7/29/26 - 2157: Will Your Mission Survive You?
Jim: This is iWork4Him, where faith meets work and believers unleash their calling.
Jim: We've been covering the faith and work movement for 13 years now. We've recorded more testimonies and emceed more conferences than anyone else in the faith and work movement. What we've seen, heard, and experienced has both inspired and challenged us, making it clear that much more needs to be done to transform how followers of Jesus live out their faith at work.
Jim: Discipleship programs are neat, but mostly leave business people empty and wondering, "Can I even live out my faith at work? Nothing I hear at church ever connects what I do on a daily basis with my faith in Jesus." That has changed in recent years, not within the four walls of churches for the most part, but within the missions of hundreds of organizations that are dedicated to discipling and training followers of Jesus how not only to let their faith impact all of their lives, but to penetrate the boardroom to the basement, the people from the top to the bottom of the organization.
Jim: Becca Spradlin knows this. She's seen it, heard about it, and she's written a book that documents what it takes for a Jesus-following business leader to bring about real kingdom impact that impacts company culture and prepares the company for long-lasting perpetuation of that culture even after the leadership changes.
Jim: Becca's book, Lead on Mission, is a fascinating read. It reads like a kingdom-focused Good to Great combined with How the Mighty Fall. Becca's here today to parse out just a tiny bit of the wealth of knowledge and wisdom in her book. Becca Spradlin, welcome to iWork4Him.
Becca Spradlin: Thanks so much for having me.
Jim: All right, Becca, we always do this with every first-time guest on iWork4Him. We're gonna talk about Lead on Mission, but first, can you tell us how you became a follower of Jesus?
Becca Spradlin: Absolutely. So when I was six, I remember praying a prayer by myself in bed one night, asking Jesus into my heart, and even though at the time I know it was more of a like a flannelgram understanding of Jesus coming into your heart, God used life that happened the decades that followed to really understand what it means to have a relationship with Jesus.
Becca Spradlin: Especially when my father passed away when I was a teenager, I felt the nearness of God unlike anything I had experienced before. So I feel like God uses those decades and time to refine us, to grow us, to help us learn and grow in our faith.
Jim: Fabulous. I love that, and I love the fact that you were young, but it was real. And because I was first introduced to Christ at six but then I ran the other direction till I was 13, but at 13 I nailed it. But it was, like I understand as a kid, I would've been so much better off if I'd had just embraced that at six.
Jim: All right, so Becca, you open up this book with this statement: "For leaders to steward their season of influence effectively, they must first live out the values they promote." Or in my words, "Do as I say, not as I do," didn't work for me as a kid, and it's not gonna work for me in the corporate environment where the leader is all about Jesus but his or her actions don't match. What's the real story here?
Becca Spradlin: There's a couple things in that statement that you pulled out. So first there's this season of stewardship, understanding you're not gonna be in that role forever. There's a humility that goes with that, understanding that this is a season God's called you to. So I think the being genuine in your faith is best illustrated by one of the case studies in the book.
Becca Spradlin: It's the ServiceMaster company. Okay And I know a lot of your listeners will be familiar with this company, started by Marian Wade in 1929. And he had actually, a life and death experience early on with some chemicals that he was using to do some cleaning, and after recovering from that, as he started this business, he realized he wanted this business to raise the question of God in the marketplace.
Becca Spradlin: And this was at a time well before iWork4Him and other faith and work resources were out there. This was kinda cutting edge in this space. But he was living out and leading genuinely. He would say, " if you don't live it out, you don't believe it." You're... It was really action-oriented, the faith pulled out of his actions.
Becca Spradlin: So he was living it out. The early leaders that followed him were also living it out. They were living out these values, these ambitions to honor God in the marketplace before they were ever written on the wall. And so once they got codified decades later and were put on the wall how there was that alignment.
