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How should Christian business owners make their companies stand out from the rest of the world? Hint: It’s more than just slapping some Christian symbols on their windows and websites!
Today, Mike Sharrow from C12 joins us to share how pursuing excellence in all that we do is imperative for representing Christ well in the world.
Episode Transcription
Note: This transcription may vary from the words used in the original episode for better readability.
Marlin Detweiler:
Hello again. I'm Marlin Detweiler, and this is Veritas Vox, the voice of classical Christian education. Today we have with us Mike Sharrow, who is the CEO of a very interesting business, helping ministry business. You'll get a chance to hear more about it. But let me welcome you first, Mike. Thank you for joining us.
Mike Sharrow:
Oh, absolutely. Marlin, been looking forward to this.
Marlin Detweiler:
Yeah, this is this will be a lot of fun. I've had a chance to know Mike for several years, having been part of the organization that he runs. But first, let's talk a little bit about yourself. Tell us about your upbringing and your family today and that sort of thing.
Mike Sharrow:
Sure. So I live in Texas right now. We're on the proud – I'm a girl, Dad, married 21 years, but I've got two little girls that are in seventh and fifth grade this year. And we are doing a university model, classical education program. We've been doing for the last seven, eight years with them. And so my wife and I get to journey with that. And I grew up though as an Alaskan, so in Texas that makes me a Yankee immigrant. So I'm, you know, my kids are Texan, but I'm something else.
Marlin Detweiler:
Being from the Northeast, I wouldn’t think of Alaska as an alignment for Yankee-ism.
Mike Sharrow:
Me either. But I got called that as like it's more like Russian Canadian.
Marlin Detweiler:
Yeah I would agree with that!
Mike Sharrow:
So yeah, I grew up in the Alaska military family and as you know, a bunch of interesting God stories. So get to know Jesus young, had health issues. And I got involved in Christian education growing up because at a young age I was crippled with an acute case of rheumatoid arthritis that frankly, most schools just don’t know how to deal with. They wanted to put me in a special ed program because I have rheumatoid arthritis. But my parents are like, well, that's kind of nonsense. Like he's not doesn't have learning challenges, just don't make the kid run. He's got some knee problems. So really, as a kind of a stopgap like, well, we'll just homeschool for a year and figure things out and so did that.
And then like, well, this actually had some upsides and so kind of journey into where it was like, well, okay, then how do we make this work? And so into doing kind of a variety of programs in the elementary years, did Abeka homeschooling for another year, did a correspondence program, and so had a lot of my childhood shaped that way.
But yeah, I grew up getting to be shaped by an early love for Jesus, early love for his word, and watching God lead me through and rescue me through a family crisis with high times, low times, health care stuff, divorce, my family, a bunch of different pieces. But in that, honestly, looking back, those were all the crucibles which God really was forging faith and character and trust in him.
So yeah, grew up in a family of boys now, live in a family of girls, grew up in the mountains and I now live in Texas. I'm just confused.
Marlin Detweiler:
That’s wonderful! I know you're not confused. It's just a variety of experiences! So what was your educational background? Did you go to college?
Mike Sharrow:
Yes, I met my wife going to college in Chicago. I wasn’t sure what I was going to do. I would be in medicine teacher or do art. Then I fell in love with the gospel and church. And so I was like, “Man, the two things I was never, ever, ever do, I said, was ever live in Texas and never wanted to work for the church.” But within high school I was like, “You know, if I want to be about the kingdom, maybe I need to be a pastor.”
And so I, I committed at that track. I went to a Christian college called Trinity on the North side of Chicago and initially jumped in as a pastoral studies major. But into my freshman year switched majors to business. Actually, the advice of my ministry professors who said, frankly, I've been well discipled, read a lot, done a lot of things as a youth.
They said you should get a different degree like education, business, philosophy, and then maybe do seminary later. So, I studied business studies in philosophy. There's kind of a blending of things, and that's actually where I began wrestling with this idea of faith and work and vocation, identity, and all that kind of stuff. But I did college there, and met my wife Jackie.
