men. And I believe that this should be one of the greatest distinguishing marks of a Christian, excellence. Christ did His work excellently. Think about if Christ didn't do the job that his father gave him to do excellently, what the story of redemption might have looked like. Of course, that didn't happen.

It couldn't happen, but that was an example to us to do the work that his father gave him and to do it excellently. Whatever God calls you to do, do it with all your might, do it with excellence. I remember a story when I was young, my mom would teach me to wipe off the table. I probably was, I don't know, maybe six or seven years old. And my job after kitchen, after we'd eat dinner and do kitchen dishes was to wipe off the table.

She'd give me the washcloth and I'd go and I'd kind of, you know, wipe off the table. And then I'd bring the rag back to the kitchen sink and my mom would come back and say, let's see how well you did. So she would have me and she would get down and look at the table kind of from eye level. And then you start to get down to eye level and you start to see all the crumbs you missed and you see the little bits of food all across the table. You can even see the wet spots where like your washcloth got to and then all the dry spots that it didn't get to.

And she would say, like, what do you think of that job? I was like, well, like, nobody looks at the table from that height, mom. Like, what do you mean? But she's like, but you can see all the areas you didn't get to. If you want to do a good job in your work and you have the job of wiping off the table, you need to wipe it off excellently.

You need to get to all the spots. So then she would teach me to go and hit every spot in a very methodical way and to even move the rag to like capture the crumbs as it's like picking up more and more crumbs and not spill them behind as you go. So she would teach me how to do that. Is that because the lesson of having a clean, crumbless table is the most important thing that can happen in a Christian's life? No.

Why did she make a big deal about that? Because she wanted me to learn excellence in every little thing. Because she knew that if that was ingrained in the way that I thought about the little jobs, that that would carry over into the bigger ones. And actually, you know, tell my mom these days that was the million-dollar lesson I learned as an entrepreneur was to just wipe the table off excellently because that set the stage to think about work in that way in in other and bigger jobs And learning to wipe the table didn't, you know, wasn't the, you know, the million-dollar lesson in and of itself. It was doing work excellently that then spread into all these other areas.

I'm very thankful for my mom. So moms, as you're out there teaching your kids these like boring, menial little jobs and you're working through child training to teach them to do it right and excellently, know that you are sort of setting the table if you will to give your children a platform under which very sweet, productive, fruitful, wonderful things can happen as a result of that. You can't see it now, but 10 and 20 and 30 years from now, that seed is going to bear a wonderful, wonderful fruit. So keep it up, moms. Kids, when your parents teach you these little lessons of excellence, lean in, thank them for them, bless your parents for these lessons, and just know that God will use these wonderfully if you lean in.

So then you can ask the question, excellent in what? For young people, if you're a young person in the room today, be excellent in communication, excellent in handwriting, basic interpersonal skills. Look at people in the eye when you meet them. You know, even if you're three, four, five, six years old, teach your kids to shake people's hand, look them in the eye, say your name out loud, say it clearly. You wouldn't believe like how much in business is just being able to clearly present something and communicate.

And honestly, part of it is just learning how to speak. It's hard to do business with someone that you don't understand and so if you can teach your kids to communicate well, to speak clearly, to be heard, to articulate their words, You're giving them the basic skills that they're going to use later on in life. So regardless of where you work, regardless of what your job is now, be excellent in all you do. Have a constant driving sense of excellence in all that you do. Principle number three, start where you can.

A lot of people, you know, you'll get excited about a business idea, but have no clue how to take the first steps. Come to a talk like this, oh man, it'd be so great to have a family business. I love this story. Like, we should do that. But you don't know where to start.

Like, where do you start? So my advice is, if you're like, I love this vision, I just don't know where to start is, take a big deep breath And just figure out where are you right now? Where are you today? Take an inventory of your assets. You could do this mentally, or I even encourage you, maybe when you get home, write it down.

Actually get a pad of paper and a pen, or open up your computer, and write down what are your financial assets, your relational assets, your experiential assets, what experiences and skills do you have. Write them down. Often, not always, but often the path forward to The next thing that God would have you to do is connect it to something that you are doing or someone that you do know right now. And I use a particular illustration around the game of spoons to explain this. You guys know how spoons, right?

