The idea of Free the Founder may very well be possible to also apply in a church context to freeing up certain pastors to move on to their next church plant.
At 5-2-50, we focus on three generic goals – sometimes adjusted a bit this way or that way, but generally, at the very least, we ask businesses to aim for the following:
- Grow to at least 50 employees in order to create good, new jobs.
- Grow your net profit to at least R 10 mil per year after tax.
- Free the Founder.
A friend of mine asked me recently what “Free the Founder” looks like in a church context, and I found that question really interesting. Just this morning I attended a Faith Driven Entrepreneur meeting here in Cape Town, where one of the videos we watched spoke about interesting research pointing to the ways in which entrepreneurs and pastors are often very similar.
Most founder-led businesses absorb more than 8 hours a day, five days a week of the founders’ time. The idea behind Free the Founder is to assist founders to get to the point where they no longer need to spend all their time in the day to day grind of their businesses.
Free the Founder is core to 5-2-50’s mission of building wealth, creating jobs. Three of the most important reasons behind Free the Founder are:
- Starting a business, and getting it to survive for five years, even if you just get to five employees in those five years, is one of the hardest things in life to do. If you can do it, you are part of a very small percentage of the population. If we could free you up from that, there is a good chance that you would start another business – and since you’ve already proven you can do it, you have a much better chance of success than the average first time entrepreneur.
- The Free the Founder program is closely aligned with the goal of getting to at least R 10 million per year NPAT. This gives founders a base of financial resources to drive whatever it is they want to start next, further increasing the likelihood of success, and thus driving more employment.
- There are more people that would be able to take an existing business and maintain or even grow it, than there are people that would be able to start a new business. By putting a process in place by which founders replace themselves in those businesses, they create growth opportunities that would otherwise not have existed. In fact, in order to structure a business in such a way that it can become independent of the founder, one has to put some very deliberate planning into how the people in the business have to grow in order for that to happen, as well as what new people you need to bring into the business to make that happen. This way you are driving personal growth whilst also creating some more new jobs.
As with everything I do, the “program” behind Free the Founder is somewhat flexible and gets adjusted from one entrepreneur to the next, but in general, it follows the following steps:
- Identify what is your “next”. Here we ask questions such as:
What is God calling you to?
What excites you when you think about it? - Work out what some of the mechanisms could be for that “next.” Is it another startup? Is it a spin-off from your current business? Is it partnering with someone else? It could even be joining an existing business that excites you, that you want to buy into / do a share swap into.
- Identify what needs to be in place for you to be able to step into that “next.” Think about things like:
How independent do you need to be from your current business?
Is it going to be a “leave here and go there” or a systematic transition process? - Identify what must be done in your current business in order for you to be free enough to make that transition.
- Imagine that you have successfully made the transition — Start from that point in the future, and begin to plan backwards to where you are today, until you are able to identify what you need to do right now, and next week, to start moving in that direction.
Which now brings us to my friend’s question, about how this might apply in a church context, and I think here there are some interesting parallels to be drawn between church leaders and business leaders.
In the church, we also find that there are “founders.” In most churches they are just called “pastors,” but there are definitely some pastors who are much better at planting new churches and getting them established, than others. I have a suspicion that these pastors who are really good at, and get most excited about planting new churches, are likely to get bored with looking after an existing church, after a few years – even if they planted that new church.
We know that there are people that are great at evangelism – and that many evangelists work in countries where there are few to no churches. However, they are not necessarily good at what goes into the process of establishing a church that will continue to thrive into the future. So I don’t think evangelists are necessarily the equivalent of entrepreneurs. A good church planter would do well to be accompanied by some good evangelists.
So I think there might be room in churches to also do a kind of “free the founder” investigation. Especially if it is a church that is being run by the person who founded the church. If that person seems more excited about the idea of going out and planting another church, then come together as a community, and work towards making that possible. Identify the person / team that will take over, and work out a plan to fund and support that next church plant.
I’m no theologian and definitely not a church planting expert. But I think there might be some great church planters out there, who would benefit themselves and their congregations if they did a bit of a “Free the Founder” exercise.
Blessings to you
Ashton