Kingdom Style | Kingdom Leadership Workshop | April 2026

[00:00:00] So to know me is to travel with me. I really just love finding new and interesting experiences in the world and going and experiencing them myself. So when I see somebody like hiking this really cool mountain ridge in Colorado, I gotta go hike that cool mountain ridge in Colorado. When I see someone touring the ruins in Athens, I gotta go do that myself.

And you know, there was one time that I saw this really cool experience. You can go. Snorkel with iguanas and penguins at the same time. I know there’s one place in the world you can do that. And so of course I have to go do it. And so I go and it’s really amazing. But you know, one of my favorite things about going and doing experiences like that is the people you meet along the way.

You know, they’re the other people in the world that get excited by snorkeling with iguanas and penguins, and you get to ask them cool questions like, what’s your deal? And why are you so weird? And I remember [00:01:00] meeting this guy on that trip and he was a really interesting dude. He was a CEO of a pretty successful company.

He was there with his dad and he had just actually finished a book tour. He had written a New York Times bestselling business book that maybe some of you have read and. We got to talking ’cause it’s like, oh that’s cool. He is a CEO. I’m, I’m in business too and I really like talking to business people and one of the most interesting things about him was that I found out was that he was a missionaries kid and he grew up in the missionary field and his dad was a missionary overseas and that’s how he grew up.

And so he’s a Christian, CEO and I was like, oh man, I get, you know, I love talking to Christian CEOs. And so we got to talking and we talked about a bunch of different stuff, but one of the craziest things that he told me was that he was really afraid to get close to the people that he led. He thought that was, he thought the fact that I was really into that was kind of a weird thing.

And you know, I asked why and he’s like, you know, so at some point if I get close to people, I might have to fire [00:02:00] them. And I think we’ve all heard that before, right? All heard that perspective. And, you know, maybe not said that plainly, but the assumptions everywhere, keep it professional. Keep your distance from those people.

Don’t get too close, you know, care about people. Sure. But, you know, not so much that it gets kind of complicated. Right. And honestly, that makes sense in the world system. You know, if people are prior, primarily a means of accomplishing work, then relationship, well that’s a liability. But in God’s kingdom, people are the, they’re the point.

They’re never just a means to an end. And I mean, we shouldn’t be surprised by that when we look at the Bible, right? Jesus said, the whole law hangs on this. Love God and love your neighbor, and that doesn’t stop when you like walk through the wall. Walk through the door of an office place, right? That means every single person in your company matters deeply to God.

[00:03:00] Whether that’s you, the CEO, or Bob in accounting, even Bob. And if that’s his way, then it has to become our way. So here’s the shift that we as kingdom leaders have to make. The team is your mission and their work is their mission and not the other way around.

So that doesn’t mean that the work doesn’t matter, of course it matters, but if you’re leading people, your first ministry is not the product, the project or the output. Your first ministry is the people that God has entrusted to you. And that means that one of our first jobs when we lead with a Kingdom style is to build deep, deep relationships with the people we lead.

We can no longer view that as a liability. We have to take that on and that’s what we call relational leadership. And when you lead this way, it literally changes. Everything. It changes your organization, [00:04:00] your products, it changes the people that you lead, and even you as a leader will be profoundly changed by this approach.

And as you start to see people more the way God sees them, your perspective on everything will be different. Okay? So I’m gonna take a pause for a minute because I can see out there. Some of you are ready to stand up and wave your Bible at me and gimme an amen. Right. But some of you, when I said relational leadership, clenched a little bit, and believe me, I get it.

You know, if I’m being honest, you did not get the world’s greatest relational leader up here talking to you about relational leadership. You got the world’s okayest relational leader. You see, I’m an introverted software developer. By nature, I went to school to get a degree in computer science so that I wouldn’t have to talk to people and I could spend all my time talking to computers.

You know, trust me that my instinct is to run away [00:05:00] from a deep relationship and to that sweet spreadsheet that I was working on. You know, you need more proof. Here I am as a baby, working on my first program, on my first computer, five pound, 10 ounce baby bride. This is, this is the way that I thought that I was wired.

And so this whole idea of, uh, relational leadership, you know, for me it’s what Cal said earlier. It’s like, God doesn’t call the equipped for this. He equips the called and if he’s on a mission to build deep relationships with these people that you lead, then buckle up ’cause you’re gonna be right or wrong for the ride.

