Kingdom Leadership Workshop | October 2025
Description
What if leadership wasn’t about control—but about relationship?
In this keynote from the Kingdom Leadership Workshop (October 2025), Ty Stolp, Director at Betenbough Homes, unpacks what it means to lead with a Kingdom Style—a way of leadership that reflects the heart of Jesus in the workplace.
Through personal stories, practical examples, and Kingdom truth, Ty reveals how relational leadership transforms teams, creates legacy, and brings Heaven’s order to everyday business.
You’ll learn how to:
– Lead shoulder-to-shoulder and heart-to-heart
– Replace control with empowerment
– Build trust through authenticity and vulnerability
– Balance accountability and love
– Leave a legacy that outlasts your position Ty’s message reminds leaders that true legacy isn’t what we achieve—it’s who we empower.
Man, I am excited and honored to get to talk to you guys today. Um, just about
this concept of kingdom style. And uh, you know, when when Jesus talked
about the kingdom, he couldn’t really directly um define it. He had to say the kingdom
is like, so he’d say the kingdom is like a sewer sewing seeds or the kingdom is my one of my favorites, the kingdom is
like a hidden treasure. You know, I kind of picture like national treasure, like you got to uncover the brick and then
there’s a clue back there on where the kingdom is. Um, and so today I’m just going to share some stories and just try
to describe what this relational style of leadership is like almost like a fireside chat with Tai up here like
picture a fire and uh just going to share some stories with you guys. So first one I’m going to start out with is
my first boss. My first boss um was a high it was when I was in high school and my first boss’s name was Art. Art
was a carpenter by trade. Uh he was the Allen ISD maintenance carpenter for all
of the school districts. There’s over 40 school districts or 40 schools in the district and he did all the maintenance,
all the carpentry work. Um and Art was a little different than the other maintenance guys. Art was a hard worker.
Um the Allen ISD school of uh Allen ISD maintenance department wasn’t exactly
the pinnacle of excellence. A lot of guys took late lunches, but art was not like that. Um art taught me that, you
know, if you’ve got time to lean, you’ve got time to clean. If you guys have heard that before, I’m not sure you
could say that to a high school student these days. Actually, um times have changed a little bit, but he’s the one
who taught me that. And uh but that’s not why I remember art. Um we worked hard, we got a lot done. I remembered
Art because he actually cared about me. He cared about my aspirations. He’d had
probably 10 or 11 summer interns before I, you know, came under his care that summer. Um, but he actually cared about
me. He knew that I wanted to be an architect one day. And so he would take time to show me about how the building
and how the design of the building affected the maintenance department, affected the users. In fact, one day he actually uh got permissions from his
bosses to go take me a few hours on a tour of the new there was a new elementary school being built in the
district. And so he walked around, showed me how the building was built. Um and he actually cared about me. I want
you to think of a leader, I know probably everyone has one, that truly cared about you. Maybe before you were
the owner, before you were a senior leader in the business, someone who really it wasn’t just signing your
paychecks. He wasn’t just um you know he wasn’t just there clocking you know
helping you clock in and out um but he actually challenged you. Someone who encouraged you maybe believed in you
before you believed in yourself. Okay. Now I’m going to contrast that with another story. Uh my second boss.
So I go to college and I take on the job of a paper route. Um and I thought man
this is going to be a great job earn a little money. Um this boss was purely transactional. I did the interview with
him and it was like, “All right, you got to show up, deliver these papers by 6:00 a.m. You pick them up at 3:00 a.m. We’re
going to pay you this much for paper. I’m going to give you one day to memorize the route. I’m going to ride with you for one day. After that, you’re
on your own.” And so, it was pretty much just every everything was on my own. And honestly, I didn’t mind that. I’m super
independent, so I was like, “Sweet. I’m going to get to do this by myself.” Um, and so I was delivering these papers,
and you know, getting up at 3:00 a.m. as a college student was kind of terrible, but I was doing it. Um, took me a couple
weeks to learn the route. I was in a new town in Idaho that I’d never I didn’t grow up in. So, it was uh hard to learn
that route. And then one day it started snowing. And as a kid from Texas, I had
never driven in snow and ice. And so my truck, which is a two-wheel drive, rear
wheel drive truck, you guys already know what happens here. It gets stuck pretty
much the first snow. And so I called I called my boss. I’m like, “Hey, man. I can’t finish this route. My truck’s
stuck. I can you come help me?” And he’s like, “Hey, man. You’re on your own. I told you you had to deliver the papers. In fact, I’m going to have to dock your
pay for every paper you didn’t deliver on time.” Um, so and and then he’s kind
of telling me like, “Shouldn’t you have snow tires?” I’m like, “Oh, thanks for telling me that now after the fact.” So,
I got some snow tires, figured out the route. It wasn’t but a couple months later that I decided, you know what? This isn’t the job for me. And I called
in, gave my two weeks notice, um, and went on about my life. Um, but honestly,
leadership that’s purely transactional like that will always have a short shelf life.
