Wow! It’s been a good week for us thanks to you! We gained 5 new Catholic Founders Guild members (paid me bership), closed a new sponsorship with Verso Jobs, and celebrated 25 episodes of the podcast.
Thank you for reading/listening. Without your support, this would be a lot harder to make time for every weekend. I’m excited to see the momentum. It feels like something really amazing is happening within this community.
Welcome back to The Saintly CEO. Every Monday, while you sip your coffee, get some tactical advice to run your business fully in union with your Catholic faith.
In Today’s Email:
News / Updates
Feature Content: Should I Skip My Spiritual Practices In Busy Seasons?
CF Role Model: Founding Educational Institutions and Extreme Energy
+5 more Catholic entrepreneurs (Heavenly Hustlers)
Miscellaneous Resources
[read time: ~9 min | word count 2,049]
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News / Updates
We’re rearranging the content to put the Feature Content at the top, and Heavenly Hustlers lower in the email.
I’m hosting a Catholic Business owners’ book club that is open to folks even outside of the Catholic Founders community. The first book is The Pope and the CEO by Andreas Widmer. We’re currently selecting a date, but we’ll be joined by the author within the next month or so on a Zoom call to discuss it.
Feast of the Assumption! Don’t forget that Friday, August 15th, is a Holy Day of Obligation. Make your plan for how to get to mass. Ideally, take the day off and give your team the day off as well.
[sponsored content]
We are excited to announce a sponsorship partnership with Verso Jobs.
These guys are incredible at helping Catholic Founders hire people who are actually aligned with your mission.
They have built this incredible gamified and data-driven job platform to help you hire people who actually share your mission and values.
The best part, it's built by Catholics.
Whether you're hiring for your startup, school, parish, or nonprofit — Verso makes it easy to find mission-aligned talent ready to build the Kingdom.
Should I Skip My Spiritual Practices In Busy Seasons?
It’s a Wednesday morning. The week has gotten underway in a really mean way, and you’re slammed. The pressure is on to deliver to your client. You’ve gotta keep up with your family obligations. There are also a few really important marketing projects you need to get started.
What happens to your spiritual routine?
More often than not, we let it slide ‘just once’ so we can keep up with our client needs. Perhaps with all the pressure, we just get working right away in the morning, forgetting to say our morning offering even.
Whether it’s missing daily mass or your morning offering, I’m sure we have all been there. Running any business, especially in the early days when it’s just you and a few contractors, it’s really hectic at times. At least if you’ve got that fire burning in you, it is.
But is it okay to let the spiritual practice slide… just that one time?
I don’t know. Is it? What do you think?
Let me lay out a few reasons why I have become increasingly convinced that we must put the spiritual plan of life/practices first and never compromise on them.
Our first vocation in life is the Universal Vocation. That is, to know love and serve God in this life so that we may know love and serve Him in the next. Every other human is also called to this (hence the Universal part).
After that is our primary vocation (marriage or religious life, usually). Then, and only then, do we focus on our secondary vocation; our calling in the world. That for us means our business vocation.
So, if you’re skipping your spiritual routine to focus on your work, you’re inverting the stack. You’re putting your secondary vocation above your universal vocation. This is a disordered situation.
Putting prayer first sets the tone of the culture. Spiritual practices are like hitting the gym for your soul. If you do it consistently, you’ll grow. If you refuse to miss a day, you’re telling the people around you what matters to you. If it’s something you compromise on easily because an ‘important meeting’ came up, what message is that sending to the team?
Remember, the culture of your team will follow the example you give. What tone are you setting?
Virtuous companies produce higher profits. We know that virtuous people will do things better. If they are charitable specifically, they will love the customer. If they love the customer, you’ll have much lower customer acquisition costs, leading to improved margins and greater profits.
This is only one example. Imagine how many fewer lawsuits you’d face if your team were always acting in truth and honesty?
You achieve more when you’re more united with God. When we work on our own power, we can achieve incredible things. How many humans have done amazing things with a bit of focus on a clearly defined goal?
How much more can humans achieve when we let God steer? We know it’s more. He can do 100x or 1,000x more when He’s leading the way. The added bonus is, when we do this, He also transforms our hearts, further uniting us to His will.