Becca Spradlin: And I think the interesting part of this case, why I was so fascinated with it, is you think about the last 20, 25 years of the ServiceMaster journey, those values stayed on the walls after they went public, after leadership changed and some of the leaders were more aligned than others. And more recently, as those changes happen and you start to see the words on the walls change, you think, "Oh, they're drifting. The words on the wall change."
Becca Spradlin: But really the leaders weren't living it out. The words remain on the wall while there's that inconsistency when new leaders, especially external leaders, come in, and you start to see the discrepancy between leader behavior and what's on the wall, and then eventually what's on the wall changes too. So you almost see the inverse, where the words remained, but the leaders weren't living it out like those early leaders did.
Jim: I ran into a guy running a ServiceMaster franchise in Springfield, Missouri, not too long ago, within the last couple of years, and I said, "Hey, how's it going?" I covered Bill Pollard years ago. "How's it going? Is ServiceMaster still living up to its, 'Honor God in all we do?'"
Jim: He goes some franchises do, some franchises don't. It's really up to the franchise now," but he goes, "From corporate, it's not there." So that's really why I reference that how the mighty have fallen in your book too because ServiceMaster's a great example of how many generations, 60, 70, 80 years they kept it going.
Becca Spradlin: Yeah.
Jim: And they were able to revive it under Bill Pollard, but when they went public It became the death knell to the vision of the original founder. How do we stop this, Becca? Because I know I'm jumping right in. That's not- I wanna talk more about your book, but I'm just like, I'm just so tired of this.
Jim: They didn't have to go public. There were other ways to raise money, but when they sold out to the stock market, it seems like they felt like they needed to compromise in order to make it work.
Becca Spradlin: I think the interesting part of their case is that, again, it was founded in the 1920s, so this is a long, coming close to a century-old organization, and when they went public, the interesting thing was you didn't necessarily see the drift right away. They went public in the '60s. It was decades after that. So I think it's remarkable that they actually kept the mission and values intact, and their objective to honor God intact for decades. And it's because they had that right blend of the leadership in place, as well as, talking to some of the leaders there who've been there, they would say that, those early owners, even though it was public, the early owners were largely employees and other people that understood the ServiceMaster culture.
Becca Spradlin: So even though it went public, the ownership piece was still very much aligned. And so I think that was one of the contributing factors. That, and they were just doing really well. It was up and to the right, and when you started to see those financial challenges, then we start to question, oh, maybe it's we've been too focused on our values, the values that have served you well for the last 80 years. And then you started to question those things.
Becca Spradlin: Again, you're now a public company. You now have owners who are there for the money and for the return. So the motives change of those owners as the ownership changed over time. So you see a lot of different forces at work, and then you're left to wonder did the board... The board's representing the shareholders. That's their legal responsibility. Do they really understand that financial returns and these values were working together and weren't working opposite each other
Jim: And that's where the drift comes in. I remember reading in your case study that -'cause this is the part I hadn't heard - is that they eventually hired a leader from outside the organization who didn't have an appreciation. Instead of mentoring and bringing up your perpetuation plan from within the organization, you having trained them and ingrained them and shown them, "This is what works and this is why it works, and eventually you could be the CEO," they went to the outside.
Jim: And I see that all the time because they want whoever the high- the board of directors wasn't think- I don't know. It's ... Coca-Cola Consolidated is the proof that you can be a publicly traded company and honor God in everything you do, and they literally lead dozens of people to Christ every week in a publicly traded company. Last year they had almost 2,000 people within their ranks come to Christ as a publicly traded company, and they make boatloads of cash.
Becca Spradlin: Yeah. That's a great example.
Jim: So it can be done. So you went on this - and we could go on like this forever. And my frustration, Becca, and maybe you could calm me down, is that I think we've, as believers who run businesses, we have decided to say, "the world knows best about business, so we should do business the way the world does it."