So everybody sits around a table, you put a bunch of spoons in the middle, and then you deal out four cards to every person, right? And there's a big pile of cards there, right? And then the goal is to take the hand of cards, the four cards that you've been dealt, and to get a better hand till you have all four of the same card, right? So maybe you start out with a queen, a nine, a two, and a jack, right? Well the goal is to just get that hand better than what you have.

And so you look for cards until, ooh, you found a queen. So you're gonna drop the jack and you're gonna keep the queen, right? So you're gonna make the hand better than what you have right now. And that's how I encourage people to think about growing and starting some of these endeavors. Rather than, this is what some people do in life, right?

Some people, their way that they do life is they put down their hand of four cards and they just go scrambling looking for any cards on the table just trying to find a good card. But how do you even know what a good card is unless you have a hand of four cards that you can analyze it against to say, oh, this is actually a better card, this is a less good card. Right? So, God has dealt us all a hand of four cards. God has given you all something in your hand.

Now, some of you may say, I don't feel like my hand of four cards is quite as good as like the guy in the pew over. I don't know, I don't know what your hand is, but you have a hand of four cards, and God has given you four cards to work from. So work to make that better. Look for opportunities, experiences, open doors that will improve and better your hand, and then start just improving the opportunities that you can work on. Then you gotta be also willing to change, right?

Part of the game of spoons, if you're just stuck to those four cards and you never change, you're never going to win the game. And I remember the guy came to my dad one day and he was like, oh, I love kind of how your family does all this stuff together. I'd like to start a family business too. Can you help me think through how to start a family business? So my dad was like, okay, sure, what do you do?

I'm a carpenter, and I work from nine to five every day as a carpenter, and I need that to pay my bills, and so my dad was like, okay, how about the evenings and weekends? What are you doing on your evenings and weekends? Oh, well, in the evenings, I watch TV every night. And my dad's like, okay, how about Saturday? I said, yeah, we tend to just take Saturday off and just really slow and just kind of, you know, we try not to like work on Saturday as a family.

And so my dad was like, well, if, you know, you work nine to five and you don't want to use any of your unions and you don't really want to use any of your Saturday to do that, I don't really see that you actually want to have a family business all that much. Because at some point in time, you're going to have to be willing to modify some of those hobbies and habits and life decisions in order to get this goal that you want. Does it sound like you really want it all that much? And oftentimes we end up in this place where we like want things but we're not willing to change to get those. And so I would say be willing to sacrifice.

If this sounds like it's a value to you, then it's probably something worth sacrificing for. And some of you may say, okay, I'm willing to do that too. Great, I'm willing to change, I'm willing to grow, I'm willing to look for opportunities. I just don't know where to start and that's a common question. How would I start?

Maybe you're 22 years old, you're a young guy and you just want to know what are some practical ideas. So our ministry compiled this list. We gathered this from five different businessmen. It's 100 business ideas of what a family could practically start as a family business. So you can scan that QR code, there's a website there, you can email me for this link afterwards if that's easier, just a hundred hundred different ideas of a family business that any family could start.

If you're still a little overwhelmed, then as a first step, just kind of work on getting your head in the game. Talk to other businessmen, entrepreneurs, other guys that have done this, ask them their story. In fact, we actually have in that Family Economics MP3 series that I shared with you earlier, we actually have these panels of just families that tell the story of how they built a family business. It's fantastic, it's just like a thousand different ways this can be done. This is the most one size doesn't fit all kind of concept out there, like every family takes their unique gifts, skills and abilities and God can build just a beautiful story around that.

So principle number four, be creative about your use of capital. I mean, if there's one thing that's true for family businesses is like, we're not made out of money, right? Like none of us are sitting on piles of money. I mean, most of us aren't. I guess there's a couple of families maybe out there that are, but most of us are constrained in our capital.

So we started one business, it was a gold and silver business that I mentioned to you, it's called Cornerstone Bullion, and I started that business with ten thousand dollars in my pocket. Here's the problem, Most gold and silver bullion brokers in order to do the business right need millions of dollars worth of working inventory So that you can sell enough volume because the commissions are very small in that business Oftentimes like a 1% commission. So you need a lot of inventory to be able to make a little bit of commission So I'm trying to think like okay have ten thousand dollars. I have this interesting business and I want to do this How would I have like how would I get the money to do this? And I realized, okay, I don't have the money, nobody in my family or extended family had the money, and if I went and raised external capital, the cost of that capital, even at a very basic interest rate, was going to be more than my business would have made if I had to go pay 8% on a line of credit from a bank or something like that.