But relational leadership leaves a lasting legacy. And you might notice that I didn’t say
the name of my second boss. And he might think I was trying to preserve, you know, give him some anonymity, but
actually I don’t remember his name. And it’s because that transactional
style of leadership doesn’t leave a legacy. And so, how do we think about this as a
kingdom leader? A kingdom leader’s mission is to intentionally care for their people and raise them up to their
God-given potential. To care for their people, raise them up to their God-given potential. This is how Jesus did it. You
know, one of the things that’s just wild. It just kind of blows my mind. I’m kind of a numbers guy, but if you think about what Jesus did, he walked with 12
disciples for about three and a half years. Today, there’s over 2.3 billion
people. billion with a B. I like how Cal said that earlier. Billion with a B that
professed Jesus as their Lord and Savior. And all that came from 12 disciples, three years with Jesus.
If you were going to leave this earth tomorrow, or if you had three years or a
week or a month, what would you spend your next hours, minutes, days?
How would you pass on the business that you’ve built up to this point
um to the next generation? So, we believe that the best way to do this is to know them and grow them. And
so, that’s kind of what I’m going to talk about today. I’m going to break this down. I’m going to try to give you a lot of practical tips and tools, show
you how we did it, but honestly, the Lord would have it different in your business. So, I’m going to give you
stories, but actually this is going to look different for you guys. Okay. Okay, the first first part of this
is know them. So, we’re going to break this down into two two aspects. The first is shoulder-to-shoulder. The
second is hearttoheart. And so, once again, this is how Jesus did it. Jesus walked alongside
He walked shoulderto-shoulder with them. And when we talk about shouldertoshoulder, we mean is that
you’re walking alongside them in their work. They’re doing their work. You’re walking alongside them. See, one of the biggest misconceptions for us as leaders
is recognizing what our job actually is. So, I grew up uh I I got trained as an
architect and I came into this company. I was doing architecture work, but today I’m no longer doing the drawings. I’m no
longer an architect really. I’m actually a leader of leaders. Um and so at some point I had to realize
that I’m actually in the people business now. If I spend any time fixing drawings
or designing homes or doing any of the things that I did when I first came into the company as an architect,
then I would actually be robbing uh robbing opportunities for my team members. I would be robbing them of
opportunities of growth. And so the way we say it here is the work is their mission, the team is my mission. As a
leader, the work is their mission. And the team is my mission. So I’m going to give you a quick example. We got a lot
of home builders here. So, this example is going to really resonate. Sometimes I have to explain it more. I’m going to get to fly through it because you guys
know what I’m talking about. But, we have uh we have a role in our company called builders. A lot of builders call
this a superintendent, but their job is to manage the construction and the schedule and
end of the home. When the home is built, they actually do what’s called a team walk. And this team walk, they all get
together. All the builders get together from the entire region and they blape it, right? They put blue tape on all the
things that are wrong about this home. Okay? So, they’re really trying to make sure it’s presentable for the homeowner
so that the homeowner walks in and there’s actually nothing the homeowner can find wrong with it. Um, and we have
a leader of these builders in our company. The leader of the builder team is called the CM or the construction
manager. And the CM is there at this team as well. And oftent times, if the
CM’s not careful, he will just start walking alongside them and start blue
taping everything, right? Just like the builders. But actually when the CM is doing that, he’s actually robbing
himself and them of an opportunity to grow. And so really, he might miss if he’s walking alongside them blue
tetaming, he might miss that one builder maybe is distracted by his phone. Maybe another builder is being critical of one
of the other builder work and it’s a growth opportunity for them. Maybe there’s a builder um who uh is not
seeing and not being detailed enough. They’re not finding the things that they need to find. And so he’s when he’s sitting there
alongside them, he’s actually missing the opportunity. Um, and so his his role as the CM is to make sure the team make
sure these builders can be the best builders they could be to raise them up to be the best possible builders that
they can be. And so this is what that should look like walking alongside. And we actually have a GM. So a GM of our region,
they’re going to manage a construction manager and a sales manager and a detail manager, um, warranty. And so the GM
might be here at the team walk as well. And so his job is to make sure that this construction manager is being the best
construction manager he can be to raise him up to and he’s watching that CM walking alongside them pointing pointing
things out and and looking for those coaching opportunities. But often times this is what it actually looks like
because we all just get caught up in the work, right? And so everybody is just all together. We’re all just blue taping
it. Okay, I want to bring one more example. So Corey Lusk, he’s our vice president of operations. And if you’ve
ever met Corey Lusk, he he loves being out in the field. He loves getting out
there with the sawdust and he’s he finds things wrong. When Corey Lusk is in the field, our jobs get better. It just
can’t I mean it just naturally excellence just comes up when Cory Lusk is in the field. But today, Corey Lusk
uh so we today in our company, we have uh around 60 builders companywide. We
have nine construction managers, six general managers. We have five construction coaches. All of those guys,
particularly the CMS and builders, construction coaches, their job is to make to bring excellence to the field.