Jim: Instead of when Abraham said, Mr. Sodom and King Gomorrah, I don't need what you got. What I got from the Lord, I don't want any of your stuff. My, the Lord is my provider. I don't want you to ever say Abraham got rich because I gave you cash.'" We have forgotten that God can do supernatural things, and we have forgotten that God loves business, that's something.
Jim: Becca, tell me, you've been a believer since you were a little kid. When was the last time you heard a sermon about Jesus running a small family business, and that Abraham had such a large corporation that he had to have 300 armed guards? When was the last time you ever heard a business sermon?
Becca Spradlin: Not to my recollection.
Jim: Never. So the word is five letters, never. And that's an issue, isn't it? Because as we're not, as believers, getting trained that God loves our work and he loves business. Business isn't a necessary evil. Business was given to us by God. Now- ... there are things that happen in business that are evil. There are also things that happen in church that are evil.
Jim: So let's come, let's find a solution here today on the show. How do we do this? You said in your book, you say, "Inconsistency can be more destructive than having no faith emphasis in the business at all." I used to say, this is something I used to say, "If you're gonna act..." This is what got iWork4Him started. As I was networking all across Tampa Bay, people would say, "I'm a Christian. You should do business with me." And then I'd watch how they did business, and I'd grab them by the shoulders and say "If you're gonna act that way, please don't tell people Jesus."
Jim: What's the problem here, Becca? Why do people who know Jesus not know how to let that faith impact their leadership, their company, and their culture?
Becca Spradlin: That, that is the question, right? I think part of it is they've not seen it modeled. So there is this kind of growing faith at work movement that's happening. But I do think people have not seen it modeled, and I do think we are taking too many cues from the world of when I get successful, what life looks like, what leadership looks like. And I think one of the things, again, back to ServiceMaster, the thing that made them exceptional is that servant leadership actually being lived out from the very top, getting down...
Becca Spradlin: there's this story of them in board meetings where they'd get down on their hands and knees to clean up the spilled coffee. They were doing that. The chairman was doing that. And when you grow up in that kind of a culture, you, that becomes second nature. When you bring in -I call it the external CEO disadvantage - when you have a healthy culture like that and you bring in an external CEO, they may be a believer, they may go to church, but they've probably not experienced that kind of servant leadership in the workplace.
Becca Spradlin: And so how do you inculcate that in them and that new leader? Now, I do think there's a case in the book of Correct Craft where a turnaround was needed, and they brought in an external CEO who was faith-driven, who pulled back onto the foundations of we wanna honor God through this boat building business.
Jim: Yeah, Bill Yeargin.
Becca Spradlin: Yes.
Jim: Again, what a great story. A phenomenal story.
Becca Spradlin: So it can happen. So you can, you, again, especially if you're in a turnaround, but when you have a healthy culture, how can you best do what you said? And what ServiceMaster did for so many years, they called it their shingles on the roof, building up the next leader for the next generation.
Becca Spradlin: And then, the CEO moves on to be chairman, and you have this cycle with this regular support and also deference for the other and humility that undergirds all of this. So I do think people haven't seen it modeled, and people have this definition of what it means to be a CEO and executive.
Becca Spradlin: And maybe it is their boards or influencers saying, "Make as much money as you can," as the number one, is the bottom line, versus how do you build a thriving culture? How do you see those returns like you talked about at Coca-Cola Consolidated, where people are coming into eternal faith in Jesus?
Becca Spradlin: How are we celebrating those things and elevating that so it's not all about the money? So I do think we're way too influenced by our culture. We haven't seen servant leadership modeled. And in those generational businesses, you may have a believing gen one or two, and then gen three comes in and is, "Okay, we'll leave the values there." But they, their faith might not be in the same place as the founder.
Becca Spradlin: So I think it can happen for a lot of reasons where you see this discrepancy. And I think at the end of the day, there's a lot of us believers who don't put the Christian fish on our cars, right? Because we are concerned. We, on the other side, people get scared to live out their faith at workplace 'cause they don't wanna be a hypocrite, and they're so fearful of those cases. And I think motivations really matter. And bottom line is what's God calling you to do? How's he calling you to live out your faith in your unique business and industry and context?