So the whole idea of relational leadership really comes down to two things, know them and grow them. But I’m gonna start with know them we’ll. We’ll save, grow them for a minute. I think the thing that trips most people up in leadership is that they believe they are being judged on how much they get done or the results [00:06:00] to which they’re accountable and, and that actually makes a lot of sense, right?

If you stop getting work done, see what happens to your paychecks and. Anybody think they’ll still get a paycheck if they stop getting work done? No, of course. But there’s a problem with that because we tend to think that, uh, just because we’re accountable to that, that our time application should match, which is problematic.

So like if my team that I lead at Impact title, uh, produces title policies, then should I be spending most of my time working on title policies? And of course the answer is no. Uh, but if we get caught up in this false thinking. And we view and we don’t view our work from a relational standpoint, you know, then we get in trouble.

So remember, the team’s, your mission, the work is their mission. And it’s no surprise that in God’s kingdom this should be upside down. We’ve been talking about that this whole time. Kingdom is upside down and the way we deal with people in our work is gonna be upside down too. So we as task focused leaders have to change our perspective.

And you know, a good place to start is this [00:07:00] prayer, Lord. Gimme a heart for the people that I lead. And you know what’s cool about that one? I could guarantee he will answer it because he already has a heart for them. He’s got already got a heart for the people that you lead. And I know for a fact that he wants you to have one too.

So we all agree now maybe that we need to have deep relationships with the people that we lead, right? And there’s kind of two key ways to structure our time to do just that. And the first is called shoulder to shoulder time. So this is probably the way that most of us are familiar with, uh, getting to know people.

It’s getting to know them in their work. And to even start caring for people, we kinda have to get close and proximate to them. And I don’t mean like relationally close, I mean proximate. And this all starts by just being physically close to them in their everyday work. Not all the time, but being intentional about taking time to be with them while they’re working.

And this only works if you don’t come into it with an agenda for [00:08:00] while you’re with them. If you’re there with something to discuss or something that you think is really important, what is important to them will never become important. And so you just have to be there as, as basically someone who is going to just be present.

And that’s really hard for a lot of us as leaders, as like driven leaders to just sit there and do nothing and be present for people. It is one of the hardest things that you will ever have to do, but it is so important. Because you’re just gonna stand there, shoulder to shoulder and see what happens.

But shoulder to shoulder is enough because you really need heart to heart. Heart to heart is what we call it when I’m standing here and there’s a person there, and there’s nothing in between us except heart to heart conversation.

And that starts, and that really is what builds the deep relationship to get close. We need that heart to heart time. You know, if we really love our people, and yes, that is the [00:09:00] word love in a business context, then we should be seeking to know them deeply. Not just what their professional aspirations are, but what makes them tick.

Who’s in their family? What are they struggling with at home, and what are they excited about in the lives of their kids right now? You know, Paul describes this really beautifully. In one Thessalonians. He says, because we loved you so much, we’re delighted to share with you not only the gospel of God, but our lives as well.

Man, their lives, they shared their lives together. That’s the picture. Not just information, not just tasks, but their entire lives. And when you lack relationship with someone like this, all kinds of problems creep in. You get less trust, less cohesion in your team, and ultimately lower performance. And remember, this is not about increasing performance of people, it’s about seeing people as God sees them.

You know, there’s this old board member here, uh, Bob Smithson, [00:10:00] and he used to have this idiom that I never really understood until recently. He used to say, uh, do you have the change in your pocket to have this conversation? You guys remember that? And I never actually understood what that meant. Uh, it was actually a reference to payphones, I think, uh, when it was a time when you had to, if you wanted to make, make a phone call to someone, you actually had to have change in your pocket because there was no other way to do it.

You’d have to stick coins in a machine and it would let you call people the young people. That’s a weird one. Right. And you know, I think beyond the, what’s a payphone question? The change in your pocket really is like the relational equity that you have with somebody. Like how deep does that relationship go, and could you have a hard conversation with them?

And do they know? Do they know you? Do they know about you? Do they know the things that make you tick? Because really what’s, what’s gonna happen is let, and I’ll, and I’ll phrase this as a hard question, right? If you had to [00:11:00] have a really tough question with somebody, or a tough conversation with somebody on your team, and I’m not talking about you, you messed up your TPS reports, I’m talking about the kind that is gonna build up somebody’s true identity in Christ that I’m talking about, that deep.

