Do you know *why* your business exists — not just what it does, but the deeper purpose behind it?

And if you do know it, are you actually living it out, or is it just a framed statement on the wall that nobody talks about?

Michelle Sloan is a principal coach and school consultant who helps leaders clarify their mission, vision, and core values — and then actually live by them.

She's built schools from the ground up, turned around declining ones in the middle of a pandemic, and watched organizations double in size when they got serious about who they are and who they're called to serve.

Join David and Michelle as they dig into what purpose really means for Christian business owners, why most mission statements never make it off the wall, and how to build a culture where every decision filters through your calling.

Redeem Your Business Today by the Following:

How can we honor God in our business?

Don't copy someone else's path. God didn't call you to be somebody else. He called you to be you.

Honor Him by staying true to the unique gifts, abilities, and purpose He's placed in you, and build your business around that rather than chasing what's working for everyone else.

One challenge from today: Before your next team meeting, put one question at the bottom of the agenda — "Does this decision align with who we are and who we're called to serve?" — and make someone responsible for asking it every single time.

More About Michelle Sloan

Website: https://sloanleadership.com/

More About David Schmidt

Free Resource: What God Says About Business: 5 Uncommon Truths for the Modern Business

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

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What God Says About Business

When I think of purpose, I think of Daniel 1, 8, where it says, Daniel purpose in his heart that he would not defile himself with the king's food. ⁓ That was a purpose in a moment, something that he was gonna do right then and there. But there's also a lifelong purpose of what we're supposed to do as well. ⁓ Daniel was faithful in all that he did. And it's interesting later on in his life that they couldn't find anything wrong with him when they tried to get him in trouble back in.

And that's when you end up getting thrown into the lines then. ⁓ But life purpose encompasses obviously your whole life and that also affects your business. And it's the impetus to move your business forward. And you may know your life purpose, you may not know it, that's either way, that's fine. Today we have brought on Michelle Salone, who's a principal coach and a school consultant to...

help clarify mission, vision, and core values and to live by them. That's what she does for schools. And we're going to talk about purpose today. So thank you for coming on Michelle. And to start off with one question is, what is one way that you have found to honor God in your business that other people may not know about?

I try to stay purpose driven and I recognize that God has given me a unique set of gifts and talents. I believe that for everybody and that He's called me to use them to make a difference. And I try to stay true to who I am, who He's called me to be and what He's called me to do. There's a lot of noise out there. A lot of people have expectations on what I should do.

⁓ The market says what they should expect of me. And it's very easy to look at what somebody else is doing in their business and say, ⁓ I should implement that or I want to be like that speaker. ⁓ But I want to stay true to who God's called me to be and what he's called me to do.

Excellent, that's good. Staying true to who you are and that's so very important. I've run that gamut too and still work on that. What am I supposed to do, myself or other people, what they do? ⁓ So yeah, give us a brief background of how God has led you and what you're doing today.

Yeah.

chaos was happening and ⁓ just utilize those same skills that I had to start a school to rebuild the school. And it really was all about mission, vision, core values and creating a unique set of skills and ⁓ defining moments for that school, clearly defining who they were.

why they exist, what sets them apart from every other school in the area. ⁓ But it went beyond that because I recognized in my first principalship that being a leader can be lonely, it can be isolating, it's a heavy weight to bear, in that you need to know who you are, you need to know your limitations as well as your strengths and your abilities, and be able to surround yourself with people.

Mm-hmm.

where you are weak. So we have to acknowledge our weaknesses and what we can't do and then intentionally build a team around us because we can't fulfill the mission that God's called us to do on our own. He wants us to be connected to people.

Yeah, we live in America and it's, wanna do it myself. But I find out more and more, you work better as a team at times. I mean, you can work individually, but there's always gonna be a part where you come back together as a group to accomplish something bigger.

Mm-hmm.

Right. And so I use that now to work with school leaders and principals. I coach them. I love helping them to define ⁓ their unique ability within themselves and their team, but then also as their school and their organization. I don't just work with schools, but also organizations. They go through the same thing. Schools are organizations. They are businesses and ⁓ you know, they go through the same things. And so I think

Yes.