Becca Spradlin: And so that's why I think abiding and discerning with the Lord is just, is the foundation because well-meaning believers who are following Jesus, one might choose a very overt way in their mission statement to reflect their faith, and one may choose not to because they don't wanna create a barrier for people to coming to their workplace and experiencing the love of God.
Becca Spradlin: And both might have great cultures, and that's what you hope for, a commitment to excellence and a really exceptional culture of care that just reinforces, wow, I don't wanna leave this place. Maybe I don't know why they do what they do, but then you're curious, and experience the love of Jesus, and that's what you want. That's what you wanna see.
Jim: Exactly. This is exactly the kind of conversations we love to have on iWork4Him. And if you've been on the fence about supporting iWork4Him, this is what your $5 a month can do. It keeps conversations going. It reaches people who have yet to learn that God wants to be part of their work life, to help them run their business, to shift their thinking, to use them for His glory.
Jim: Go to iwork4him.com/donate. And don't forget our summer picnic initiative. Jesus told us to love our neighbors, to love our enemies too. How many of you know your neighbors? We're encouraging you To have a block party this summer. Invite your neighbors over. Take a picture of it, and if you don't know how to do all this, we actually have a page on our website that will be in the link on the show notes.
Jim: Hey, here's how you can put together a neighborhood picnic. But we want you to take a picture of you gathering with your neighbors and email it to jim@iwork4him.com. We are never going to turn around this country if believers don't know their neighbors, and this is the summer to do it.
Jim: Have a picnic, take a picture, send it to us. And a potluck picnic, people. That's what I'm talking about, where all the food is the best food from around your city. Have it in your yard because when it's on your property, you are the owner of that property. You bring Jesus to that property, and you can love on people right there in your yard or in your garage if it rains that day. You just might have to clean it up.
Jim: Remember, there'll be one winner at the end for the grand s- grand summer prize, but have a summer picnic.
Jim: Becca, what we just talked about makes me think, and again, this is a little off from what I said I was gonna say, but it's hiring.
Becca Spradlin: Yeah.
Jim: As CEOs, we tend to not hire people as smart or smarter than us for the positions of COO, CIO, CMO, all the ABC, CFO, all of those people. Yet that's what's so critical is the hiring and the raising up people those positions, isn't it? Because if those people aren't the kinds of people that fit your culture, that understand your mission, who've been mentored and discipled by you, not one of them's gonna be ready to take the position when you decide it's time for you to step down, move on to free your future, whatever you're gonna do. That hiring becomes so critical, and that's something we talk about every once in a while on iWork4Him, but people aren't very good at hiring, are they?
Becca Spradlin: Hiring is something I think people - we often take too little time. And just talking with leaders, you feel, especially when at the C level, you feel the pain of the vacancy. And you're like " they have the right competencies," and then you tend to compromise on that chemistry, that character fit. And, in a business context, you're not hiring for their faith, but you do wanna hire for their values alignment.
Becca Spradlin: So you should see evidence that these folks are gonna be a good chemistry, they're gonna be a good fit. But when you feel the pain of the vacancy, it can blind you a little bit to what you know maybe those small voices in the back of your mind saying, "I don't know, is that a yellow flag or a red flag?"
Becca Spradlin: So I always encourage folks, especially in those critical roles, have someone who you know to be mission and values aligned, who doesn't feel the pain of the vacancy. Make sure there's one interview with that person so they can get a good sense for who this person is. Are they a good character and chemistry fit? Are they a good culture fit for us? But not be compromised by the just, the drive of you just, ugh, you wanna fill the role. I had a leader share with me, it's better to have a vacancy than to wish you had a vacancy.