She was an Iowa farm girl, and we actually got married at the end of our sophomore year of college. So we were those weird people who were full-time school, working full-time, and married, and commuting.
Marlin Detweiler:
My mother was an Iowa farm girl from the Iowa City/ Colona area.
Mike Sharrow:
My wife was about 20 minutes north of of well, closer to the central part where Iowa State University is near.
Marlin Detweiler:
Very good. So before the work that you're doing now with an organization called C12, which we'll get into in just a few minutes, where did your career path take you?
Mike Sharrow:
The most formative time was spent about eight years working for a little drug company called Walgreens. Their headquarters was right by our college and they they had a bunch of subsidiaries. I got to be part of a startup they were doing that wasn't related to the stores, it was related to business consulting type services. And so I had a phenomenal experience with them.
In fact, they were actually testing ideas of faith in the work and how Christians behave against non-Christians. And it was just a wonderful laboratory. So I got to do a ton of different roles and kind of do a corporate rotation program with them. And then I helped out a gentleman who was a mentor of mine, start a financial services business in the Chicagoland area, doing pension plans and annuities and exciting stuff like that.
But it was with Walgreens that I moved to Texas to be near my wife’s family that moved here. We came down about 17 years ago and I was traveling the country as a consultant and doing work on helping governments and big corporations with healthcare strategy stuff with the church that my wife was on staff at was looking to go into multi-site, doing things in the church actually approached me about coming on staff and helping lead teams and teaching and do leadership development and all that stuff.
So I’ve been just shy of four years in a pastoral role and then it started a few nonprofits get involved in foster care and missions and other pieces and so I did my tour of duty there, started their health care company was leading health care company when I actually got involved in C12 as a member about 13 years ago.
And then about 12 years ago, I transitioned to become a local full-time C12 chair and coach and began that journey.
Marlin Detweiler:
Okay. And how long have you been the head of C12 corporate?
Mike Sharrow:
A little over seven years. 2016 is when I started.
Marlin Detweiler:
Okay, so tell us, I want to hear this in your words. I don't know that I've ever heard this. What is in your words, what is C12?
Mike Sharrow:
What is C12? C12 is an organization helping business owners and CEOs truly integrate their life around the gospel practically to build businesses that glorify God or the Bible is shaping in the Gospel, shaping how and what and why you do everything in unlocking really a greater purpose of what what business means. And so it's solving the issues of how do you actually honor God in your career and vocation?
How do you fulfill conditions and mandates to make an eternal impact in this world? And how do you have accountability and wise counsel to make sure that who you are and how you are is just as honorable to God is what you're doing for Him?
Marlin Detweiler:
It was the idea of peer advisory and peer accountability. It was very appealing to me and was the reason that I was a part of C12 for the years that I was. And that was really good to be with good guys, wrestling with things and in completely different industries. Here we are in the education industry dealing with guys in the manufacturing industry or the technology field, printing all kinds of variations that, and being able to see those common business principles that applied were so helpful, especially applying something from a manufacturing process to an educational process was really a good challenge.
But the idea of bringing ministry into the workplace, where you have a company that's not distinctively Christian, was really fun to watch guys do. Our world was a little different than most because our business is about the gospel. There is this is about sometimes a widget or an idea that isn’t distinctively Christian, but wanting that to be glorifying. Talk to us about how that gets developed.
Mike Sharrow:
Yeah, well, it in part I love you engaging because they said you had an implicitly and explicitly gospel oriented products like your product was about the gospel. Yeah, but you and I both know there's plenty of wonderful organizations that have gospel missions, whether it's churches, schools, homeless centers, where sometimes the mission is clearly Christian, but maybe the process, the accounting and HR, and operations is not always the best or excellent or as redemptively shaped.
