Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Speaker A: What's up, my friends? Welcome to another episode of A Brit and a Yank Talk Business. I'm Stuart Amadon and with me is Tom Choltica. And we're here to blow your mind about how to build businesses in the world today. Actually, not really. We're still trying to figure out how to get started.
[00:00:20] Speaker B: I mean, these conversations are helpful for me to understand how we're going to build businesses. So.
[00:00:26] Speaker A: Yeah. So it works out well. It works out well. Yeah. I find that.
I think that this kind of got birthed out of you. And I just had weekly touch points because we work together.
And those conversations were so edifying for me. I was like, we really should record these.
We really should have these things out there for someone else to kind of, I think, benefit from. Because like we talked about before, we want to want to educate, we want to motivate, we want to network with people.
[00:00:54] Speaker B: So we.
[00:00:54] Speaker A: So we want to throw this out on the Internet and see who else out there thinks like us or is willing to at least entertain the idea of building a Christian business, a Christian business, world network, whatever you want to call it, and then we can move forward and fulfill Jesus's mandate. Take dominion, expand the kingdom. Let's do this thing. I think it's a. I think it's going to be a valuable tool for people for years to come. But this is only episode three. And Tom, what are we talking about today? Episode three?
[00:01:22] Speaker B: Yeah. So last week you were interviewing me about Knox Thomas, my business, and today we're going to find out what page 50 is.
[00:01:30] Speaker A: I mean, I'm still trying to figure that out.
Yeah, man, let's go.
[00:01:41] Speaker B: I think the first one. Got you. Go.
[00:01:44] Speaker A: Well, so page 50. Here's my elevator speech, right? This is my elevator pitch. Page 50 is a full service marketing and media production company. We serve all verticals and we solve people's problems. That's the gist of what we do.
And marketing and media is so obtuse. Whenever you say that to people, it just about always invites more questions. What does that mean? What do you mean? You do marketing.
And if I was to push it all the way down into the granular level, it would be to say we help your business be more visible. That's kind of what we do.
We help build your top of funnel really, really well so that you can worry about sales and conversions and we can worry about marketing. We can worry about getting you in front of as many people as we possibly can. And the Lord has blessed and over the last decade that we've been in business, we've had good success.
[00:02:38] Speaker B: Yep. I mean, let's ground that a little bit more because it's still a little abstract.
What do you do for Knox Thomas? What do you do for my business?
[00:02:47] Speaker A: So, Knox Thomas, my favorite client. Don't tell anybody else that.
So, Knox Thomas, we do a lot of digital discoverability.
So that means that we take content pieces that you guys produce, whether they're blogs or video pods similar to this one, or other things, and we convert them into digital discovery magnets. So in other words, we put them on your website, advise you about pushing them out and getting them published in other places for the purpose of increasing your digital footprint. And the things we put on your website are highly discoverable. That we give you tools for social media kits that you can throw these bits and pieces out on the Internet to increase your discoverability.
And I'm pleased to say it works. It's a simple methodology.
Basically, we're trying to get you the most value possible out of the things that you make. And I find that in the digital space especially, it's so incredibly technical that you do need somebody to come along next to you and say, hey, let me take this and calibrate it for you. So you're getting the most horsepower out of it as possible, which is functionally what we do.
And we've set similar systems up with other clients, and it gets. It's very effective, very successful methods. What we do is not complicated, really.
It's the technical side that's complicated. The fundamentals of it, anybody can do, start a podcast, write blogs, put posts on social media. The difference between when we take it is we take that piece and we optimize it to reach the largest audience possible to get them top of funnel and then start moving them down.
[00:04:37] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, one of the other things that when we first met, you were. You were talking about was kind of this, this coaching piece.
So, you know, being an entrepreneur, I'm happy to throw as much spaghetti as I can at the wall, but if someone can kind of tell me that, Tom, you're actually throwing it at the wrong wall or in the wrong direction, and you don't need to throw that much spaghetti. You can throw half.