How would that go if it was like, man. Joe, you are being so prideful in this and we gotta talk about it. We gotta have this conversation today. And would they come back to you and say, you know, Brad, he just doesn’t get me. He doesn’t understand what I’m saying. He doesn’t understand what I’m going for. He doesn’t trust me.

He thinks that I’m doing this wrong, but actually I’m doing it right And actually this is Brad’s fault that this is happening. And if only he understood what was going on. Or would it be man that stung? But I know Brad and I know he’s someone that I’ve walked with a long time [00:12:00] and I know he loves me and I know he wants what’s best for me.

So I really need to listen to what he’s saying and take it to heart, you know? Which one of those two responses would you get? Because when our love for someone reflects God’s love for them. That’s that second response is the kind of response you should expect from hard conversations. And that probably seems like a lot, right?

How do you even get there? Well, I’m glad you asked because we have a tool called One-on-Ones, and now I gotta stop for a second. ’cause the first thing all you high performance leaders in the room thought when I said tool was great, a system. I can do this. I love systems and tools, and I can wrap a system around anything.

And don’t get me wrong, I’m a software guy. I can do the same thing, but systems aren’t personal and they take away from relationships. So remember that as we’re talking, that this isn’t about systems, this is about people. So what is a one-on-one? At its [00:13:00] core, it’s a block of time set aside on a calendar, on a regular cadence away from the work where you can just talk.

I get it in your heads. You’re like, and go on. But that’s it. Surely you meant to say something else. Nope, that’s it. You just talk. This isn’t at your desk or office or anything like that, and it’s not, while you’re huddled around the computer, working’s face-to-face, heart to heart, face to face, with nothing in between that gets in the way of that relationship.

This is something almost every person in our company does for about an hour once a week with their leader. Fundamentally, I think about this as catching up with a friend over coffee. I love to include coffee in my one-on-ones, and you can too, uh, but you can do a lot of creative things as long as it’s not something that gets in the way of that heart to heart.

And that’s what you gotta be careful about. [00:14:00] So, I know I said there wasn’t an and, but there’s probably a couple tips I can give you guys to do a good one-on-one. Well, first we talked about this a little bit with shoulder to shoulder, but you as the leader, cannot bring an agenda to this. You cannot, this cannot be.

Here’s the list of things I want to talk to you about. Uh, it needs to be things that are important to them. Now, that doesn’t mean if you have something important that you shouldn’t talk to that person about it, you should just don’t save it for a one-on-one. Second, you can talk about anything. This is not just work this.

We’re trying to build whole relationships with people. That means you can talk about work, you can talk about personal things, you can talk about spiritual things. You can talk about anything. Again, this is like coffee with a friend, right? Doesn’t have to be anything specific. We’re not putting rules around this.

And third, this is not therapy. I think this is something that a lot of leaders have fallen, fallen into over time, where it’s like, my job as a leader in a one-on-one is to sit back and listen to you describe all your [00:15:00] problems to me so that I can help you solve them. That’s not building relationship, that’s therapy, and that’s not what we’re doing.

And fourth, when we talk about a deep relationship, that goes both ways. And that means that you have to be open about yourself. And what makes you tick and what’s going on in your family and what you’re excited about in your kids’ lives. And often that means that as the leader, you’re gonna go first. You know, there’s this crazy time, a long time ago that I had an opportunity to go, uh, from one area of the company to another.

And I had this opportunity. There’s a great opportunity, and I took the opportunity to go talk to the three people that I was immediately leading. And I said to them, Hey, I am thinking about going to do this other thing. And I would just really love for you guys to give me feedback, uh, as your leader. And I’d love to know like what are the things that I could get better at and what, what, what they said was stunning, actually.

Uh, ’cause I didn’t expect [00:16:00] it. And they all three said the exact same thing. So, you know, it had to be true. And it, it actually stung a little bit. So, you know, it was probably right. They, each of them said individually without conferring in advance that they never really knew me. They knew that I was a high performance guy, that I love to get things done, but they never felt like they knew me personally.

That’s tough. And you know, we had been doing one-on-ones the whole time, but I hadn’t been doing them well. I hadn’t shared about those deeply personal things in my life, like the death of family members or my wife and I trying to have kids. And it wasn’t okay for me to expect that level of vulnerability from them if I wasn’t able to do it myself.

So number one, tip for one-on-ones. Just do it. All you have to do is start. You don’t have to worry about this being perfect. There’s no, there’s no judgment in this. You know, when it comes to relationship, being present is what matters the most. [00:17:00] And you know, at this point some of you’re probably thinking like this guy has completely lost his mind.