And so what I love is I don't really care how you pay taxes whether your product is, you know, you're making pencils or you're making Christian education materials. I think God's honored, and glorified by the way you do it, why you do it, and how it's impacting people in his world.
And so we like to create environments where you got, like you said, peer advisory. You're going to get diverse peers around the table. There's gonna be content learning and things are going to force you to look at parts of your business you may not have thought about and make you assess and then get ideas. How do I begin to improve on that and basically approach it like a gymnasium or a fitness program.
Like it's not a 12-step program. My grandmother's not a Christian. When I joined C12, she was like grandson, “I looked it up online. It sounds like AA for CEOs.”
Well, Grandma, we are all in need of recovery at some level, but there's more than 12 steps. But I get the correlation. It is a support program. It's got professional facilitation. But you know, I've been in it 13 years, with people who’ve been in it 20 years. It's not a plug-and-play. It's a fitness commitment to building and growing a business and navigating ups and downs with an intentional framework that doesn't just say your business funds ministry. I think if you're running a traditional business, it's easy to feel like your job is to “don't do bad things and fund people doing good things.”
Marlin Detweiler:
Little bit simplified, maybe.
Mike Sharrow:
I think there's so much more to go. I think God cares about what you do when the business is in ministry. The only question is if it's a good one. Like Charles Spurgeon said, “Every Christian is called to be a missionary or you're an imposter.” There's not really an in-between. So yeah, we now get to serve just shy of 4,000 people who are trying to be on that same journey across four continents and if you think about it- I view Sunday morning church is a locker room as the as the huddle of the team. You get coaching and equipping. But Monday through Friday, Monday through Saturday is the field play, that's game day. We get to impact the world, shape the world, and fulfill garden mandates, creation mandates, and great commission mandates.
Marlin Detweiler:
But I found, you know, my my involvement, as I said, was encouraged by somebody that said, “Marlin, I think you're really due to have a board to work with.” And I wasn't ready to jump in with a full board like that. And this was a good place for me to take the next step in that way. And it has been my experience with C12 was so good dealing with people who were quite successful, many of them more successful than me, all of them in very different industries, and yet having common core things about how we treat people, how we operate.
And even from a techniques standpoint, it was really wonderful to be part of an organization that had guys that had been there before me, done things before me and had ideas for management like key performance indicators and and bonus structures and that sort of thing to motivate what we really want. Those are things that I found immensely valuable, even more so than how do we operate Christianly, because that was, you know, that was stamped on the forehead of our organization.
Now that it's not a given that we did, as you pointed out, it's not a given that our human resources are operating that way, thinking that way. But I don't think we were unaware of that. But the other things were so important. And for that to come out of a Christian organization has to do with, I think, a mindset of excellence. You want to talk about that a little bit?
Mike Sharrow:
Yes, so when I moved to Texas, maybe I'll back up – when a buddy of mine who ran a construction company first invited me to a C12 meeting, I never heard of it. He's just like, “You should check out C12.” And I said, “What is it?” and he said, “It’s like a Christian business group.”
And I said, “Nah, you know, thanks, but I'm busy.” And he said, “No, no, no, no. You love God, you love business. This is your kind of group.”
When I moved to Texas, my first time living in a Bible Belt community, I didn't know until I moved here that everyone in Texas is “Christian”. They just don't believe in Jesus or read the Bible. It's kind of a it's a different kind of Christian. And then when it came to the business world, I’d often find people who were very overtly Christian in Texas with, you know, symbols and flags but they’d run really bad businesses, and they'd almost revel in it, like being well it’s because I'm Christian or I'm being bold for God. And I'd be like, “Can you be a little less bold for God? Because your business isn’t representing Him very well.”
Or you find people who ran just moral businesses and they maybe tithed and it was kind of a good old boy club, and I really was just kind of allergic to all those things because I don't think grace should lower the standard , it should actually compel us to a higher standard of excellence. And so those Christians are guilty of what we call in C12, “sloppy agape”, where we think love and grace comes with lower expectations.
