Shownotes
Is there a purpose after profit for your business? What happens when you make profit your leading purpose of your business?
If you have ever pursued profit over people, you may find out like Jeremy did that it doesn’t lead to long term satisfaction.
Jeremy Reyes started out his entrepreneurial journey in marketing with the goal of making money. He did, but he was not proud of the way he did it.
He was miserable and became convicted about the way he was doing business, so he took a very courageous step and shut it all down.
Having restarted his marketing business, he is now passionate about using his gifts to love people rather than using people to love money.
Join us in a candid conversation about the change he made as well as pointers on honing in on your marketing skill so you too can have a purpose beyond just making a profit.
Having mission clarity on what the purpose of your business is foundational to a healthy, transformed business.
Redeem Your Business Today by the Following:
How can we honor God in our business?
Honor God by your intentions and motivations of why you do what you do in your business. Be honest with yourself, if you are honest and don’t like your motivations, you can always change.
One challenge from today:
Walk in humility. God is love and you are loved.
More About Jeremy Reyes
Website: Purpose Beyond Profit
Take a Free Assessment: PBP Assessment
More About David Schmidt
Subscribe to Redeeming Business Today Podcast Newsletter
Book a call: Get Unstuck and Move Forward
Website redeemingbusinesstoday.com
Transcripts
David:
[0:00] Marketing for your business is critical to life of your business.
David:
[0:04] It's telling people what you do and how you can benefit them, but there's more to business than marketing and more to life than profit. And today I brought on Jeremy Reyes from Purpose Beyond Profit, and the name aptly describes that mission. We live in a business economy that uses people as a tool to love profit, but Jeremy is helping to grow a new economy that uses business to love people instead. And so, because people are more important than just a tool to make money, hence purpose beyond a profit. Jeremy, welcome. And yeah, to start off today, you've worked with a lot of businesses. What is one way you have found to honor God in your business?
Jeremy:
[0:44] That's a good question. Thanks for having me, David. I think the primary way that the Lord has been calling me to honor Him is first with my heart. And by heart, I mean my intentions and my motivations.
Jeremy:
[0:58] So growing up, I understood what truth was because I grew up in a Christian home. And so the principles and the right thing to do was kind of instilled in me from a young age. But over the last several years, the Lord has been asking me why I do the things that I do. And when I started to ask myself that question or allow God to ask me that question, I didn't really like the responses I was getting when I was being honest with myself. And so honoring the Lord in this season has looked like first being real and honest about what my true intentions are in business. Not liking the answer, but understanding the Lord still meets me there, that he wants to be present with me, even in my ugliness, even in my brokenness. But he wants to redeem that. And he wants me to not just glorify him with the money that I make, but glorify him and honor him and the way in which I'm making money, the way in which I'm running my business. So I have a feeling that's going to be a lifelong journey, and there's a lot more room for me to grow in that. But it's also been really, really redeeming, I would say, over the last probably four years of just really taking honest assessments of where I'm at, allowing the Lord to meet me there, and Him leading me into building Purpose Beyond Profit.
David:
[2:16] That's very good. That's neat. It's like I have to answer honestly, but it's not always the answer I like. But at least for being honest, and yeah, God takes you from where you are,
David:
[2:28] from point A to point B, and that's great.
Jeremy:
[2:31] Yeah.
David:
[2:32] We talked about earlier you used to be heavy into marketing, and that was like all you did. And then you got transitioned to where you are today with business purpose.
David:
[2:40] I'm sorry, purpose beyond profit. Sorry, I'll add that up for you. Um tell us your journey a lot of people like to see the journey what made you go from marketing solely to to this venture in you now
Jeremy:
[2:53] Yeah so i long story short i grew up in an entrepreneurial home my dad was an entrepreneur and so big family he did whatever it took to put food in the table i learned from him um just going on little uh i'd said ride-alongs um the last interview i did and my wife was like ride-alongs is only in the context of like going with a police officer in a cop car so call it allow me to come along with him right um and so i went to business school and got a business management degree it's kind of like a backup plan in case the whole entrepreneur thing didn't work out but i knew from a young age like i want to be an entrepreneur so i graduated from southeastern university with that and then i was like if i'm ever going to make a leap and start something while i still don't have a family while rent is cheap. I was living with three other guys. I was like, now's the time to do it. And so I went for a full service marketing agency, like you were saying.
Jeremy:
[3:49] And my original intentions, it's funny, I'm talking about intentions again. My original intentions were to bring truth and love to the marketing industry, because I saw it in my dealings with it growing up as kind of like a historically dark place. And the more you see marketing, the more you're, we're probably all aware of how it's a lot of times just deceitful, very, what can I get out of you? Very numbers focused. And so I wanted to change that. Um, but I didn't realize yet at that time that God mostly just wanted to change me and my heart. And so, uh, for the first four months, I don't land my first client, which was very ironic because I was running a marketing agency, supposedly able to help people market themselves. And so imposter syndrome set in, um, you know, and so eventually I landed my first couple of clients. I started this little magazine called This Is Why. And I just started traveling to little local businesses around where I was still living in Central Florida.