So if Corey spends any time today walking homes, making them better, he’s
actually robbing over 70 70 to 80 people of opportunities to grow and learn. See,
Cory’s responsibility is to actually lead the next generation of leaders. He leads three area directors and his job
is to make them the best senior leaders that he can be. And the truth is if we fail to invest
deeply in developing the next generation of leaders then we’re not building something that can thrive beyond us. We
risk creating a business that revolves around us instead of releasing others
because true legacy is not what we achieve but who we empower. So true
legacy is not what we achieve but who we empower. you know, in the last couple of years with Rick and Ron passing,
as someone who’s been in this company a long time, um a friend of Rick and Ron’s, a an owner in this business, um
man, I can’t be more grateful for their heart and desire to model this for many
years before their passing. They were modeling, empowering others. They were always um lifting up the next
generation of leaders. The fact that the Lord told Rick to night Cal many years
before he passed allowed this this to thrive. And Cal was ready. Cal was ready because Rick had been empowering him for
years and years and years. It didn’t start in that moment whenever he realized that he was sick.
And you know, Jesus modeled this. Uh we got to see got to see Jesus working side by side um with all of the disciples
throughout once again. And so I want you to think about your role as a senior
leader or as a leader in your in your organization and I want you to think about how you’re empowering your team.
You can actually see it at this conference. So at your last table talk and maybe at the next one.
Does everybody wait to answer until the senior leader answers?
That might be a sign that you’re not empowering your team. They may be afraid to answer. So they want to hear what you have to say first. And so your job as a
leader is actually to invite that discussion to bring the discussion from everybody. But often times we want to
control it because you know what? If you’ve been a leader, maybe you started this business from the ground up.
You’ve done everything in the business, right? And so you know how it needs to be done and so we just want to control it. But God wants us to release it. In
the kingdom, it’s kind of upside down. The truth is is that you can have control or you can have growth, but you
can’t have both. And I love the way Cal modeled this. I’m going to I’m going to call him out. A
recent discussion that we had um we had a we had a serious discussion we’re
going to have with our Beaten Mahomes leadership team. Cal is the senior leader on our beaten bahomes leadership team. So, he’s the leader of our of our
team. And we were going to talk about changing the pay of one of our senior leader roles. Um, and I know that Cal
has an opinion on how this should go. And so I remember the day before this
meeting, I remember thinking, um, man, I wonder what Cal’s thinking. Like, how is he going to foster this? Because I know
he has this heart. I’ve known him for long enough. He has this heart to foster this. So, I actually asked him, I’m like, hey, how do you, man, we’re going
into a meeting like we have tomorrow. like what is your like what is your strategy for um for making sure that
everyone’s heard um and not shutting down the conversation and Cal he told me
a number of things but one of the one of the things that stuck with me is he said you know I have to fight it off every day I go into the I go into our what we
call our BH leadership team and if I think about that agenda once before I go in there I’m going to start developing
thoughts and opinions on where we should go and he said so I have to fight it off when I think about that I have to say nope I’m going to wait till we get to
the group because I want to hear what the group Um and honestly
Cal’s role in that meeting was not to just decide although once again this is
not a democracy. Cal does have the final say on the thing we were talking about but it’s not his role was to actually
watch the group make sure everyone was heard and actually coach some I was someone who got coached and I’m so
thankful and grateful after that meeting he came to me and said hey when you said this what did you mean by that? I’m
like, man, I didn’t even realize what I had said there and how that impacted the group. And so, that’s what Cal’s role,
that’s what your role as the senior leader in your business is. You know, at these table talks, really be open um to
what the Lord has to say to your team members because oftentimes he’ll speak to you through your team.