I remember calling a software company that was installing a CRM for us and it was just a horrible installation, product busted. So I called them escalating because it was an $80,000 software purchase, saying, “I need help here.” And the VP went, “Mike, you're Christian, right?” I said, “Yeah.” They said, “Well, I'm a Christian too, so I need you to show us some grace.” And I said, “Will that grace reflect on my invoice?” And he said, “Well, no.” and I said, “Well, I think you're misunderstanding grace. Grace should compel you to want to honor God in this piece.”
So, yes, we get really serious. I think what surprises people, given our mission, our vision and our emphasis on eternal impact is you get into C12 and we go, “Hey, if you're not running a profitable business, if you're not managing cash flow, if you're not putting in strong incentive plans, if you're not looking at lean processes in your programs, if you're not looking at these fundamentals of building a really great business, I don't think you're honoring God.”
If you had Jesus come to your house for dinner tonight, I'm pretty sure you'd clean up the table. Things would look nice, and you and your family be like, “Let's make sure this is a great meal!” And if He comes to audit your business, man, it shouldn’t be awkward like, “This is how you run my business? You put a cross on this? You put a fish symbol on this?”
So we do believe excellence is a couple of things. When I was at Walgreens and I was wrestling as a Christian, I had a mentor recognize me as a young professional and say, “Hey, Mike, you're trying to figure out this whole Jesus in business stuff, aren't you? I can tell you're trying.” And I said, “Yeah.” And he's like, “I think you're complicating it.” I said, “Okay. what should I do?” and he’s like, “Let me give you advice. Two things. One, be super excellent in what you do. Be so above reproach in your work performance, your product that no one can criticize you anything other than your face. They may still not like Jesus. They may not like that, but don't give them any other ground of complaint. Second, be so genuinely in love with Jesus that you're not plugging him as a program or a track. Just ooze it. Like, you can't help but talk about Him as a reason for the hope you have. You have anyone if you do those two things, I'm not saying you won’t get persecuted, but you'll go far and it'll be pretty hard to ignore.”
Yeah, and that was true for my career personally. But I think in business, man, if you run a great business, like say Chick-Fil-A, there's a good easy one. Look to it. Even if people don't like the Christian values of the Cathy family – I mean, they run a great business in that group. It gives them influence and impact and opportunity. And so I think excellence is a key part of honoring God in business.
Marlin Detweiler:
I love that there's another category, too. I wonder if we could go this a little bit. It's a half step removed from C12, but it's something that I call a Christian negotiation. And this is my definition of it. I understand that it's not a comprehensive one and it goes a little bit like this.
I can give a specific instance, and I don't know that I'm the best example of this, but I have an example where I needed a painting done and we have a teacher that teaches online for us who is also an administrator who I asked if he would produce that painting for me.
He gave me a price on it and I said,” I will not exploit you for that price. I insist on paying you more than that.” It is just as an example. I wish I had an example that wasn't mine, and I'm sure there are many out there, but the idea is always, nearly always, “I'm a Christian. Give me a better deal.” Isn't it the gospel at work to say “I'm a Christian, I'd like to pay you more?”
Mike Sharrow:
Yeah. This is a fun paradox. The tension of we’re called to be shrewd and want to be good business people but it's not meant to be cheap. So I think I remember having a wise mentor once told me, if you don't make money from your friends, it means you have to do a lot of business with your enemies.
So if you don't learn to charge a profit, they'd be okay. You're forcing yourself to have to do business a lot of other places, and I think at the end of the day, profit and pricing and compensation are reflections of value, right? And I think we've entered an era where sometimes there's a social stigma as though like profit is bad or price is bad.