Like, that's really valuable, you know. So your feedback, certainly to me being like, Tom, do this more, refine that this is good. Don't bother with this has been.
Has been really valuable. And yeah, we genuinely, and I'm not saying this just for an audience, is that we wouldn't be where we are today if you hadn't helped us out and given us that, that steering that guidance and done the work on the website and the blogs and the rest of it. So, yeah, totally worth it.
[00:05:25] Speaker A: I appreciate that. I'm glad. It's good for me to know my mission personally is to help people build what the Lord has given them. Like, I want to be faithful and fruitful and I want to help other people be faithful and fruitful. And so that's very encouraging to know that that has worked especially, I mean, page 50 will work with anybody provided that you're not trying to communicate evil into the world.
But I especially love working with Christians because that, that gets my, that gets my heart going a little bit like, okay, now we're building. Now we're not just building some, but something that's going to make some people a little bit of money that they're going to spend on something foolish. I'm helping to build the actual kingdom of Christ. Okay, let's go. Like, we can, we can work that through. We just had an opportunity to run a campaign for somebody and their initial campaign costs were going to be, I mean, something astronomical, like $30,000 or $40,000. And so we were, we came in and assessed the situation that they were dealing with and saying, well, why are you spending that much money when 70% of the people in your target audience are never actually going to buy your product? So in other words, we were able to kind of help them refine their target audience down to help them save. Oh man, I don't know, something ridiculous. Like I think 80% of their budget or something is not, is now saved because it's actually pointed at the people who might buy, who might, who's actually their target audience. Like, that's just. And that's kind of the things that I like to help people think through. Like, why are you trying to communicate to this entire community right now, not all of them even remotely need what you're offering?
You know, we gotta, we gotta think about the ones who it's actually applicable to, which just audience defining can be so financially beneficial for companies because so many folks do that too with their advertising campaigns is they're just like you said earlier, they're just throwing spaghetti at the wall.
And there's massive opportunity cost, especially for entrepreneurs because they're just, they're using all their time and trying to see what sticks.
But if you just have a little bit of strategy attached to it, you can be far, far more effective. From what we've seen.
[00:07:38] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, it's gotta be quite exciting kind of having that business where you sit.
[00:07:43] Speaker A: Cause you're.
[00:07:45] Speaker B: When you're kind of engaging with other Christian businesses because you are the mechanism by which they scale and they kind of, you know, the kind of blessing factor. I don't know how you. That's probably terrible language, but like multiplications on that because of kind of stuff that you offer.
[00:08:02] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:08:02] Speaker B: Highly valuable and a real blessing. So I think the. The next question that I have, and if you were to go on your website, you'd be able to get the answer to this just as quickly. But why. Why the name?
[00:08:14] Speaker A: Yeah, I get that one all the time. Yeah. So why the name? Page 50. You can go to page50.com to read the answer. But so when we first started our business. Okay, let me actually go all the way back because this involves storytelling for why we exist at all. When we first started, we started because my kids were hungry and I was a church planner, and church planners don't make money. That's just, you know, that's just how it works.
We had two kids back.
[00:08:40] Speaker B: How many years back is this?
[00:08:42] Speaker A: Oh, this is a decade, I think, by this point. This is the other part of the problem is I don't know when exactly my business actually started. Is it when I started doing the work and getting paid for it, or was it when we formed an llc? Like, at what point do we count?
[00:08:54] Speaker B: You know, that's a good.
[00:08:58] Speaker A: Counts enough. Yeah.
So this is probably a decade, 12 years ago, something like that.
We had two kids. My wife.
We have a classical Christian school attached to our church.
My wife was teaching full time, and we were making the bills, you know, comfortably for probably the first time in, I don't know, another decade. So we were very excited about that.
