Hello.
I’m Kathy English, and I want to welcome you to Profiles and Stewardship, where my husband, Bill English, has conversations with business owners about how they integrate their role as a business owner with their faith in Jesus Christ. Today, Bill is talking with Jeff Thomas, the CEO of Arcos Global Advisors and the author of Trading Up moving from Success to Significance on Wall Street. Jeff is passionate about helping Christian business owners become more generous toward God. If you own a business, then you’ll find Bill’s conversation with Jeff to be both challenging and encouraging. So I invite you to listen and learn as Bill and Jeff talk about generosity in this Profiles in Stewardship episode.
Welcome and good morning. I’m Bill English, the publisher here at Bible and Business. Bible and Business exists to help Christians in business integrate their leadership roles into their faith and to understand all that the Bible says about owning a business and leading in business. So I want to thank you for joining us today. This episode is part of a growing series titled Profiles in Stewardship. These interviews are intended to illustrate what Christian stewardship looks like in the real world for Christian business owners and Christians who lead in business. So from time to time, I talk with business owners and business leaders about how they integrate their leadership role into their Christian faith. These profiles and stewardship interviews are unscripted. We broadcast live and we record them, and they are real and they are unedited. We only do one take of these interviews. Many of the topics I discuss in this series are also discussed in my book, a Christian Theology of Business Ownership. Today I’m talking with Jeff Thomas, the founder and CEO of Arco’s Global Advisors, a pure fiduciary wealth management company that is all opening offices across the country seeking to help clients at a deeper level.
Jeff and his team founded Arcos after 25 years at the largest firms on Wall Street. Jeff has authored a book called Trading Up moving from Success to Significance on Wall Street and is the co host of the Generous Business owner podcast with Alan Barnhart and Jeff Rutt. Jeff and his wife Dolly live in Houston where it’s very warm today. We’re recording this on January 14 and I’m in Minneapolis where it’s very cold today and they have two daughters. Jeff and Dolly stay very involved in their church as well as several nonprofit endeavors. They are founders of the National Christian Foundation of Houston and Jeff currently serves on the executive board there. Dolly has been on the Board of Child Advocates for many years. And in addition to chairing the Lee Strobel Ministries Executive Board, he also chairs the Mission Increase Houston advisory Board. So, Jeff, welcome to Profiles in Stewardship and a Bible in business.
Hey, thanks for having me.
Bill, talk to me just a little bit, just for a second. I want to promote your book here for just a second, but talk to me about this book and then a little bit about the podcast. This is your book. Trading up. Moving from success to significance.
Yes, I wrote the book. It’s really just my own story, as it says there, from Moving from success to Significance on Wall Street. That sort of success to significance line is something that, at least for me, that Bob Buford made famous with his book Halftime. And that book had a big effect on me. But this was really my story, mostly professional story of I grew up as a pastor’s kid, so I was really raised in the church, accepted Christ when I was 13 years old through, you know, just confirmation class. And I remember standing up there when I was 13 in front of the church and asking these questions about whether I trusted Christ as my savior. And I remember thinking, actually I do. So that’s when it happened. But then, you know, I didn’t feel called to pastor at church, I felt called into business. But really my first decade doing that, I was really just making my own plans and asking God to bless them. And after about a decade of that, it really led to kind of an empty place and I couldn’t figure out why. And so I read some books, including Case for Christ by Elise Roble, whose praise God is now a good friend.
And that really helped solidify that I should go to the Bible for the answers. I wasn’t sure, did I just believe all that stuff? Because my parents did. So I had a little bit of a crisis of faith, but that helped kind of renew that. And I started doing a lot of Bible study and God revealed through that study what my problem was, that I was putting worldly success above him. Really, I spent about a decade trying to repent of that and trying to do things differently in business and I’m sure we’ll get into some of that today. And then in 2010, sort of after a decade of frankly doing it wrong and a decade of trying to do it better, god gave me this vision to scale something in our industry for his glory. And so sort of been on that road for the last twelve years. So that’s kind of the underpinnings of the book. And then the podcast, the generous business owner podcast just came about because a couple of friends yeah. Jeff Rutt is the founder of Hope International, the Christian Microfinance nonprofit. He’s also a home builder who’s given the majority of his company away.
89% of his company is owned by the National Christian Foundation. And and then Alan Barnhart, another friend who runs Barnhart, Crane and Rigging out of Memphis and has given all of his company to the National Christian Foundation in our coast. Our company, we’re slowly doing that. We’re a little younger than those guys, but we’ve got 20% now owned by the national Christian Foundation. We plan to continue to do that and follow that model. So the three of us just got together and thought, hey, the way we’re doing things is pretty different relative to the rest of the world, but we’ve got a lot of generous business owner friends and frankly, doing interviews similar to this and just talking to our friends, like, I just think of it as lunch. And sometimes you have a lunch with somebody who’s inspirational to you and you’re like, man, I wish my friends heard that, some of them. So that’s what we try to do on there and we’re having a lot of fun doing it.