Jim: Yeah, there you go. I'm gonna tell you, people, to go even deeper. A few weeks ago, we interviewed Bob Spence, who wrote a book, The Game Plan For Hiring The Right People. He's my mentor. He wrote, it is the absolute best book I've ever read on hiring. It's hilarious, it's deep diving, and he has got a copyrighted way, a kingdom copyrighted way, on how to hire the right people. I recommend you go back and look at that, or listen to that show. Bob Spence, I don't have the date right here, but we'll make sure we get it in the show notes.
Jim: But it is A Game Plan For Hiring The Right People by Bob Spence. That is the book, because it involves everybody that person's going to have report to them in the hiring process, as well as the management team. It's pretty cool. All right, alignment. You just talked about alignment in, in your hiring. You wanna make sure people are gonna align. And alignment on purpose in order to stay on mission is an everyday task, especially while the day-to-day has to be maintained.
Jim: How critical is constant surveillance of these three things, the three things that you mentioned before, or that we've talked, that you mention in your book? Leadership, ownership, and governance that keep you on mission. Give us an example of a great company that's always evaluating this, one that still exists and is still honoring God. What, is there a company out there?
Becca Spradlin: Yeah, this is a great question. I would definitely reference like Correct Craft and other cases in the book because these things don't change rapidly, right? The leadership, the ownership, and the governance pieces, these are the three pieces you need to have in alignment in order to perpetuate and to take that culture that you've spent decades building, to take that culture forward. So you wanna see alignment in those things.
Becca Spradlin: I think we have way more failure cases than success cases on this because people take too little time to think about leadership succession, to think about ownership transitions. People are often too busy, especially in the small and medium sized businesses and the nonprofits too, they're too busy working on and in the business to work on the business to be future planning for this. So you gotta be really careful at those big transition points, and it's not a be careful in the moment. That's years of planning to make sure that you have that governance, ownership, and leadership alignment.
Becca Spradlin: So it's years of leadership development, years of planning for an owner transition and thinking that through, and discerning who should be, if there's a governing body, who should be on it and how that governing body works. So there's years of planning on that.
Jim: So wait a minute. You're bumming everybody out. They're like, "Okay, so this isn't like a six-month plan?" No, this is ... What, is this a three-year plan, a five-year plan, or could it be a decade? You're talking, this takes a long time to get your board right, to get your leadership right, to get your heart right, to get your culture right. If you're talking perpetuation so that it sticks like it did for 80 years for ServiceMaster-
Becca Spradlin: Yeah ...
Jim: this is a long play. Most business people aren't thinking long play. They're thinking a year. And today they're, people are doing, they're doing business plans, they're doing 48... they're not doing five-year plans anymore because things change so fast. So how do you get people to take the time?
Becca Spradlin: Yeah. I do think there's something there in what you said. It is actually thinking about the culture you wanna build today. I think a lot of people are building great cultures, but think about where do you want the business to be in 20, 50, 100 years?
Becca Spradlin: Now, every industry's different. I'm sure your industry's gonna be very much evolved and changed in that period of time. But if your business is still there, what do you want the culture to be like? And what, how do you plan when you think that long? And I think thinking and asking those kind of questions helps bring and build that humility, because you won't be there leading.
Becca Spradlin: So if you're not gonna be there leading, who is gonna be there leading? Who is gonna be the owner of that? So I think start thinking a little bit more long-term, because you and I both know there have been businesses that have spent decades building a great culture. They sell to a misaligned owner, private, public, what have you, and in three to six months, decades of intentional care and culture building is gone.
Jim: I literally had a tire guy... I'm sorry to interrupt. I thought you were done.
Becca Spradlin: No, go ahead.
Jim: We were in Jacksonville, Florida, five, six, seven years ago. I can't remember. I lose track of time at this point in time. We were interviewing a guy, and he had 30 tire centers all over Jacksonville, Florida.
