Join Sebastien and Jesse on an in-depth, hands-on, and practical dive into Christian entrepreneurship. Explore why business is important to God, if you are entrepreneurial material, how to get started with no money and how to share the gospel through your business.

GYC 2019: By Many Or By Few

<p>Join Sebastien and Jesse on an in-depth, hands-on, and practical dive into Christian entrepreneurship. Explore why business is important to God, if you are entrepreneurial material, how to get started with no money and how to share the gospel through your business.</p>

<p>Free sharing permitted under the Creative Commons <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/">BY-NC-ND 3.0 (US)</a> license.</p>

Generation. Youth. Christ. (GYC)

God Means Business

Sebastien Braxton

Jesse Zwiker

Are You Entrepreneurial Material?

This message was presented at the GYC conference by many or by few in Louisville, Kentucky.

For other resources like this, visit us online at GYCweb.org.

I was not expecting as many people based upon the introduction of our seminar, but I'm happy to see your faces.

My co-presenter will be joining me shortly, but allow me to introduce myself for those of you who do not know me.

I used to collect meal tickets about 16 years ago.

And then I became the first speaker liaison for GYC.

So we created a position to take care of the speakers.

And then I became the general vice president.

But most importantly, as relevant to this seminar, is I am an entrepreneur.

So I've raised over about $4 million for different businesses.

There's no mute on that, just so you know.

I've worked in app development, UI, UX, I've worked in consulting, business consulting, financial consulting, and also I'm trying to think of all the other different things.

FinTech, financial technology, credit industry, and now I'm focused on corporate wellness and mentorship.

Right now, I just recently launched, about 4 months ago, an online spiritual mentorship program designed for people who are trying to reach certain professional goals or start a business, but they want to be mentored by someone that agrees with their personal values.

I realize, as you'll go through this seminar, you'll realize how I came to that realization in starting that business and how quickly it's already grown to about 3, 000 to 4, 000 in revenue every month.

And I just signed a contract for 15, 000 2 weeks ago.

And so in those things, it grows really quickly.

And it's not about the money, because obviously I'm not in it for the money and that will become clear as well.

But in that sense I will be hoping to transition this for Jesse and I, our long-term vision and our passion is to really revive a mindset of independent thinking among God's people.

This idea that we are constantly fighting, as we should, for religious liberty, constantly fighting for people to get Sabbaths off, constantly fighting for people to work in a place where they feel like their boss agrees with their personal values and you don't have to argue for time with your family.

In all these different circumstances, it is because we are working in areas and for organizations that do not espouse our values.

We are becoming Daniels in Babylon, Josephs in Egypt, Esthers in Persia, trying to figure out how to navigate that and those are some great success stories we don't hear about all the ones that were not so successful.

So that's kind of my background, and I'll tell you more about that mentorship program later, but I want to give Jesse an opportunity to kind of introduce himself, talk to us about Hive Camp and all those other awesome things that you do.

I'm excited to be here together with Sebastian.

I'm very excited about the things that we're going to be hearing that he's going to be sharing and I'll be sharing a little bit.

Just very quickly, a little bit my background.

I was born and raised in Switzerland, so this is why I have a little bit of an accent.

And when I was 18, I actually, both my parents are teachers, So I had no entrepreneurial background whatsoever.

But at 18, I got thrown out into the Philippines to do an evangelistic campaign.

And I got thrown as a drummer into the Philippines to do this campaign.

And I started preaching and I started getting so excited about it that I wanted to get baptized with them because I wasn't baptized yet during this time.

And then all I wanted to do was give up my other stuff that I was trying to get into, which was drumming, for mission work.

So I went to Honduras to work as a missionary to start a project there and while starting a project in the jungle, I realized that everything that I was doing was essentially entrepreneurship.

And the more entrepreneurially I thought, the more missionary success I had.

And so I realized, oh man, entrepreneurship and mission work are actually 1 and the same thing.

And so that was for me the basis to then go out and start.

I had the privilege of starting a number of non-profits and also some for-profits, a translation company and then a technology company.

And so now and I started studying all of this stuff online mostly, reading books, tons and tons of, I don't read, actually.

But anyway, so got into that and now I'm working part-time for the GC in this technology project to crowd translate Ellen White's writings into 55 different languages.

And amongst the 1 of the big things is we started Hive Camp based on this experience.

Hive Camp is basically a startup community helping missional entrepreneurs to get started.

So we help people to incubate their projects, to make an impact, a social but also a spiritual impact while being profitable, amen?

So that's a little bit about our background.

So, I'm going to ask you to just jump into it.