So what we did was we said, OK, let's get creative. How can we do this? So every time we would sell gold or silver to a client who is a friend or a close family member or someone that we knew well, we would ask them, hey do you know where you're gonna store that? And they're like, oh man yeah now that you mentioned that, yeah maybe in a closet or a safe, like you know what would you recommend? And like, well hey we can store it for you.

We have some safes or some vaults. We'll pay for the insurance on that, and we'll store it for you totally for free. All you have to do is agree to let us use it as a working inventory, where if we can sell those coins or bars to someone else, we'll immediately buy more and replace it. And so you always have something there. It'll either be there or on the way, you know, there from the supplier.

But we'll use it as a working inventory. We'll store it for free. It'll be insured storage. You don't have to worry about it. So we'll kind of solve that problem for you.

And what it did for us was it allowed us to just sit on a growing pile of inventory to the point where after a while we had millions of dollars worth of inventory. All we were paying was the insurance to store it, which was totally negligible. It was like some complete fraction of 1% of the value. And then we could have millions of dollars worth of inventory. And like this was an example of using kind of a creative idea to solve for the fact that we didn't have a lot of capital.

And I think that there's a lot of times that we can do this in family businesses. We can substitute creativity for normal capital needs. I would also say on this kind of question of like capital and money, this common mistake I've seen is Don't confuse spending money with making it. A lot of the times we get into a family business and the first thing we think about, like okay, I got a family business now, I'm in business for myself now, I probably should just spend money. I watched this one guy do it he's like I'm gonna start a lawn business so the first thing he did is he started his lawn businesses went out and he bought a nice truck and a nice trailer and a bunch of lawn equipment he spent like tens of thousands of dollars doing this And then he spent the next three to four years just trying to pay off all the equipment that he bought in year one.

And then by the time he had roughly worn out his equipment, he had roughly paid for it all. And at the end, like the family business was sort of like a net-sum-zero game. It just wasn't very productive because it's easy to sort of in our minds think, hey this is fun, I'm gonna like spend money. The reality is is like we got to have our eye on the ball of like where we're generating the value before we jump right into spending money. And in fact, I would just say, try to conserve capital wherever you can, especially as like your launching business, and be creative, like substitute creativity for capital, even in your operating expenses, particularly like marketing.

So the gold and silver business I mentioned to you, we were trying to figure out, how are we going to get the word out about this business? One of our competitors was doing $100, 000 a month in Google SEO, and AdWords, and online advertising. I have $100, 000, much less $100, 000 a month marketing budget. So how am I going to compete with that? So what we did is we started advertising.

This was maybe like 15 years ago on Craigslist. It was free to post a Craigslist ad. It was perfect because gold and silver buyers like to be kind of local cash buyers and someone anonymous. And so Craigslist was like a perfect forum. So we started advertising on there.

Every time I met with someone off of Craigslist to sell them gold or silver coins, I would finish the conversation with something like this. I'd pull out three business cards and I'd say, hey, if you liked our pricing and our service and you liked the experience that you had buying from us, then could you do us a favor? Could you tell three of your friends and family members about us? Because the way that we keep our pricing low and our service high is by not paying for marketing or advertising. And that allows us to deliver great prices to our customers with great service But that only works if we don't have to pay for advertising and the way that we don't have to pay for advertising is people spread the word so would you help us spread the word and And keep you know good service and low prices out there for the people in Denver and they're like oh yeah That totally makes sense so they grab the three cards They'd spread the word and we built a business that has done about a quarter of a billion dollars in revenues with this marketing budget, zero dollars.

To this day, we still don't pay for marketing because the word still spreads, and word of mouth for good pricing and great service spreads naturally and organically as a way to just bypass advertising in time. I'm not telling you that no business should ever advertise, but I'm just saying like that's one way to do it. And when again you're starting a family business, you're not made out of money, you really wanted to be creative wherever you can to solve for those expenses, particularly during launch when you're trying to really de-risk the business. Okay, principle number five, fear not. It's one of the most repeated commands in Scripture, if not the most repeated command in Scripture, it shows up roughly 365 times, which means that it must be something that God wants us to think about roughly every day of the year.