He’s completely nuts. There’s no way I could spend a week an hour with every one of my direct reports, man. I have way too many direct reports. And you know what? We agree. You have way too many direct reports. And in fact, we intentionally limit the number of direct reports that every leader in our company has to like six or seven, which is pretty low when you look at corporate America and you’re pushing 2030 in some cases.

But when a team gets bigger, we restructure and look. That’s expensive. It was fun. Gina actually asked me the other day, uh, not, not very long ago. She’s like, you know, it’d be interesting to know how much we actually spent on one-on-ones, not actually, because we were like, oh, we need to make sure we’re being efficient with our time and we need to cut that to the bone, or something like that.

It’s like, I, it would be kind of fun to know, like, and we all kind of guessed at it and I actually, uh, went and did the analysis and it was, uh, $3 million a year. Is what we spend on this. If you look, if you just look at people’s time and the coffee we spend money on, don’t worry, the coffee wasn’t that big of a, [00:18:00] a part of that, but that’s a, that actually works out to about $7,000 a year per employee in our organization is what we spend to build those relationships.

And, and the numbers actually probably a little higher than that when you take into account all the expenses that go along with it, which is actually, it actually rivals how much we give in large grants outside our organization. Which is kind of mind blowing and it’s a lot of money, but you wanna know the truth.

Having done it now, I’d spend more. There isn’t any better way to care for people than to know them deeply. So what’s the cost of not doing it? I remember, uh. A long time ago when I was still leading it, we had this young guy who came to work with us. He was a really cool guy who was super smart. He came to work for us as an IT tech, just someone going and uh, working at desktop support.

He was great at it. He was, he was good with people, he was good with solving problems. And we thought, man, we’re gonna put him into a role where he’s a project manager and what [00:19:00] a disaster that was. He was not an organized person. He was not good at managing projects. Uh, things were never, uh, on time when we were working with him.

And so we actually had, we ended up having to let him go. And it was so funny, was a few weeks later, he shows back up at the office asking to meet with his leader. Awkward. Right? Does anyone want someone that they fired a while back to come back to the office to try to talk to them? It’s like, no, you don’t.

But this is wild. He came to talk to his former leader because he was about to join the military. He had decided that he was gonna have a massive change in his life, and he needed someone to pray for him in that transition. And he knew because he knew his leader, that he could come and get that prayer from his leader, the the same person that fired him.

And that’s the level of relationship that we’re talking about here. Alright? So that’s what it looks like to know them. Let’s talk about grow them. [00:20:00] And I’m sure you have a ton of ton of questions about that, but your table coaches are here to help. But this is the so what, when it comes to knowing someone really deeply when we talk about these deep relationships, when you develop this deep relationship and you love them in a way that starts to mirror God’s love for them.

You can’t help but pray this other prayer. God, give me your vision. For the people that I lead, help me raise them up to their highest potential. You see, that’s exactly what a leader should do from a kingdom perspective. Seek out God’s highest potential for a person and help them get there because once you know them, you will naturally end up wondering how you’re gonna grow them.

Ephesians. Says, for we are God’s handiwork created in Jesus Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do. So when I’m leading someone, I’m not inventing their purpose. I’m trying to help them discover what God already put in them. But we need to be [00:21:00] really clear about something too, because this is where Kingdom leadership diverges sharply from the world.

We don’t grow people so they perform better for us. We grow people because God’s vision for them in their life matters more than what we can get from them in production. It’s for their benefit, not yours. And that changes how you lead. Because if your goal is to grow someone, you can’t just assign them tasks.

You have to give them real authority and something to own. And that gets uncomfortable because we don’t, you know, they’re not gonna do it the way you want them to do it all the time. It might be slower, it might be messier, but that’s how people actually grow. Now sometimes growth is a lot of fun, right?

Growth can be in trainings, conferences, we, we do a ton of growth where we all get to travel to conferences all over the world. I remember Ron Beaton. Bo used to be the biggest promoter of this, and he’d always come back and ask me, Hey, are you smart as a whip yet? And that was one of my favorite Beaton BOMs.

And, uh, man, they all wanted me [00:22:00] to have like the best tools and the best training. And sometimes even, uh, growth means promotions, which is super fun too. You get to take on more territory, make more money, even. And uh, I remember though the training thing, it kind of bugged people. ’cause they would ask, you know, what happens if we invest all, all this money in people and they end up leaving?