But all this can only happen if you’re truly engaged as a leader. And so, um,
you got to be walking alongside your team just like Jesus did. Everything I just said could actually be read about
in other books. It’s just kind of maybe just general good leadership principles. Um, but this next part is what is truly
unique to the kingdom, which is the heart-to-heart. See, true connection begins when we stop
focusing on what someone does and start seeking to understand who they are at the heart level. Our goal is to get to
intentionally care for the whole person professionally, personally, and even spiritually. We
want to know the real them, not just the person that comes to work from 9 to5. If you can’t name two to three things about
each person on your team, do you really know them? Two to three personal things.
So, I lead uh a handful of leaders. I’ve got four direct reports. Um, one of mine, Mitch, just came back from a 15-
year anniversary trip to Italy. It was kind of the trip of his dreams. I got to catch him Monday morning as he came
back. Um, I’ve got another leader who just moved into a new house and has a brand new baby, has two kids um, under
three, which is um, man, I remember those days. There’s a lot of work there.
And then I’ve got another leader who’s actually got two teenage daughters um, one who is off in college and one in
high school. And so I’m getting to learn the future challenges actually from that leader. But you know, here at Bebo
Companies, knowing personal things about our team members, it’s not out of the norm. And it’s because uh of a lot of
things. It’s because of this relational style that we try to foster. But one of the biggest tools I’m going to talk to you about is what we call a one-on-one.
And for us, a one-on-one is a one-hour once a week meeting on your calendar with your direct team members. It’s
relational in nature. It’s not just a catch-up meeting. A lot of people I I hear they come to the conference, they’re like, “Yeah, I do one-on- ones
with my team.” But then when you start asking about it, it’s like, “Well, we we catch up on the things that are going on and work and like, have you done this?
Have you done this?” That’s not what this is. This is actually a time set aside purely to be relational purely to
build that trust and relationship with your team members. And this will look different. I’m going to describe some
tips on how we’ve done it, things that we’ve learned, but this once again will look different in your business. So, you
need to ask the Lord about this. The first tip is that um this is about
them. So we ask we tell our team members that man this one-on-one time is about
you. What do you want to talk about? And so it’s kind of like having a meeting with an old friend at at uh you know
having coffee with an old friend that you haven’t seen in a while. Like are you going to talk about just work? Are
you going to talk about personal things? You can talk about maybe some spiritual things. You’re going to kind of catch up, right? you’re going to get to know
each other’s lives and and uh that’s kind of what these are designed to be. Um just a relational catchup time.
Tip number two is you got to schedule it. You got to put it on the calendar because nothing says what you value more
than what you have on your calendar and the and the time that you put um there.
Um, and so if you just say, if you have the thought, well, I’m going to do these one-on- ones, but you know, maybe Fridays I’ll just kind of go around the
office and just kind of like just pick people up, catch catch people as, you know, they’re working. That’s not what
this is. This is a dedicated time. Um, we actually had in one of the first
Kingdom at Works, we had a uh Kingdom podcast radio uh organization come here
and they they came here and they heard these talks from the stage and they thought, well, that’s great, but those
are like, you know, those are the leaders of the company talking at the stage. Is it really like this out there? And so they asked us, can we go
interview some of your people in the office? We’re like, sure, yeah, go interview some people. So they picked some people at random. The vast majority
of those people that they interviewed, they asked them a series of questions, but the vast majority of people, their favorite time of every week was their
one-on-one with their leader. See, we all crave the relationship with our leader. We actually want to know. We
want to trust them. We want them to trust us. And you can’t do that just in
business meetings all the time. You develop that trust over time with this connection.
Which leads me to the next tip. Regular one-on- ones over time lead to a deeper connection. This the regularity.
It’s kind of like the concept of compound interest. If any any other numbers people out there, man, I love
the comp the compound concept of compound interest. You know, you get to put $5 in every day or whatever and, you
know, avoid that cup of coffee and then you’re a millionaire one day or something. I think that’s how it works.
