Hey folks! Happy Tuesday and happy feast of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary! Today would be a great day to get to daily mass.
I’m pleased to share that our son was born last week Thursday. September 3rd. The feast of St. Gregory the Great. His name is Constantine Gerard Luwaga Mähner. Advice welcome on this post. Thank you for your prayers!
Welcome back to Saintly CEO: the Tuesday morning newsletter for business owners whose first objective is to become a saint.
IN TODAY’S ISSUE
News/Events | Feature Content | 6 Heavenly Hustlers
[read time: ~9 min | word count 1, 889]
News / Updates / Events:
🧗🏻Upcoming Men’s Retreat/Hike: We’re finalizing the details of a men’s hike/retreat weekend for Catholic Founders in Chattanooga on the 9th and 10th of October. The cost will probably be around $150-200 to attend (covers lodging and food). Please register if you’re interested (we only have 15 spots).
💰 If you’ve never heard it, check out our past episode with Will O’Brien: Should Catholics Try to Become Billionaires?
🤝 For CF Guild members attending the SENT Summit, don’t forget we have a dedicated group chat for you to find other Guild members. Find the link to join inside the WhatsApp community.
Register for upcoming events in South Bend (Notre Dame), Nashville, Mexico, Columbus, Wisconsin, Dallas, Washington D.C. Check out all of our in-person events on our Luma page.
Join the Catholic Founders Guild Today
If you’re a Catholic — looking to launch or grow your business, Catholic Founders is made for you. 200+ Members and counting.
Join today for $100 a year or $10 a month.
Curious? --> “What is the Catholic Founders Guild?”
Community | Directory | Monthly Calls | Industry Masterminds
Farming-Games or High-Intensity Games; Which Are We Playing?
In entrepreneurship, one can categorizing the type of game you’re playing, as a Farming Game, or a High-Intensity Game. When playing the former, Catholics have an advantage over secularists.
A farming game is one that required some amount of effort, consistently, over a long long period of times. At the bare minimum, decades, ideally generations.
High-intensity games
A high-intensity game is one played at a much faster pace. You have to win in a short period of time. The longer it takes, the less likely you are to win.
Generally speaking, building a VC-backed startup is a high-intensity type of game. VCs invested, they want returns, you’re often going up against others, and it’s a race to see who can capture the market first. This naturally occurs often because VCs tend to invest in things that just on the edge but about to become mainstream.
Farming games
Outside of literally using agriculture or literally farming as an example, most mom-and-pop main street businesses are in this low-intensity type of game. You can be intense, but if you’re not the first person to start your HVAC service company, it’s not like you’ll have no market left. There will always be people in search of a new provider. There will always be some attrition from bad service.
To win in this game, you need to be consistent. You need to be in the game longer than everyone else.
Now, being around isn’t sufficient. You need to be good. You need to be better than others, consistently for a long period of time.
Septic cleaning business example
Let’s take the example of a Catholic-owned business I know that cleans out septic tanks. They acquired the business from another person. If I recall, it was just one truck at the time. It’s perhaps one of the least glamorous jobs one could do. But, little by little, they have grown and expanded.
Most of their expansion has come as a result of customers in the area being dissatisfied with their current solution. Lack of reliability, breaking things, overcharging them, etc. Others had been there for longer, but were not consistently virtuous in how they ran their business.
20-years later, this family has now grown to be the largest septic service in the entire region of the state. All because they were consistently good. They were virtuous. They kept their word. They were honest. And they did a good job.
Word starts to get around when you do good things.
Don’t Waste Your Parish’s Money
A mismanaged budget is a headache in business. In the Church, it’s a tragedy. Every dollar wasted on a poorly run construction project is a dollar taken from the mission.
When your parish or diocese is building something, goodwill isn’t enough. You need professional, unyielding stewardship.
Our Father Constructors and Associates acts as your expert owner’s representative. They support projects from $1M to $45M. Cristian and his team manage the architects, protect the capital, and find the money you didn’t know you were losing. They ensure what you build today serves the Church for generations.
Run your parish’s next project like a pro.
👉 Visit ourfather.us or email cristian@ourfather.us today.
