Growth is good. But at what cost are you willing to grow?

Partnerships can be great, but not at the cost of compromising your values and culture.

Listen in as we dialogue with Rick Johnson who pursued a lucrative growth option and how it cost him dearly.

Having realized how compromise in his workplace was costing him his business, he sought the Lord, made changes, and stepped away from this growth opportunity.

Operating a business that honors God doesn’t mean you get it right all the time, but when you are going the wrong way, do you listen, adjust, and start going in a way that honor’s God again.

Compromising your values and joining together with unbelievers on a business level is not something we are to do according to 2 Corinthians 6:14. We cannot go out of this world, but at what level are we not to be joined together? It’s a line you need to ask God about and follow His lead.

Key Take Aways:

1. Don’t put God on a timeline to answer your prayers
2. Don’t go into partnership with an unbeliever
3. Listen to warning signs and friends that are alerting you when things are going wrong
4. Take action to make things right. Which may be ending a lucrative business deal

It’s not that you never make mistakes, but when you make them, what do you do to course correct?

Redeem Your Business Today by the Following:

How can we honor God in our business?

Follow God’s lead in your business. Seek to get God’s input with decisions rather than looking at things from the outward appearance.

One challenge from today.

If you haven’t given your company to the Lord yet, what are you waiting for? You don’t have time not to follow God daily.

More About Rick Johnson

RC Fasteners & Components

(623) 516-1551

(623) 516-1552

rcfastener.com 

rickj@rcfastener.com

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More About David Schmidt

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David:

[0:00] 2 Corinthians 6, 14, 17, and 18 said, Be ye not unequally yoked together with unbelievers. For what fellowship hath righteousness with unrighteousness, and what communion hath light with darkness? Wherefore, come out from among them, and be ye separate, saith the Lord, and tench not the unclean thing, and I will receive you, and will be a father unto you, and you should be my sons and daughters, saith the Lord. When you operate a business for the glory of God, it's not just what you do, It's how you do it, and it's who you do it with as well. And while you don't have to limit yourself to only hiring Christians, those in leadership positions should be in alignment with God's Word. And so today I brought back Rick Johnson, who's a CEO and founder of RC Fasteners,

David:

[0:42] to talk about compromising the workplace and the havoc you can wreak in your business. I recommend don't go there. In episode six, we had Rick on, who had talked about giving his business to God years ago and the change in his business and how that happened. And that'd be a great episode to refresh and be encouraged on. But today we're going to talk about, yeah, about compromise. And you don't have to have, glorifying God is not about having things right all the time. But it's when we realize we're not going God's way, we need to make adjustments and how to get going where God wants us. So Rick, wonderful to have you back on the show.

Rick:

[1:21] David, great to be here again. I always enjoy it.

David:

[1:25] Thank you. And so, like I ask all my guests, what is one way that you have found to honor God in your business?

Rick:

[1:35] We gave him the business. So it's all his and we we follow his lead. We follow the lead of the Holy Spirit. And every day we're doing something. Prayer. Thankful Thursday was today. God brought the message today. So we just follow him. I mean, to honor him is I believe is to follow him, follow his lead. Spend time with him in the morning and then bring that into work and encourage others, lift up others, be intentional in your walk with the Lord and use your business for God's glory. Yeah, it's awesome. It's awesome.

David:

[2:11] Very good. And I think that giving God the business and what you do may look a little bit different for everybody. Just like personality was different, businesses are different, And it shouldn't be a comparison like I'm doing this and you're doing that. It's just between you and the

David:

[2:26] Lord, what does God want you to do and how does God want you to use it?

Rick:

[2:30] Yeah.

David:

[2:31] Very good. Well, go ahead and start us off with the story about a year or so ago. You had merged with another company and thought it was going to be a good idea. It ended up being a vast learning experience. Go back to that time where you were starting out and just give us a little brief history of what led up to the merger.

Rick:

[2:51] Yeah, we had a, we had a guy we'd been praying for, for years. He was, uh, from our old company, uh, that our, our, our boss, he was our boss's son. And, and he had a, he had a company that he, he was, uh, you know, he was, it was starting to lose business and, and, uh, he, he wanted to kind of wrap it up and, and, uh, he came to us, he had, he approached us and said, Hey, uh, You know, I want to shut down our business, but I have a following of customers that I want to bring on board to where I go next. And he goes, man, I've just really loved what what's happening in your business over the years. And I'd love to come to work for you. And what do you think about that? So we so at first we were like, wow, this is an answer to prayer because this is this guy I'd been praying for for years. I'd been praying for him for years that he would come to know the Lord. So I thought, wow, God, you know, so super excited. And I said, I told him, you know, the usual, well, you know what, this is, this is great, you know, but, uh, we're going to pray about it. So, so we did, we did, we started to pray about it and he was kind of checking in and we, we kind of hadn't totally had, you know, an answer yet. And, and, um, um, this was like November of 23. And, uh, so I was kind of praying and I didn't pray right. You know, David, I didn't pray right. I was saying, Lord, if this is from you.

