What Non-Profits Can Learn From For-Profits – Live Notes From Orange ’14

Back for Day 2 of the Orange Conference!  Just a reminder, in an effort to grow in my skills to better add value to pastors and church leaders I am being dispatched by Injoy Stewardship Solutions (ISS) to attend this amazing event.

The afternoon’s final breakout session was conducted by Joel Manby, CEO of Herschend Family Entertainment, and David Salyers, Vice President of Chick-Fil-A entitled What Non-Profits Can Learn From For-Profits.  The following are 40 leadership quotes I captured during this incredibly informative session:  Joel and David’s initials are by their comments:

1. There are a lot of great business leaders who are Christians and making great decisions…Anytime we can get together and talk about what makes great leadership we can learn from each other. – JM
2. I know a lot of people who think biblical principle have no place in business. – DS
3. We’ve never had a year ever the sales were less than the year before. – DS
4. Church is the marketplace of love.  My business, that’s what we’re about too. – DS
5. Churches and businesses are organizations made up of people and God made people.  The principles are the same. – DS
6. If you’re in a business that’s not about love, that’s a problem. – DS
7. Every Sunday we fill the room with people who are involved in business. – Carey Nieuwhof (CN)
8. Biblical principles do work in for-profit business leadership. – JM
9. If you want to have excellence you have to measure what you’re going for. – JM
10. What makes us really unique is our B Goals.  What can of leader do I want to be? – JM
11. In most non-profits there is a dearth of conversation about the leader but not enough about how you lead your teams and volunteers. – JM
12. We measure our leaders on how their doing their job as well as what they do. – JM
13. We ask our employees to give first to our foundation and we match it dollar for dollar to help our employees in need. – JM
14. You struggle with how to help everybody…There’s pain and suffering everywhere. – JM
15. Do for one what you wish you could do for everyone. – JM
16. How you run Herschend Family Entertainment is far more Christian than many churches. – CN
17. We are totally debt free as an organization.  We are a $5 billion business without debt. – DS
18. In a non-profit world it’s all about being frugal…Don’t confuse frugality with morality. – DS
19. God is honored when we do things with excellence.  In the non-profit world we start with the size of the budget instead the size of the dream. – DS
20. If you start with the size of the budget, people don’t show up. – DS
21. The best ideas win.  The best ideas get funded. – DS
22. Part of stewardship is creating amazing value.  Value is what you get divided by what you pay. – DS
23. The church has the most important message in the world.  Why would we get cheap with that message? – DS
24. Do we want our epithet on our gravestone to read “We Kept Charity Budgets Low”? – DS
25. What happens in for-profit world things get eliminated more fastly…In the non-profit world there is a reluctance to cut what is not working. – JM
26. I hope the least important thing you ever get from Chick-Fil-A is a paycheck. – DS
27. Business is based on a flawed idea…Most businesses exist to extract value from other people. – DS
28. The best businesses think of itself as a platform to create value for people. – DS
29. We believe every life is a story.  We have the opportunity everyday to edit that story. – DS
30. Giving an employee or volunteer greater meaning is something I took from the non-profit world. – JM
31. Our vision is to bring families together and create meaningful memories. – JM
32. You give employees and volunteers something to go for greater than themselves. – JM
33. No one has ever died from over-encouragement. – CN
34. I think people, including me, are too self-focused. – JM
35. God being a loving God made the most important things in life free and in abundance. – DS
36. It’s not fair to my competitors that I get to go to North Point Community Church and learn principles from Andy Stanley to use in my business. – DS
37. God interpreted us to interpret the world through stories…The church ought to be the best at story-telling. – DS
38. Businesses overestimate the value of the product.  They underestimate the value of the story associated with the product. – DS
39. For home is the boardroom of Heaven.  A place from where His glory flows. – DS
40. The most important story ever to be told will come out of the church. – DS
41. North Point is unusual where church leaders and business leaders have a common conversation. – CN
42. If you ask a leader how to be a better leader, that’s a great connection point. – JM
43. Most business leaders are disconnected from their children more than we want to be. – JM
44. Any reaching out to business leaders about their children is a great start. – JM
45. Find the right person and make a specific ask. – DS
46. Anybody equals nobody (when making a general ask). – CN
47. What attracted me about Reggie Joiner he had a strategy about reaching children from birth to when they went to college. – JM
48. If you ask a lousy question you get a lousy answer…If you ask a profound question you get a profound answer.  We need to elevate the quality of our questions. – DS
49. The power of questions is underestimated in most organizations. – DS

As a gift to everyone reading this post, ISS would like to provide everyone a FREE copy of the Ebook 5 Mistakes That Will Kill Your Church Fund Raising.  Simply click here or on the image to the left to receive your complimentary resource.