Um, but that’s how these one-on- ones are. You’re not going to go if you’re if you have not done this with your team members, you’re not going to go have a
one-on-one and like all of a sudden you’re getting just super deep spiritual day one. In fact, for guys like me, I’m
taskoriented. It takes years. Um, it can take years. So, I had the privilege of
being led by Corey Lusk, our VP of operations, for almost a decade, which
in our company, we’ve got a lot of movement. That’s actually kind of rare to have the same leader for that long. Um, but God designed it that way because
maybe Corey’s a task a task oriented a guy, I’m a task oriented guy. We took a little more time to develop that relationship. But it didn’t happen
overnight, right? Like those first one-on ones, yeah, they were pretty superficial. We were just talking about what we’re doing on the weekend and um,
you know, maybe some work things and um, but didn’t really go deep. But over time, they started to go deeper and
deeper and we found out that, you know, our our wives are similar and we we our wives got to know each other. We found
out that we both like golf and so we started golfing together and we’d have dinner uh with them. And so over time,
over years, it actually developed into a deep relationship to the point that one day I was actually man, it was uh kind
of at the end uh probably about three years ago, I felt like the Lord was me to potentially leave this company. I
felt like I had, you know, I had kind of been here and I had done a lot of things here and learned so much from this
company. I thought, man, maybe I’m supposed to go somewhere. And I actually told Corey about it and I said, “Man, I
want you to pray with me.” And he did. He prayed with me. And he gave me advice as a friend, as a son. And it didn’t
have anything to do with whether I should be here or not. He was giving me advice and and praying for me that the
Lord would would show me what my plan should be for uh the next kind of season
in my life. And honestly, that’s super rare to be able to share that with your leader. I
see it all the time. I interview people. I get the privilege of interviewing people to join the company and all the
time, you know, you get towards the end and you’re like, “Have you told your leader that you’re interviewing?” And 99% of the time they haven’t. And we
actually had one recently that was going to be a manager in our company starting in about a month. And one of our last,
hey, have you told your leader? And he’s like, this this person had been working with their company for 13 years. and he
said, ‘ Man, I don’t think I could tell my manager. I don’t think he would take it very well. And um and so I don’t want
to lose that if this doesn’t work out, if you don’t offer me the job, I don’t want to lose that right relationship.
And I want to and so I’m I’m I can’t tell them. And man, I’ll just tell you
after experiencing leaders that care about me, it’s lifechanging.
Share these personal things and you can go deep with your leader. I’m here today honestly because I know that my leaders
genuine genuinely care about me. Not just what I can do for the company, but about me as a person.
But once again, this doesn’t happen overnight. And it also takes vulnerability. My next
tip is real trust isn’t developed without real vulnerability. And when it comes to vulnerability, the
leader has to go first. But what does vulnerability mean? It doesn’t mean just oversharing. It
doesn’t mean just telling just telling you about everything about your life, right? And so I’m going to break this
down a little bit. The vulnerability actually comes from the Latin root words vulnus and abilis. Volus means to wound
and abilis means able. So literally when you’re being vulnerable, you’re actually opening yourself up for attack.
When I shared with Corey about potentially the Lord calling me somewhere, I was opening myself. I was
being vulnerable with him. And the only reason I did that was because he had been vulnerable with me time and time
again. He shared about his family, about his struggles that they were going through. Um, and all kinds of things o
over time over the years to where I felt comfortable doing that.
And you know, honestly, when I first became a leader here many years ago, I didn’t do this very well. I was actually
trying to be like the leader that the company wanted. And I was striving in a way to, man, always I just wasn’t
honest. I wasn’t genuinely authentic with my team members and the relationship showed early on. I had to
kind of learn this the hard way. Okay, that brings me to my last tip, which is that God doesn’t do easy bake
recipes. Every one-on-one is going to be different, right?
God has created us all uniquely. And so, this isn’t going to look the same for every one of your team members. Um, some
of them you’re going to go might maybe shallow for many years. Some of them you’re going to get deep quickly. I’ve gotten deep quickly with many leaders um
over the years as well. Others you might get into spiritual philosophical discussions, which kind of
brings me to a question of how and when do we invite the Lord into these one-on- ones? Do you, you know, pray for them
openly right there? Do you start talking about spiritual stuff right away? As a leader, we want to be vulnerable, but we
also know that, you know, here at Beatenbow, we don’t invite just Christians to join. And we would have it no other way. That’s not how Jesus did
it, right? And so, we have many people that we lead that are non-Christians or they’re at different places in their
faith. Maybe they’re Christian, but they can’t hear from the Lord yet or maybe they um you know, they’re they’re just
everybody’s at different places in their faith, right? And so, when do you bring that in? And honestly,
I don’t have an answer for you. I have one little answer, which is you have to ask the Holy Spirit because this is
about discernment. Relationships aren’t you can’t put them in a box. There’s no like, you know, there’s no three-step
plan for this. But you just have to ask the Holy Spirit for when you should bring that up. But you should pray for your people. Jesus did that. He prayed
for his team. Um he had to go off and pray and then come back.
But you remember the goal of this relationship is not so that you can save people because you don’t save people.