And then my wife came home and she told me that she was pregnant again. Now, that was a big deal because at the time we thought that that was dangerous for her. So there was all kinds of extra anxieties that were tossed on. Turned out it wasn't dangerous at all. We were just poorly advised by the doctors.
She was actually fit as a fiddle and fin.
But anyway, she said she was pregnant. We knew, and we've always known that we wanted her to be home with the kids. That was our big, big checkbox.
And we were willing to sacrifice whatever we had to sacrifice in order to do it.
And so I told her. I still remember this. We were in our.
We were in the parsonage and she told me that was going down.
And I said, I Don't know how we're gonna pay for it, but we're gonna figure it out and you're staying home again.
And so she did, and we were dead broke, man. Like, I remember, I mean, grinding like crazy. I'd get checks for $90 from going to do an event or something like that. And I was so excited. I was like, look, babe, we could buy milk, you know, like, it's happening.
I remember the first client we ever signed was somebody who paid me 150 bucks a month. And we did, you know, web edits and video production and all their social media posts and all, like, gave them the moon for $150 a month. But I was so excited. Like, I was like, we have work. It's working.
So then it got to the point where we established an actual business filing for an llc. Okay, well, we need a name.
And the first name was MCA Studio, because at the time we had three kids. It was my oldest daughter Marie, my second born Cindy, and my son Abel. Mca. And I was like, okay, great, MCA Studio. Because in my mind, having a business has always been oriented towards our family, towards our household. You know, we're serving people out there, but ultimately the business exists within the household sphere. And so that's, that's always been my primary orientation. Well, we had our third child, and her name is Rosa, or, sorry, fourth. Fourth child, her name is Rosa. And it was like, well, we can't change the name of the business every time I have a kid. So we have to figure this thing out. And so we just kind of went back to the drawing board and trying to figure out something that would be a little bit more.
A little bit more timeless, I guess you could say.
And at the time, it was a thing where people would do bucket lists. You know what a bucket list is? Like, when I'm. When I'm dead, I want to have done these things. And so it was kind of trendy then. And so I, I kind of took that opportunity to sit down and think for a little while and just be like, well, I don't really care to write down what I want to do before I'm dead, but I do want to care about. I do care about what I want to leave behind.
And so I wrote, you know, I made a little list. It wasn't really complicated. It was like two or three things on the list. Um, and those three things were, I want to leave something to my children.
Um, I want to raise children basically in the fear and amnest of the Lord. I Want to pass my faith onto them. And I want to make disciple makers. Okay, so children who love and follow Jesus, something to leave them and make disciple makers. Those are my three things.
And, and we, I wrote those three things on page 50 of my journal and I was like, oh, here we go. And so that's been our name and that's been our focus really. And I was writing down people in the corporate world. I hate corporate lingo, but people in the corporate world would say, oh, you wrote down your core values? And I'm like, yeah, I guess, whatever that is. But yeah, that's it. That was it. And we rolled from there. And those three things have always been the rudder. This is what we're trying to do, this is the goal. And so we make decisions and calls that other businesses wouldn't necessarily make or do.
And that's fine because our rudder is a little bit different.
Yep.
[00:13:30] Speaker B: And what, what does that look like today then? So you, you've got those three core values in the day to day running of your business. What, how, how do you, how do you engage with those? How do you kind of put those out in front of the people that you work with? You've, you've got employees. I mean, well, first of all, how, how big are you today? What, what are we talking about when we Talk about page 50?
[00:13:49] Speaker A: So we're officially bringing on our fourth full time in house employee. And I am actually very excited. So for a long time when you're starting a business, you can't really pay people very well.
You know, like you're just, you can't pay yourself well, you can't pay them well. Like you're just like, sorry guys, I apologize. I, I'm really sorry for how small this check is. I hope you guys enjoy life.
But really, within the last two years, the Lord has blessed and grown the business to where now I don't feel bad when I pay someone, you know, like, I'm like, this is a good wage. Here you go. And So I have four, as of June 1st, I'm going to have four full time employees inside of the staff.