⁓ having led a school, starting a school really helps me understand that leadership perspective. And whether you're leading a school or an organization, a nonprofit, a for-profit, an LLC, we all face the same challenges of trying to clearly define ⁓ who our clientele is, who we are, who we're gonna serve, what's the socioeconomic background, what's the demographic, ⁓ how do you define success?

and not just what you do, but also what you're not gonna do.

and I know all those, but it's hard to define that. I mean, you say it all really quickly, but it's sometimes harder to do that. So you like, we've talked about purpose a little bit and how that is like the foundation for your business or profit or whatever, your school, wherever you go. So define purpose for us, whether it be individual or business you pick, define that for us.

huh.

Okay, well, I like to define purpose as your mission. your individual purpose is knowing who you are, what you stand for, what your abilities are, what your calling is. ⁓ I believe God creates every single person with a purpose.

They have a unique set of skills, talents, abilities, whatever you, a genius, an unfair advantage, whatever you want to call it, that just comes naturally to them. They were gifted, they were made for that, and they're going to find passion and joy in that. so defining who you are as a person, that's to me your purpose. But then...

Living that out to serve others and make a difference becomes the purpose of your organization or your calling or your school whatever it is that you're doing to to make a difference using those so there's a purpose of ⁓ The school and I in a business and I think so many times we take that cookie cutter mission statement

and think, okay, this is our mission. It's a one and done. And we've got our mission statement. It's in our handbook. It's on the wall. We told it to the person when we were hiring them and now we're done. we really have to learn to filter every decision that we make on is this who we are? Is this going to further my mission? Is it going to make a difference serving the calling that God's called me?

Let's go.

And if it's not, we have to have the courage to say no. So that's how I define purpose. It's what you were created to do. ⁓ Very often it starts as a desire and maybe it's somebody speaking into your life when you were younger and you don't even recognize it, you know, at yourself for a while. ⁓ You realize what you're good at. You realize what...

you find joy in. And I think those are the things that we use to define purpose.

You said a lot there. I don't know if you realized that, but you mentioned about purpose needs to define everything you do in business. Can you expand upon that or give me, give us an example? Because I think that is what's missing in a lot of businesses because it's hard to get a mission statement of purpose. It's harder to live it out and to put it in, install it in everybody and to talk about it and all that. So can you dig?

Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

a little bit deeper into that and tell us a little bit more how to do that or give us an example.

Yeah, I think this is where a lot of organizations stall. This is where they really struggle because it takes a lot of collaborative effort and a lot of opinions and a lot of discussions around the table with a lot of stakeholders to finally figure out this mission statement. Who are we? Who are we going to serve? What defines us? What are we going to do? And then you have to take that mission.

Mm-hmm.

a little bit further and cast the vision. And I love vision casting. That's part of who I am. It's like painting that beautiful picture of ⁓ where the cruise ship is taking you or that travel agency. It's like, look at all these beautiful pictures of where you want to go. And they make it look so pretty. We spend our time, we spend our energy, we save our money, all to get to where that beautiful picture is. it's people in your organization need that. They need to know that

where you're going is worth the hard times. And so it goes beyond writing those statements and it's hard writing those statements, finally getting to that place where you have that clearly defined, but the work isn't done then. have to, that has to show up in, yes, you want it on your website. Yes, you want it on your onboarding content. You want it, you know, in your applications. You want to talk about it at the beginning of the year when you're casting your vision.

but it shows up in every meeting that you have. And in every decision that you get ready to make, somebody has to ask the question, is this aligning with our purpose, who we are and who we're gonna serve? Is this furthering our mission? I see this in schools a lot because there's ⁓ the latest and newest program that's gonna raise the test scores.

and it worked at the school in California, so it should work at the school in North Carolina and we're going to implement it. Well, it's two very different socioeconomic backgrounds. One's rural, one's urban. And so ⁓ it's just not always that simple. We have to really look and analyze and say, this going to further our purpose and our mission? We have to know our students strengths and their opportunities.

And as our goal to get them into college is our goal to get them to graduate and be able to read. And so there's just very, very different dynamics. we've we've the businesses do the same thing. You know, ⁓ here's we start Googling. What's a good mission statement for a service industry? And that sounds good. Let's use that one. ⁓ But there's so much more that goes into it to really be. ⁓

because I believe everybody's unique, we're all different, and that's a good thing. And we need to celebrate those and we need to ⁓ get really specific about what we're doing and who we're serving. ⁓ you don't know what to say no to until you truly know what to say yes to. And you don't truly know what to say yes to until you really know what you're gonna say no to. So it just has to show up in every meeting, every conversation. ⁓

Yes.

needs to drive every decision.

