The Saintly CEO: Don’t Let Your Fundraising Hurt Your Employees
Plus! What We Can Learn From This Catholic Chocolate Billionaire.
In case you missed it, I’m going to be in LA this week and San Francisco next week. While in SF, I’ll be hosting a Catholic Founders dinner with the help of my mate, Will O’Brien. If you’d like to take part, reach out today.
Welcome back to The Saintly CEO. A free weekly newsletter from Catholic Founders.
Each week get (1) tactical ways to integrate your Faith w/ your business, (2) a curated list of Catholic biz owners, and (3) misc. resources to help you with your business.
In Today’s Email:
CF Role Model: How the Creator of Nutella Treated His Employees & Customers
+ 5 more Catholic entrepreneurs (Heavenly Hustlers)
Don’t Let Your Fundraising Hurt Your Employees
Miscellaneous Resources
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Heavenly Hustlers
Looking to find more Catholics who share your ambition? Each week, we curate a short list to do just that.
Huge shout-out to Catholic Owned for partnering with us to aid in this curation experience. Catholic Owned is building the Catholic Economy — currently it’s a huge database of Catholic business owners, so we can buy from each other.
Some of those listed each week were discovered through Catholic Owned.
We encourage you to get listed in Catholic Owned today if you’re not already.
CF Role Model:
🍫 Michele Ferrero, the inventor of Nutella, Ferrero Rocher, Tic Tacs, and Kinder Surprise, was a devout Catholic.
He had a special devotion to the Blessed Mother. The name Rocher comes from the grotto at the Lourdes Apparition site. He had images of Our Lady in every one of his factories.
He also took good care of his employees. He created transportation to bring people from their homes in the surrounding towns into the factory so they could keep more space rather than living in the cities. Evidence of his good treatment is found in the fact that many of his employees are children of the early employees.
He also personalized his customer by giving her a name and making the best products for her. He would invest in perfecting a chocolate for a decade in some cases, before it became profitable.
Let us imitate his love for his employees and his customer in our work.
Other Heavenly Hustlers:
🧑🍳 Josh McCallen is building Vivamee Hospitality where they are putting the soul back into hospitality with incredible, human focused experiences.
🏈 Austin Wright and Harrison Butker are co-building MDKeller, a holding company of several businesses with Catholic values at the center of all of them.
🥸 Bernard Dumond is building Catholic Vitality 360. Helping build vital Catholic schools.
🎥 Kyle Bush is building Cumberland Creative and has a bunch of very interesting projects coming out soon (including a documentary).
🙋♂️ Nominate a Heavenly Hustler (including yourself) - It takes 1 min.
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Don’t Let Your Fundraising Hurt Your Employees
Okay folks. I’m going to keep it ultra short today. Tomorrow I leave for a two week trip to California and still have a lot to prep. I’ll need you to spend some time thinking about this topic on your own to get the most out of it (to be fair, you should probably do that every week).
Today we’re talking about responsible fund raising.
A lot of businesses start with some capital. Nowadays, a lot of people chase venture capital. The type of money that enabled facebook. They raise a lot of money early on. The fund takes equity (equity the founders and employees can’t get anymore). They write a bunch of these checks in the hopes that a couple of them achieve massive returns. We’re talking billions or more.
Another common funding mechanism is private equity. This is usually the money people are looking for when they sell their company. They get a big payout and often get more if they stick around until the next earn out.
Of course there is traditional financing where you take out a loan from the bank to get your business started or fund an expansion.
And today, some people are using combination vehicles buy existing businesses.
There are a lot of options, but there is one principle to keep in mind regardless of how you’re raising money.
As Catholics, we can never put our investors above our employees.
This is hard to hear for some but it’s the truth.
In VC, it’s not uncommon for a business to have some traction. But without enough traction, they are forced to shut down because not enough VCs will continue writing checks. That business could have been profitable with a lean team. But with the pressures of VC, it becomes an ‘uninvestable’ asset.
In the case of private equity, they often buy a bunch of businesses. Overhaul them. Maybe roll a few of them together. And then get rid of the redundancies. This is frequently done in a very calous way without regard to the workers impacted. All in the name of increasing return on investment.
With debt, just be sure to maintain a responsible amount of debt. Too much debt can also strain the business and lead to closing your doors. So avoid that. (As a side bar, I think the Catholic Church does have some teachings on interest / usury, but I’m not super well versed on them. So you might want to look that up).
Regardless of what funding you use on your journey, you must find ways to avoid putting yourself, and by extension, your employees, at great risk from that capital. In some cases, that means picking the right vehicle. In others it’s about choosing the right investment partners. Choosing the right partners is especially important with private equity.
The dilemma you have to face here is finding a way to get on the same page with your investors. That you will do everything you can to build a good business. Grow at a responsible rate. And never put the business in a situation where you need to make a decision to hurt your employees if you can avoid it.
We all know there are tough times in business. Just be sure to spend time thinking about the implications of your fundraising efforts.
Okay. It’s short but that’s what I’ve got for you today.
God Bless & Happy Building
~Silas Mähner
Misc. Resources:
Groups:
Events:
Join our SF Catholic Founders meetup (HMU for details).
Sign up for the SENT Summit (Sep 8-11, 2025, in Notre Dame, Indiana)
Content:
If you’ve not already heard it, I’d highly recommend checking out this episode with Nathan Crankfield on Catholics and Sidehustles.
Services:
Hire a Catholic Virtual Assistant through ParacleteVA (email us: dearcfpod@gmail.com)
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