Outside of that, I have about 15 part time contractors that or just part time employees, kind of depending on how you want to look at it. But I'm categorizing W2 and 1099 and it works out really well. A lot of our, our part time employees are stay at home moms who just want to hustle a little bit of extra grocery money or you know, stuff to buy things for the kids or Whatever. And so we employ a decent amount of those. Um, and then a lot of them are contractors from all over the country that think like us, want to build like us, and align with, you know, the values that we've kind of laid out in our organization.
[00:15:21] Speaker B: Yep.
So in there, you, you've kind of, you know, your vision, or part of your vision was so that your wife could.
We were just talking before. This could be the COO of your house.
[00:15:32] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:15:32] Speaker B: Which is kind of helpful language and totally true.
So your wife's the CEO of the house. So what's the engagement with your kids in the business then?
[00:15:42] Speaker A: So my children are relatively young, except for my 15 year old and my 12 year old.
And so right now I'm just beginning to really work my 15 year old into the actual work of the business.
She's got some, she's got some tasks that she receives from our SEO manager every couple of weeks or so.
And she walks through those tasks. So I do like to brag on her because she's a 15 year old and she's SEO SEMrush certified. Like, that's kind of a big deal right there. And she, she's. I told her the other day, I was like, honey, I don't even have that, you know, like, I don't even have that certification. But here you are at 15 and you've got these things. And I'm very proud of her. But before that point, our office has just always operated to where we know that people are going to bring their kids.
And so I'd bring my kids to work all the time and they would just go play and hang out and run around and be with the employees and talk to them and chatty chat. And it was wonderful, honestly. So we've always kind of had them in and around the business, but I'm just now getting to push into them, working within the institution, learning some trades, learning some skills. My 12 year old, I sat down with both of my older two because I was like, I think it's time for you guys to start developing a few skills, just in case.
And I asked him, I was like, hey, Marie, which is my oldest, I said, would you envision yourself working on a computer more or would you envision yourself working with like a camera more? What would you, what do you think you'd like? She was like, I think, I think I would prefer to just be like doing work on a computer. And I was like, okay, cool. And so I leaned her into the SEO side, the computer side of things. Asked the same question to my 12 year old and she's like, I think I'd be more interested in like creating things like with a camera. Said, okay, great, we got her a camera. And so she carries it around with her and takes pictures and practices. And if they just hone those skills a little bit, they'll have opportunity to just lean in and really be able to have an astonishing skill set by the time they're 20, you know, like something and the advantage for them.
And I was talking to my daughters about this, I was like, girls, the skills that you're learning here you can literally do from anywhere in the world. You know, you can do while you feed the babies. If your household needs a tiny bit more income, you have an opportunity to push a button and be able to earn that. And that's, that's a huge benefit for you. Maybe they'll never need it. That'd be great if they didn't. But if they do, they have skills and at this point they're going to have far more skills than I have.
[00:18:32] Speaker B: Yeah, that's an interesting one. Like how, you know, it's kind of off tangent a little bit, but it's popped into my mind the, how do you equip your children to be the roles that they're going to be when they're older? So like, um, I'm very much blessed by my wife because she, she studied accountancy and I mean without that I'm not sure if I would have got the business off the ground. Like, I don't know what to do in that space. So how, how do we equip, you know, our sons, it's probably a bit more straightforward. You know, they, they could take on the business potentially. But our daughters, how, how do we almost equip them so that they can be a help to their husbands?
What sort of skill set? And I mean like if they've got some sort of marketing background and understanding, there's something of substance there that they could depending bless their husband with.
[00:19:24] Speaker A: So absolutely, they could help further the mission of their, of their one day household by coming to the table with tangential skills from the jump. So my wife, for example, is an educator and she inherited those skills. Sure, she went to college for education, but you know, you and I both know that a college education on education is hot trash. All right, but you know what? She was, she was trained by her mother, who was probably and who still is honestly probably one of the most phenomenal educators that South Louisiana has never heard of. You know, it's one of those Kind of situations. It's.