I’m going to try something here. I have never tried before on this while we’re actually live, but I’m going to bring up a quote from your book. I have the Kindle edition here, okay? And I thought that this quote was very helpful. It was helpful to me. And it says, success and significance are two completely different commodities. But so many people believe, as I once did, that if you gain success, significance inevitably follows. And that’s just not true, is it?
No, this is the whole thing, right? I think it seems to me from our discussions that your life’s mission is very similar to mine, which is God’s economy and everything he does is almost opposite of the way the world thinks about it. And so, deuteronomy 18, you were asking me some key verses, things like that just hit me when I started doing that Bible study where I was like, no. I kind of bought into this false narrative that I think is sort of subtly in the American dream of if you get enough money, you’ll be happy and it’ll solve all your problems. And then Deuteronomy 818 says, but remember the Lord your God, for is he who gives you the ability to produce wealth. And then Hagi 28, the silver is mine, the gold is mine, declares the Lord Almighty. And so I actually have this thing, and I’m in my home office today, but at my office at work, I had a mentee of mine that is really a craftsman, and he made me a turtle on a fence post, kind of carving metalwork and wood. And I was like, man, I was patting myself on the back for all my success early in my career.
And then when I started reading this stuff, God’s like, yeah, anyway, I gave you your parents, I put you in this country, I gave you those skills. You realize you’re born rounding third. Okay.
Yeah. We had nothing to do with where we were born, when we were born, the parents we were born to, the opportunities that were just given to us. All of that is from the hand of God to be stewarded for his glory in his kingdom. And it’s just yeah, you’re you’re scored.
You know, I do, I do a thing in the book talking about scorecard. I literally had this is not I’m not kidding. I had a scorecard button. It literally said scorecard. And I spent 17 years at Morgan Stanley. Every morning I would come in, and I was like, Pavlov’s dog. I would hit the scorecard button to see where I ranked globally in the firm. And I was an old tennis singles tennis player growing up through college and everything. It was like cat and IP, because it was just like a tournament. Who’s going to be number one? And it was just like, that was my scorecard. Assets improvement. And then I thought, I’ve got my 100 clients. I’m taking care of them. It’s a safe place. Like, I’m going to do the right thing by them. But, boy, I was pressing that button, and that’s the wrong scorecard. You can never win.
That is the wrong scorecard.
You can never win. Where does it lead to? Just more stuff. And so I was like, oh, my gosh, I’ve got the wrong scorecard. And a friend of mine challenged me. I said, I got to get rid of this score. I got to replace this scorecard. And so he goes, all right, don’t press that button for 30 days. And I said, Well, I got to replace the behavior. So I got, like, a little journal, and I would just, like, write down if I’d ask somebody where they went to church, I mean, anything. I mean, for ten years, the first ten years of the business, I never prayed with anybody in the office or any of that stuff. Like, if I actually had the guts to pray for somebody, I’d write that in my little journal. And then after 30 days, actually, my behavior started changing. I was starting to use the business more as a platform to talk about eternal things that make sense. And so what I realized was we were building these financial plans for people, and even though I don’t think we were doing anything, I don’t know that antithetical to the gospel, but what was implied in those financial plans was that if you get to a certain number, you’re safe, you’re happy.
You don’t need God. What do you need?
God.
Say it.
But it’s implied.
It was implied that your safety comes from the number.
Yeah. I mean, God can not from the hand of God, not from God’s promises. That’s one of my biggest problems with financial planners in general, and America, really, it’s not just financial planner, it’s America in general. We put our faith in money correct rather than in God. And a lot of Christians do that. And if God chooses to let our economy implode and our money come to nothing, who are we going to trust then? Right.
As I was preparing for this chat, one of the things I wrote down was, money is a terrible master and a great servant. Like most gifts.
Yes, that’s a great can I use that? Phrase.
Of course I stole it from somebody else. I don’t know where I but it was in a different topic, actually. But any great thing that God gives us, like, that, that we can sort of abuse, and I’m sure we’ll get into this some more, but like, you look at the lives of the people that are the most generous, what I always say is I always say, think of the most generous person you’ve ever met. You know, like, try to picture in your mind’s eye the most generous person you’ve ever met. And I say, are they miserable?
Never.
In fact, they’re usually the most joyous people that you’ve ever I love being around them, and yet they’re wildly generous, not hoarding it for themselves. So God gives us these things to enjoy, but, man, if we make them our little g God that’s what I did early in my career. I made sort of worldly success my little g God. And it’s not a good master.
Well, listen, Jeff, I know we have a whole list of questions to get through, but you said something that really piqued my interest. That’s not on our list, and I’d like to just pull on that thread for a minute. For 30 days, you kept track of what I’m going to say snippets of God conversations that you might have had with people, and I think you were kind of starting to work into sharing your faith in the workplace. And not that you presented the gospel and the whole floor came to know Jesus, but talk to me just a little bit more about what you were doing there and how you were doing it.
Well, it’s just amazing. You can’t take anybody where you haven’t been. And I think for me, a big reason that I didn’t have deep spiritual discussions at work with clients, coworkers, that kind of thing, was that my faith was shaky. Yeah, I just hate saying that, but it’s just true. It wasn’t that solid in my 20s.
It was shallow.