I want to start with a quote from the World Economic Forum.

What we don't realize is that where our church began, the world is just now catching up to.

And unfortunately, we've gotten away from those roots.

And so this is what the World Economic Forum says, it says, societal change agent, talking about entrepreneurship, essential for developing the human capital necessary for building the societies of the future.

They continue by saying, it is not enough to add entrepreneurship on the perimeter.

It needs to be at the core of the way education operates.

My second favorite book by Ellen White is the book Education.

I think I've read it maybe 10 times, maybe more, but I love the book.

And it wasn't until I got into entrepreneurship training and consulting and working with business owners and people trying to start a business that I realized these ideas I was telling people I'm quoting things from the book education that success depends less upon genius and more upon the op the right use of the opportunities given.

That if we are truly experiencing true education, we will become masters and not slaves to what?

Circumstances, which is fundamental to an entrepreneurial mindset.

So a lot of people who have a ministry idea, a business idea, may not realize that success is often grounded in your and my experience in true education, which the World Economic Forum is saying this needs to be at the heart of education in order to really get society to where we want.

So they say entrepreneurship and education increases societal resilience, Individual growth, increased academic engagement, and improved equality throughout the world.

Because entrepreneurship is not the story of Mark Zuckerberg.

It is not the story of somebody with a rich uncle, Or somebody had a trust fund that they inherited.

Like Donald Trump comes and says, oh, I had a million dollars when I started.

You can give a fool a million dollars and he'll waste it all.

I raised a million dollars for a startup, haven't seen 1 ounce of profit.

Because I didn't understand the things that I'm gonna talk about, and Jesse and I are gonna cover in this seminar.

So I'm telling you the same thing that you know, 1 poet said.

People say, oh you know, you are so wise.

And he says, well, unfortunately, good judgment comes from bad judgment.

I made a lot of bad decisions to learn the things that I'm telling you.

And I have horror stories for every single principal.

When you think about schools right now, Adventist schools, non-Adventist schools, the problem is equally the same.

Notice this graph here from Gallup in 2016.

From fifth grade all the way to 12th grade, notice the student engagement decrease.

The closer you get to finishing school, the less engaged you are.

From fifth grade, they're very engaged in school and in learning.

And the only reason it goes up in 12th grade is because a lot of people drop out, so the percentage goes up.

So don't be fooled that, oh, it's just senioritis, you know, I just gotta finish.

Is your Idea Feasible?

The Father in heaven, Lord, please guide us now as we discuss these business concepts, and especially these ideas that we have in our mind, Lord, help us to know whether these are your ideas or they're just our ideas.

And Lord, we want to lay them at your feet to check the feasibility and to check whether this is something that you want to use to build up your kingdom.

And so we ask for that special connection with the Holy Spirit now for this next hour.

Can the thing thrive that you're thinking about?

And we're gonna go through basically the 10 main questions that are important to answer before and while starting any mission project or business idea for me when I say business I mean a Ministry as well right when I say ministry I mean business as well.

Because any avidness business if it isn't a ministry it's not worth my or your time.

Time is short, we're about to go home, don't waste your time just doing business for business sake.

By the way, Sebastian said something very important.

If your main focus is to make money, then you're not going to be in business very long, right?

This is very important but let me tell you the other extreme.

If making money is not 1 of your top 3 priorities then you will not be in business either.

So it shouldn't be the highest priority, it shouldn't.

The mission is always the highest priority.

But if it isn't 1 of the 3, you know, history tells us that you're not going to be in business very long.

As a basis, Let me just go through real quick my personal story.

I already mentioned a little bit at the beginning.

I got offered a scholarship to go to Berkeley College of Jazz in Boston to study drumming and then thankfully the Lord sent me on this mission trip.

I didn't even know what I was going to be doing and then suddenly the pastor said, hey you are actually preaching an evangelistic campaign and so I ended up preaching I already was used to being on stage so so anyway through that I got so excited about mission work that the last thing I want to do was to go study drumming afterwards so I wanted to become a missionary so I ended up being in Honduras working with my buddy here we were 19 years old this is by the way this is me I was a little bit thinner back then a little bit less hair in Honduras and we we started a number of projects there and I and I had no no idea how to do any of this I was I was 19 I didn't know what it means to start a nonprofit or start a for-profit I had no idea that you had to do a legal paper for this, you know.

But we started then a number of things, a lifestyle center and a mission school and then a elementary school.

Now the elementary school has like a hundred and 40 kids.

And then a number of enterprises, a tamarind plantation, 1, 600 trees, you know, we created a processing plant, selling juice, you know, selling concentrates, a juicing company.