But her mom taught her how to work with little kids from the time whenever she was little.
And therefore, guess what? She has a phenomenal skill set that outpaces the previous generation. And she's at home educating my children. Come on, man. Like, what kind of better world could that possibly be?
I have an in home classical Christian school model if we need to tap it. That's phenomenal. And she's killing it. She's ridiculously gifted. But yeah, it's. It's exactly what you're talking about. What, what skills and, and values and, and vision can we, you know, get inside the hearts of our children so that when they hit the ground running, they can run faster than us? I think that's a great way to look at it.
[00:20:54] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. And over. So you've been around. You can't really decide when you started, but let's say 10 years.
[00:21:04] Speaker A: What.
[00:21:05] Speaker B: What has been the biggest surprise in those 10 years in the way that the business has been a blessing to your household? What was the thing that was like, these are, these are the things that I expected, but this thing, this thing happened. What's the. Yeah. What's the biggest way it's blessed your household that you weren't expecting.
[00:21:27] Speaker A: Probably. So when we first started, I was happy to just offset the expenses of the house and the bills and to help pay for the, for the things that we were dealing with. Like, that was. I was very happy with that.
The first surprise was whenever we were able to start hiring employees.
And then things really started taking off quickly.
That was. Oh, I didn't, I didn't see that coming. You know, I just thought this was side hustle. Stewart. Until I was 70 and dead, you know, I thought I would be. I think the contemporary expression is a solopreneur. You know, I thought that was going to be me forever.
But then there was this day where we hired an employee and I thought, oh, oh, we might actually have something here like this. This might actually be legitimate. That was our first. That was my first moment.
It was the second time, actually. We went to Fight Lab Feast conference. I think it was in Tennessee that year, or Kentucky, I can't remember.
And I made some connections with people who would eventually become very close friends and they helped us network into a national space.
And that was like, what has happened?
You know, like, it got to the point where we started doing work for Gabe Wrench and the Cross Politic guys. It got to the point where we were now working contracts in other states all over the country and you know, now all over the world. Hello, Nox Thomas.
And now like my month of June is sending me and several of our employees to New York State for a project and to Los Angeles for a project. And I'm looking around like, what is happening?
What is happening?
The Lord is doing something incredibly profound. You know, it's just, and I didn't see, I never would have seen this coming, you know, I never would have thought, ah, yes, in 10 years we'll be an international brand that serves people all over the world like that. That was not, that was never the point.
The point was always my kids got to eat and man, it would be cool. Leave them something super cool. And the Lord has just blessed and turned this thing into a machine of what I would say, pressed down, running over blessings not just for our family, but, you know, I have 10 other families connected to the institution through employment.
And now it's a blessing to them too. Like, it really is mind boggling for me to think through those. So I would say, what was the moment? I'd say, well, there's two and it's those two.
[00:24:12] Speaker B: Yeah, nice. And you're, you mentioned kind of values at the beginning. Obviously page 50 is very overtly, if you can understand the name written or ingrained into a set of values.
Have they, have they developed over time? Have they kind of changed into potentially changed direction at all? Or have they just become, I don't know, an engraving in a slate that has just become deeper and deeper and deeper? What, what's happened over those 10 years? Because we're, we're only two years old. So, you know, what, what, what's your experience?
[00:24:45] Speaker A: So developing those core values, like just about everything else that's happened with our company was an accident. You know, there was, it was not, it was not. Stewart sat down and said, yes, let me think through my core values. You know, like, that wasn't a thing at all. It was just, what do I want to, you can, you can look at the page in my notebook that we wrote it down as. The header on the page is when I'm dead.
Like that's, this is what I want to leave behind. That was the whole point of the page. I was just thinking about things like that, which is how my head works.