It was shallow. Like, I literally thought, my dad has a D min in this stuff. And I was trading on that for like, 30 years. Sure, but I had, like, a second grader’s knowledge of the Bible. I had to go to church. I went to church. But it was like little pieces. I’d never really studied it. And so when I started, I did Bible study fellowship. Lots of your viewers will have known of that. It’s just great blocking and tackling, sort of daily work and go to a little class Monday night and that, but you get through like, 90% of it. This was when it was a seven year program, I guess nine now. That was so good for me because I started seeing how it all fit together, and I’m really studying the whole thing comprehensively. And so things like this stewardship thing, god was screaming at me, I own it. Stop acting like you do.
Right?
That was the big message. I mean, I could read anything in the Bible, and for that, like, five year period when I started that Bible study, I was like, he was hammering me on that. And so I started getting more confident about this worldview, and then I wanted to share it more. I felt more convicted that I needed to change our narrative at work. So a lot of it was just exercising that muscle. As my Bible knowledge and faith increased, I wanted to share it, but I’d never done it. So how do you create change in your behavior? It was easy to just walk in and do it the same way I always did, so you have to do something to change it. And then I was amazed that after 30 days, it only got stronger after that. But it was so encouraging. And I literally went in my manager’s office at this time and I said, hey, I’m going to start telling people their money isn’t their money, because this is the big lesson God was giving me, right? And I go, if my business made just totally crater. Anyway, I just want you to know that I’m going to start saying that.
You were like, the number one or number two guy at Morgan Stanley, right?
Yeah. So this may totally crater my business. I just want to let you know he was actually a believer, but he was like, okay, well, thanks for telling me. Like, what is he supposed to say? I guess he could have said, don’t do that, but he knew I was going to do it. And after that, I’m not in a great evangelist. I always want to get better, frankly, in that way. And Lisa will. Mark Middleburg. These guys are helping me with that. But we did have later, years later, we had a client who’s a rough and tumble Marine in Vietnam. He served in Vietnam. I can only imagine the trauma he had been through. And he lost his wife to cancer. And I would show up and take him to have some barbecue on a break and that kind of thing while his wife was in the hospital. And it opened up a conversation about God. I was like, how do you see? Because anyway, we just started having this conversation, and unfortunately, his wife passed away. It was almost like she was his little g God. I mean, that was the most important thing in his life, and he knew that that was misplaced when he lost it.
Now what do I do? Anyway, over months and months, we had a lot of these spiritual discussions, and I’ll be dying if he didn’t come to Christ. And in my office, after months of just having a natural discussion as friends about who God was and who Jesus was. So, I mean, we went from ten years of never seeing boo okay, to having those kind of things. It was just that’s so much more fun. That’s actually the scorecard that gets me juiced. The chasing the money thing didn’t do it.
What I find interesting there, just when I was praying this morning for our spot today, our interview, and just in general, what God brought to my mind is that Bill, if we could change two things in the church, it would revolutionize it would almost bring revival. If we could help people learn to enjoy my presence, which give them something to share, because that really speaks to the shallow and the shakiness of your faith. I think faith is deepened when we just simply learn to enjoy the presence of God, and then if we could help them become generous, I think those two things would solve so many problems in our churches that it’s difficult to overstate their importance.
I think they’re the same thing because one leads to another.
Yeah.
I love that. I always pray for more intimacy because that’s where the joy is, and that intimacy transforms us. Of course, we’ll never quite get there, but if we can have this sort of sanctification or whatever term you want to get more like Christ makes me more generous. I can’t do it without a deeper relationship with Him. Now, it helps me to see some other examples. Hey, that person is happy, joyous. And my gosh, they’re so generous with everything, willing to share all those things. But I haven’t been able to do it without that intimacy. And I never had that same drive before for that first ten years. I really was turning up the music to try to drown out God’s voice, and I thought it would be more fun doing it my way. I didn’t want all his rules that would limit my fun. And it’s exactly the opposite, as you said, way more fun doing it his way. Just like a great parent, he’s not trying to limit our fund. He’s trying to show us the proper path to joy. And I think that’s an important thing it is joyous to do.
Because you and I both work with business owners. You work with them more in the generosity area. And that really was supposed to be the focus of our interview. I kind of want to transition to.
That a little bit.
Talking about the heart of generosity. Generosity is a heart issue. It’s not a process issue. It’s not how do I budget this issue? It’s really a hard issue. And the most happy people how do I say this? The most mature people I’ve ever met in the Lord are also some of the most generous people I’ve ever met. And they usually don’t have a lot of money to begin with, but they’re almost like the widows might, right? They’re very generous with what God has given to them. So I want to transition and bridge this a little bit to one of the questions that we had prepped here. What’s the role that generosity should play in the life of a Christian who owns a business.
