My consulting and mentoring service is called Rewarding Toil. I use the word toil very intentionally. It goes to the heart of my work in helping business owners. As a consultant I do the things all good consultant should do. I review finances, I instill sound business practices, I evaluate management and employee performance, and I help with difficult problems and internal conflicts. But what I bring to my clients that is different from other consultants is an underlying emphasis on motivation. I believe that work should be enjoyable. Not necessarily fun–there are many hard things inherent to being in business–it really is toil in that regard. But if we press in and come to understand the purpose of working we can come to enjoy work and the many benefits that are derived from our labor.
In this regard the fact that am both a pastor and a business consultant works to my advantage. That’s because the best book ever written on motivation and work happens to be found in the Bible. The book of Ecclesiastes is all about this very question. Its thesis is, “What does a man gain in all his toil?” Before I was a vocational pastor, while I was still in the thick of running Newfangled, I studied this book intensely and it made a deeper and more lasting impact on me than any other business book I read (and there are some good ones).
My observation of most business owners, managers, and employees is that they desperately want to be happy and satisfied in their work–but they end up “striving against the wind” so that lasting joy always seems to elude them. There are many practical reasons why the trials and travails of toil can defeat our joy and satisfaction (and I help to alleviate many of those), but there are deeper, internal problems that can short circuit joy in our work. That’s why even business owners who are very successful on paper can sometimes be the most miserable in experience. So while I bring the basic value of business consulting to my clients, I also bring a pastor’s understanding of this amazing short book of wisdom and a pastor’s ability to come alongside and mentor business owners toward deeper and lasting joy in their work.