And welcome back. I’m Bill English the publisher here at Bible and Business and I just want to thank you for joining me again today. You’re catching me in an eight part series on chapter five of my book a Christian Theology of Business Ownership. This chapter after deals with advisors and wisdom and in this episode I’m going to be looking at why business owners should be building a panel of trusted advisors. But before we get started there today I’d like for you to just head over to Bible and Business.com and check out the articles and the podcasts and the other information I have there.
Of course I write for Christians who are in business and Christians who own businesses and that’s what Bible and Business is for. I’ll also ask that you take a moment and subscribe to this YouTube channel here at Bible and Business. So let’s start by looking at building a panel of trusted advisors. Let’s talk about this for just a moment. Every Christian business owner I believe should have a group of trusted advisers whom the owner relies on for wisdom and advice.
I can’t tell you how many business owners I’ve met who are isolated islands. They don’t trust anybody. And the ones who are particularly dysfunctional don’t even bother to make sure that any one given advisor knows everything about their business. So for example they’ll tell their banker one set of details about their business and they’ll tell their financial planner another set and their lawyer a third set and their accountant a fourth set and that’s just really dysfunctional. It’s almost paranoid in some ways and I’ve never seen a reason to not develop trust in my advisors.
Now if you don’t trust your advisors maybe you need other advisors. But too many business owners, especially Christian business owners seem to be islands and they don’t really take the time to trust the people who are around them or who could be around them to give them a better business. So I want to start in terms of a panel of advisors by looking at intercessors. All I want to say here is that if you plan to use your business and move out for Jesus Christ if you plan to blaze for Jesus in the marketplace satan is going to oppose you. And when he does he is going to come after your business as well as your employees as well as you.
So having intercessors who can run spiritual interference for you I think is going to be a good thing for you. If you don’t plan to try to use your business for the kingdom then Satan’s probably going to leave you alone. He’ll probably just let you go. In fact, he may even actually help you make a lot of money so that you become less dependent on the Lord and you drift from the Lord and really become kind of this lukewarm Christian. And Satan would love nothing better than for you to think that you’re a Christian, but really find that you’re a lukewarm Christian down the road.
A lot of business owners actually legally they have boards of directors but they really don’t pay attention to that. And so what I sometimes recommend is that you get an advisory counsel. These are friends that you trust to sit with you once or twice a year and look at your business and look at you as an individual and speak truth into your life and into how you should be running your business better and maybe how you should be managing yourself better. Proverbs 27 six says that wounds from a friend can be trusted, but an enemy multiplies kisses. You need to be wounded from time to time as a Christian business owner by people who love you.
You know their hearts. You know their hearts are in the right place, but they still give you some truth. You need that from time to time. So I would advise you to put together an advisory council. In my book, I talk about this a little bit more.
And so I would advise that you get an advisory council. Your panel of trusted advisors are going to be a banker, a lawyer, an accountant, a financial planner, someone in human resources and maybe a personal advisor or coach. I can tell you that many Christian business owners, in fact business owners in general, they shy away from giving very much information at all to their banker. It’s like they treat their banker almost as an adversary because they’re so afraid that if their banker even sees one smidgen of bad news that the banker is going to come in and squeeze their line or take away their line of credit or ask them to go to another bank. Nothing really could be farther from the truth.
Of all of the people who you see listed here in terms of your trusted advisors, your banker is the one person you never want to surprise. Don’t surprise your banker. You can surprise your lawyer, your accountant and everybody else. Don’t surprise your banker if you work with them and let them know both the good and the bad of what’s happening in your bank, the good bankers now, they will work with you and they will understand. I mean these guys and gals look at businesses all the time.
They might look at 100 or more businesses a year. So they are accustomed to seeing businesses that aren’t perfect. And so I would strongly advise you the time to develop a really strong relationship with your banker is when you don’t need that line of credit. So that during the times when you really do need that line of credit, you already have that relationship established with your banker. You already have that history.
They can go to bat for you and maybe do a little bit more than what they could have in the past. So in review, I’m going to suggest that you build a panel of trusted advisors, that you not be an island anymore, that you not be a business owner who just doesn’t trust other people. I think if you’re going to really scale your business past what you yourself, what you are able to do by yourself, if you really want to scale it, you’re going to need a panel of trusted advisors who you talk to on a regular basis. They are really essential to running a healthy business. And also be sure if you’re going to use your business for Jesus Christ, which I strongly encourage you to do, then you’re going to need a panel of intercessors who can help you with that as well.
And then finally somebody to speak into your own life, right? So develop an advisory council that can speak truth into your life and truth into your business. These people on the advisory council is probably your pastor, but probably not a lot of ministry people. You want other business owners and maybe even some of your trusted advisors to be a part of your advisory council. So in our next episode, we are going to look at a really odd topic, and that is churches who become intentional about growing new business owners for the kingdom.
Should be interesting, should it not? I want to thank you for joining me today. I’m Bill English, the publisher here at Bible and Business. So glad that you came on board with me today, and I hope to see you at our next episode next week. So until we see each other again, I hope you go out and make it a great day.
Take care.