You sent me that list of questions, and I wrote one word by that question, which was central. What role does generosity play? It’s back to what we’re talking about, right? Everything starts with your worldview and who owns it. You have to deal with that question, and we talked about those verses. Just a couple of deuteronomy 818. Remember the Lord, it’s him who gives you the ability to produce wealth. And the silver and gold is mine in Hagi 28. If you don’t have that right, the rest of it never flows. You got to have the and that’s what I had wrong. I thought I was in charge. And the crisis in the passenger seat, I mean, he’s driving. I’m, like, in the back of the bus, happy to be on the bus. So you got to walk in with that perspective. Now, the way you work that out is kind of unique to everybody, but just understand that platform that you would agree with this. I think there are a lot of Christians in business. They go to church on a fairly regular basis, but then you show up Monday, and it’s the rat race. And now I’m emptied, and I got to go back next Sunday and try to get a charge so I can make it through the next week.
Right?
As opposed to thinking about this is the other thing. Even though I thought early in that first ten years of my career, even though I thought, okay, if I have 100 clients, that’s sort of my flock. I even thought of it kind of like my dad as a pastor that he could probably get to know about roughly what was going on with about 100 families. I was like, okay, I’ll take care of those people. But again, my focus was on success. So if you would ask me, Are you in ministry? I’d be like, I mean, I’m trying to do the right thing for people, but no.
They’Re the ministers.
Yeah, business people. We try to be ethical, make money and give it to the people doing the heavy lifting. They’re in ministry. They go over to Africa or someplace, run a nonprofit. I think the mindset is the most critical. Understand your turtle on a fence post. You don’t own anything. You’re a steward. I mean, that sounds so basic, I think, but actually behaving that way Monday through Sunday, and even with your language, maybe with the way you set up the company, with the way you treat employees, with the way you treat customers, maybe the ownership structure, do you give away money from it? There’s a lot of ways to work this out, but the framework has to be that way. And that, I find, is very rare for people to come in with that full on mindset. How is every interaction, every transaction, everything imbued with that worldview?
The church is full of people. And I’m not trying to be overly critical here in my evaluation here, but I suspect that the church is comprised mainly of people where their Christianity is a part of their life. They’re checking the box. I’m a good person, right? I go to church, I went to Confirmation, my kids went to Confirmation, so forth and so on. But in terms of God and Christianity being the organizing principle of their life, well, that’s a little bit different. And the kind of business owner that you’re describing is a business owner who has been captivated first by God for God’s glory, and then he or she happens to own a business. And, oh, they understand their stewardship and they’re going to give away as much as they can because it’s God’s money, it’s not theirs.
Yeah, the generosity has very little to do with the money. You know what I mean? It literally is the mindset. It doesn’t matter what the zeros are. Back to your widow’s might example. The zeros are frankly irrelevant, actually. And we know this from God’s word that it’s harder for a rich man to get to heaven than a camel will get through the eye of the why did you say that? Because it’s just as you accumulate resources, there’s that temptation that we talked about to put your trust in those, not God.
Yes.
It’S very countercultural, but I think you’re exactly right. But the thing that hits me is, I mean, I got that T shirt trying to chase the worldly success and be in the just go to church on Sunday kind of deal. And for me, it just left to a super empty place. I was like, early 30s going, what am I doing? I’m just making rich people richer. That’s my purpose. Like, shoot me now. I don’t know what it should be. I didn’t know what it should be at that time, but I knew that wasn’t it. And then what God shows you is there’s this massive awesome adventure if you get intimacy with Him. He’s got this incredible adventure available for the three books I sell a year. I sign them with Ephesians 210 in there.
You got your own book, huh?
Yeah, but it says, we are his workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them. And so for me, literally, the number one reason I wrote that book was that moment where I’m sitting with a mentor of mine, Ron Blue, who would create a wealth management firm. And he said, I can’t believe everything I start gets bigger and better after I leave, because I can’t believe this firm has 15 offices, 50 million in revenue. And it was like God literally spoke to me and he’s like, I want you to scale what this guy started. And it was like I was telling you earlier, before he started recording, my whole life flashed those ten years of doing it the wrong way, the ten years of chasing him, and this is 20 years into the career. And he redeemed all that and gave me a mission to scale something. And that was so personal. I told you the film is playing in my mind of that decade of doing it wrong and then the decade of trying to doing it better. And I’d gotten this intimacy that I never had with him.
And then he gave me this cool project that I’m going to work on for the rest of my life until he tells me to do something different. But that’s the thing I want for everybody. That was so personal. He’s got one for you. He’s got one for every single person watching this. Custom tailored. But you don’t get that, I don’t think, without the intimacy. You got to be listening to him. I wouldn’t listen to I could I couldn’t even execute it on it. I wouldn’t I wasn’t listening for ten years.
You know, God doesn’t throw his pearls before swine and he isn’t going to throw the really important stuff in front of us until we’re faithful to him. That’s kind of how I look at that. We’re talking today with Jeff Thomas, who’s the founder and the CEO of Arcus Global Advisors out of Houston. Jeff is also the author, and I want to just show this to you again of his book called Trading Up moving from Success to Significance on Wall Street. And he also has, I think, an increasingly popular broadcast along with Jeff Rudd and Alan Barnhart on generous business ownership. And we’re talking about stewardship today with Jeff and so glad that he’s here. Let me ask another question here, if I may, Jeff. How do business owners give out of their business? Now, I know that we can write checks, right? And sometimes the ministries see us mainly for that. But you have alluded to an ownership gift where you actually gift some or all of your business to a foundation. So I am acquainted, although I’m not friends with the National Heritage Foundation representative up here in Minneapolis. I forget his name, but can you talk a little bit about taking ownership and gifting that to the kingdom?