Rick:

[4:19] Um, Lord, just, just make it, make it fall into place. Um, if it's not, would you take it away? Take it away because I want to honor you in every way. Uh, but Lord, if you could do it by the first of January, then that would be, that would be awesome. And Lord, if you don't take it away by the first January, Lord, I just, I think that's the green light. That's the green light to go. And, and you know what I, I did, there wasn't the right way to pray. And, um, you never put God on a, on a time, you know, time, time, uh, time span. And, uh, anyway, so I definitely, that was lesson number one. And, um, so we ended up doing the, doing the merger. We brought him on board and, and, um, uh, there were, you know, even prior to that, we, we couldn't agree on salary. So I was just saying, okay, Lord, just take it away and then take it away. So we stood firm in our salary and we thought for sure he wasn't going to take it but he did and then so we began and the one thing we began was we started noticing that his, his customers were kind of like him they were very um they didn't do things, the way we're ISO certified so they didn't do things kind of by the book they did kind of slide things under the rug and we're like hey wait a minute you know we can't do that um because.

Rick:

[5:42] Because we're, you know, we're a company that follows the Lord. And honesty, integrity, and our word is everything to us. And we just can't do that. So there was a lot of, you know, and then he would try and do it with the employees. So he would do the same thing with them. Well, I can't get there with Rick, so I'm going to do it with these guys. And they were the same thing. They're like, hey, we can't do this. So this kind of kept going and going. And anyway, David, it kind of turned into...

Rick:

[6:10] Everybody's starting to get stressed out. We have a really great culture, really blessed by the Lord. We've got Christian music in the warehouse, Christian music in the office. And there's a lot of joy. And we just started to lose that. And it happened fast. It happened almost overnight. And it was like just our culture shifted to nobody's smiling anymore.

David:

[6:39] Yeah. When you said it happened really fast, was that like weeks fast or months?

Rick:

[6:45] Yeah, kind of weeks. It just turned into major stress. It's turned into long hours. We had our great warehouse quality guy that he just walked out. Yeah. I mean, he told us, he said, man, I just can't do it anymore. And we're like, wow. It's like, wow. So we started to, we started to things gradually started to get better but man we're working six days sometimes seven days and i always said i wouldn't do that but we didn't have a choice and at the time we had some new employees come in and anyway um to kind of get straight to it um we um we i brought my wife and our son and i said hey on a scale of one to ten um what what do you think about this merger. I mean, would you, would you, would you, if you wanted it, if we could get out of it, what would you, what would you give it?

Rick:

[7:40] And my wife said, 10, I want out, I want out of it. And our son said, 11, I want out, we need to get, so yeah. So we were thinking, okay, you know, so, cause you know, and I, and without getting into total details, um, his customers were a lot like him. They just weren't, um, they were always trying to do things, um, that weren't, that weren't, um, they weren't integral. And it, it wasn't, we know the value of integrity by, you know, as we read Proverbs and we, we know the value of honest scales and just scales and we're weighing a lot of parts and there's a lot of stuff going on. And it just, we kept telling him. So, But it just didn't change overnight. But one thing that did happen is I got to minister to him a lot. So a lot of nights after work, I got to minister to him and pour into him and let him know what God's doing and how great it is to have a relationship with

Rick:

[8:43] the Lord through Jesus Christ. So, yeah, that's kind of it in a nutshell and kind of how the culture shifted extremely fast. like compromise, just, you know, there was that compromise and it, and it just shifted really fast.

David:

[9:00] Yeah. So you said something about integrity here. The customer's wanting you to, I'm not sure what you're talking about as far as not doing things by the book or whatever, but I know with ISO, you say what you do and do what you say. And so that's, that's what you need to do and follow that or be nonconforming. So if they got a bad example or bad customers and bad employees, that's seems like it's spreading just like 11 spreads throughout the whole, whole lump. It seems like it's spread in your company. So what were early warning signings? What were early warnings that this was happening for you? When did it first become apparent that there's a shift taking place?

Rick:

[9:44] Well, the culture, number one, the culture went from joyful culture to, you know, guys having, you know, our motto has always been work hard, have fun. We, we do, we, you know, the joy of the Lord's in here. we seek the Lord every day through prayer, our Bible studies on Friday, all kinds of things. And so we've always had this amazing culture. People that come in and go, wow, I feel like I'm in a church. I'm like, wow, that's awesome. Yeah, that's great. But so the culture was the first thing. The stress and the workload was the second thing. So those two hand in hand, and it just suck the joy out of you. It totally would just suck the joy out of you. And I come in upbeat in the morning because I spend time with the Lord and in his word and worship. And so I come in pretty on fire. I don't drink coffee or anything. I, all this is natural and it's all from the Lord. And so I come in and immediately, yeah, I come in and there's problem after problem after problem. And they're all little.

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