Only God saves people. Like that’s not what we’re trying to do here. I’m going to tell you another story about my
friend Robbie Moon. Uh he was a leader in our company. He’s actually a construction coach today. Um but he was
our permitting manager. He was managing the permit department years ago. And he had a team member named Dom. And Dom was
on the architecture team. Uh he was on the permitting team, but he was going to architecture school. And so Dom came and
he came under Robbiey’s care. Robbie got to know him through oneon ones. They’re working together. And one day after a
few months, Robbie had just kind of started to notice a pattern with Dom. And and he confronted him about it. And
Robbie said, “Dom, I don’t feel like you’re giving your all. Just doesn’t seem like you’re giving everything to
this job, even to school. Like doesn’t seem like you’re passionate about it.” And Dom immediately was like, “Man,
you’re right. I’m actually not passionate about it. I don’t even really like architecture. I actually wanted to
be a police officer, but my parents thought, man, it’d be better if you went to college and got a job, got a degree
and then a job in that field. And so I became an architect so that I can make my parents proud.
And so in that moment, Robbie all of a sudden that vulnerability allowed connect with him. And Robbie got to walk
with him. you know, we didn’t, you know, there was no consequences of that meeting right then, but we but Robbie
got to slowly walk with him and he got to encourage him and say, “Hey, you should you should follow, you should talk to your parents about that. You
should have that conversation.” And they got to play it out together. And one day, Dom got the courage to actually
leave. And so, we did a sendoff for him. He got to leave to go to the police academy. He went to Albuquerque.
And, you know, most businesses, that’s where the story would end. And that’s where my story would end right here. I would stop talking about it. But
actually, that’s not where the story ended for Robbie because Robbie cared about Dom. So, he kept calling him. So,
he would call him at their one-on-one time every week. They might miss a couple weeks here and there. And so, he
would catch up with him. How’s it going at the account academy? How are things going? And so, he learned that one day
uh Dom shared with him that he had a girlfriend. One day Dom shared with him that he had passed the police academy
and Robbie got to celebrate with him that he was official he was official police officer in the Albuquerque Police Department. One day he got to learn that
uh Dom and his girlfriend were starting to go to church. They had found a church. They were starting to go to church. And then finally one day uh
Robbie learned from Dom that Dom got saved and gave his life to Christ at his
church in Albuquerque. See, Dom wasn’t a Christian when he was here. He wasn’t a Christian when he
left. But Dom could not help but feel the love that Robbie Moon had of him his entire
time here and after he left. And that’s the way God works. If we’re
obedient with the prompting as leaders, Rob, we had a prompting, right, to share that, hey, how come I’m not seeing you
give all your passion? If we’re obedient and if we care about our people, we’ll see the we’ll we won’t always know or
see the fruit, but it will be there. You know, I was telling the group um
kind of the prayer team was before this talk and we were talking about hearing from the God. You guys were just in the
hearing from God session. And you know, sometimes you don’t hear from God right away.
We may not even running this conference, even at your tables, we may not get to
know that. We may not like we may not get to see the fruit of it, but God is
speaking to each and every one of us. I know for my life, God was speaking to me well before I knew that he was speaking
to me. And this is how Jesus designed it. Um John 15:15, “I no longer call you
servants because a servant does not know his master’s business. Instead, I have called you friends. For everything that
I learned from you, my father, I have made everything I learned from my father, I have made known to you.” Jesus
modeled this. Being a kingdom leader is not about managing a team. It’s about building friendships. It’s about caring
for people. It’s about knowing the whole them. Um, so at this point you might be
thinking, man, this sounds great. I want to get to know my team better, but I can’t. I have
like 30 reports. Like, there’s no way I can do a one-on-one. I’m just not going to know all 30 of these people. Um, and
I would say, you’re right. You have too many direct reports. You may have to restructure your
organization to make this happen. You may have to prioritize people over
profit. We believe here that a leader can only
deeply engage and connect with around five to seven people on a weekly basis. Beyond that, we restructure. That may
not be what the Lord does in your business. Um, and that is more expensive. It does cost us something.
But you know, I bet many of you guys as owners of businesses and leaders, I bet you give to worthy of worthy nonprofit
organizations probably in your communities around the world. And that is a great thing. But do you think God
cares more about the orphanage in Africa or the people in your company?
Or does he love them equally? And so investing in this, invest in your
people. Okay, I can see I’m losing a few of you. I’ve got a few minutes left. I want to
get to grow them. Um, and share a few quick things about about how we how we
think about growing them. You know, we talked earlier about a leader’s mission is to get to know and care for your
people so that you can raise them up in order to raise them up. Um, you have to
be growing them, right? You have to see things in others that they don’t see. And this is, um, I love the story of
Jesus when he met Simon Peter because he, right, they’re fishing. You guys probably have heard this story, right?
Simon Peter’s fishing. They’re not catching anything. Jesus tells them to throw the net on the other side and
they’re like, “What are you talking about? We’ve been here all night. There’s no fish over there.” Um, and then of course he pulls in all the fish.