How does that work?
Yeah. So I’ll just tell a story about the first time I heard Alan Barnhart’s story. One of my co hosts on the podcast was, I don’t know, probably 2006, something like that, at a Generous Giving Conference. Generous Giving is just a nonprofit that gets people together and tells stories and shares biblical wisdom and kind of lets people draw their own conclusions about how they should think about generosity. And it always starts with this worldview of who owns it, like we talked about. But I heard Alan’s story and I was really just trying to be a tickled tither, stepping up to try to get to 10% of income. And I hear Alan’s story, which just. Blew my mind. I’d never heard of such a thing, where even to this day, he pays himself. Well. The way it worked was and he’s in his early sixty s, I think he started the business, I want to say, like 1986, something like that. He was getting out of college with his brother, and his parents said, hey, do you want to take over this family business? What was two cranes that they sort of rented out from their house, and they said, we’re going to sell these cranes either to you and your brother or somebody else, but we’re going to go buy a boat and go around the world and retire.
And so Allen was engaged to be married, and his then fiance, Catherine, now wife, they were having this debate about she wanted to go into the mission field with him, and he wanted to take over the family business with his brother. And apparently the vote was one to one, kept being one to one, and she finally relented. And the compromise was we’ll set our salary as what the mission board would pay us, and we’ll give away everything else above that.
Oh, my. Really?
First year? Yeah. So the first year, he and his brother, they took over the business, and they made that agreement, and they gave away 50 grand the first year, which was, I think that’s pretty impressive, 1986, whatever, just right out of college. And now they’ve kept to that same program. He pays himself 100 grand a year, and they give away a couple of million a month.
A month.
A month.
Not a year.
A month. Not a year. A month. So it’s I mean, depending on the year, tens of millions a year. And he’ll tent camp sometimes, just because he likes to tent camp, when he visits one of his 50 locations around the US, he’ll just drive in and have his tent in the back. To me, this guy is like a modern day John the Baptist. You know what I mean? It’s just insanely generous. And he’s the most calm, happy, joyous person you’ve ever met. He thinks you have to listen to the podcast I record with him all the time. He just thinks, this is so normal. This is what everybody should do. You don’t have to worry about money. He goes, I read the Bible about all of these problems money can cause. Who wants that? I just took it out of the equation. I don’t have any of those problems. Like, why wouldn’t you just take it out? It was so countercultural to me. It blew my mind when I heard it, like 16 years ago, but it stuck in there. And I started seeing other models. I started learning from our exposure to National Christian Foundation, seeing how this was done.
So what Allen did and what Jeff Rutt did is they took the ownership and they donated the ownership of the company as an operating entity. Into National Christian Foundation. You can do it at other places. But they gave it to me. They gave so you get a deduction. Okay, when you do that. Now, those companies were so big that no way they could write it all off. But now there’s sort of a direct pipe where a certain percentage think about running the business. You still allocate the capital. You still maintain control of the capital allocation. So if you have 20 million in profits, you can reinvest ten of it or 18 of it or whatever, but whatever’s left over if 100% of stocks owned by the foundation goes directly into a donor advised fund. So it’s a really interesting tool. And that’s one of the things I love about America, is our tax code. This is black and white. This is not gray area. It actually subsidizes giving. We get a deduction for it. Not all countries do that. That’s a way to do it other times. And then this is what we do for a living, is we deal with generous business owners, often having liquidity events.
Most of them aren’t doing that. 20% of our coast, our company is owned by Natural Christian Foundation. So 20% of whatever the profits are that are left over go directly to our donor advised fund, and then we give it away as a group. That number obviously, we’re a smaller company. Barnhart, he’s got six committees we can get into. That how you give it away. It gets a lot of money to give away. How do you figure out how to do that?
Well, yeah, that was one of the questions going through my mind. But before I get there, I can imagine a business owner saying, wait a minute, I take my stock and I gift it into a donor advice fund, either through NCF or through some other organization. Most nonprofits, in fact, all nonprofits, have a board of directors who can control the assets of the nonprofit. So how does my donor advice do I get my own board for my own donor advice fund, or does some other board control all this stuff?
Yeah, so you’re in total control of that fund. So NCF is just the 501, but they’re hands off. It’s like a giving bank account that you completely control. Okay? So you could just individually do it. If you’re the sole owner of the business and you give the stock, you can just determine on your own where to donate that funds. But the donor advice, that’s literally why it’s called donor advised, because the donor advises the fund where to give the money, so you still maintain complete control. So that’s probably the most radical, is to give interest in an operating entity. Because, again, what we’ve been taught is that, hey, that’s my safety is the equity in the business.
Someday I’m going to sell that safety of Jesus Christ.