Yeah, what you said there reminded me, I think it was Pat that said in his book, The Advantage, once you have your core values and who you are, who you're serving, you need to be intolerant. You need to be intolerant of everything else. If it doesn't fit your mission and your core values, ⁓ you don't tolerate that behavior, that decisions, any of that stuff, because you have to go down a certain way. And so I think it was interesting what you said that talking about mission and purpose,

Hmm.

Yeah, that's good.

in your interviewing process is important because the people, when you talk about values, I don't know of any interviews I've had where they said, our core values are this, our mission statement is this. They don't talk about it, but my core values need to at least align with your values if I'm going to stay there long-term or else somebody is going to get frustrated and leave. And so that's really good.

What are some simple steps that we can take once we get our values and they're implemented and life starts happening, business starts getting busy. How do we maintain that? mean, you can start good, but then it's maintaining it.

I think we have to build time in our schedule where we are intentionally reflect pausing and reflecting. And it's an ongoing, it's an on before every decision. And at every meeting, put it at the bottom of your agenda, whatever you have to do to say, is this aligning with our mission? Are we living out our core values? And I loved what you said about the core values because you're right. people have an idea.

Okay.

of how your organization runs by what they've seen, whether it's on social media or from the time they walk into your building, what they've read in the application, just the different interactions. They have an idea, but they don't truly know. And if they see them written, they're going to hold you to that. They're thinking, okay, well, we honor one another here and we value trust and we value feedback. But if the very first time that they share

Feedback and they share honesty and trust they're shut down and people are gossiping about them as soon as they leave the room Then those aren't core values lived out. And so to truly live that out we have to build a system of reflection and ⁓ an authentic trust culture and feedback and we have to value that because Who's gonna hold us accountable when we get off track?

if there's no trust. And ⁓ so we just have to, we have to make sure that there's a space for reflection. There's a time for intentional trust building. There's, know, everybody's talking about psychological safety right now. And so we need to make sure that it's a safe place to share your thoughts and your opinions. And, ⁓ you know, that doesn't mean that it's.

always open to every meeting. But if you build the space, can, and time for it, can say, okay, we're going to spend next month on Thursday. We're going to talk about, give everybody time to feel seen and heard. ⁓ before we roll out this decision, I want to hear your concerns. And so, ⁓ in order for those, the mission, the vision, the core values to really be alive in the organization, we have to be able to trust one another and, and hold each other accountable.

agree, absolutely. Trust is essential because if I disagree with you, I need to be able to voice that and tell you why not attacking you as a person, just looking at the idea. You need to have trust. I know one organization I worked at, they had their mission statement and they made it a company policy that every PowerPoint presentation had to have that as their first slide and they're supposed to read it.

Yeah.

But we didn't really, I don't feel like we really lived it because people just stood up there read it really quick and then here's the obligatory slide, whatever, whatever, and just ran off. But I wonder if you had somebody at the end of every meeting ask the question, somebody designated saying, does this align? Just does this align with our core values to just help people reorientate that? Because I think you're right. That's, and it's going to be a habit, right? I mean, you have to actually do it or you don't do it.

Yeah. And I think too, along with that, the idea is that there's some training on the mission statement to like break it down. There's usually three or four components to a mission statement, but what, let's do some training on this. What does it really mean to serve our customers? Well, let's break that down and do some training on this, but then how does that look?

⁓ Very good.

and live out in every different department and every different role and every different responsibility because we make the assumption that they understand all of that and we find out quickly that they just didn't know. We have to have those expectations, conversations, and that can be freedom. Knowledge is power in freeing.

think what you said there is very good there as far as explaining it, because if you don't explain it, it's going to be interpreted however that person interprets it, which could be wrong. So yes, it's work. What you're saying is a lot of work, but I think it's probably worth it. Do you have a story that you could share with us about a school or a company that went from unclear to super clear and what happened?

right.

