Start Here: About Catholic Founders

Silas Mähner

and

Catholic Founders

Apr 01, 2025

Hey there! 👋

Given the name of this post, this is likely your first time here. Thanks for stopping in.

In this post, we’ll explain the WHY, WHAT, and WHO of Catholic Founders.

Our WHY
WHAT we do
and WHO we are for

WHY does Catholic Founders exist?

There are immeasurable amounts of business advice available on the internet, mostly for free.

There are countless hours of sermons and zillions of blog posts about the Catholic Faith.

But unfortunately there are not many resources for Catholic Business Owners.

We aim to solve that.

To boil it down, we say that our why is…

“To help Catholics learn how to run their businesses like a saint.”

The result being, thousands of entrepreneurs promoting the Kingdom of God.

Does it sound lofty? It might be. But all things are possible with God, and I feel this is my calling in life.

Now onto the WHAT section.

WHAT is Catholic Founders

1. Community, 2. Content (Pod & Blog) 3. Events and 4. Business Accelerator

Catholic Founders is made up of a few components.

#1 First and foremost, CF is a community of Catholic entrepreneurs.

This includes a paid community where we meet monthly to support each other with our biggest challenges and questions. The free portion of the community is all unofficial and self-organized.

The paid community is called The Catholic Founders Guild. To become part of the paid community, become a paid supporter of this Substack. Click ‘upgrade to paid’ in the top right corner. Or if you’re not subscribed at all, just click the subscribe button below and choose the tier you prefer.

It’s $10/month or $100/year. We also offer a higher tier for anyone who wants to become a serious contributor to this work. That is called The Magis Club and starts at $360 a year, but you can give more if you choose.

Upgrade to Paid

#2 CF is a collection of content.

We have three branches of our conent.

The Saintly CEO
A weekly newsletter, published every Monday at 7:00 am CT.

Each issue shares one tangible way for us to run our businesses like a saint (5 min read), a list of other Catholic business owners (to help you discover your peers), and various resources we find valuable.
The Catholic Founders Podcast
A podcast where we meet other Catholic biz owners and entrepreneurs to ask them how they run their businesses in line with the Chuch’s teachings.

On occasion, we drop bonus episodes that are only available to paid subscribers.
The Catholic Founders Blog/Substack
Outside of the newsletter, we occasionally publish additional content, reflections, takeaways, or listicles to serve as resources for you on your journey to running your business like a saint.
Often these are free, but on occasion they are only available to paid supporters.

Think about it this way. A huge part of this journey as a Catholic Founder is education. To strive towards rightly ordered business practices, we need to first have a clearly defined vision of what exactly we are striving for.

#3 CF hosts local events.

Each month, we host small groups of Catholic entrepreneurs. Currently, we are only in Wausau, WI, but will be expanding soon.

This will help foster community among Catholic entrepreneurs to support each other through our challenges. We can also collaborate on our evangelization efforts in our communities.

Over time, we aim to host more events throughout the country, but for now, we are focused on building out the local chapter model. Every parish should have one of these in the future.

If you’d like to create one at your local parish, we’re glad to help you get set up using our playbook.

#4 CF runs a business accelerator.

This is in its infancy now (aka: me consulting and giving free advice to Catholic entrepreneurs I meet). But over time, we aim to build this into a full-blown program that helps aspiring Catholic entrepreneurs clarify their vision and get started making their first dollars.

In the end, we want to help 10,000 Catholics start businesses. This would lead to freedom for many families. Freedom for them to put family first. Attend daily mass. And of course employe many other Catholic families to free them from the corporate machine.

WHO is Catholic Founders for?

In short, any Catholic entrepreneur (current or aspiring).

If you’re a faithful Catholic, committed to using the skills God gave you to bring glory to Him on Earth, this is for you.

We mean this. This is not just a social club or networking group. We fully expect the members of Catholic Founders to be genuinely committed to building the kingdom of God. We recognize that the fullness of the kingdom of God is only at the end of time. But we also know that the gift we’ve been given, the gift of eternity, is too great not to share it as widely as we can.

Another part of being a Catholic Founder is focusing on the transformation of your own heart first and foremost. This community allows us to meet others who have the same mentality and who also want to transform their hearts to be instruments for God to use freely.

Thanks for stopping by. We hope this is merely the first encounter on a lifelong journey to eternity through our shared work as entrepreneurs, as Catholic Founders.

God Bless & Happy Building

~Silas Mähner