Thank you. So if you can construct your life, but if you’re going to do something with the world would consider radical of giving an interest in an ongoing operating entity. You’re not going to have a liquidity event if you give all of it. Okay? So if you give 100%, like Alan, if they sell the company, all the proceeds will go into the foundation to give away. He’s not going to have a giant payday. And what Jeff Rutt said, he gave 89% to the National Christian Foundation. He said after he announced to the company that they had put 89% into the donor advised fund, one of his managers came up to him and said, hey, you’re one of us now. You just work with a company. I thought that was really kind of a cool statement.
I’m sorry, what does that do for so now my head goes, because you and I talk in our prep time that I do some leadership evaluation for second generation taking over. How does a guy putting his business into a donor advice fund, what does that do to family succession planning?
It it changes everything, actually.
Yeah, I would think so.
We just two weeks ago, I interviewed Alan for 30 minutes. The two questions I get the most about him, because sort of in our little world of giving away businesses, he’s the grand pooba. He’s done it the longest, you know.
Right.
He’s the most radical with how little he pays himself.
Right.
And it’s such a relative. It’s a mid size company in America, but 1700 employees. It’s a decent sized company, so it’s a meaningful example that’s been going on for decades. But we recorded the two questions I get the most about him are how does he give it away? Which we can get into, and then what do the kids think of it? Or the family? Which is kind of what you’re alluding to.
Yeah, because they see all this wealth that could have been theirs, it’s no longer theirs.
Right. We recorded a podcast just on that topic. But what Allen’s viewpoint is it made it all easy because nobody’s entitled to anything. We’ve talked about this from the very.
Beginning, I suppose it’s true.
So they can come, they can have a starter job there and see if they can work their way up, but they ain’t going to own any of it. So they’ve never had that in their minds. And so there’s never been any entitlement from the beginning because it just takes it all out. So it’s a meritocracy. Whoever’s going to run it are the best people. But my kids have had a rich inheritance, and one of the things we talk about at Arcos all the time is inheritance is not just money. We call it the five capitals, which is spiritual capital, the most important, relational capital, education, character, and, of course, money. And we do this presentation with people, and we always say, if you had to bankrupt one for your kids, which one would it be every single person picks finance. So what Allen would say is, we’ve led a rich inheritance for our six children, and it ain’t money. It’s all those other things. They’ve been all around the globe helping give the money away. What have they learned from seeing what the money has done? He goes, they’re thriving as individuals. Isn’t that fascinating?
Wait, our definition of thriving is the person with the most toys wins. And wait, that doesn’t work. He’s giving them zero toys and they’re winning. It’s a radical example. But anyway, so there are other ways to do it. You can give away a chunk of the business before you sell it. You can own all of it. And right before you sell it, we do a lot of those where we give it pre tax sometimes for whatever legal reasons or your shareholders or private equities in it, whatever, you can’t do it that way. You can give a big chunk to a foundation or whatever the year you sell it. So we just did one of those with a great friend and client where they were unable to do it pre tax just because of the way the ownership had already been structured from a generation ahead. But they could give 30% of the proceeds and write that off. So there’s a myriad of ways to actually do the deduction that very few people maximize in the United States. Our tax code is, I think, amazing at letting us do this, but nobody you got to have the worldview.
You are personally going to have less money. You got to get over that before you even get into all these techniques. And if you’re going to get over that, you got to have this deeper relationship that we talked about. So it builds on itself. It builds on itself.
So less money, but more god and more significance. And money probably a lot more happy.
Well, and as our buddy Randy Alcorn, who writes all these great books on this topic, he always says, you can’t take it with you, but you can send it ahead. And so I’ve been thinking a lot lately about this idea that do we have less? What’s the definition of less? And what’s the definition of we had a podcast guest on recently. We’re talking about the cost. He’s spending a lot of his time, like half of his time doing charity stuff, and he’s like, there’s a cost to it. I always tell my peers, like, if you want to do it the way I do it, there’s a cost. I was like, Danny, there’s a cost. But what’s the definition of the benefit? I think you can send it ahead where you get eternal credit for this type of behavior.
Yeah, I totally agree. We’re talking today with Jeff Thomas, who’s part of the Generous Business Owner podcast, and that’s the podcast he’s referring to. And he’s also written a book titled Trading Up moving from Success to Significance on Wall Street. If you’re listening to the podcast, maybe the audio, how we’re flowing. This may not make total sense because we’re also recording this in video format and we are sharing some things on screen as we go through this. Let me shift us just a little bit more to one other topic and I’m going to just pull this up here. Let’s talk and maybe round out our time today. And by the way, this has been a fabulous time, jeff, I really appreciate you being with us. Let’s talk about saving and hoarding because there is a place in the Bible. When I wrote this part in the Bible, I had to face the question, or in my book, I had to face the question, what does the Bible have to say about saving? And it does have some positive things to say about saving and where I landed. And I’m interested to hear your perspective on this and then on what hoarding is.
Where I landed was we save for what we can realistically expect our future expenses so that we pay for those ourselves, rather than having to depend on the government or somebody else. Having said that, hoarding is really excessive savings. Hoarding is just saving too much instead of being generous with that. So I’ll tee it up that way. But I’d love to hear your perspective on Christian saving and then what hoarding looks like and why we don’t hoard.
Man, there’s a lot there.
Yeah, I know.