Uh, that’s a scary thing. You know, there were probably conferences that Cal and I went to that were probably, I mean, we probably spent 10 grand on a conference. I mean, Michael Horton and I went to London one time to go to a really fancy conference on software development. That was very expensive, you know, but the better question for that is what happens if we don’t and they stay.

You know, sometimes growth, it’s not that much fun. The truth is growth comes through constant refinement, and that necessarily involves pruning. Henry Cloud says getting to that next level always requires pruning and requires ending something. And you know, I think he was mostly [00:23:00] talking about the activities that we engage in and the roles that we have in companies.

But it’s also applicable to the things about our personalities and the attributes about us that get in the way of us being successful and us achieving that level to which God’s called us. You know, the fact is a lot of that refinement comes through correction, and to be honest with you, that hurts. And by the way, the world doesn’t view correction as a good thing.

It’s generally the first thing you hear before you’re being ushered out the door by security at most companies. The standard HR playbook treats correction as just documenting your case for why the person shouldn’t be here anymore. And when I talk to other leaders about correction, that’s exactly how they view it.

You know, honestly, we should start calling that view condemnation, not correction. And even the way we act when we’re being corrected is driven by this very same view, right? We tend to view corrections as an assault on our very own, closely held identities. [00:24:00] When a leader shares something with me that they think I should get better at, the sinful part of me recoils in terror, the enemy is shouting in my ear that the person telling me this wants to hurt me and they want me to be in pain, and that I’m actually good enough and I definitely didn’t do anything wrong, and it’s definitely their fault.

Does anyone relate to that? If I’ve accepted the fact that I’m imperfect and that God has a vision for a perfect me, then it shouldn’t be surprising that in his kingdom correction is a part of me achieving that vision. And as a result, I need to reframe how I think about it, both for me, the receiver, but especially me as the leader who’s giving a correction.

And that means we need to completely reframe accountability because in the accountability in the kingdom, accountability isn’t punishment, it’s love.

It’s not condemnation, it’s not control. It’s not documenting a case against someone. It’s helping them become who God made them to be. And that [00:25:00] kind of accountability is mutual. It’s not just the leader to the team member, but it’s from the team member to the leader to, you know, we all need people who love us enough to tell us the truth.

Some of us have gotten this idea that as Christians, our job is to be as nice and agreeable as possible. The idea of calling someone out for difficult behavioral traits. Ugh. Poor performance. Hmm. Maybe not. It’s almost counter-cultural, right? But it’s not. When Peter needed correction, Jesus, Jesus gave it to him.

Right? Look at this, and I tell you that you are Peter, and on this rock, I will build my church and the gates of Hades will not overcome it. Jesus is building up Peter’s identity right here, and literally this is classic Peter, like the next verse. Is, and Jesus turned and said to Peter, get behind me Satan, you are a stumbling block to me.

You do not have in mind the concerns of God, but merely human concerns. [00:26:00] Both of these are identity developing statements, right? One of them is obviously lifting them up in a very clear way, but the other’s correction. But he’s telling Peter who he’s not, and this wasn’t because Jesus was done with Peter, right?

It’s because he loved him and he knew what he wanted him to be. So when we get to an opportunity to help someone get better, God’s kingdom says that we should help them. And that’s gonna be really uncomfortable for some of us. But it’s critically important. And boy, do I wish I could stand here and say that I’ve always done this perfectly.

The truth is I rarely get it right, but in God’s kingdom. It’s upside down. It’s often the addict who’s sharing the testimony about breaking their addiction. Right? In this case, that’s true too. You know, a while back I had my own situation that, uh, required some pretty significant connection. I mean, you know how this goes, right?

You can’t be lost unless you’re found. The best way I can really think of this is [00:27:00] that I was kind of the Pharisee praising myself and speaking down to the tax collector. I was struggling with pride. Performance was everything for me. I felt like I could do anything better than anybody else. And, you know, a lot of times I did do a lot of things better than a lot of people.

I was just in a, I was in a role that I was really strong at. I was, I was very capable with finance software, other technical areas, pretty good. I’d been promoted many times and finally found myself as an executive, as the CFO of this very company. And I was wrongly assuming that my value as a person was my output as a worker.

And so this sense of pride just continued to grow and grow and grow in me. And I was excited to show when I was right and always quick to deflect criticism. And this has been a problem my whole life, actually, but it really came to a head when I had to deal with being devoted. My identity had been so out of whack that I struggled big time with the consequences of that.

