David:

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

David:

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

Stan:

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

David:

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

David:

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

Stan:

[1:30] Sure. So I had a great career with what would have been the old ITT Corporation, which spun into a couple different companies along the way. So my education is engineering. My faith is to follow Christ. And as I retired in 2014, I did a little consulting. And as I was working with businesses, I saw the business leaders struggling. And I also felt a pull from God to get involved with Christian businesses. So I began to look for opportunities to engage with Christian businesses. I engaged with the Faith Driven Entrepreneur Group. It's a great group. If you don't know them, check them out. And I ran into a person who knew a person who called me up and said, Hey, man, we need to talk about C12. And I said, well, what is a C12? So from that kind of quick journey of doing some external consulting, seeking God's direction and networking in a Christian business environment, I found myself in a place where I get to learn about C12.

David:

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

Stan:

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

Stan:

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

David:

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

Stan:

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

David:

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

David:

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

Stan:

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

David:

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

Stan:

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

David:

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

Stan:

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

David:

[8:28] Gotcha.

Stan:

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

David:

[8:56] Yeah.

Stan:

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

David:

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

Stan:

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

Stan:

[10:54] I have to say one of the coolest things that I heard about last, well, I guess two years ago when Roe v. Wade was struck down, one of our C-12 members said, hey, I am pro-life and I want the world to know that I'm pro-life. So what he did for his employees was if you're adopting a child, you're going to I'm paying for it.

David:

[11:16] Wow.

Stan:

[11:17] If our insurance doesn't cover all of the costs of your childbirth, give me the rest of the bill. I'm paying for it. I want my team to know that I'm pro-life. And that's the kind of fun stories that you hear. And when you're in a C12 community, you get encouraged and you get challenged by that.

David:

[11:36] Oh, yeah. And that's the whole thing, I think, from Hebrews 10, you know, spurring one another on to love and good deeds. It's like, oh, cool. Look at that. I never even thought about that. I know there's one of my guests from Rick Johnson. They have pieces of paper, big printing paper, and they will tear off a sheet and then write answers to prayers on the sheet. If anybody and his employees can write it up there. When it's filled up, they take it down and they've lined a wall in their business full of all these answers to prayers because they've been doing this for years and years. And so when they give tours, they'll walk by this wall and they're like, what's that? It's like, those are all answers to prayer for people in this company that God has answered. And it's just a living testimony of that. And it's really neat, just different ideas you find.

Stan:

[12:29] Yeah, no, that's super cool because I know one of my members, he has, so in the break room, it's like, okay, prayer requests go up on the fridge, right? So, you know, if anybody's got something going on, they can make it visible. And then this particular member does have a Bible study. So, you know, they can kind of touch all those prayer requests, at least formally, when they have their Bible study meeting. But, yeah, it's really interesting to just see so many different things. You know other things you can do even in your community right you can volunteer to host some of your your near peer or your near physical peer businesses right host them for events and use the opportunity to you know just weave some of your faith into the conversation and the presentation, and and one really easy way to do that is that businesses can if you own the business you can write the mission statement. You can write the vision statement, right? So you can put words in there like, I'm here to run my business to honor God. And maybe the guy next door doesn't know that's in your mission or vision statement. But when you host a meeting, you can kind of do a little talk and you can highlight that. It just gives you an opportunity to present your reach. Maybe you're having a shared picnic or something, but at the same time, you're able to share your faith as you communicate what your business is all about.

David:

[13:54] Those are all really good ideas. And that's what I want to encourage with my listeners, help encourage them to use their business for the glory of God, to talk about them. You've worked with businesses then for a little while. What are some common mistakes that business owners may make when they start going down this path? Is there things that they do that maybe they shouldn't be doing? Or what do you see?

Stan:

[14:19] I think the biggest mistake is hesitating to get started. Because the challenge for everyone is, my people are here, I'm staffed to run my business. What if seven of them decide they want to go talk to the chaplain on Friday morning? It's like, how am I going to function? Right? And so there's a little bit of angst around that. But I think those that have done it have found that the trepidation of getting started is really just maybe them second thinking, is God really in this? Because when we turn our business over to God and allow Him to run the business for us, He's not going to shut down the factory with too many people going to see the chaplain on Friday morning. He's going to help you manage your way through that.

David:

[15:15] Yeah, the chaplain I spoke with basically said, we know you're here to work, so we'll just schedule a time during your breaks or lunch or maybe outside of work so we're not interrupting your work. But I also know one of my, the same guy, he allows, he has a chaplain and he has three to four hours a week that he basically gives to his employees for Bible studies and prayer meetings and this and that. But it didn't all start at once, but it's just one thing led to another thing. So, yeah, that's good for all these different ideas.