So as I got into all of this And I started realizing that the more I did this, the more successful I would be, or the ministry would be, in reaching people with the gospel.

Because suddenly we had 20 employees in the Tamarind business.

And with those guys, guess what we did for morning devotionals?

We studied the 28 fundamental beliefs with all of our employees, right?

So we started realizing, oh man there's a lot of potential here And I came from a mindset of this poor missionary concept.

So I thought, no, the poorer I am, you know, the more spiritual I am, and the more people will also have compassion on me and give me funds to do the project, right?

And so I realized that that really is not the goal and Ellen White has a really cool, I mean about, I don't know, probably a thousand quotes talking about self-supporting work.

She's saying, hey guys, when we do mission work, what we're supposed to be doing is making it self-supporting, self-supporting meaning business-based, that it funds itself, so it's not necessarily based on donations, but it's self-funded.

So I realized, huh, when she's talking about self-supporting work, she's talking about business evangelism.

So I re-baptized the term, call it business evangelism, and now suddenly all the millennials are liking it you know so so but my idea was that money was evil and I thought and I realized that this is actually a general concept understood in our church not just in our church in all of Christianity and I and I started researching figuring out where does this concept come from because this is actually inhibiting us from really advancing God's work because we have this adverse relationship to money.

And so I studied into it and I figured out that it comes from the medieval time period and that the church at that time created this idea that the more spiritual you are the more the the poorer you are so So the most spiritual people were who?

So if you had more money, then you were considered more worldly.

If you had less money, then you were considered more spiritual.

They were telling the people these things, so that they would then give also indulgences to the church and so forth, you know, making them feel good if they're poor.

So, so anyway, this concept really persists until today, except actually in Protestantism.

It was Calvin, John Calvin, that realized that this is not a biblical concept.

That the Bible looks at money as a blessing from God, and actually is a tool to be used to advance the work of God.

We all know this, even poor missionaries know this.

So we need money to advance the work of God.

So the Bible is very clear that we should use the money.

With a hammer you can build a house and with a hammer you can kill someone right?

Yeah, so but it's just a tool and we should use it to advance the work of God not to do anything That is selfish so Max Weber German guy Wrote this book.

It's 1 of the most quoted books in social economics, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.

He actually saw the correlation between which countries became Protestant and their power of economic success and their ability to start companies to think and do, to think differently, to think independently.

These are the guys that are going against the regime at the time of the papacy and so, you can actually see up to today here, the green parts versus the yellow parts, Protestant and the Catholic countries, and its distribution in terms of economic growth of the country, is based on whether the country is more Protestant or whether it's more Catholic.

So the spirit or the mindset, this entrepreneurial mindset has an effect on the culture, it has an effect on society, it has an effect on economic growth of a country.

Now somebody told me, you know, the root of all evil is what?

It's not money that is the root of all evil.

So if you attach your heart to money, then you are in trouble.

So this is why the whole church has shrieked away from money because there's danger there.

There's a hole in the middle of the room that you can fall into, right?

And so we'd rather not enter the room, but we won't get anywhere if we do that.

Ellen White writes this quote, this really blew my mind when I read this the first time.

Who of you wants to accumulate wealth in here?

Hey, I thought this for the last 10 years, okay?

What is a Business Model and How do I Create One?

Okay, all right everyone we're gonna get back.

I know that we have a lot to do and I can tell that you guys are creating the environment that I thrive in which is people coming to me with questions and ideas and business concepts.

My wife gets annoyed because I can talk about it until the wee hours of the morning.

Jesse is excited to connect with you guys.

This is something that we're excited about.

And once I accepted that about myself and made it very clear what type of role I was going to have, and the importance of partnerships and making sure you have a team to build your business.

Because somebody's got to be the manager to make sure that those processes are being improved on and you're increasing efficiency.

So let's go and start with a word of prayer.

There's paper and pencils on your tables.

So we're gonna really get, you know, kind of really get our feet into it deeply.

Father in heaven, thank you so much, Lord, for the knowledge that is available to us.

Thank you, Father, for the failures that Jesse and I have gone through, that have taught us critical lessons, and Lord, and that somehow those moments could actually be valuable in order to move the kingdom of God forward.

But also, Lord, We're thankful for the successes and the opportunities to see that when God is guiding and when we are operating within certain principles, Lord, that we can see the blessing of the Lord in his grace upon our work and efforts.

That is our desire, And we trust now as we move into more practical, hands-on decision making, that you would guide us and you would bless this meeting with your presence.

