Episode 1201: Invest in Others - Interview with the founder of Stewardship and author of Work-Life Harmony Grant Botma – Part 2

[00:00:00] Scott Maderer: Thanks for joining us on episode 1,201 of the inspired stewardship podcast.

[00:00:06] Grant Botma: I'm Grant Botma. I challenge you to invest in yourself, invest in others, develop your influence and impact the world by using your time, your talent and your treasures to live out your calling. Having the ability to find work life harmony is key.

[00:00:23] And one way to be inspired to do that is to listen to this. The inspired stewardship podcast with my friend, Scott.

[00:00:32] Because the employee and the business owner, if they both care about their work and they both care about their family, they're excited about both. The only difference is a great business owner, a great manager or leader. We'll do all that they can to not only try to have work life harmony in their own life, but encourage work life harmony in the people that they're

[00:00:53] Scott Maderer: leading.

[00:00:54] Welcome. And thank you for joining us on the inspired stewardship podcast. If you [00:01:00] truly desire to become the person who God wants you to be, then you must learn to use your time, your talent and your treasures for your true calling in the inspired stewardship podcast, you will learn to invest in your.

[00:01:13] Invest in others and develop your influence so that you can impact the world

[00:01:20] in today's interview with grant BPA, I ask grant to share with you why work less or do less is not always the path to reals. I also ask grant about purpose and harmony and how those two things fit together. And grant also shares with you how he hopes this book helps you and everyone who reads it. One reason I like to bring you great interviews.

[00:01:43] Like the one you're gonna hear today is because of the power in learning from others. Another great way to learn from others is through reading books. But if you're like most people today, you find it hard to find the time to sit down and read. And that's why today's [00:02:00] podcast is brought to you by audible.

[00:02:01] Go to inspired stewardship.com/audible to sign up and you can get a 30 day free trial. There's over 180,000 titles to choose from. And instead of reading, you can listen your way to learn from some of the greatest minds out there. That's inspired stewardship.com/audible to get your free trial and listen to great books the same way you're listening to this podcast.

[00:02:29] Grant BMA is a husband, father, and Arizona native, who has worked in the personal finance industry. Since the age of 15, he took a stand against financial injustice by forming stewardship, a group of companies serving his community with wisdom and love through home loans, insurance and investments included twice on the ink 5,000 list of America's fastest grown companies.

[00:02:52] Stewardship success stems from Grant's personal philosophy of harmonizing. And family life. He is a business [00:03:00] owner, bestselling Arthur keynote speaker and family man, who is on a mission to love others. Welcome to the show grant.

[00:03:09] Grant Botma: Yeah, thanks for having me. It's gonna be fun.

[00:03:11] Scott Maderer: The last week we talked a little bit and you mentioned about not aiming for working less or doing less to achieve happiness.

[00:03:19] Why is it important to you to emphasize to people. That working less isn't really necessarily the goal that they're aiming for if they wanna achieve true harmony,

[00:03:32] Grant Botma: because God created us for work. God created us to contribute, and it's why we feel so much joy in life and feel fulfilled when we are working.

[00:03:46] And working well, and we know that our work makes an impact on the life of people, man, I'll just be honest with you. I think one of the travesties in our society is that many people [00:04:00] have family members, a spouse or kids that have no idea how good they are at their. Or worse have no idea the positive impact that they're making on the world?

[00:04:13] I just, I don't like it. It's sad. Scott, are you married? Okay. And what's your wife's name? Carrie. Okay. Does Carrie ever listen to the

[00:04:22] Scott Maderer: podcast? Yeah, actually she does. Okay. She's she's a little behind, she doesn't necessarily listen to today's episode today because she's got other things, but she listens to him.

[00:04:32] Grant Botma: Yeah. She sounds a little bit like my wife she'll listen from time to time, but it's not like her top priority. Yeah. She doesn't wanna listen to her husband talking more. It's

[00:04:38] Scott Maderer: on the list, but it's not top of

[00:04:39] Grant Botma: the list. Sure. Yeah. So I'm gonna. Say something and say a message to your wife, Carrie right now.