Stan:

[15:49] Another thing I just mentioned briefly on the chaplain. So corporately, at a national level, we partner with corporate chaplains and marketplace chaplains. And one of the benefits of that is they have their network of all the other chaplains that they can connect with. So when we have a member who wants to consider a chaplain and they go, here's my situation. Here's how I work my workforce. They can go back and say, yeah, we've got 17 people that have a similar situation. Here's how they do that. Here's how it's been effective for them. So they have a wealth of experience that they bring from serving across the country as they serve businesses. So it's a really good relationship between us and C-12 encouraging our business owners and then the corporate chaplains connecting with the business owners to do that, hopefully, faith talk. And I would be remiss if I didn't mention, we've had some really cool salvation stories that have come out of some of the meetings with our chaplains, just even here in Fort Wayne, not to mention, I'm sure there were hundreds of cool stories around the country. But we had a member who had a young lady who was working for him. She was pregnant. She was probably on her last day at work because she was going to take pregnancy leave and then probably not come back to work.

Stan:

[17:12] She went to Bible study and accepted Christ. And when you see that kind of reaction, you go, this is all worth whatever the energy it was that it took to get to here. So it's really fun to see the fruit.

David:

[17:27] Yeah, that's neat. And that's cool that you can purposefully use your business, intentionally plan saying, how can I help them not just physically, emotionally, but spiritually as well? So, yeah, because when it comes down to it, when I look at business as a whole, it's nice to make lots of money, but the important part is, are you bringing people to Christ? Are you telling people about Jesus? Because you're not going to take the money with you. You're not.

Stan:

[17:56] Our mission is to change the world by advancing the gospel in the marketplace, and that's really why C12 exists, and that's why we focus on helping the Christian business owners build a great business for a greater purpose. Because if God stewards everything, that's our time, our money, our business, our family. I mean, it's all right there.

David:

[18:21] Yes. Just real quick, you mentioned the caring matrix of physical, emotional, spiritual. How do you do that with your vendors or your customers? You were talking mostly about your employees, but how would you do that with them?

Stan:

[18:38] So it's an opportunity to, for instance, if you have a supplier's conference, kind of the same thing like I was talking with, you're having a picnic with the business next door, right? You can kick off your vendors meeting. You may be bold enough to open your meeting with prayer, you know, but if you've got faith-based statements in your mission and vision, you know, you can clarify that to them and you can explain to them, this is who we are. This is how we work. And, you know, oftentimes that's an opportunity to just set the integrity level for how you want to have in business relationships. And all your suppliers aren't going to care, but they're going to appreciate the fact that you're telling them this is how we are going to work. And so that's just one way, but it's really just communicating to the supplier base. Maybe invite them to your, some of them to your Christmas party where they get another chance, you know, at a dose of your faith. So it's really just extending out, you know, and, you know, if I go one step down caring matrix, it's out into the community so how do you how do you get your faith outside your street into your greater geography and some of the members will take they'll give people paid time off to go volunteer.

Stan:

[19:55] Or they'll you know collectively as a business they'll pick a charity a faith-based charity that they want to give to so there's just different ways that you can extend what you're doing as you live your faith in your business and it kind of goes down like i mentioned a bit ago that Taking the small steps. Once you take the small steps, you start seeing or your employees start seeing the benefits and they want to do more. It's not just you now, the business owner. It's the employees going, hey, this feels good to help people. We want to help more people.

David:

[20:30] That's very neat. Very neat. So how can my audience find out more about you if they wanted to work with you in a C12 group or groups around the country?

Stan:

[20:40] Sure. So there's two ways. If you wanted to find out what's going on here in Fort Wayne, you can go to C12FortWayne.com. Our national website is JoinC12.com, and you can find facts and all kinds of information there about the C12 business forums.

David:

[20:58] All right. Sounds good. So you've talked about a lot of different things today,

David:

[21:03] mostly about spiritual and helping your business grow and honor God. What is one thing you'd like our listeners to take away that they could start doing today in their business?

Stan:

[21:16] Well, the biggest thing I would say is start your day with prayer. You know, when we, we all can be challenged by that. You know, we like to encourage our members to take the first hour of the day in the word. And that's where you get yourself grounded. That's where you get yourself tuned in. If you believe that God owns your business, it might be a good idea to talk to the owner once in a while. And so just starting your day off in a conversation with God and not being afraid to go to him with questions about what's going on. That would be the great starting point, I think.

David:

[21:53] Okay. Very good. Thank you so much for your time and your encouragement today. And you guys remember to check out the show notes for an outline of what we've talked about. There's going to be the links in the show notes. Remember to sign up for our newsletter because that's a great way to communicate and make this show better for you. And that's all for now. Trust you've been inspired to redeem your business, redeem your time, and fight back and use it for God's glory.