And, in the Old Testament, you had the instruction. You know, there wasn't government aid, there were no government entitlement programs, there were no stimulus programs for most of human history. So in an agricultural and trades environment, they were still supposed to do this idea of gleaning, to help those who needed it. And so that's a charity principle. But I think in business, one of things I hope I challenge CEOs with is in the Old Testament Kings, which is maybe the closest approximation for our role, is CEOs were held accountable not just for their personal piety and righteousness and good deeds, but what happened in their domain. God would criticize kings who like well, they didn't worship idols, but people were taking advantage of others and people suffered. There was injustice under their watch and they didn't tear down high places and they didn't promote human flourishing and I think in business being concerned about wages compensation, fair payment.
We’re actually about to launch this right now, a survey we do every year, we survey our vendors, we do our customer NPS, Net Promoter score. We ask our customers, how are we doing? Do you like us? We ask our staff, how are we doing? Do you like working here? We actually survey our vendors and suppliers and we ask them, do we pay you on time? Treat you with dignity? Do we fulfill our contracts? Do we communicate well? Would you recommend us as a customer to appear in the industry, and how could we be a better customer?
We do it at times because we've actually not been a great customer. And so the first time we did it, it was an egg on our face to go shore up some better relationships. But what it's actually led to is vendors calling and saying, “Wait a minute, this is reversed. Shouldn't I be asking? Why are you asking?”
I go, “Because I actually think my testimony in the marketplace is I should be a great customer and I want you to be profitable. I want you to make money in our account. I want you to be thrilled to answer our emails and phone calls.” And so I think part of why I love it, you have been committed so much of your career to, Marlin, is what I see lacking in education, which is then manifested in the marketplace. Even for those like, I went to a Christian college and I had a great experience. I had zero integration of faith and work. I did not have an integrated biblical worldview taught to me even at a great evangelical institution and it was still dualism.
When we compartmentalize history, education, truth, thought, and living, you end up with inconsistent outcomes and inconsistent living. And I think the great joy for me is if we realize that economics is actually an expression of theology and accounting, and all of those things stem from a worldview.
Marlin Detweiler:
Theology is the queen of the sciences.
Mike Sharrow:
It is the queen of the sciences! Whether you name it or not. Like it may be junk, but you're operating off of one and I think at the earliest stages, like I love seeing my kids wrestle with like, how does this history and this philosophy manifest? What is happening in this part of the world events and geopolitics?
All of those things are more connected than we ever realize, and thus business is the same opportunity to manifest that in a different theater.
Marlin Detweiler:
That is wonderful. And I don't want to give the impression when I said earlier that a fair price, fair pay is obviously what we're after. We're not always offering more, just as I'm sure anybody is. But there are instances where, you know, more than somebody else does and they're not asking what they should. And I think there's a responsibility in a biblical response to operate that way sometimes.
What is a little bit more about C12? Talk about the monthly pattern for members and benefits for members and that sort of thing. I don't mind this being a bit of a shameless plug and is even a funny way to say it, because I think there are people listening to this that may not know about C12 and where they would go to find out more.
Mike Sharrow:
Sure. So usually, Marlin, I say a bunch of things around these big ideas, but practically like what is C12? So it stands for the Christian 12 Group, and the idea literally is we facilitate hundreds of forums which are monthly meetings that are 7 hours in length with a professional facilitator, we call a chair, and those people join in.
They're part of that forum every month, like I'm a member of a forum that meets on the third Thursday of every month and so it’s on my calendar 9 to 4. We're going through business, education, ministry, education, accountability. It is like an external board of directors, but without the power to hire you, fire you or block you, but committed to your success working through issues, holding each other accountable.
And there's there's curriculum, there's tools, there's technology to help reinforce that and drive this excellence commitment we're chasing after. And then the chair does 1 to 1 coaching each month to help and get some personal application driven there. And then you're also part of this global community. And so, like you said, is powerful in your forum. I know a forum that has a health care company and an AI medical software company, cybersecurity, manufacturing, the diversity of perspectives in my forum makes me a better leader.
Marlin Detweiler:
It's remarkable.