But the thing I didn’t see about this story, the first probably hundred times I read it was this little verse right
here. When Simon Peter realized that what had happened, he fell to his knees before Jesus and said, “Oh Lord, please
leave me. I’m such a sinful man.” Instead of being excited about the fish
and being excited about being in the presence of Jesus, he was like, “I’m not worthy of this. I don’t deserve to be
with Jesus. I’m just a fisherman. I don’t deserve to be with Jesus.” But that’s not what Jesus saw. Jesus didn’t
see Simon as a fisherman. He saw him as the rock, the one who would one day
establish his church. And so Jesus saw something in Simon Peter that he didn’t
see in himself. And that’s often times what we have to do if we’re going to grow them up. We have to cease see it in
themselves. We have to be looking for those opportunities and to and help them get there. That’s our job as leaders.
Okay. So, one of the keys, we’ve got two keys I’m going to go over here for grow them. One is that when we’re growing
them, it’s got to be for their benefit, right? Um it can’t be for ours. And I’ll
tell you how this company has impacted me. So, when I came here, um I came here as a part-time intern in uh June of
2009. They actually told me that uh my internship would be up in August. And so, I was like, “Sweet. I’m going to get
some experience for the summer.” Um and I just never got the memo that I was supposed to leave in August. Um here I
am 16 years later. Um, but honestly, uh, when I first, you know, was here,
they offered me part-time job to keep, you know, just really to fix up the plans and I was going to school at the
time. So, it really wasn’t like a career decision for me. But two years in, I was getting ready to, it all of a sudden
became like, do I want to stay at this company, this beaten bow homes, homebuilding company. Um, and they
offered me a full-time job. And I had to think about it because my dream at that time was to become a licensed architect.
A little bit about that backstory. Um to be to be a licensed architect, you have to have three things. You have to have a
master’s degree in architecture. You have to have a year under a super under a of supervision under a licensed
architect. And then you have to pass some tests. So I knew that staying here
there was no licensed architect at Beanbo Homes. In fact, there wasn’t really a need. By the way, in the architecture industry, you don’t need a
licensed architect for residential work. And so, there’s really not a need for Beenbo Homes to have a licensed architect. And so, I knew that by
staying here, I was kind of either delaying or maybe even giving up on my dream of becoming an architect. And so,
I had this real decision. I was like, well, but but I saw the love. I knew Rick I knew Rick and Holly cared about
me as owners of the business. I was one of 60 employees and I knew that they cared about me after two years in. And I
knew that my leader cared about me. And so I thought, you know, I can learn something from here. I’m going to delay this idea of becoming an architect. I’m
going to commit to it. Um, and that’s one of those times I about talked about earlier where the Lord was speaking into my life. I didn’t know it. I didn’t
recognize it as the Lord at the time, but the Lord was telling me, “You need to be here.” So, I stayed and um it was
a few years later after uh doing one-on ones and getting to know my leader that I’m telling him about my dream. Yeah,
I’m kind of I’m really, you know, I’d like to be an architect one day, but I just can’t really do that right now. And
my leader started asking me more questions about, well, what’s required? And so, at the end of it, my leader, uh,
Brett at the time, he actually was like, man, I want you to be able to get it, get your license while you’re here.
Like, I’m going to go, we’re going to go see if we can figure this out. And so, he goes to Rick Beatenbo. And turns out
that Rick Beatenbo’s roommate in college was a licensed architect. What are the odds of that? and he was
practicing in Dallas and a great friend of Rick’s obviously. And so once Rick heard about this, he said, “Yeah, we can
get let me talk to my my uh roommate Randy.” And so got got hooked up with Randy Barnett and I actually got to get
my license. And so the truth is is that did any of that benefit Holmes?
It really didn’t, but it benefited my life. You know what God was doing in my
life? God was keeping me here so that I could have a relationship with him. Because see at that time I was Christian
but I didn’t have a relationship with the Lord. I didn’t believe you could hear from the Lord honestly even though the Lord was speaking
through me and the Lord was telling me to okay you need to stay here and then later on the Lord actually provided this
opportunity the odds of the founders’s roommate being an architect. It’s not
coincidence. The Lord is working through my life. Okay. At this point in the conversation,
you might be thinking, “This is just all unicorns and rainbows here at Beenbo.” Like, we literally are skipping through
the halls, holding hands. Um, and that’s what we do all day. I don’t know how homes get built. Um,
but honestly, this is not quite like that. Um, this is a high accountability
environment. Um, we hold each other accountable. And the truth is is that
truly loving someone means that you will hold them accountable. Think about this. Who has kids in the room? Show of hands.