We offer this prayer from our hearts in Christ's name, amen.

I want to share with you a quote that when I used to do canvassing ministry for about 11 years, I used to use this quote because 1 time I came in and 1 of my canvassers said, Sebastian, you said, according to Christ's object lessons, it is not the capabilities you now possess or ever will possess that will give you success in the work.

It is only that which the Lord can do for you.

You need to have less confidence in what men can do and more confidence and what God can do for every believing soul.

So if it's not the capabilities we now possess and it's not the capabilities you ever will possess after I train you and teach you that are going to give you success, then why are we doing training?

I should just drop me off on the street and we'll figure it out, right?

And I said, you know, that's interesting because there's another quote in Call Porter ministry about Joshua at the Battle of Jericho and she says Joshua prepared his army for the battle of Jericho as if the success of the battle depended on them alone.

He trained the soldiers, not with the mindset that God is gonna bring the walls down.

He says, we're not expecting any help from God.

You're going to have to climb those walls and get inside.

But you see, unfortunately, that's not how we approach ministry.

We say, well, because it's a ministry, God's going to bring down the walls.

But unfortunately, we learn the hard way.

So my father says, experience is the best teacher, but a fool learns by no other means.

If you got to touch the fire to know it's hot, you're going to have a lot of burn marks.

But if I can look at your burn marks and know, okay, that's hot, I'm not touching that.

We must learn to learn from the mistakes of others.

So you must prepare your army, Joshua, with no expectation of divine help.

But then the quote finishes, but he went into the battle of Jericho as if everything depended on God alone.

This is what they talk about in sports, soccer, football, basketball.

They say, man, how in the world did he make that shot?

There's no way he could have kicked that goal.

No, luck is when preparation meets opportunity.

Now you and I probably couldn't make those type of shots on a soccer field or in a basketball court because we don't have the preparation.

But in that moment, in that game, preparation met opportunity.

But unfortunately for you and I, we're not good at preparing because we think Jesus is going to bail us out every time.

Jesus don't bail people out all the time.

The thief on the cross was going to heaven, right?

But they still broke his legs when they took him off.

I know, everybody's like, whoo, I ain't saying amen to that 1.

The man is going to heaven, but he's about to get his legs broken and go sit and wait to be re-crucified again.

So let's not romanticize entrepreneurship.

I'm going to tell you right now, there's moments where I sit down in my mind with tears in my eyes wondering, did I make a mistake?

There are times when I'm wondering, maybe I'm doing the wrong thing because I have a wife and 4 kids.

So when all of a sudden revenue is gone or a customer decides I'm not going to pay you on time, you've got to figure out how to put food on the table.

So I don't want to romanticize this thing for you, like, oh, there's going to be this whole glorious.

It's like, it's going to take work like Joshua.

So the whole purpose of this session, of looking at your business model, is preparing to start your business as if you're not gonna get any help from God.

Unfortunately, most people think business people are all about risk, when we're actually all about removing risk.

They said if I build the product, they will hire me.

So as you think about your business idea and concept, and we look at your business model, on the Attendify app, I've actually uploaded 1 of the canvases I'm gonna be using, so you'll see this on there.

Now this is a very common thing, you can download this for free, the Business Model Canvas on businessmodelgeneration.com slash canvas.

You can download as many copies as you want.

It's completely free and available to anyone.

And what I want to do is just basically summarize, but you have a piece of paper there in front of you.

Series

God Means Business

Is your Idea Feasible?

Transcript

Description

Parent Series

Parent Conference

Sponsor

Recorded

Unraveling the Gay Spin

5. Meeting Today’s Challenges from the LGBT Agenda

1h

Plenary Sessions

One Life

1h 21m

Laodicea Study

Laodicea Study Recap

30m

Breakouts

Original Leadership

1h 2m

Devotions For Decisions

1. Devotions, or Just the Motions?

1h 2m

The Sabbath

“Do Not Neglect the Gatherings”

52m

Devotions For Decisions

4. It’s How You Look at It

58m

Christ In Me = GYC

2. God’s Righteousness or Yours?

1h

Remnant Identity: Who We Are and Why It Matters

2. The Message of the Remnant & Postmodern Youth - How Revelation’s Message Resonates with Thinking Young People Today

1h

GYC 2012 Seminar: Pentecost and Feasts, Tongues and Charismatic Movements

Mission Accomplished

1h

Knees, Keys, and Please!

1. To Know Christ

1h

GYC 2013 Seminar: The Individual Conflict: Victory Over Sin

04-Sin is a Four-Letter Word

53m

Sound Doctrine