We need to acknowledge something, however. None of these things should be done with the primary goal of making more money or gaining more success. These things need to be done because, as we can see, they are properly ordered to our first calling, the Universal Call.
If we begin to compromise on that first step, it shows where our priorities really are.
Without going into it in depth, the first step in all of this is crafting your plan of life that is achievable. Your daily and weekly spiritual practices. If that means a non-negotiable 15 minutes of prayer before the day starts, great. If that’s adding daily mass for you, amazing. Whatever it is, write it down, put it in your calendar, and stick to it.
This is not something you can move or forego. You are making a commitment to pursue things in the right order.
So next time you’re thinking of making a compromise on one of your spiritual practices, stop and ask yourself where your priorities genuinely lie.
God Bless & Happy Building
~Silas Mähner
[sponsored content]
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We’re proud to welcome Fio as a sponsor of Catholic Founders. Think of Fio as Spotify, but only Catholic content creators allowed. That includes music, podcasts and more.
The best part, for a limited time, they are offering readers of Catholic Founders Free Advertising Space. So if you’re looking to reach a Catholic audience, learn more at fio.fm/ads
PS: They actually pay the first ever streaming royalty for podcasts—something unheard of with all major podcast platforms. So, if you listen to the Catholic Founders podcast, check us out on Fio to indirectly support this project financially. You can follow us on Fio by clicking here.
Become a Sponsor! Get your message in front of hundreds of Catholic business owners! Reach out today —> DearCFPod@gmail.com
Heavenly Hustlers
Looking to meet other ambitious Catholic business owners? You’re in the right place.
Meet today’s Heavenly Hustlers.
🏨 Timothy Busch is the Founder & CEO of Pacific Hospitality Group (a hotel real estate company). I don’t know a ton about Tim, but I know that he co-founded the Busch School of Business at the Catholic University of America. He and his wife, Steph, also founded the St. Anne School in Laguna Niguel, CA, which now has over 850 students.
He and Fr. Robert Spitzer co-founded the Magis Institute to use modern astrophysics to prove the existence of God. He co-founded the NAPA Institute to help shape the future leaders of the Church.
It wouldn’t be possible to list all the things he’s involved with or on the board of. But what we can say is, he’s someone who takes action and has decided to be active. This trait is something that most of us would need if we aspire to make an impact on the world. We don’t achieve things, or rather, God won’t be able to use us properly, if we’re just sitting at home.
Really consider how much you’re doing now and if there is something else that you could get involved with that would really be a good use of your skills and that would help you carry out His will.
💻 Henry Kemme is building Kemme Kreative where he’s making websites for home services businesses. I met him recently and he’s got all of the right stuff. Motivation, God-first attitude, and energy. He’s going to focus on this business and do school on the side (don’t tell his professors… unless they are chill haha)
📸 Gabe Fuerte runs a photography business. Something he started during college (also Benedictine — I wonder what they are feeding them over there).
🖌️ Dino Carbetta works in Italian Fine Art and Photography as well. So many photo-takers today!
📈 Ryan Cruz runs TRAFFICSALAD and is helping Catholic biz owners drive growth through client outreach automations.
💰 Rob Hays is an investor in mission-aligned startups. He’s also on the board of some incredible companies in the healthcare space. From what I understand, he’s also one of the biggest Catholic entrepreneur superconnectors in the DFW area.
For $1,000 hire a top Catholic overseas talent who will save you thousands of dollars a month. While doing so, you’ll be transforming the life of a Catholic family overseas.
You pay $500 at time of hire. And $500 if you’re still happy after 30 days.
I just dropped episode #26 and episode #27, recapping my biggest takeaways from 25 episodes of Catholic Founders. Treat it like a directory of past episodes for you to check out. All of the content is in those two episodes. Had to break it into two parts.
HIRING: Looking to hire top talent that is also bought into your mission and values? Give the guys at Verso Jobs a shout. Joe and his team are incredible at filling jobs accurately and fast. And they won’t break the bank.
FREE ADVERTISING: Advertise for free on Fio — fio.fm/ads — tell them Silas sent you. Fio is basically Spotify but they only put Catholic creators and artists (music and podcasts) on it.
OFFSHORE TALENT: Hire a Catholic Virtual Assistant through ParacleteVA (email us: dearcfpod@gmail.com)
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