Yeah, so I the one that I started from the ground up, we just had the opportunity to start it off right. So a lot of research went in a lot of team building a lot of let's let's do this and so taking that and seeing a school that was declining during COVID I knew I was going to have to rally the troops together if we were I'm brand new. I'm new to the state. I don't understand the state regulations of what's going on with COVID and so we're trying to navigate and figure all this out together. But you know our the mission of the school did not change, but the.

purpose that year was really to try to provide a quality education for the students in the midst of the ⁓ pandemic that was happening. our purpose kind of shifted a little bit. ⁓ But one of the things that stood out to me was some of this, was a very academic driven school. And so, and there was some athletics that made it

You know, so athletics and academics were the two, which very often we find in schools. so it's hearing and seeing students feel like they weren't successful at anything. I can't do anything right. And that really bothered me because I want like not in my school. Like that's not, I don't want to hear that. Like I believe God has given everybody abilities and gifts and talents. And so.

I started saying over the loudspeaker, I honestly don't even know how it came about except that the phrase just stuck with me. You were created on purpose and for a purpose. You have gifts and talents that nobody else has and this world needs you. Now go and make a difference. And then I would say that when it was their birthday. And it just took off. I heard them saying it to their teacher, Mrs. Smith.

Hmm.

Happy birthday, you were created on purpose and for purpose. And then they had t-shirts made that said I was created on purpose and for purpose. And so we started celebrating other things in our award assemblies, not just students that were ⁓ achieving athletic awards at the award, award assembly and students that were achieving academics. We still celebrated those because that's part of.

Neat. Neat. Okay.

of some people's story and their abilities, but we were looking at character and we were looking at things that they were enjoying outside of school. know, if they were on ⁓ ice hockey team or a soccer team, you know, what were things that they were good at building friendships, conflict resolution. We just built in things and awards and achievements to celebrate everybody and believe that they could be successful at something.

and that they were, that they mattered, they were seen and they mattered.

That's good. You saw the increase in your school system then too, didn't you?

Yeah, it doubled in size within a year and a half. was crazy. We were on, yeah, hiring frenzy. It was crazy.

crazy in a good way. Sometimes it's like that. Sometimes it's just crazy. Is there any other questions I should be asking you about purpose? It seems like we've covered a lot of the bases. Is there anything I'm missing here?

Yeah.

No, think it's, I think it's a lot of times people want to just Google and figure this out. And it really does take a lot of time. It takes a lot of thought. It takes a lot of prayer and we need to reflect. It's, it's very easy to get off track. ⁓ it's very easy to, as a business owner to, look at somebody else's path to success.

and try to imitate that, but we don't honor God by being somebody else. We honor God by being who we are. And, you know, I think we have to build time to pause and reflect in who we are and what we're doing on a regular basis, in the good moments and in the bad moments. We're so good at doing it in the bad moments when we're struggling, but we need to build

intentional about building those times ⁓ in the good moments too on a regular basis like you said earlier it's a habit.

Yep, yep. And that reminds me of things you've mentioned throughout the whole episode here, as far as your uniqueness and your success isn't going to necessarily look like somebody else's. And that's what excites me about business and frustrates me about business, because I just want to set a rules and follow them. But I know that even if it worked for you, it may not work for me because we're two different people. It's not meaning I'm doing it wrong. It's just God has a slightly different path for me.

Yeah.

I know when I home educated my children, I realized that each one of them learns at different speeds and they learn different subjects at different speeds too. And that just made everything very complex. But it's just that individuality and it carries on into adulthood and business and everything else and our different purposes and different ways we run business. But yeah, purpose is something to...

Yeah.

It's worth the effort and the work and time to figure out. Well, Michelle, thank you very much. Do you have any final words of inspiration or challenge for my audience today that you'd like them to, if they forget everything else, to, hey, remember this?

that they matter, they're good at something, that they were created on purpose and for a purpose, and God sees them, He knows them, and He wants them to use their gifts to go make a difference and help somebody else.

and love it, you matter. Michelle, thank you so much for your time and encouragement today. And if you're looking to go deeper or want to learn more about Michelle and her work, check out the show notes for links and sites to understand her and where she's at and how to get a hold of her, how to work with her. And if you've enjoyed this episode, I encourage you to leave a rating and review, subscribe and sign up for our newsletter. And you also get a verse of the week with the challenge with that. And remember, your business represents the great God you serve. So build a business worthy of God's name.

and in a way that honors him. Bye for now.