Jim: And he sold out to private equity 'cause he wanted to retire. He was tired of it. Didn't know anything about ESOPs. Didn't know anything about the different solutions that are out there and available. And he literally cried. He goes, "Jim, in six months I didn't even recognize my own company, and all my best employees were gone." And it had been 30 years in the making. How do we stop that, Becca?
Becca Spradlin: Yeah. One of the cases in the book of a communications company, I really love. The, the owner of the company, he didn't feel like he wanted to sell yet, but he had a friend pass away suddenly, and it got him and his wife thinking if, what happens if that were to happen to me?
Becca Spradlin: So he started putting things in place so that when the time was right, they would have some support to help them with a business sale. And within a year or two, they decided to execute on that, so they updated the numbers, and they started looking for buyers. And he said there were six offers he got.
Becca Spradlin: One, some of them didn't understand the business. One was astronomical. It was just stupid large. And of course, the person helping him was getting a cut of it, and they're saying, "Oh, that, that looks really good." And he's like, "I don't have a peace about the character of the buyer, of the future owner. I just don't have a peace about it."
Becca Spradlin: And eventually, God provided a seventh option, an individual leader with, who's backed by some investors, and he talked with him and he talked about faith, he talked about the culture, and that leader/owner really liked the culture, had some connection to faith himself. And I think one of the really unique things that the seller did in this case when he did decide to go with that seventh buyer, he gave incentives.
Becca Spradlin: He gave some of the portion of the proceeds back. He gave an incentive for some of the senior leaders to stay. If they stayed, he pyramided it, so year one, year two, each year it got higher and higher, a bonus they would get if they stayed up till the third year, and then the fourth year would be a little less, the fifth year would be a little less.
Becca Spradlin: So if they stayed, they would get these bonuses because he knew they, he needed the executive leadership team to stay in order for the new owner, new leader, to come and feel supported and to carry forward the leadership. And he built into some of the buy-sell agreement certain programs, certain leadership development, things that they've been doing that he wanted those things to go for at least 12 or more months.
Becca Spradlin: So he actually built in some of the things that if you buy this, these things need to continue, and here's some other, the logistics. So he had the thought to craft that simple buy-sell agreement to keep some of those things that were culture related. Now, did some of them change after that year or two or three?
Becca Spradlin: Yeah, they did, but a lot of the leadership team is still there, and this is well past those bonuses that they were getting. Most of them stayed. So there was a lot of intentionality that went into that, both preparing for the sell, both selecting the buyer, and then also equipping that leadership team to stay and effectively support the buyer, the new business leader, but also the whole team that had been built over time. So there are success cases out there of successful sales, but it is, it takes a lot of intentionality and planning.
Jim: Is that a public-facing company you just described?
Becca Spradlin: Yes.
Jim: Can you mention their name?
Becca Spradlin: Oh, yeah. OneSource Communication. Yes. It's in the book. There's a case study in the book.
Jim: I must have missed that one or I don't remember. I apologize. I must... I read it, so I must have missed that one.
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Jim: Becca, as we finish up our conversation, we've talked about so much and really it's... We better, we gotta end with encouragement because there's... sometimes I get the glass half empty kinda thing 'cause I've been so frustrated 'cause I see so much opportunity lost, but there's been so much opportunity gained.
Jim: And I got to meet with Mark Whitaker, who's in charge of culture at Coca Cola Consolidated last week, and they're killing it. When I first- ... when Mark first got in his position, they were reaching 600 or 700 people, maybe 500 or 600 people a year for Christ in Coca Cola Consolidated out of 17,000 employees at 107 locations.
Jim: Last year, the number topped 200,000, and they're still wildly profitable. So there are examples all over the place, but have you seen any good examples where private equity did the buyout and kept the culture?
Becca Spradlin: I, unfortunately, I do not have great examples of that. I do think there are new private equity firms developing and managing toward this. So if you look at Correct Craft, I mentioned them, they're a boat-building company. They're owned by Ambassador Enterprises which is a faith-motivated private equity firm. And so in the work I've done with them and seen in their other companies, this culture piece, this people piece is really present and very much aligned with the ownership of that equity firm.
