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really
grabbed me," Chuck said. "The world tells
us there is a career path that makes us successful. Buford
taught me that God creates a calling that makes us
significant."
Building People
In 1995 Chuck founded his consulting firm, SKILLSOURCEŽ, "on
a kitchen table with little more than a PC and a file folder."
His business model was equally simple: deliver top quality
consulting to small businesses at an affordable price. His
slogan? Building sales, building profits, building people.
The Halftime philosophy stuck to that last category like a
magnet to steel.
"[After I became a Christian], I started looking at all
the companies I was servicing," Chuck recalled. "If
you want to focus on significance when you look at your clients,
then you must generate more than sales or profits for them.
I became intentional about how I could help my clients build
into people. That started coming out in cool ways. I discovered
some of the executives I was working with had climbed the
ladder and were miserable. Building into them was giving them
permission to start dreaming about a calling instead of career.
In some instances, it meant allowing themselves permission
to be a little less successful from the profit and sales standpoints
and more successful at building people. Bottom line? Many
of those clients now spend more time at their kids' ballgames."
Fishpond Mentality
Chuck also modeled for his clients the investment potential
of strategic charities.
"I lead by example," he said. "I build businesses,
but the focus of my company's charity is to build livelihoods
- to help disadvantaged people in underdeveloped areas launch
small businesses of their own. In partnership with an innovative
nonprofit organization called Self Sustaining Enterprises,
my colleagues and I teach them how to fish and how to buy
the fishpond! We call this sustainable philanthropy, and we
teach clients they can do this, too."
And clients are jumping into those fishponds with a vigor
they haven't felt in years.
"I've seen grown men weep because they begin to feel
again - to tap into a part of their hearts they believed they
had to choke off to be successful in business."
A great success story is H. J. Benken Floral, Home and Garden,
one of largest florist and greenhouses in the state of Ohio.
The 60-year-old company had a marketing program, but there
was no strategy to their charitable giving.
Chuck encouraged CEO Mike Benken to develop a charity that
celebrated what Benkin does best-showcasing the beauty and
bounty of nature. Together, they developed a targeted slogan:
Experience the Beauty of Benken. The strategic focus?
Help provide a positive experience of nature to people who
normally couldn't afford it.
On Valentine's Day, the company delivers exquisite roses to
battered women living in shelters. Employees also host handicapped
children at the Benken facility, where they see flowers in
all their glory, carve pumpkins, go on hayrides - things the
children have never done.
"That's marketplace ministry!" Chuck declared. But
getting the Benken company in touch with local needs was just
the beginning.
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The
dehydrator is built from readily available
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"I
then approached Mike, who calls himself a greenhouse
brat, about expanding his reach. ... Nigeria, one
of the places where I'm involved philanthropically,
is a country of 130 million people with no food-preservation
technology. They don't have refrigeration because
there's not enough electricity, so they grow stuff,
sell it, and eat it until it rots. Then their primary
food source is gone. I told Mike: 'I want you to build
a food dehydrator. Pilot test it in Cincinnati, and
we'll take it to Nigeria. But build it with materials
available there because we're going to teach them
to do it themselves.'"
And Mike delivered.
"The man was awesome!" Chuck said. "He
built the dehydrator out of cinder blocks and plastic
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sheeting . . . like a solar cooker. . . . The sun dries out
fruits and vegetables so the process preserves them. It's
simple technology, but this will literally transform the agricultural
economy of Nigeria. It's a primitive but effective way to
preserve food with the products they have at hand."
But the physical transformation that emerges when you build
into people can't compete with the spiritual transformation.
"Mike goes to Nigeria, and he's really touched,"
Chuck said, his voice packed with emotion. "He sees how
we've set up micro-enterprises so that widows and others who
are desperately poor can support themselves and their children.
He sees his company make a difference there. He gets back
home, and he has been so spiritually touched that he commits
his life to Christ on Easter Sunday. That's how powerful this
stuff is! It bridges the gap that we've created in our world
between marketplace and ministry."
Bob Buford's Gift
Following Bob Buford's lead, Chuck is adamant that the integration
of marketplace and ministry is the right model for kingdom
building.
"Most Christians go to church on Sunday and to work on
Monday," he said. "They live separation instead
of integration. But when you give yourself permission to break
down those barriers, you can become God's servant in the marketplace
right now! Right where you are! Anywhere in the world! It's
an amazing paradigm shift."
"This is Bob Buford's gift to me: He created, especially
for men, a shift from what the world tells us is success to
what God tells us is significance. He showed us how to trade
a career for a calling. What I'm preaching and teaching, through
SKILLSOURCE® and my nonprofit marketplace ministry called
At Work on Purpose®, is to shift from the current
mindset of marketplace here and ministry over there to the
strategic reality that marketplace and ministry can walk hand
in hand - seven days a week!"
In the August Halftime Report, Chuck will unlock
the synergy of BIZNISTRY® and the ever-growing role it
plays in his church, Grace Chapel in Mason, Ohio.
"In Bible times, the greatest material resources were
locked up with the kings," Chuck explains. "But
today, the greatest material resources - the money, the talent,
the equipment - are locked up in the marketplace."
BIZNISTRY® picks those locks, throws open the doors, and
changes lives. To learn more now, contact Chuck at chuck@skillsource.com.
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