But this is key stuff and this is stuff that very few people actually talk about.
Oh, I know.
And I think it’s a really important topic. And so one of the cool things, one of the things I think that we should really get across is some people have you can take this too far to where you just got to live in a hole and not have any fun. I mean, God gives us all things to richly enjoy, right? Even John 1010, the thief comes only to steal and destroy. I have come that they may have life and have it in its fullness. Like he wants us to enjoy the things he gives us. And there’s no place in the Bible. There’s almost 2300, as you know, verses on money and possessions. The Bible talks about money and possessions more than heaven and hell combined. I mean, this is a very important topic. Why? Because I think obviously it competes for our hearts. Okay?
Right.
There’s nothing in the Bible in those 2300 verses that says, now, here’s what you should do. You should take this lifestyle and compound it for inflation. So each of us, fortunately or unfortunately, has to, through prayer and intimacy with Christ, determine what our own lifestyle should be. Now, this is very important because how do you define your hoarding? If you have an unlimited if you’re going to never limit your budget, I mean, if you’re always wanting more, then you got to keep hoarding more. They would never call it hoarding, but you’d have to keep saving more. So the first thing you have to do is pray about what is the lifestyle God is calling me to. Once you have a lifestyle God is calling you to, now you can define a finish line. So what’s my financial finish line? How much am I going to spend on an annual basis? Now, we can run a little financial plan and endow that, but for the people we’re dealing with, if they go through that process, there’s usually some extra.
Where I’ve landed on my book on that is live at the median of whatever community God has placed you in.
So I just posted on LinkedIn this week a great story about a very successful business guy who he and his wife did that and we’re giving away everything over that. I mean, they just the most joyous people. So the right answer is unlikely to be no. Cap.
Right. Although, Jeff, we do need Christians living with the ultra wealthy. We absolutely need that exactly. From a church. But we also need Christians living with the ultra poor. We need Christians in all economic strata.
Well, one of the things we talked about, one of the things we talk about in the business is, okay, how much is enough for you? Okay, first of all, we’ve already hammered home the who owns it? You got to get that right. Okay, right. Who owns it? God owns it. I’m a steward. I mean, that sounds simple, but it took me ten years of my professional life to actually behave that way. So that’s not a small thing. Okay, now that we’ve done that, what’s our financial finish line? How much is enough for me? How much enough for the kids? That’s the number one question we get from our clients. What do I give the kids or not give the kids? And then what do you do with the excess? And one of the banes of my existence is what we call the template, okay? And we have this thing we call the kingdom versus world estate plan. And let’s say it’s a radical example. I know it’s a big number, but just for fun, somebody sells their company for $100 million. They got four kids. What the world says to do is divide your estate by four and each kid gets a trust for $25 million when you die.
And the only question you have to answer is when do they become full trustee? Now, I would propose that maybe you should tap the brakes on that discussion because you can do that in about 3 hours. But that’s how the estate planning attorneys are trained to do it from a tax standpoint. And probably you should be doing it earlier and discounting the business and getting that in there anyway. There’s a lot of games that get played, but at the end of the day, that’s what they do or they buy a big insurance policy to pay the taxes and all of this sort of stuff. So this is the default. All I’m saying is, why don’t we tap the brakes and ask God what he wants done? Maybe in a few of these sort of worldly instances, they’re like, oh, you give money to your church and some.
Other little nonprofit, make sure you write.
A $500 check on that, $100,000 in that out of $100 million estate. Now, that’s nice that they really thought about that. And what we would say is, let’s forget the template for a second. What does God want you to do with this? Forget all the tax law, all that stuff. What is God telling you to do? He’s wildly generous to us. My gosh, if you’re running a business like that, can you imagine how generous he’s been to you? What do you want to do? So where’s your finish line? How much stuff for the kids? And there’s usually excess if you really go through that and then give it away while you’re alive, not when you’re dead.
Right, okay.
So you do now give while you’re living so you’re knowing where it’s going. That’s an old one, but it’s more fun. And then you can include the family. What does that teach them, all of these kind of things? I feel like we spend half our time at our company just defining that, like blowing up the template. And we don’t have another template. You tell us, let’s pray about it. You tell us what God’s telling you and then let’s design this thing. And it almost always has a good chunk of generosity in it because that’s his heart. That’s his heart.
And so hoarding, which is the opposite of God’s heart, because hoarding is selfishness, it’s not generosity. So if I were to read between the lines with you, hoarding is not giving away the excess.
You and I talked about the two barns. I like this as an example of hoarding. Okay?
Right.
So multiple examples, okay? Luke 1213 to 21, the parable of the rich fool. Remember, this is where well, look.
I’m going to look to my for those who are watching on video, I’m looking at another screen.
Let me just read. Okay, in verse 16 says, and he told them this parable, this is Christ, of course, the ground of a certain rich man yielded an abundant harvest. He thought to himself, what shall I do? I have no place to store my crops. Then he said, this is what I’ll do. I’ll tear down my barns and build bigger ones. And there I will store my surplus grain. And I’ll say to myself, you have plenty of grain laid up for many years. Take life easy. Eat, drink and be merry. But God said to him, you fool, this night, this very night, your life will be demanded from you. Then you will get what you have prepared then who will get what you have prepared for yourself? This is how it will be with whoever stores up things for themselves, but is not rich toward God. So that, to me, is the classic biblical definition of hoarding. It’s more than you need, man, I’m just going to coast and not do anything for anybody but myself. So this whole model that we have, we sort of reject the whole concept of retirement in our company.