Eternal timeline
Outside of just virtue, there is another advantage we have over the secularists.
They think only in terms of this life at most, but usually they think in terms of years, quarters, or maybe even days.
In the recruiting world, it’s very common to see someone have a huge month, and then completely fall off the next. Partially because they lost focus of fore year.
However, for us Catholics, we are not just focused on hitting this coming quarterly earnings target. We are first focused on eternity for our souls. Doing things that benefit our souls — that don’t compromise our spiritual life.
Serving our children
After that, our focus for things we do in this life must be for our children. How can we build something that can help our children to better serve the Lord. I do believe in most cases, people should build businesses to last for a thousand years (or longer). Build them so your family can take them over. This compounding can (and will) lead to your family being able to fund the construction of a new church or school in the future.
If you are too short sighted, how are you any different from the secularists?
Of course, we don’t aim for earthly success of our businesses. We aim to do God’s will fully — which usually means being diligent, virtuous, courageous, humble, etc. If we do those things, it’s pretty likely our businesses will grow.
Sure, one generation can mess it up. Does that mean you shouldn’t try to raise them in a right way? No, you’ve got to give it all you’ve got and keep at it.
Your business isn’t your worth
The key benefit is, you know you’re not building that business for some earthly glory. Your worth doesn’t hinge on the financial success of your business. God will judge you for how hard you tried, and for how much you loved Him and put Him above all else.
We build knowing we can pass it down to our children, where others try and extract the value as fast as possible just to get rich.
Who is going to win in the end?
We both know the answer.
Catholics are mostly playing a farming game
It’s important to recognize, the game we are playing as Catholic Founders is largely a farming game. We are trying to transform the culture around us. This requires a life of acting upon culture, but never enough that it causes us to lose the fight with raising our own families well.
Taking lower profits to pay a living wage. Investing in the beautification of our communities. Contributing to the building of a school or church in our area.
The secularists see their life as the end. When they die, they think it’s all over.
That’s why they need to get rich quick. They need to get retired so they can actually ‘enjoy’ this life.
Hire Catholic Offshore Talent
We help you find vetted Catholic offshore talent to help your business grow.
$500 upon hire and $500 if you’re still happy in 30 days.
Email us your needs -> hire in days -> admin@catholicfounders.com
Sometimes you need high-intensity
It’s worth noting, I’m not saying we should never play high-intensity games. I would contend that far too many Catholics never play at the type of intensity they ought. We cannot use the fact we think in generations to do things poorly — or without attention. Low intensity is not the same as low attention. We must be diligent and focused at what we do.
There will be times when we really need a burst of intensity to accomplish something. Usually this is the case when you start your business and stays the same for the first few years. It doesn’t usually just fall into place.
So. Let’s unite in playing the longest of games — the eternal game. Where we run our lives in a way that serves our vocation. Where our business is run with real virtue day in and day out because that eternal game is front and center in our minds. Let’s do things with genuine focus so that they may be done well.
In doing this, we will build many businesses that a secularist could never build. Because their time preference for money is too short. Not for us. We don’t need to be in a hurry to spend it in this life. For us, it can compound and compound. Serving generation after generation and allowing for greater magnificence to be practiced.
God Bless & Happy Building
~Silas Mähner
Reach Over 1,000 Catholic Business Owners
Become a sponsor today --> Admin@CatholicFounders.com
Heavenly Hustlers
These are other Catholic business owners. Nominate one (including yourself).
Please note: to see the full list of heavenly hustlers, you need to be a paid member. Today, there are 6 in total. The first one is a freebie.
Get the other 5 by upgrading to a paid subscription now. Discover builders in Colorado, Brazil, Dallas, Nashville, and Wisconsin today!
🏢 Alexander Cartwright is building HotelSHIFT to convert old, distressed hotels into affordable housing units without government subsidies. Dallas, Texas
🙋♂️ Nominate a Heavenly Hustler (including yourself) - It takes 1 min.
Here is a huge list of various resources that we have compiled over time: The Ultimate Catholic Founders Resource Guide.
Feel free to bookmark it as we’ll continue to update it. And if you have suggestions on what to add, ping us (even if you want to promote your own stuff).