Becca Spradlin: So I am encouraged because I do think there are more examples of this happening, more private equity out there. There are also other options. You mentioned ESOPs. There's purpose trusts. There's different tools that you can do. And I think with any of them, again, back to the word intentionality, whatever governing structure, ownership structure, leadership structures are in place, you just wanna spend time on, on, on those, and make sure those are aligned.
Becca Spradlin: If you're considering selling to whatever type of buyer or structure, really understanding who's gonna be the future leader ... owners, influencers of that, and what are their long-term objectives. So I think really getting clear, if you're selling to this private equity firm or other buyer, what are their intentions?
Becca Spradlin: Are their intentions to build it up and sell it? If that is part of the mix, whether they're faith-related or not, I think it's really important to be careful because maybe the faith will go on another five to seven years or however long they hold the company. But if they're gonna resell it, then who's gonna buy it then?
Becca Spradlin: So I think it's really important to understand the motivations and the long-term plans of that future buyer and understand to just understand what the culture is gonna do. How long will it extend the culture and care for the team in the way that you want your team to be cared for?
Jim: Caution is what you just heard from Becca, is caution. Be cautious. Know your people. And as private equity thing it is you need to exercise caution. Don't just take somebody's word for it. Double-check their record. You need to do your due diligence. And the ESOPs, employee stock ownership programs, are successful. You can get the same kinda buyout if this is what you use to perpetuate, and you can perpetuate your culture 'cause you've raised up those employees who will then be running the business.
Jim: It's an option that you gotta look at. I loved ... I love this conversation. We could go on forever, Becca, but I've already taken up way too much of your time. Any final words? Any final things you wanna say to encourage our audience today about helping people to stay on mission, to lead on mission, to perpetuate that mission, and to keep it going into the future?
Becca Spradlin: Sure. All of us are prone to mission drift. I've worked with mission-driven organizations for 20 years, and more recently focusing on the topic of mission drift, and for me, it always comes down to abiding in Jesus. We need the leaders, the owners, the board members to be abiding and have a vibrant life in Jesus, an active life that informs and influences how they lead.
Becca Spradlin: Because the reality is there are a lot of different options out there. There are a lot of different decisions you'll make every day as a leader, decisions to transition, decisions in the operations, and there isn't really one right way of doing this, one right way of living out your faith. And God has given each person listening a very unique calling.
Becca Spradlin: So we need to be getting direction from Him and obeying that. There's a lot of best practices we can share and approaches and cautionary tales. But at the end of the day, it's how are we abiding in Jesus? How are we letting that inform the future ownership, leadership, governance, direction of our companies and our lives?
Becca Spradlin: So that would be my encouragement. How do we just stay close to Jesus? How do we obey what He's telling us to do? And be okay if it looks different, certainly than the world around us. It will, and it should. But even from other well-intentioned believers at church or in your business groups, He's gonna call us each to do something different.
Becca Spradlin: But it's always gonna be involve excellence, involve care for people, involve sharing the love of Jesus. But it will look different in each organization.
Jim: And please pass on this show to all your friends who are running businesses so that they can be prepared for that inevitable. Eventually, you're not gonna be able to run your company. You might be 85 or 90, but you eventually need to have a plan, and you can always bring in Becca to get some advice on how to do this the right way.
Jim: Becca Spradlin, thank you so much for being on iWork4Him today.
Becca Spradlin: My pleasure. Thank you.
Jim: Great conversation. If you enjoyed the episode, we encourage you to support iWork4Him in spreading the message that your work matters to God and everything you do at work does. Just consider giving a minimum of $5 a month at iwork4him.com/donate.
Jim: You've been listening to iWork4Him with your host, Jim Brangenberg. I'm a Christ follower, and my workplace, it's my mission field, but ultimately, iWork4Him.