I couldn’t find someone fast [00:28:00] enough to blame for that. I blamed everybody and I had become bitter and angry about it actually, and I was just playing hurt. And this was a really strange time in my life. I was having to explain to friends and family what was going on. It’s like, you know, I’m not really an executive anymore.

I’m just kind of a frontline team member. And uh, their answer to me was like, they were supportive, but they were like, man, you should just go be who you are. You’re a software guy. Just go. You should just leave that place and go be a software guy. ’cause that’s what you were supposed to do anyways with your life.

You were never supposed to be an executive or a leader or anything like that. But you know what was cool is I was lucky enough to have a different kind of friend in that moment. Kant, who you met before, was my leader for many, many years here. And in that time we developed a deep relationship doing one-on-ones and all those things, shoulder to shoulder.

And I knew he cared about me and wanted the best for me. He didn’t look at me and see pride, but he saw a broken person in need of redemption. He saw the vision that God had for me, even when I didn’t see it myself. [00:29:00] And he came to me in one of my lowest moments with an idea. The Lord had told him that we were supposed to get into building supply distribution and that a guy named Randy Wilson was supposed to lead it.

And I was like, great, that’s awesome. Now I didn’t know Randy, but I knew he was an a co up and coming leader in the company and I heard really good things and I was like, man, that’s good for Randy. But that’s what it’s, that wasn’t all Cal wanted to talk to me about. He said, the Lord had also told him that I was supposed to be right, Randy’s right hand man in this new venture, and that he felt like that message was clear and that he didn’t really understand what this would’ve meant if I had said, if I was gonna say no to this.

And I remember thinking to myself, man, aren’t, aren’t I supposed to be the guy Lord that leads this? I’m, I’m the person you’ve given all this leadership capability to and all this technical competency, like I think I’m supposed to be the guy who does this.

Well, he told me something else too. He told me that in my past work I had made it all about me, but in this new venture, it would have [00:30:00] to be different for it to be successful. That was a correction, guys. He corrected me, but if I’m being honest, I wasn’t hearing from the Lord all that well at the moment.

Pride has a way of drowning out God’s voice, but I knew Cal and I knew he heard from the Lord. And I knew he cared about me and loved me and that even though it made no sense to me whatsoever, I said yes and we got started. Elevate Building Supply was born at one of the lowest points in my life, believe it or not.

And man, in my prior life, I was really good at lots of different things. You know, I could wrangle spreadsheets with the best of ’em. Any kind of data analysis you wanted, I could do it. And I could write software without even trying. So distribution, man, that should be a piece of cake. But it wasn’t. I actually wasn’t good at that at all.

Never have been. And don’t get me wrong, I had my moments like, it’s not that I didn’t contribute anything, but most of my days were like this. I remember [00:31:00] this one time when we had to rent a forklift. It was the very first forklift we had. ’cause of course you need a for if you’re gonna get a warehouse, so you need a forklift, right?

It looks weird if you don’t. That’s what I thought. And uh, I had no clue about anything forklift related or heavy equipment. I’m a software guy. But I’m like, this can’t be that complicated. So I call the company, they, I run a forklift, they deliver it on the back of a big truck, and the guy, the truck driver gets out and he’s like, he hands me the keys to the forklift.

He undoes all the bindings. And he’s like, alright, it’s all yours. And I’m like, oh no, I’ll let, I’ll let you do it. I’ll let you unload it. I had no idea how to drive a forklift, y’all and I, it was like this back and forth. He was like, no, no, no, really, you go ahead. I’m, he was like, most people are probably excited to unload the forklift.

I was like, I’m like scared to death that I’m gonna drive this thing off the side of the truck and damage it. And like this goes back and forth for a while. And finally a guy named Sean Peacher, he shows up, he’s like, he could drive any piece of heavy equipment there is. He shows up miraculously at that time and helps me unload it [00:32:00] ’cause I’m so incompetent and unable to do it.

You know, I remember, uh, talking with Randy Wilson and we would go and we would try to convince vendors that they should sell to our brand new distribution company. And you’d have ’em out ’cause they’d wanna see you like, well, you know, I don’t, I’ve never heard of you guys before, but we’ll come out and check it out.

