You have a business plan, but do you have a business plan specifically how you will use your business as a ministry?

If God has blessed your business and you desire to take your business to use it to minister to your employees, customers, and vendors alike, listen in to begin that journey.

Today we sit down with Stan Griswold, a retired engineer who re-entered the workforce specifically to help businesses grow and shine as lights in this dark world.

Stan is a facilitator with C12, the largest Christian peer advisory business group in the world.

Listen in and learn how you can grow and refine your business by being involved with C12.

Redeem Your Business Today by the Following:

How Can We Honor God In Our Business?

We can honor God by recognizing that all we have ultimately comes from Him. Our skills, resources, and the opportunities we’ve been given are all gifts entrusted to us to steward well.

This means making decisions that align with biblical principles, treating employees, customers, and partners with integrity and respect, and ensuring that our business practices reflect God’s love and justice.

One Challenge From Today:

A key challenge from today’s discussion is applying the mindset God has given us in our daily business decisions. It's easy to fall into the trap of viewing our work solely through a lens of financial success or personal achievement.

The challenge is to consistently remind ourselves that our business exists not just to serve us but to serve others and fulfill God’s purpose.

More About Stan Griswold

National Site: JoinC12.com

Find a C12 Forum near you

C12 Resource Library: C12 Resources

Indianapolis-Fort Wayne C12 Website

More About David Schmidt

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Website redeemingbusinesstoday.com

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Mentioned in this episode:

What God Says About Business: 5 Uncommon Truths for Modern Business

If you want to go deeper in your walk with God and integrate your faith and business this is the tool to make it happen. God has laid out the path to success without the regrets and emptiness that come with success the world's way. Download your FREE e-booklet today. A 10-minute investment of your time will return a lifetime of transformation.

What God Says About Business

Leadership GPS: Christian Business Coaching

Are you looking to integrate your faith and business but don't know where to start, book a time to discover if Christian business coaching and training might be right for you. If you are dissatisfied with your current rate of improvement, desire a clearer vision of what God says about business, or even what those first steps may look like, let's talk.

Initial GPS Coaching Call

David:

[0:00] Today, I'm super excited to have with me Stan Griswold. He is a retired electrical engineer who got compelled back into action, and he's now a facilitator at C12, which is one of the largest Christian peer group advisor groups in the U.S., and they serve businesses, 2,010,000 employees and up.

David:

[0:21] I coach entrepreneurs on systems and productivity and spiritual growth as a leader, and Stan facilitates groups of Christian businessmen in the overall health of their business endeavors. So Stan, welcome to Redeemer Business Today podcast. What is one way you believe that we can honor God in our business that other people may not know about?

Stan:

[0:42] Sure. Well, thanks, Dave. Thanks for having me on today. One thing that's interesting to think about, and I'm going to speak a little bit personally and a little bit as a business owner, is to think about all that we have is God's. You know, we often hear that in church, but we don't always think about applying that practically and how we make our decisions with our money and our time. So that to me would be something I don't think we think about often enough.

David:

[1:12] I agree. I agree. Because it's not material, you know, so we just don't think about it. So good. So you've had quite a trip, quite a journey.

David:

[1:23] Give us three or four minutes, how you got started of a C12 and what that program looks like.

Stan:

David:

[2:41] Very good. And so C-12 has been around for about 30 years?

Stan:

[2:45] Yeah. So C-12, I think 32 years now. C-12 is, as you mentioned, it's the largest Christian peer advisory group in the world. We actually have 4,400 members plus right now. Probably 4,000 of those are in the U.S., 400 outside the U.S. But the thing that attracted me to C-12 when I was thinking about what to do with my life, And I should give a plug to a good friend of mine who was a pastor. We grew up as kids together. And I was sitting with him one day in the summer out at the lake, and he was talking about his dad. And he said, you know, my dad is really struggling with what's God's purpose in his life right now.

Stan:

[3:25] And he was talking about his dad. God was talking to me. And, you know, that just kind of pulled me into this journey where I got to be involved with C12, where our focus is to help Christian business owners run a great business for a greater purpose.

David:

[3:40] That's neat. That's neat. When we were talking on our pre-call, you said that there's five key starting blocks for C12. Could you mention those real quick, what those are?

Stan:

[3:52] Sure, I could. So this is part of how I got engaged with C12. So part of my corporate career, I was in Fortune 500. I did lots of planning for large organizations. So the business piece is kind of like, okay, you got to do rev gen, financial management, or dev, ops management. In C12, we had a fifth piece of that. And we call it our five-point alignment matrix. So those first four I talked about, every business has to think about how they're going to execute and plan that. The fifth piece is business as a ministry. So within C12, we encourage our business owners to intentionally plan, so schedule, task, monitor, correct, what is their plan in their business for ministry. So that's the five points that we work on pretty much every month.