But I would say the longer that I'm doing this, the more that specific thing matters to me. And so one of the things, you know, you and I have been talking about this a lot lately is the development of goals, objectives, and key results.
And so we read Matt Reynolds Ryan Matt Reynolds book Undoing Urgency, which is very helpful to me. Matt's a friend. He's been super kind to me and taken phone calls whenever I just need to bounce some ideas off of people or try to figure out why I'm in a slump and get unstuck. He's been very kind and so his book has been incredibly helpful to me to be able to say, okay, this is who we are, but what do I do with it, right?
What are the specific things that I should now change and apply?
And so I'd say within the last 10 years, especially within the last year or so, I've been able to take those specific objectives, right, those specific core values and convert them to particular goals and things that I need to do. So for example, I want to make disciple makers. Well, the page shifting office has always been an, an area of disciple making because I mean, you put Christians in a room together and what are they going to do? They're going to edify and admonish and exhort one another and encourage one another and like, boom, discipleship's happening.
But one of the things that I've started doing lately with it is being a little bit more formal and saying, hey, what are you trying to do with your life? Like, what are your, do you have goals? Where are you headed? Where do you want to be when you're 40? And which, you know, I have 20 year olds that work for me, I have 30 year olds who work for me. So it matters to ask those kinds of questions to them. And then we help them develop lists of, you know, their goals, what they're trying to accomplish, and we provide a degree of accountability. So that's, you know, one easy, one easy moment, one easy result.
It also helps me deal aggressively with financial goals. So if I want to leave an inheritance for my children, that means I have to have an inheritance to leave them, right? And so I'm developing some what I would call very, very aggressive financial goals.
And from those aggressive financial goals, I have specific key goals inside of the business that I'm trying to meet and exceed as we, as we continue to go through things. I hired a project manager to get that aspect of the business completely off of my plate so that I can focus on top of funnel and sales development. And it's been really, really cool to see that happen over the last year or so. So yeah, the longer that I'm doing this, the more those things work down into the granular. I almost think like, if I would have tried to do this 10 years ago, I would have screwed it up.
You know, like, I would have made some stupid mistake in my objectives or measurables or things like that.
But now I think the Lord has given me the time and the opportunity and the space to be able to try to develop them more and more and more. So I think it. I do think they're important.
I do think core values are important. I do think the most core values that I read aren't great.
You know, like, they're not written very well. They haven't thought through what they're really trying to accomplish.
They feel more like objectives than. They feel like, this is who I am. So you want to be careful whenever you're laying those things out. But if you can. If you can get them down. And they are distinctly Christian, meaning they resonate with the Bible and the mission that God has already given us. Because that's really the question you're asking, right? You're saying, how does. How specifically is. Is my mission going to exist with un. Within the broader mission of Christ?
And so figure those pieces out and then build. And I think that's a better priority for us to run through.
[00:29:24] Speaker B: I think my last question, and we've kind of discussed this sort of stuff.
[00:29:28] Speaker A: Before.
[00:29:30] Speaker B: I was thinking about things that, I don't know, potentially I would have wanted to hear, or if you're just starting out a business or you've even got a business going, what are the things that you have done?
I'm thinking kind of in line with scripture and kind of. That the world would just be like, why on earth are you doing that?
[00:29:50] Speaker A: And I think.
[00:29:50] Speaker B: I think two of them.
What are the two kind of things that you've gone. Scripture says this, therefore, we are going to do this. And it has kind of seemingly ballooned in blessing your business.
[00:30:05] Speaker A: Okay, can I give you three?
Okay. Okay. So the first one is we keep the Lord's Day, and we draw a hard line there. Now, there have. Admittedly, there have been times when I've screwed that up because I didn't ask appropriate questions about a particular project before it was started. And then, boom, we wind up working on the Lord's Day. It's like, man, I hate this. This is not what we meant to do. This is a problem. You know, all those different kinds of things. But, um, if you. If you work six days, you really look forward to the seventh. Like, there's something. There's a holy anticipation in it, and. And you get to rest at such a far deeper level than I believe.