Okay, we got a lot of Okay, you guys are gonna relate. Um I’m fairly new in the game. I’ve got a 5-year-old and a
nine-year-old. Um but when you have kids, you know, my So one of my sons, he’s learning how to
play chess right now, right? Uh and so I’m teaching him how to play chess. We get to play games together. Um, and do I
ever sit around and worry one day, is he going to beat me in chess? No, I don’t. That’s ridiculous, right?
It’s ridiculous that I would worry about him beating me in chess. I’m looking forward to the day that my son can beat
me in chess. And so, why is it any different with your team?
Why are you worried that one day they might become better than you?
Maybe it’s because you actually love your kids. And so you might need to ask the Lord,”
give me a heart for my people.” If you actually care about something someone, you’re going to want them to pass you
up. You’re going to want to give them everything you have to make them the best person they can be.
And once again, this is how Jesus did it. Rather speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into him
who is the head Christ. It’s about speaking truth. Okay, another another story. We’re going
to go back to the glory days. Um, this is when I was uh in college and I loved
raetball. That was my sport in college. Um, these were really the the glory days
for me. I like to talk about it a lot. Um, but
this was a powerful lesson in my life came in around this time. It was right before I got to beaten actually. Um, and
I was the I had uh so I love raetball so much that I started the the club sport at Texas Tech. And so we had a group,
here’s our team here. We had a group of us there. Um, we would go around to tournaments and we just had a lot of fun
together and we got to compete together. Um, and there was a job. I was looking for a job uh my senior year in college
uh of my undergrad. And I was looking for, you know, just some work. And I knew the uh sports club, the head of the
sports clubs for Texas Tech. This is the guy that I had worked with as the sports club president. And so he was hiring an
assistant. And so I applied for this assistant role. I was like, man, this is the perfect job. Like I’ve been working.
Guy’s name is Jonathan. He was the head of the sports club sports clubs at Texas Tech. I was like, I really like
Jonathan. He likes me. In fact, he had actually of all the sports clubs, he had given uh me the award for the best
sports club president the year before. So like out of the 30 sports clubs. So when this job opening came up, I
thought, I am a shoe in. Like I’m literally like Jonathan likes me, I like him. This is going to be a fun job. So I
go and I I interview for this job and I’m waiting. I get the call the next day and I’m thinking he’s going to be
telling me that I got the job and he’s like, “I’m sorry, Ty. I’m going to tell you that you didn’t you didn’t get the job.” And I was like, “What? How?” Like,
who? I just first of all, a lot of pride that I’ve dealt with in my life. Um, but at that moment, the pride just welled up
and I’m like, “How did I not get this job? I don’t understand this.” And I had
the courage after thinking about it one night, I called him the next day. I said, “Jonathan, you got to tell me like what?” like I had enough relationship
with him that I thought he would tell me like tell me why I didn’t get this job. And he said, “Ty,” he said, “I didn’t
think you wanted it. You didn’t seem like you cared at all.” Like you had no emotion at all. Just didn’t seem like
you really wanted this job at all. And so my immediate response is, “Well, I
applied, which means that I wanted it.”
No, but I learned I learned a lesson that he told me, you know, it’s something I had struggled with my whole
life is showing emotion, showing passion. I wasn’t good at that. And
honestly, he didn’t see any of that in the interview. And he thought, I don’t want someone who’s just going to come in here and do the work. I want someone who’s going to be passionate about
growing our sports clubs. And so, he made the right decision, not hire me. And you know what? That lesson, I
actually had an interview with a little company called Beatenbo Homes about two months later. And I took that lesson to
heart and I was able to go into that interview saying, “Man, I’ve got to I’ve got to amp up the energy a little bit so that they know that I’m excited about
this opportunity.” And so the truth is that that was
critical lifegiving lifechanging feedback that Jonathan gave me. And
every leader I’ve had here has done that like regularly uh throughout my time here. And it’s why
I’m able to stand up here. Like I’m standing up here because I’m standing on the shoulders of all these leaders who
have had the courage to tell me what I’m doing wrong and what I could be better at.
And the truth is that passive leadership, the kind of leadership where you don’t tell the truth, is cowardice.
As leaders, we can’t do that. We can’t walk past it. We owe it to our team members. If you
really love them, you will tell them. If you really care about your team members, you will help them go to the next level.
Okay, that’s it. Know them and grow them. Um, one last little tip that I’ll give you
as I walk away from here. The biggest barrier that I feel like that we all
have to making this a reality is you’re going to go back and you’re going to be
busy because if the devil can’t make you sin, he’s going to make you busy.
And you can either keep the business moving forward and you can do that deal or get one more sale
or you can invest in the relationships on your team and in your companies
and leave a lasting legacy. Thank you guys.
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