Mike Sharrow:
But I can also go talk to other people who are in my context around the country or leverage. In fact, there's thousands of other people doing this. And so we're in about 150 cities, 130 of those being in the US, 20 something being outside the U.S. right now. And it's again for profit and nonprofit businesses. We do focus on businesses that have employees and revenue and about truly running a business. It doesn't fit for early-stage startups but it's a really neat force that is impacting hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people every month through those we employ.
Marlin Detweiler:
You are having a really wonderful impact. Where do you see C12 going?
Mike Sharrow:
You know, we're the largest player in our space, but the reality is, it's a massively unserved space. So, you know, being the biggest and the least in a blue ocean just means we you know, we got a good beginning, but we got a lot of places to go. So right now we've got a near-term goal of by 2025, getting to serve 5,000 members who will be impacting 10 million people every month through their businesses and being in about 175 cities.
We're doing a big emphasis on international things right now so we’re launching in Taiwan, South Africa, looking at the Philippines this winter, already in Malaysia, Singapore and Brazil. So we're going to see some a cool global perspective, which is a whole bunch of learning. And we're getting to a place there where you can do some reverse flow, where we're learning things from those countries that we can help apply in other countries.
Marlin Detweiler:
It's great.
Mike Sharrow:
And my hope is like, why get bigger? Bigger isn't always better. Our founder Bob Jacobs always exhorted me, “Rather be holy than huge.” The quality matters more than the quantity. And yet what we find is there's so many men and women running businesses who don't know this, who don't have this that it can have such a transformational effect on them.
We want to get there. Right now, we serve less than 4,000 people, right? About 4,000 people. There's about 75,000 men and women running businesses in America that qualify for our program, that are near cities that could be served and less than 10,000 of them are involved in anything. And so, again.
Marlin Detweiler:
It brings a lot of opportunity.
Mike Sharrow:
Yeah, it's a generational change point. Like if we can help. One of my passions is integrated discipleship, how to bring all of life together and see as part of a whole.
Marlin Detweiler:
Sorry about my dog. By the way, if you can’t see him, he’s my border Collie– the official breed of classical education.
Mike Sharrow:
In my house, it's a Siamese cat, so you're just cooler.
Marlin Detweiler:
Your children, you're getting into experiencing through your kids what a classical education looks like. Maybe for the last minute or two. Tell us how you might see classically educated people being well equipped and maybe more effectively equipped for C12, running businesses, seeing business as a ministry, and that sort of thing. Is there any correlation that you're able to put to that?
Mike Sharrow:
Yes, I think I think that I think the differential is widening, frankly. American education is not doing so hot. So even just on I mean, I took my daughter just turned seven. I take them on business trips with me at least once a year. And I was taking my eight-year-old on a trip last year and on the airplane that we were getting on board, the stewardess says, “Hey, young lady, you traveling with your dad?” And she just shakes her hand. And my daughter answers her question and has a 20-second conversation. And as we were getting off the plane, the stewardess says, “Young lady, you're going to be a leader and change the world one day.” And she said, “Why?” “Because you're so impressive.” She said. Because I said hello and had a conversation? Like what was that based upon? You realize that actually, the bar is so low –
So I think the fact that I'm watching kids involved this kind of education, they read material instead of being on screens, they're forced to think critically. They're forced to engage and have a higher ownership in learning, not just passing, I think we've had a dangerous shift in most education systems of mistaking passing with learning and I think an emphasis on learning is creating so much more well-formed thinkers in humans.
Whether my daughters will run companies? I don't know what they’ll want to do. They'll probably naturally be bubbled into leadership roles because they think, they communicate, and they connect dots, they ask questions, and they try to understand things that will be a strategic advantage in almost any industry context.
Marlin Detweiler:
That is wonderful. Mike, thank you so much for joining us.
Mike Sharrow:
My pleasure, Marlin. Thanks for the work you're doing.
Marlin Detweiler:
Really good to have you here, folks. You have joined us today for Veritas Vox, the voice of classical Christian education. See you next time.