Fear not. Second Timothy 1, 7, for God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and a sound mind. God's workers, the workers in God's kingdom cannot work in a spirit of fear. If you look back to the parable of the talents, Who was the one servant that didn't produce for his master when the master gave him the talents? It was the servant who got one talent and why did he not produce for his master?

He said, master I knew you to be a hard man and I was afraid So I hid the talent. He was unfruitful and unproductive because he was fearful. That was the only guy that didn't make money in the parable, was the fearful guy. And there was the guy with the wrong attitude about his master. Every good business person that I know of has some degree of kind of drive or hustle or whatever you want to call that.

Sometimes that drive or that hustle is motivated by money or greed, and this is how the ungodly kind of imitate success. But the real drive and the real motive that drives us to be fruitful in God's economy is a loving, gracious view of your Father. It's a joy-filled, delight-filled view of the Father. We can't let the focus of our productive work be self-service. It has to be Father service, and it can't be motivated by fear.

And sometimes when we think about fear, we're like, well, I don't wake up in the morning thinking of myself as being a fearful person, so break that down for me. And sometimes what I'll tell people is, don't watch out just for fear and the big sense of fingernail biting, I don't know what to do or what's gonna happen tomorrow or whatever, but there's also like what I call fear light, you know, like you know Bud Light or Coors Light or you know whatever, it's like the light version of it, like there's such a thing as like fear light, there's this sort of light harder to detect versions of fear, but they're still very real. And I think one of the ways that this expresses itself is in not wanting to do hard things. There are certain things that you have to do in business that are not natural, intuitive, or easy. So, I'll just like build out an example for you.

So you have a business, and you sell things. And I don't care what you sell, but you've got a website, you've got a toll-free number, And that's your business, is you sell things. In order to sell things, someone has to call your toll-free number and buy it from you, right? And so on the first day of business, nobody really calls, right? Cuz you just started your website, nobody's really buying from you.

So How are you gonna start making money? Well, people have gotta start calling you, right? And so what you really need to do is you need to start finding people that are gonna start buying from you. But that's hard to do, because that requires you to start selling and start calling people and start asking and having those difficult conversations. So what do you do instead?

Well, you think like, okay, well, I'm paying $15 a month for my toll-free number here. I wonder if I could check around online and find a place that could sell it to me for $10 a month. I think that's what I'll do today. And you pick the project, not really that's adding the most value, you just pick the one that's easiest. Why?

Because the one, the harder one, the more valuable, the more productive one, it's hard to do. And so sometimes what we do is we sort of pick, because our fear of doing hard things sort of causes us to gravitate away from the harder thing to do, we sort of like gravitate back towards the easiest thing to do. And of course, where you gonna be if you do that? If you don't sometimes take on that really hard, difficult to do task, you're not gonna break through, the business is gonna stall, and you're gonna just blame it on the economy or the widget that you were selling or something. But the reality was, is there was this tendency to hold back from the hard thing that you needed to do that day.

So fear not. Wake up every day, brothers and sisters. Do the hard thing. Add value. Identify the thing that is most valuable for that day to move the ball down the field and go for it.

In fact, Gary Powers made a great comment the other day in the business breakfast, or was it Scott maybe, It's like find the hardest thing that you have to do on your whole to-do list for the day and do it in the first 20 to 30 minutes of your work day. When that gets finished, the whole day gets easier because you have done the hard thing on the front side rather than just like pushing it off to the backside doing the easy stuff, checking your email, just doing the easy stuff. Start with the hard thing then move on to the easy things. Number six, beware of the hockey stick curve. And I'll actually show you what this curve looks like.

This is the hockey stick curve. You get the flat part, which is the first part. It's the early years. And in the first part in the early years, before you hit the inflection point and maybe a period of more rapid growth, the early years are the hard part. They're the flat years of like you're grinding along, it doesn't feel like you're making a whole lot of progress.

You're just grinding through the hard work. And I'm showing you this not because I'm saying if you do that, don't worry, there'll be an inflection point and then you'll be massively rich for the rest of your life. That's not the point of the hockey curve. The point of the hockey curve is it can take a long time of a lot of what seems to be boring and insignificant work before you start to feel that measure of success. And I think a lot of people stall out during the early years because they don't have the perseverance to push through the hard, flat years.

