As The Leader Grows with Ken Joslin

Coaching with Ken | Money Mindset Mastery

• Ken Joslin

Share episode

The way we view money fundamentally shapes our business decisions and outcomes. For faith-based entrepreneurs, understanding that we don't face a money problem but a management problem transforms everything about our approach to finances.

When I realized that God doesn't reward hustle but instead rewards faithful management, it completely shifted my perspective as a business owner. Luke 16:10 tells us "whoever can be trusted with little can also be trusted with very much" – a principle that has guided our company to seven-figure growth in just three years.

This episode unpacks four critical pillars of financial stewardship: creating and sticking to a budget, achieving targets before their scheduled time, tracking your spending daily, and maintaining consistent cash reserves. Each practice isn't just good business sense; it's biblical wisdom applied to entrepreneurship.

The story of how tracking our numbers transformed our business is particularly powerful. As a visionary, I initially resisted detailed financial tracking until a friend reminded me that I would ultimately give account to God for how I stewarded what He entrusted to me. After seven months of building our daily cash tracking system, I now review our exact financial position every morning – a practice that has revolutionized our decision-making.

Ready to make your own stewardship shift? Download our free 21-day Physical Fiscal Fitness challenge at growstackdrive.com/challenge or email support@growstackdrive.com to request our daily cash tracking template that transformed our business. Join 2,300+ faith-based entrepreneurs who are learning to manage God's resources with excellence!

Welcome to the ATLG podcast I am your host Ken Joslin, former pastor turned coach & host of CREATE, the #1 Faith-based Entrepreneur conference in America. My mission is to help faith-based entrepreneurs become the best version of themselves by growing in our Core 5: Faith, Health, Relationships, Business & Finances. You can get more information as well as join our FREE Facebook group at https://www.facebook.com/groups/676347099851525

Speaker 1:

Hey guys, welcome to another episode of as the Leader Grows. I am your host, ken Jocelyn, super excited to continue this series we started a couple weeks ago called the Stewardship Shift. Now the entire month, we're talking about a couple big ideas. Number one is that we don't have a money problem. We have a management problem. As faith-based entrepreneurs, we understand that what season that we're in financially is just a trust test from God, because we don't have a money problem, we have a management problem.

Speaker 1:

God's word is very clear. As a matter of fact, luke 16 10 says whoever can be trusted with little can also be trusted with very much. So those of you guys that are faith-based entrepreneurs, I'm sure you're well aware of the parable where Jesus talks about the talents, the one, the two and the five and the three different people, or stewards, if you will because as faith-based entrepreneurs, we understand we don't own anything. Everything that we have belongs to God and what we're called to do is be great managers or stewards of that. As a matter of fact, I was on the call, probably about two weeks ago, with somebody and they said something about paying their tithes and I just stopped her and I I just said can I redirect or kind of maybe change your thinking just a little bit, reframe that if you will. And she said sure, and I said, if I pay you something that indicates that that money that I have belongs to who Me? Now, if I return my tithe, that means that what I have, I understand, belongs to God and all I'm doing is returning to God what belongs to God. Now I don't want to get a theological discussion on tithing and Malachi, chapter three, or any of this stuff that Jesus talked about in the New Testament. That's not the point today. But in this we understand biblical truth in the New Testament that if we steward well, if we take the two talents or the five talents or even the one, and we steward those well, that God promised us to give us more to steward. So if we don't have a money problem, we have a management problem and, like I said just a moment ago, god doesn't reward. And, like I said just a moment ago, god doesn't reward. God does not reward hustle, he rewards faithful management. So I want to talk tonight biblical foundation Luke, chapter 16, verse 10. Whoever can be trusted with very little can also be trusted with very much. Small faithful practices prove our readiness for greater responsibility, and God honors consistency in every area of our life, specifically especially in our finances.

Speaker 1:

So there's a couple of books I want to recommend to you. I've actually got some kind of what we call wisdom integration moments. One is the Complete Works of Frances Scoville Shinn Not sure if she's a believer or not. The book was written in 1925. But it's about your mindset around money and there is a ton of scripture in it. And it's not again, guys, not money from a standpoint of a prosperity theology. God wants you blessed and Bentley and all the stuff. Again, I don't think God's concerned with what you drive. It's just whether or not you're stewarding and handling what he's entrusted you with the right way. But what I want to do tonight is I want to talk about we're going to hit eight pointers over the next couple of weeks.

Speaker 1:

I had a good friend of mine, carrie Van Meter, from All Access Accounting. She does books for about 180 different businesses. She's a phenomenal CFO. She handles all of our stuff as well. But I wanted to go through these eight things. I'll do four today and we'll do four next week.