Jeremy:
[4:50] And I would just interview them, ask them the purpose of why they started their business. And I would record the whole thing. This is obviously for AI. And so I'd record the whole thing and I'd mainly go back and transcribe and turn it into an article and put it out there. and didn't really get a whole lot of traction. It was cool, but I wasn't really making money with that. And so... Um, I started doing Facebook ads for my dad cause he was a realtor. And then I started doing some Facebook ads for some other realtors, some other loan officers. Um, and then, um, kind of scaled that a little bit, grew that to where I was working with, um, several realtors and loan officers across the U S. Um, again, mostly running Facebook ads. And then one day Facebook changed their algorithm to where they didn't want ads related to housing, employment, or credit, which was all of my ads. And so in one day, I lost 70 ads overnight, lost all of my customers, went back down to zero, not making any money. And this happened to be, so this was senior year. No, this was right after I graduated college. I was about to marry my wife for 90 days before our wedding day. And that's when I lost all of my clients, went back to zero. My wife was still going to be in school. And so I was going to be our primary source of income. And I was like, well, I need to make money now. I need to figure this out. I could tell my parents were getting a little nervous. side, people, friends text me like, Hey, what's the plan? Like, what are you trying to do? Yeah.
David:
[6:13] You have to have a plan. Come on. Right.
Jeremy:
[6:15] Exactly. And so, um, I was like, you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to teach people how I landed those realtors and loan officers as clients. So in that time, um, you know, digital marketing was kind of pitched as the easy way to make money online. It was like, just teach what you know. Right. So I started to do that.
Jeremy:
[6:33] And by scaling that and bringing in people, you know, telling them we're going to help them make money. We're going to help. We're going to kind of scale the amount of emails they can send. We developed software that would evade Google spam filters so we could send even more emails. Like it would spin text. It would change the text and emails so that we could, you know, it looks like we were manually sending out these emails, but we weren't. We would, we created templates that would be kind of a little bit deceptive in the sense that we would ask them, Hey, are you offering XYZ service. The business would respond thinking that we were a potential customer, which of course we weren't. And then we'd say, Hey, we'd love to send you 10 to 15 people next month who want XYZ service. Now, obviously we didn't have 10 to 15 people lined up. Uh, we're kind of making
Jeremy:
[7:18] a guarantee we really couldn't make, um, and hoping that it worked out 80% of the time. So I ended up becoming the problem that I set out to solve.
Jeremy:
[7:28] And that was a really humbling moment. We scaled to that business anyways while that conviction was growing i kept running it kept doing it i found enough people around me who said jeremy you're making a lot of money from this there's a lot of good that can come from this with the money that you're making from it um and so we scaled that fifteen thousand dollars a month and then i was the most miserable i'd ever been in my life like i achieved kind of the milestones that i wanted to hit and still wasn't happy i was actually more unhappy um and it was affecting relationships it was affecting pretty much my whole life because i was living this double life i didn't want my personal friends and family to know what i was doing my business and I didn't want my business customers to know that I love Jesus because I knew that the two, you know, right.
David:
[8:06] Wow.
Jeremy:
[8:07] And so, yeah. So the Lord called me to shut that down, start over from zero. And when I did that, about six months was just coming back to the Lord like, okay, God, now what? Like, what do you want? And so through journaling, through waking up at three o'clock in the morning, just started to receive, and other people in training, starting to receive from the Lord what it looked like to use my gifts and my skill sets, but now for a completely different purpose, to love people. And so when we shut down the business, we sent out a mass email to everybody, which is ironic because you were doing mass cold email. But we sent a mass email to everybody who had opted in to receiving emails from us. And we told them, hey, I built this business with a purpose to make money. And people ended up becoming a tool in the process.
Jeremy:
[8:53] And I'm on this journey now to figure out what it looks like to love people through business. And so I started putting frameworks together, started doing one-on-one coaching, learning from other entrepreneurs. as I was coaching them by God's grace, just trying things out, really experimenting trial and error. And that grew into doing little cohorts with like two or three people at a time. We did 18 or 19 of those. When people graduate from cohorts, they were like, okay, now what do I do? And so we developed this mastermind for ongoing support. And then in the last six months, we've actually reintegrated everything. So I'm offering my course and my coaching and my Mastermind as one program that is basically ecosystem of Christian entrepreneurs who are building their business in alignment with their God-given purpose, all learning from each other. I've kind of taken a step back and allowed myself to learn from other people who are in different industries and provide space for people to receive and give to each other in holistic ways, like spiritually, but also from a business standpoint, just teaching each other and learning from each other. So does that answer your question?
David:
[9:57] Sure. That was a great answer to your question. That was a long one. But yeah, very interesting that you said that you hit your goals, but you're very unhappy because of how you hit them. Basically being dishonest and trying to say, hey, we got these customers, but you didn't have the customers. And I found it interesting that you said you didn't want your customers to find out you love Jesus. You didn't want your family in that to know what you're doing. That is a perfect recipe for contention and anxiety and stress inside of you yes um but that's neat that you're able to just being led by a little shut it down yeah start over again yeah first person i've i've interviewed that as a similar background of success with compromise and then okay we're gonna try it in a different way i
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