And I remember like, we would walk them through a completely empty warehouse because there was nothing there. We had nothing. And we’d take ’em in and I’d be telling them about all the cool things we wanted to do with this distribution center and how we wanted to carry all these different building products.

And man, I bet you at least a few of them thought, I need to call 9 1 1. This guy’s gonna murder me right here. I mean, we got laughed off the phone so many times I can’t even count. And we didn’t really find success early on. We were burning cash and only had put together maybe a few different products.

And at this point, I still had no idea what I was doing, to be honest with you. I remember trying to load a semi, unload a semi-truck by myself one time because I was the only person who actually worked there. And it was, uh, some of you have probably done this before, but in the, when it [00:33:00] rains, uh, the dock plates get wet, you can’t drive a forklift over it.

I didn’t know that. So here I am trying to do it, shouting out at the Lord, like, what am I even doing here? Why am I doing this? ’cause it doesn’t make any sense. It’s not working and I’m. I’m struggling here. I have, I can’t do this by myself,

but around that same time, we started hiring some people, and the Lord people said he sent people like Sawyer Reynolds, who’s an absolute genius when it comes to building products. He, he could tell you anything there is to know about it. He, he has this pretty natural ability to understand how they fit into an overall system.

And he said, he said, Sarah, who had experience managing warehouses. She taught me all kinds of things, how to operate a forklift, how to even sweep the floors of a, of a building, which is actually a lot more complicated than I ever even knew. And he sent Chase who could drive anything with a steering wheel and probably some things that don’t have steering wheels.

And as time went on with his team, we started to [00:34:00] gain momentum. But the initiatives that I started always seemed to fail. The only decent idea I ever had to start with was selling disc lights. I found this idea that maybe we could like buy the same disc lights that we were using in our ho in our homes today from a factory in China and use them.

And that has so far been the only product I’ve really done successfully. I’ve done a lot, and most of them we don’t all, we don’t really do anymore, uh, which is kind of funny. But Sawyer, uh, created entire product lines. I watched as he developed plumbing and cabinet lines, added vinyl flooring and others that elevate building supply still carries to this day, artificial turf, all kinds of stuff.

And every time he’d bring up a new idea, I’d think in my head, I don’t know, man, that sounds crazy. Uh, I mean, it seems like a good idea, but, uh, I also remember that like, I didn’t really have any success here. And so we were desperate. So like, why not give it a try? And over time I started to see this pattern of pe everybody around me finding success except me.[00:35:00]

The Lord showed me that that was a different way of thinking about it. Their success was my success and the less I accomplished, the more they succeeded. And this makes sense when you think about it in retrospect, but it was surprising at the time. And I remember one day in the middle of 2023, the Lord telling me that Sawyer Reynolds was actually supposed to be the guy who led Elevate and not ever me.

And that my time there was coming to an end. And I had lost everything. I wasn’t good at anything I was doing, and probably about to no longer have a job. And I remember trying, I was sitting there with my wife one day trying to explain to her what I had heard and saying like, I don’t know, like, I’m not supposed to be here, so I may have to like leave.

I don’t know. Like it’s, it’s weird, but I don’t know what to do. But that’s God’s kingdom. I was about to lose everything I’d perce previously considered to be my entire identity, but in losing everything I’d found myself and I was okay and I wasn’t even anxious about it. I knew the Lord had a plane and I was perfectly okay [00:36:00] not knowing what it was.

And I remember what Cal said about before not making it about me and this, and through several years of struggle, I finally figured out what that meant. You know what’s funny is later that year, that’s exactly what happened. Sawyer Reynolds took over the leadership of Elevate Building Supply and I left, and that’s how the story ends.

It’s not a story of how I found success. It’s a story of how the Lord found success in spite of me. And it’s a story about how you can’t find strength without weakness, and you can’t be the first without being the last. And it all happened because someone loved me enough to tell me how much of a mess I was making.

And now, honestly, I can look forward to how the Lord will continue to shape me in my work, but not for my own selfish reasons. And all that happened right here in the middle of the marketplace. This isn’t a church. It’s in the work that we do. It’s in a workplace, and that matters because if God has entrusted people to your [00:37:00] leadership, then your ministry, it’s right in front of you.

It’s your team. They’re not an interruption to the work. They are the work. So if you remember nothing else, remember this.

Remember, the team is your mission and their work is their mission. And that means that this is what it looks like. You’re gonna know them and you’re gonna grow them. And that’s it. And if a spreadsheet obsessed guy like me can do this, so can you, I.