It can take a while, especially on a more entrepreneurial path, to be able to push through. There were a lot of years for me where it didn't really feel like it was massively moving the needle every day, I wasn't fabulously wealthy, it was just grinding through things. And I'll share this, if you're a young person in this room, the best way to interact with this is to just start early. If you start early and you can grind through three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine years on something before even you're married. Like for me I started my first business when I was 17 years old, I was married like right around 25, 26.

So like eight or nine years of being able to work in this entrepreneurial path before I even really had any meaningful expenses. That was great because you need some years. It's really great to have years with like not a lot of expenses as you're starting out. Now, that doesn't mean dads that you can't start a business when you're married and when you do have expenses. It just does make it a little bit harder, and you need to respect the fact that you may not, if you start a business, may not just take off to the moon tomorrow.

So you may have to put in some time and maybe have a transition path. Maybe you don't quit your day job. Maybe you work both tracks in parallel for a little while. Young people, I would also encourage you to think about mentorship, about doing projects, coordinating events, serving with a ministry, starting an extra job, build the skills and experiences that can help you build core competencies during that early time period. And I'd say that like that concept of a curve also can apply a little bit to the idea of finding a calling for young people.

I did not immediately just like fall directly into the thing that like I would consider to be the core or sweet spot of my business generating activity today. It took years of like sorting through. I spent some time in law school, had a lawn business, tried insurance sales with my dad, tried a credit card processing sales company, built some product businesses, tried some sales and service businesses, tried some real estate stuff. Took a little while for me sorting some of those things out before I found the sweet spot. I say that's normal.

If you're like, hey, I'm 22, and I haven't totally found that absolute core sweet spot of my calling, that's normal. Sometimes it actually takes a number of years of just doing things before things start to click into place. Just being aware of that and just getting started early. Get your feet in the, you know, get your feet feet in the pool and start feeling the temperature of the water and figure out what works for you. Those things are super, super important on the entrepreneurial track.

Number seven, be humble. Of course, yes, we should all be humble. That's great. But how does this apply to a business context? Here's some humble things to do in a business context.

Don't be overconfident. Ask a lot of questions. Derisk your work by tapping into people with more experience than you have. Submit yourself to wisdom. A lot of people will come up and say like, hey Chad, you've talked about various mentors you've had in business and in life, that's so great.

I don't really have any mentors. How do you get a mentor? And one of the things I tell people is like you can actually in many ways make a mentorship or find a mentorship by having an attitude of humility and question asking in whatever you're doing. So I mentioned my gold business. At one point in time, I needed a mentor in this gold business.

I had some things I needed to do. I needed to hedge some risk. There's commodities contracts, but those are too big. And so I had like these certain problems. And I didn't really know who to ask.

I didn't have any like godly men I knew in the gold business and so there was one guy I knew, he was not a believer, he was a kind of a crusty old guy, about 80 years old, been a chemical refiner his whole life but he knew gold and silver markets really well. So I would just start to ask him questions and I was very gracious and I listened and I took notes And then the next time I talked to him, I'd follow up. And then I would say, hey, look, this is what I learned from the last thing you taught me. And one day, I was like, can I just take you out to lunch and keep asking you questions? Over time, he became a mentor.

And then at one point in time like a few years later he even offered to sell me his gold and silver refineries, one of two refineries in the state of Colorado, not because like I was family member or whatever like he just thought well here's a guy that's like paying attention and probably, you know, honoring him in a way that maybe like not a lot of other people did. And he came back and just basically offered me his entire business because there was a relationship that was built. It wasn't even really built around, you know, the Lord or anything like that, but there was a relationship that was built because I was just willing to like humble myself, honor Him, ask questions. I didn't end up taking on the refinery. We ended up taking a different track.

But like God just opened up that through an attitude of humility. So I would encourage you, be humble. Resolve conflict. Don't burn bridges. Pride can really destroy a business.

We get confident, we get hard to work with. I think of the Psalm, blessed are they who love thy law, for nothing shall offend them. Be hard to offend. Be someone that's easy to work with, that's difficult to be at odds with. We have a statement in one of our businesses that we have that will constantly remind each other, there's like no end to the amount of money that you can make when you let other people take their credit for it and you're easy to work with.

