If you're running a faith-based business and desire long-term success, it needs to be done with integrity. This blog will be your ultimate guide to achieving just that. It's about honesty, integrating strong moral principles, and making sure your customers and stakeholders get real value. You'll also learn how to build a business model that aligns with your beliefs while solving problems for your target audience.

To avoid common mistakes when trying to grow your business, we'll show you how to use efficient systems and processes to maintain top-quality products and services. You'll find inspiring stories from successful businesses that have scaled with integrity and learn important lessons about treating everyone with respect and dignity.

Embrace a mindset of abundance and inspire others to join your purpose-driven journey. Whether you're already experienced or just starting out, infusing your business with faith, values, and integrity will help you create a sustainable and thriving venture that positively impacts both your team and the world.

Prefer to listen? Check out the audio below

All About Integrity

You don’t have to be religious to value doing business with people of integrity. Integrity means, “the quality of being honest and having strong moral principles; moral uprightness” or “the state of being whole and undivided”.

Either definition works. As entrepreneurs and consumers, we want to do business with people and organizations who...

• do what they say they will do, and
• who are not in various stages of unraveling.

No one in business wants to disenfranchise their ideal customers with shoddy products or lousy service. Both outcomes and more can occur when trying to grow your clients and revenue - in other words, scale - without having the systems, skills, and processes in place to handle the faster speed and increasing work volume.

So, you might be saying, “Why scale?”

Why put yourself in a situation that you know is going to stretch you and your team and, if not done right, can end up unprofitable? In the worst cases with poor scaling attempts, you can lose money and in other cases growing too fast can create cash flow crunches that end in bankruptcy.

When you start your business, oftentimes you are excited not to be working 9 5 on someone else’s business.

Typically, we focus first on surviving and then getting all of the moving parts working, so you don’t become a slave to your new enterprise.

Especially for lifestyle entrepreneurs, the idea of scaling isn’t really on the radar.

But with time and experience, you realize if you manifested a job, not a business…

• If you don’t work, you don’t earn,
• If you get sick or tied up with an issue, your business could go down the tubes,
• And being needed 24/7 because everything in your business revolves around you, becomes a real drag….quickly, depending on how “needy” your business is.

Scaling and having a business that runs without you appeals more and more.

But how do you automate without losing your personal touch with clients to make them feel like a number?

How do you keep quality high, honor your promises, and design a scaled business your clients continue to rave about?

A smart strategy for business owners and growth-oriented people learn from their mistakes and reduce further pain by learning from others’ mistakes. We interact with businesses all the time, every day.

Savvy business owners observe which businesses leave them with that warm, fuzzy feeling, where they want more, and which ones have them needing to go to the gym and release some stress in the kickboxing class.

Here are three principles from my recent experiences with two different scaled businesses:

1. Operate in an honest way offering high value to everyone who experiences your business.
2. Treat everyone with dignity.
3. Have an abundance model that permeates your business and is generated from the top.

Being Gaslighted In Style

One of the fun parts of moving out of the confines of my therapy office to the more visible world of my coaching and consulting business was getting to work with several stylists over the years.
Preparing for branding photos was the impetus for engaging with the various stylists. I recognized the investment associated with getting professional photos. I didn’t want to botch the project with a wardrobe and look that did not convey my desired brand message.

My current branding photos were out-of-date. I started working with a branding specialist to discover that there were many more steps I needed to accomplish before being ready to do an updated photo shoot.

While doing the work to get the right foundations in place to up-level my brand, I casually explored the options for stylists I might want to work with soon.

In my limited past work with stylists, I realized I like playing with style. One’s presentation with style, grooming, and even the care for their physique not only promotes their brand but can be a form of artistic and personal expression. Style can be a blank canvas to explore your identity, personality, and creativity playfully.

Learning about fashion and styling became a hobby. I discovered a vast online library of Styling YouTubers with advice for looking your best, updates on trends, smart purchasing strategies, etc.

My past stylists helped me feel confident and attractive with pulled-together looks. But I rarely could duplicate the experience with my wardrobe purchases. I felt discouraged by wasting money on items that ultimately didn’t work well. I knew I had good taste, but I had blind spots around what looked best on me specifically with my body shape, coloring, and personality. I had always wished that rather than being “given a fish”, I could be “taught to fish” in coming up with and maintaining my unique style in an affordable way both for business and personal occasions.

Likely because of my online perusing of styling videos, I was approached by a woman with a company that offered high-end, done-for-you styling services for busy, successful, professional women. I was familiar with the company. About six years previously I had done a free or low-fee styling session with the founder of that business. I found that session valuable, but did not feel that their services were a good fit for me at that time or really a good value, based on what I was looking for.

That woman had scaled her business and I was approached by one of her underlings. Thinking that the business might have evolved into offering something that might be a better match for my needs, I was open to doing the session.

The bottom line was that my encounter with the woman and the business was quite negative. I came away determined that I would never do business with that company because of the way I had been treated:

• The session was misrepresented as a styling session when it was a lead qualification/sales pitch session.
• I invested what I considered to be a lot of my precious time to complete the pre-consultation survey and arrange my time to be in the session and received zero value and some very angry feelings from the time I spent.
• I was told the session that originally presented as a 45 - 60 minute session was over after 20 minutes of listening to their sales promotion when it was clear that I was not a prospect for their high end and I declined the $300 PDF I was pitched.
• When I challenged the women for misrepresenting the session as being a “styling session”, which it wasn’t, I was told that I had misunderstood the appointment. (Here’s where the gaslighting - manipulating something using psychological methods into questioning their sanity or powers of reasoning – came in.) According to her, the session was for me to learn more about them and their business to see if I wanted to work with them. It was not a “styling session”, even though every email and text reminder I received for the session referenced my complimentary “styling session”.

Knocking Me Off My Feet

About the same time frame, I had a delightful, contrasting experience at a scaled business, Fleet Feet.

Blessed genetically with flat feet both my son and I have learned that to continue being active while avoiding foot, knee, and hip pain we must use supportive (and might I add expensive) footwear. We were referred to Fleet Feet by our podiatrist.

Also offering a high-end service, Fleet Feet serves not only serious runners but also consumers like my son and me with special footwear needs. They have a sophisticated, but straightforward process of electronically scanning your foot, gait, and the way you put pressure on your feet, to make recommendations for the best athletic shoes and possibly inserts to support your feet.

At Fleet Feet, we received the red carpet, low-pressure treatment where the sales representative…

• Patiently took time to assess and educate us on our unique needs,
• Was knowledgeable on the best shoes to meet our needs and shared other information to empower us to take optimal care of our special footwear needs.
• Had a streamlined system for us to purchase footwear on the spot or online down the road,
• Left us with what we can for and more in the time we spend in their store.

Business Checkup

So let’s take a look under the hood at your business right now:

1. Is your business model one that solves a specific problem well for enough people, who need it and can afford it?
2. Do you have time built into the growth of your business and the everyday routine to treat everyone in a positive, respectful way?
3. Do you have an inspiring vision and “why” that you actually are willing to go through the peaks and valleys with and will inspire others to join you?

Conclusion

It’s never too early to consider your values and apply them in your business. It’s much easier to inject your values into your business from the very beginning, rather than having to go back and undo structures and systems that aren’t aligned with what you believe in and how you want to treat people.

Have your radar up for “business integrity” so you can copy those doing it right and avoid the practices of those who don’t.

Take steps of faith that allow you both to work smart to have a profitable business while treating everyone inside and outside of your organization very well, including yourself.

Christian Entrepreneurs Biz and Life Tips: Commit to becoming a master at the art of living a personal and professional life of integrity.