People who don't practice that. Actually get to the, the secularists would say, well, we get a two day weekend, sometimes two and a half or three day weekend, like we're really getting to rest. And my retort to them is, no, you're not. You, you don't work.
And so what that means is on all your rest days you are actually working, maybe in smaller amounts, but you're still working. You're, you're doing all right. I got to take care of this. I got to do a few emails here. I got to take this meeting. Oh, I got to, you know, you're not, you don't actually get to rest. I turn everything off on the Lord's day. I set it down.
We even have in our communication standards within the business, hey, our comms. We believe in the Lord's day, therefore our internal comms should be mostly silent whenever it's between. And we set our time between sunset on Saturday and sunset on Sunday. That's when we formally observe the Lord's day as a company.
And because of that, I think that we're actually tapping into the way that the world is designed to work, that humans are designed to work.
Cam Newton points this out in his book Deep Work.
Excuse me.
He says that if you don't turn it off, then you never actually rest and you're not fresh the next day. Now his point in saying that is he's like, hey, you have to turn off the work side of your brain at a certain time and not engage anymore until another certain time of the next day and then get back in to do your deep work. And I agree with that principle. I've practiced it. I think it's, I think he's right on, on the days when I used to run hour top to bottom days all day and answering emails in my bed at, you know, 9:30 at night, I did never turn off, so I was never fresh. I think the same principle applies to your weekly rhythm. If you don't turn it off, then you're never actually resting. You're always doing that. Well, I got a few things to take care of. I got a few more things to do. So the first thing I would say we did was keep the Lord's day. And the Lord blesses that tremendously.
The next thing I would say is tithe. We made a commitment to tithe out of our income plainly. And that sounds so simple, doesn't it?
Just give your, give your 10%.
But I'm just absolutely convinced that the Lord has blessed our business because we just said you know what? We're going to tithe and we're going to keep the Lord's day. And that's all I really know how to do right now. So that's what we're going to do A detail on.
[00:33:24] Speaker B: Tithing then, is that. And when you say income, are you talking household income, you're talking business income? Where, what. At what point are you talking tithing?
[00:33:33] Speaker A: Yeah, so I'm talking about money that comes into the business and the Amazons, plus a little. Okay, so now it gets very complicated because you have to say, well, what do you tithe on? You tithe on your increase, right? Not every dollar that just channels through, because that's actually how you're going to get in a lot of trouble really quickly and you're going to overextend yourself. Ask me how I know the answer to that.
I needed some counseling on that early on because I just was like, yeah, 10%. And so I was writing these enormous 10 checks out of every dollar that came through the business for a little while. Then a friend of mine who is a pastor, he was like, you know, it's on the increase, right?
And I said, oh, yeah, I got it, I got it, I got it. So I learned that and I, you know, began developing and practicing that more and more.
And so the way that we do it is we have, you know, the money that goes to our house, we have the money that goes to specifically our family, and then we do a little more. Do a little extra past that.
That's the way that we practice it particularly. But we do a tenth of those numbers. It's honestly probably more like somewhere between 15 and 18, I would say, if I was trying to think through what the actual numbers would be inside of us, inside of what's coming into our family, but it's something along those lines.
[00:35:06] Speaker B: And then what was your third item? Then you decided to increase two to three.
[00:35:11] Speaker A: Oh, that's right. Yeah. So be willing to fired and be okay with it.
You know, being in the marketing business, it's a little.
I'm promoting things. That's my job. My job is to promote businesses, to promote things that they do and to help them be louder about it.
But what that means is that sometimes you have to look at a client and say, I can't do that. I can do anything else you want me to do, but I can't do that.
And that means that you have to be willing to take a pay cut.
You know, like, you've got to be able to say, I don't do that and take my money. That's okay.