David:

[4:41] Okay. And you may mention that, you know, let's dive deeper into number five, which is basically intentionally planning your business, your business model as a ministry.

David:

[4:53] So how do you do that? What does that look like?

Stan:

[4:56] Yeah, so I'll give you a couple observations up front from just in general working within the C12 community. So a lot of business owners, they come in, they join C12 because we are intentionally a Christian group. So we're working to help them live their faith out in their business. They really don't know how to do business as a ministry. And so every month, so I meet with all of my members. We meet for a full day once a month. And every month we'll have a segment where we focus on what you'll be thinking about in ministry. And ministry is a big, big question or big area. So I'll just mention a couple of things. So one of the tools we have to use is called a caring matrix. So our caring matrix is a three by five matrix where if you think about it, look at your people. They have physical needs. They have emotional needs. They have spiritual needs. And then so you've got your employees. You've got your employees' families. You've got your suppliers, your customers, and your community. So if you think about that as a three by five matrix and you see, if I'm as a Christian business owner trying to live out God's love as I steward this business that he's given me, how can I help across that caring matrix? And so that's just one construct that we use to kind of help people think through, you know, what can I do? How can I care for my people?

David:

[6:26] Okay. So, and then you go down that road and say, I'm going to care for my people physically or emotionally or spiritually. They might pick one of those and say, here, how can we do that particular piece of the pie?

Stan:

[6:37] Yeah. So, because we've been around 32 years, we've been able to capture a lot of, say, normal and or best practices. And so, we will share with business owners, you know, hey, what do we all struggle with? We often struggle with taking the first step. So let's take a small first step. Let's get a win. And then think about what's the next step after that. So for many of our members, that easy first step is to hire a chaplain, to be available, to counsel, meet with their employees. You know, often people, well, it's true that eight out of 10 of us are carrying around something we don't want to share with others, right? So if you've got a chaplain there, your employees are more likely to go talk to the chaplain. that may not be about a faith-based topic. It may be about something else they're struggling in life, but it's a way that the owner can care for them. And oh, by the way, the chaplain can also help them with spiritual, biblical kind of instruction. So oftentimes that's kind of step one. And then the steps beyond that, you'll get to be really, really fun to talk about.

David:

[7:44] Yeah. So what's another step or two that people take? Because that's, I've talked about chaplaincy before That's a great first step. What's another one after that that they might be proactive and do?

Stan:

[7:58] Yeah, so I'll cite a couple. So one of them is you can just have a Bible study, right? And I would mention that C12 partners with Alliance Defending Freedom, and every year we put out a document to all of our members that gives them legal guidance. And it's like, if you want to live your faith intentionally, know where the guardrails are. You're still running your business. You can cross the guardrails if you want, but we're going to try to help you know what you can do and what you need to be careful with.

David:

[8:28] Gotcha.

Stan:

[8:28] So, for instance, on a Bible study, if the business owner is leading the Bible study, that could be perceived as coercive. So maybe you get somebody else. Maybe you go to the Bible study, but you have somebody else on your team to lead the Bible study. Just some kind of practical things like that to help the owners live their faith and live their faith in a way that's going to keep them out of the headlines most of the time.

David:

[8:56] Yeah.

Stan:

[8:57] And there's a couple others. I'll just share with one of my members right now is actually working on developing in the caring fund area. So to have all the employees contribute to a pot of money that would be available for employees' special needs. So maybe someone is ill, maybe, you know, they're having issues, maybe they can't afford to fix their car, whatever. Whatever the issue is, to encourage the employees to put money in and then to make decisions on where the money goes. So just kind of a very practical meeting the physical needs of people, but it shows the love of the leader in terms of supporting the employees when they have physical needs.

David:

[9:46] Yeah, that's neat. So do the employees kind of control where it goes and help decide who gets it then?

Stan:

[9:53] So we have different, in my particular case, the member hasn't decided yet how he wants to do that. So across C12, we have a large breadth of companies. You know, as you mentioned, you know, we don't really cater to entrepreneurs because our curriculum is really driven to help you as a leader develop your leaders as you manage your business. It's not that we don't love the entrepreneurs, it's just that a lot of our business conversations are at that next level of scale. So our larger companies, I happen to know a company right now that is setting a budget of $1.5 million for their care team for this year. So in that case, they do have a team of employees that will be deciding how that money gets set out or allocated to people who have particular needs. But there's some really other fun things, right? You can sponsor a marriage weekend trips for your employees. You can sponsor kids' camps.

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