We dash tirement. You can put new tires on. You don’t have to work for the same company. You can do other things, but you got to have a purpose, a Christ centered purpose. That’s where the joy comes from and the reward. But we all know people that retire sit on their rear end and just die.
They die soon. Isn’t the average two years after a guy retires?
You gotta have a give back is the healthy. They’ve done all the neuroscience stuff. That just backs all this up, too. It’s the healthiest lifestyle you can have. But what I find so interesting is then Joseph, remember, it’s not about the money. It’s never about the money. It’s always about the heart.
Right?
Remember the story of Joseph? This is, I think, in Genesis 41, where, of course, Joseph is working for Pharaoh. And remember, he interprets the dream that nobody can interpret, so that he gets elevated. Well, the dream that he interpreted for Pharaoh was you’re going to have seven, like, great years of harvest and then seven lean years, they stored up. They did 20% savings during those seven years. And Joseph, so you could argue they’re building bigger barns. Bill, it’s not about the barns. It’s about what did God tell you to do? God gave him the interpretation, tough times are coming. It’s not excess where you sit on your rear end. It’s to provide and show God’s power. And he’s a guy. Of course, that whole narrative about the brothers coming and everything else, it’s just doing the thing God told you to do. So if he’s telling you to build bigger barns, I guarantee it’s not so you can sit on your rear end. It’s for his glory to build the bigger barns. So the whole thing is custom. We’re back to this intimacy, custom plan for your life. It’s so cool. And that adventure is so much fun to do it the way he says to do it.
I’m having 10,000 times more fun than I did when I was trying to do it in my own power.
Man, what a testimony. What a story. Just as a follow up, I remember talking to a guy who sold water heaters, sold water just out of his house, and he hit a streak of time where everybody he talked to bought a water heater, and he was wondering what God was doing. Well, what God was doing was prepping him, because there was another month coming up where he didn’t sell any. And he couldn’t. He got sick and he couldn’t work. And God gave him extra money in advance so that he could survive that month when he was sick. God does those things, right. Small scale, big scale, doesn’t matter. It’s our faithfulness to God that matters. The zeros don’t matter because the widow remember, the widow gave more than all the other rich people in her church. So there’s the mindset.
We’ve talked about it’s the mindset, and but what I think is so cool is just the adventure. I mean, I want people to take away from this, maybe somebody’s listening or watching to this that is thinking, yeah, but isn’t God going to send me to I’m definitely afraid he’s going to send me to Africa, and I don’t want to go to Africa if I give Him control. I literally had those thoughts because, like, we knew missionaries growing up, and I was like, oh, man, please don’t send me to Africa. You know what I mean? Like, it’s a thing. The last thing God is going to do is send me to Africa. I’m terrible in those situations. He’s going to use us all in the place we’re most effective for him.
Yeah.
And that’s fulfillment is to give him glory by your behavior, which we spend so many hours at work. How do we do that? How do we live that integrated life? That’s what you were talking about, not just on Sunday, but all week. And how much fun is it? The way you treat the employees, the way you treat you’re, even writing stuff for you. If you have a hard boss, maybe you’re not even the boss. How do you still live that out at work in a tough environment? But it’s the mindset.
Well, Jeff, I love your heart, and this has been an invigorating conversation, at least for me. I don’t meet a lot of people that traffic in these topics that I write about. I just don’t meet a lot of them. And it’s been great to get to know you and to have you on the show. We’ve been talking with Jeff Thomas, who is the CEO of our Coast Global Advisors. He’s out of Houston. This is his book. Trading up. Moving from success to Significance. You can get it on Amazon. I bought it for the Kindle edition, but I’m sure you can also get a print version with that, too. And I also want to recommend his podcast generous business owner. He does that with Jeff ROTT and Alan Barnhart. I found it on Apple audible, simple cast, but I’m sure that it’s also available elsewhere. Jeff, great to meet you. Thank you so much for coming on today.
Hey, Bill, thanks for having me. It’s a joy for me to meet you as well.
So until we meet again, my next guest is going to be Kirby Spike, who spent his years at three M in middle and upper level management. And Kirby and I are going to be talking about how you maintain your faith and even possibly share your faith when you work for a boss who is really difficult, very demanding and can basically be a horse’s platoon. How do you do that as a Christian and maintain your faith? I think it’s going to be a very interesting profile in Stewardship. So until we meet again, thanks for joining me today and I hope you go out and make it a great day. Take care.
Thank you for joining Bill and Jeff today. I hope you found their conversation to be helpful to you as you grow in your faith in Jesus Christ. If you’d like to talk with Bill, just email him at bill at bible. Andbusiness.com Bill and I hope, hope you’ll join us again for another Bible and Business Profiles in Stewardship podcast. So until then, please go out and make it a great day. Take care.