Sometimes it was a church. Sometimes a leadership conference, a retreat, a church planter boot camp, or a room full of business leaders.
I’ve spoken to some pretty big crowds. I’ve also sat across a table from a handful of people with a legal pad and a cup of coffee.
I’m not sure one matters more than the other.
For more than 25 years, I’ve had the opportunity to lead and speak in the corporate world, as a pastor and church planter, and with leaders trying to figure out what comes next.
These days, I’m a little less interested in giving people a great speech.
I want to give them something they can use on Monday morning.
A story they remember.
A question they keep thinking about.
Maybe even the courage to do something they’ve been putting off.
That’s probably the best way to describe how I speak.
I tell stories. I laugh at myself. I talk about things that worked and things that absolutely did not. And somewhere along the way, we usually get to the question I’ve learned matters most:
Because inspiration is great.
But eventually somebody has to figure out what to do next.
I learned a lot about leadership in places that looked nothing alike.
I spent years in the corporate world, working with startups and Fortune 500 companies. At one point, I led a group responsible for $1.5 billion in sales accounting.
Then I became a pastor.
That will mess with everything you thought you knew about leadership.
In business, people generally have to show up. Church planting taught me how to lead people who didn't have to show up at all.
In 2006, Julie and I joined about twenty other people to start Bridge Church in Perry, Ohio. We officially launched in January 2007.
Our first service happened on a bitterly cold, snowy Ohio morning.
Ninety-eight people came.
Apparently nobody checked the weather.
Within twelve months, the church had grown to around 200 people.
Since then, I’ve helped start churches, coached church planters, led businesses and teams, written books, made plenty of mistakes, and collected more stories than I could possibly fit into one talk.
Those experiences shape the way I speak today.
I don't have a binder full of speeches where I simply change the name of the organization on the first slide.
What we talk about depends on who is in the room and what you're trying to accomplish.
But there are a few places I naturally keep coming back to.
Not leadership theory for the sake of leadership theory.
How do you actually lead people?
How do you build trust?
How do you help someone else become capable of carrying something without you?
And what do you do when the football gets pulled away again?
A lot of this comes from the ideas behind Saturday Morning Leadership—using familiar stories and characters to talk about resilience, courage, contentment, responsibility, persistence and the kind of leadership that gets lived out in ordinary life.
I've spent much of my life helping organizations figure out where they're going.
But writing a vision statement is the easy part.
The harder question is:
Yes—but how?
How does a vision become something people understand, remember and actually do?
That's the part I'm interested in.
I've started businesses.
I've planted churches.
I've helped other people do both.
There is something wonderfully uncomfortable about staring at a blank page and realizing nobody is coming to fill it in for you.
We can talk about starting, building, experimenting, failing, adjusting and continuing when the thing you're building doesn't look quite like the picture you had in your head.
The older I get, the more I think about this.
Eventually leadership isn't about what I can accomplish.
It's about what continues after I'm no longer the one doing it.
Who are you preparing?
What are you passing along?
What do your children, grandchildren, team or organization know because you took the time to teach them?
And are you building something that still matters when you're no longer standing in the middle of it?
I’ll do my homework.
Before I speak, I want to understand your people, your event and what you hope happens because we spent that time together.
I'll tailor what I do to the room rather than forcing the room into a canned presentation.
I'll respect your schedule.
And I'll come prepared.
There will probably be stories.
There will almost certainly be some humor.
There may be a legal pad involved.
But underneath all of it, my goal is pretty simple:
Give people something worth carrying home.
Not just something they enjoyed hearing.
Something they can actually use.
If you're planning a leadership gathering, retreat, church event, men's event, conference or something else where you think I might fit, tell me a little about it.
You don't have to know exactly what you want me to speak about yet.
That's something we can figure out together.
Pull up a chair. Let's talk.