And that's just like so true. People wanna work with people that are just easy to work with, they're not, you know, they don't have sharp elbows, they're not high maintenance. Be a low maintenance person. Have humility be easy to work with. And then number eight here, it's not about profit, it's about production.

It's about production, not profit. The goal of our work for the Lord, whether it's in a family business, whether you're working a job, whether you have your first job, or whether you're making a million dollars a year at some successful corporation, the goal is not about making money. It's about adding value, about producing, about being fruitful, about serving, not just increasing our bank account. An increased bank account is the fruit of godly labor. It's not the goal, Okay, and just be willing to distinguish those in our minds.

I think about a story of there was this young man, he really wanted to work in a particular business and he had this goal in mind and he knew exactly who he wanted to work for. So he finally was able to meet with this guy and say, I would love to work with you. The guy's like, oh, that's great, I'm not hiring. And the young man was like, no, no, seriously, I'd love to work with you. I'm going to come work with you for free for three weeks.

And the guy's like, what? He's like, yeah, 100% for free. Absolutely no obligation. I'm going to just come. I'm going to do anything you want for three weeks.

You shouldn't say no, because I'll literally just do anything you want. So say yes. OK, great. I'm coming tomorrow. We're going to just work for three weeks.

So At the end of three weeks, the older man came back to the young man and is like, okay, how much you want to make? Like, I can't lose you. He was so indispensable over the course of those three weeks. He had presented so much value. He had so ingrained himself in the habits of that older man, even for just those three weeks, that the guy couldn't imagine like going back to a world where he didn't have this guy helping him.

And he could name his price. Why? Because this young man wasn't all focused about how much am I gonna make and I'm gonna be offended if your job offer isn't you know what I'm worth as a person and what I've always thought that I'm worth as a person. He was just glad to come to serve, to produce, to create value, to help those around him. And then what was the result, what was the fruit of that?

Well, the fruit of that was, he got to name his price on a salary moving forward. That's what I'm talking about, it's having a heart to just serve those around you and become indispensable, to solve problems, to serve people, and to add value. If you focus on that as the core, you know, God is going to fill the bank account in His time and His way, and He's going to add blessings to that. Here's the promise that I just want to share with you as we close. Seek first the kingdom of God, which includes diligence, excellence, faithfulness, creativity, unselfishness, all these things we talk about.

And God's gonna take care of that business and money thing that you desire. He's gonna take care of all these things. That's his promise. Seek first the kingdom of God. All these other things shall be added unto you.

So just kind of in closing, just I wanna share a couple of book ideas. You can find all these books back at the Generations booth in the back. Kickstart, it's a life launch product to help young people launch into life, to start your first mentorship, to start projects, to get into that area of finding out your calling and start sorting through those things. So great product for kind of high school age, teenage, young people. How the world runs and your part in it.

It's a basic primer on economics. This is great for kinda the middle school to high school years for young people. And just a basic introduction to the way that economics works. The book One With Everything, It's the anatomy of a hot dog stand and other great family businesses. It's a bunch, it's a compilation of stories of basically homeschool families that went out, started family businesses, and how God used that.

And then a book there called Durable Trades by Rory Groves, and it's just basically kind of a breakdown on the trades business and different things that young men can do there. I also threw a QR code up there in the upper left with my contact information. I'd love to connect throughout the rest of this conference, continue the conversation. If you're wondering what does God have for me to do or you have a particular idea and you want to chat back and forth, grab that. It's got my email and my phone number on that.

Pop me a text. I'd love to connect. We're here the rest of the day and would love to just stay in touch. So let's close with a quick word of prayer and we'll get you off to the rest of your schedule. Father, I thank you for this time together.

I thank you for the beautiful picture of fruitfulness that you've built for us in your word. I pray that blessing upon every family gathered here. Lord, I pray that That Psalm 144 picture would just be the picture of every family here, the peace, the joy, the fruitfulness, just the abounding glory of what you do in the life of families as they lean into your ways, let you define the fruitfulness for their families. And Lord, I pray that you would just provide that and pour out that rich blessing on everyone gathered here today. And I pray these things in Jesus' name.

Amen. Thanks for watching!