Speaker 1:

Number one is create a budget and stick with it. Create a budget and stick with it. And here's the deal as faith-based entrepreneurs, a lot of times we're moving. We're going so fast. Sometimes it's hard to be able to stick to a budget. But I believe that one of the first things that we can do as great stewards or faithful managers of what God's entrusted us with is to create a budget. Now, carrie, when she was on our Zoom call a couple of weeks ago and then she actually flew in for a proximity event the one thing she shared about the budget she goes there's two types of budgets that you can create. Number one is you can have this projection, this faith budget of last year. We hit this, we've grown this. So let's say we hit a million. We know we've grown 10% a year. So this year's budget we're going to do at 1.1 million. That'd be 10% of a million, to be a hundred thousand, so that'd be a decent growth path. And then she said this then you can do a budget. A different kind of budget is based off of what are our monthly expenses in full? Basically, what's our nut every month? What do we have to come up with to be able to break even every month? How quick can we get to that number every month? So then we can exceed that and then we allocate the resources that come in after that. So create a budget and stick to it.

Speaker 1:

I want to encourage you guys this you can go to growstattdrivecom forward slash challenge, growthstackdrivecom forward slash challenge. And there is a stewardship challenge that we did called Physical F-I-S-C-A-L Fitness. It's a 21-day challenge. If you download that ebook, you can sign up for the challenge. If you sign up, you'll get an email every day. But inside of that digital workbook, day one is a link Every day has a link to it for you to do something to become financially fit over 21 days. And day one is downloading a Dave Ramsey 10-minute budget creator. Super easy to create a budget that way and then literally monitoring your money.

Speaker 1:

That's one of the other eight. We'll get to that in just a little bit. So create a budget and stick to it. Number two achieve targets before time. Like if I'm, if I'm wanting to go after, like I think this year our budget is going to be right at right at seven figures, right at a million dollars. That's how much revenue we'll have come in.

Speaker 1:

We're trying to consistently outpace what we did the year before, and so what that does is that tells our sales team. Hey, we've got to make more calls, we've got to, you know, is there another way that we can run our Facebook ads? Is there another way that we can market? Is there what? What are, what's the pain points of faith-based entrepreneurs out there and how can we solve their problems? Because if you solve the problems that are out there, I promise you you'll blow all of your projections away, all your numbers away, and you'll never struggle for having enough cash flow but be able to achieve your targets before their time. And I'm telling you, guys, when you really get locked in and you've heard from God Psalms 46, 10, be still and know that I'm God. Number two you've you've heard from him, you've been still before him, you've heard from him, and then you've written the vision down. It's amazing at how quick things begin to happen.

Speaker 1:

So one is create a budget, stick to it. Number two is achieve targets before their time. Number three is track your spending. Track your spending. Now I'm going to get into the second half of this kind of talk, if you will. Next week I'm going to hit talking about financial reports. But when we talk about tracking your spending, here's one thing I encourage you to do, and I heard Grant Cardone say this five and a half years ago at the 10X Bootcamp I went to in October of 2019, when not very many people knew who Grant was, but this is what he said. He said money is like a woman If you don't pay attention to it, it will leave you. So what I did in this process for me inside of GSD and we hit three we hit seven figures in our third year. We did 1.18 million in revenue in our third year and I was having a conversation a year ago. This would have been June in 2024.

Speaker 1:

I'm in Costa Rica with RMI, the Regenerative Medicine Institute, the number one of the top stem cell companies in the world, who's one of our top sponsors, and I'm getting stem cells and my good friend, troy Hoffman is down there. We're having breakfast. Troy looks at me and he says, ken, he goes, what's your budget for Create? I'm like I don't know and he goes you know what your budget is and I'm like, well, so-and-so cost me $85,000. So-and-so cost me $85,000 to come speak. The building is $29,000. My caterers were $35,000. The band was $14,000. The tech team was $11,000. My swag was was 11,000. My swag was 8,000. I just started spitting off all these numbers. And I said and then I only have to sell this many CEO tickets, this many executive tickets or this many general mission tickets. And Troy looked at me and he goes, bro, he goes. You know you can't scale if you don't know your numbers correctly. Then I said Troy, I'm a visionary. I'm not very good when it comes to finances, but I can tell you what I got in the bank. I can tell you what I've got coming in Just off my head. I can do that. And Troy looked at me and he goes Ken, you're going to give account to God one day for what he's called you to build and what he's given you to steward. And I was like cool, you're right, he goes next week. We're going to start. I'm going to meet with you for a few weeks. I'm going to give you. Now Troy is the CEO for foundersio, so they invest, scale and help businesses exit Three to five year plan on each of those businesses. And so this is what Troy said he goes, I'm going to meet with you and I'm going to take some of the financial forecasting spreadsheets and models that we have and I'm going to give those to you. We're going to create one for you.