So one of the stories that I tell about this is we got hired by a subsidiary for the Louisiana Department of Health, probably, I don't know, eight years ago, seven years ago by this point.
And it was going to be this enormous contract. It was the largest contract we had ever worked on up to that point. They were going to pay us so much money.
I just remember thinking, wow, we've made it.
So they hired us to run their socials and to help them with their marketing and promotional strategies and different things. And so, you know, we're working for them for a month or so. A couple of months. Things are going well. And then it became June, you know, Pride Month.
And they said, hey, it's Pride Month. Here's the stuff that we would like to promote this month. And I was like, oh, got it.
And I went and talked to some of my employees at the time, and we're thinking through things like, what are we going to do? How do we think through this? Well, and at the end of all our conversations, I was like, we're going to have to. We're going to have to tell them we can't do this. We don't have any other options here. If we're going to be faithful Christians, we got to just call them and say we can't do it. So I called them and I said, hey. I said exactly what I just told you at the beginning of this. Hey, I'll help you do anything else you want to do, but we can't do Pride Month stuff. We're Christians. We believe the Bible. We can't put that. We can't help you promote that. And it was a funny conversation because the guy that I talked to, he was like, oh, well, I'm on vacation right now, so I can't really help you, but I'll call you back in a couple of weeks. And I was like, oh, okay, whatever.
And sure enough, they called us back in a couple of weeks. They were like. They were actually very cordial about it. They were like, hey, look, we respect your values and who you are.
And I'm pretty sure that the guy that was on the other end of the phone was a practicing homosexual. And so I appreciated that. He was like, hey, we respect who you are, but we just. We can't work. We can't work with you guys because we want to promote these things. And I was like, hey, you know what? No harm, no foul. We're done here. Thanks for the business. See you later.
And then what was really cool, okay, so I was terrified because, like, this is the biggest contract we've ever had. I can't believe we just lost this. What are we going to do?
And then I went and checked the books.
This is at the time when I was still managing all the financial aspects of our business, which was also a bad idea, but I don't anymore.
I went and checked the books, and I was like, oh, we actually never invoiced them, and we also actually never counted their income in our operating budget in the first place.
So I was building our operating budgets as though that income was never present.
And so, in other words, they fired us and we never felt it.
And then I realized they owed us, like, I don't know, $10,000, something crazy.
And so I wrote them this huge invoice, and I sent it to him. I was like, I wonder if they'll pay it, you know?
And then they did. So functionally, according, like, on the bookkeeping side of things, it was like, we got a $10,000 bonus that none of us saw coming. Like, in other words, this trial turned out to be so much more of a blessing for us than we thought it would have been. It was very, very cool. So, yeah. So thing number three, just be willing to be fired and trust the Lord with it, and if you're faithful, he'll bless. Go read the Psalms, man the Psalms over and over again, talking about the Lord's blessing on the faithful, on those who keep the commands of God. Amen. So just hold on to that and do what he says and trust him, and you're going to be able to see those blessings manifest. I've seen them. It's happened, you know, like, it's not a joke. It's real. It's actually real. If you stay faithful to what God said says he will bless you. It's not hyperbolic. It's actually true. And it has manifested itself in our lives. The whole reason I would quantify any of our success is just because of God's grace and him keeping his promises. Yeah, that's all of it. All of it. So, yeah, there's your three things right there. Tithe, keep the Lord's day and be willing to get fired.
[00:40:13] Speaker B: Awesome. I think that's a great way to round up our podcast.
[00:40:18] Speaker A: Amen. Thank you, guys. Thank you all so much for listening to another episode of A Brit and a Yank. Talk business.
If you've got questions or if you have, you know, thoughts or you want to follow up with some of the things that we're talking about.
Feel free to reach out to us. You can. You can email me directly at stuartage50.coms t u a r t at page 50 p a g e f I f-t dash y dot com and we'll see if we can't work some of your questions or thoughts into future odds. Thank you all again so much for listening, and we will see you all next time.