Speaker 1:

So I started in June of last year. I went back four and a half years, all the way back to December of 2019, when I established GrowStack Drive Ken Johnson Group Incorporated. I went all the way back. We went through every line item in QuickBooks, every single transaction in any of our checking accounts, all of our credit cards, our PayPal, our Venmo, everything. It took us four months to go through everything. I hired a guy. We walked through everything. Every day. I'm looking for about 30 to 40 minutes at transactions and, for whatever reason, my mind works oh, that money goes here. This money goes here. I just knew where it went. Mind works oh, that money goes here. This money goes here. I just knew where it went. And so it took us about six or seven months to be able to create what we call our GSD daily cash sheet.

Speaker 1:

And so if you'll email support at gross that drivecom or if you go to gross that drivecom forward slash free there's a lot of these financial spreadsheets that we give you now for absolute free. It probably costs me close to 20 K to create for us, but you can look at it. You can. It's obviously it's a blank, doesn't have any numbers in it. You can look at it and then you can take that and formulate that or fix that. However, you need it to be fixed for your specific vertical or your company and where you're at.

Speaker 1:

So now, every day, um, at 5 PM, my my fractional CFO team they go in, they look at all of our credit card accounts, the balances. They go in and they update all the balances from credit cards, from our checking accounts, our cash accounts and then all of our business loans or anything that we have like that. I've got one business loan that's complete. There's no balance on it. There's a pretty high credit limit. There's another one that's almost paid off about a 20% credit limit. But I look and even in those business loans that I have, on that GSD daily cash sheet it says, let's say, this one is like $55,000, and I think we owe $12,000. So it'll tell you what the percentage of your debt utilization is.

Speaker 1:

Everything I get everything. Then I have one little graph inside of it that says weekly expenses and I've got this is how much our weekly recurring revenue is. It's coming in this week and this is how much our average week for second week, third week, fourth week of the month. These are our average expenses and then I get a positive or a negative number now, so I know automatically, going into this week, we're either positive or negative for the week. Then I have our monthly recurring revenue for our community circle and our corner. So I know what our monthly recurring revenue is and I know what our monthly expenses are. So I get to look at that every single day. So I'd encourage you if you don't have something like that and you're a faith based entrepreneur, you need to know your numbers. So when you track your spending, that's the third thing you need to know your numbers.

Speaker 1:

Number four maintain a consistent cash reserve. Make sure you've got Dave Ramsey's very simple, I think emergency fund is a thousand. The next baby step is three months of savings or reserves in the bank that will cover all of your expenses. So if you're a business, you want three months of whatever it costs you to operate every single month. Personally, you need three months of all of your bills and your expenses in there as well. So maintain a consistent contract cash reserve.

Speaker 1:

One of the things that we've done early is when I set up our relay online checking accounts. Anything that goes through Stripe or goes through our QuickBooks dumps into our relay accounts different ones, I think we have five or six set up and then inside of those our fractional CFO team will go in. Let's say we deposited yesterday. We deposited where are my numbers $6,231.74. So $6,231.74 got deposited yesterday. My team will go in and they'll take $623.17, 10% and they'll put it over into our kind of a cash savings account and that money just sits. We take 10% and it goes over there every single time we have money that comes into GSD.

Speaker 1:

So four things I wanted to start with today create a budget and stick to it. You can go to Dave Ramsey he's got a 10 minute budget creator. If you go over to um gross, that drivecom forward slash challenge, you can do that 21 day physical fitness physical fitness challenge absolutely free. Sign up for it. It'll download the digital workbook and then you'll get an email every day for 21 days, kind of walking you through that process. Achieve targets before it's time, track your spending. And, number four, maintain a consistent cash reserve.

Speaker 1:

Also, if you need a copy of that GSD digital cash sheet or GSD daily cash sheet, I'd encourage you to just email support at growstatdrivecom or go over to growstatdrivecom forward slash free. We have about 2,300 faith-based entrepreneurs that are a part of that free community. All those resources, guys, are absolutely free. So here's what I want to encourage you right now You're listening to this podcast. Make a commitment today when you get up every single day.

Speaker 1:

If you don't have one of our GrowStatDrive planners like this, you can get one of these super simple GrowStatDrivecom forward slash free. You can download a digital copy of our planner absolutely free. You put that into an iPad or some kind of a digital tablet. You can literally write on there. One of your morning routine items needs to be it's my very first one I do every day needs to be going in there and checking the balances you have in your cash accounts and then your credit accounts. What does that look like? You should know those numbers every single day. So super excited for this entire series about the stewardship shift. Today we're talking about eight things that we need to do with our finances. We hit four today. We'll hit four next week. Again, thanks for joining us on as a Leader Grows. I'll see you next week.