[00:04:46] And I'd love for you to play this for her. Carrie, I don't really know Scott I've only had one pre-interview with him and I'm in the process of having this podcast interview with him. But I wanna tell you something, [00:05:00] Scott is very good at. Most of the podcasts that I go on.

[00:05:05] There's a code that is used. That is, Hey, this is just gonna be conversational, which means nobody really prepares. And I have to show up to the interview and be ready for anything. And I do that. But with Scott, I know exactly what to expect. I feel extremely confident about this podcast interview. I'm only halfway into it and I'm having a blast.

[00:05:28] Scott is really good at. And as a result, I know that what he's doing through this podcast is making an amazing, positive impact on real people who are listening. And I think it's beautiful and I'm grateful that you as his wife are supporting that and are part of that. Scott, I don't think our spouses and our families hear about the real impact that's being made through the work that we do enough.

[00:05:53] And my hope is that Carrie was able to experience just a taste. In that message that I shared. And,

[00:05:59] Scott Maderer: and I [00:06:00] will first off you, thank you for sharing that, and you may be emotional as you said it. So folks are gonna get to hear that part by voice too. But the interesting thing is, cuz again, I think.

[00:06:13] I, I am very fortunate and I think you are too. And that I've found truly a virtuous woman and my wife and she actually does know what I do fairly well. Now she does, she know all the details, everything all the time. Absolutely not, but right. At the end of the day, I'm even lucky enough.

[00:06:29] My mother could actually tell people what I do for a living as well, which I think is rare. But to your. There's other people that are dear to me in my life that have no earthly idea. What I do or how I do it or what it looks like or anything else. And I think that's true for a lot of us.

[00:06:46] Grant Botma: And the sad part about it is either consciously and most of the time, subconsciously those people who really care about you and who you really care about as well, each time that you do engage in your work [00:07:00] and it might prevent you from engaging with. There's resentment and bitterness about your work that can come up, especially if they're not connected with the purpose that's being made.

[00:07:13] If they don't know how big of a role they play in your life, that supports you to make that positive impact that you're making. So not only are you battling for balance when you have the right the wrong target. But you think that work is bad and you have the shame about it and work is something that brings you joy and worse.

[00:07:33] There's the people in your life that you care about most. They don't appreciate that work. They don't appreciate that joy and they don't appreciate the positive impact you're making on others. What about all the statistics that are out there, right? You see all these surveys that say 85% of people hate their job.

[00:07:50] Scott Maderer: That people at work waste 40 to 60% of their time on non-work task while they're at work these sorts of things. What about the person that's hearing this and going. [00:08:00] Wait a minute. I don't actually like what I do. I don't enjoy it. What would you say to them? Yeah,

[00:08:06] Grant Botma: that's actually the topic of my first book and in that book the title is called the problem.

[00:08:11] Isn't their paycheck, how to attract top talent and build a thriving company culture. And it talks about a motivational hierarchy. A lot of employers believe that the best way to have happy employees and to motivate them well is to just pay them a. But that's not true. As you mentioned in the surveys and all the data for years and years and years, it all said the same thing.

[00:08:33] And basically every industry that money's important, you gotta pay well, but that's only the fourth, most motivating thing. And there's three other things that are even more motivational than that. Yeah. And the most motivating thing is purpose. And the sad part is as entrepreneurs, small businesses and big businesses, they miss the mark.

[00:08:52] Most of the time, because big businesses with stockholders, they believe their primary role is to make stockholders happy and make stockholders money. So [00:09:00] that's their purpose? That's a terrible purpose to perpetuate to employees, right? And smaller businesses entrepreneurs. These are people who were bootstrapping it from the beginning and were never trained on how to lead people or how to help people feel connected to the purpose of their business, or even how to be transparent with their own heart and mind with their employees about the purpose of their business.

[00:09:18] If other people are listening to this saying, oh man. Yeah, that sounds neat. But I don't feel like I, I have a purpose in my business. You're not alone. That's a lot of people, but there is one fact that remains Scott and that is businesses fundamentally exist to serve somebody somewhere that it's not a business without it fundamentally if somebody somewhere is not being served with a product or service.

[00:09:43] It's not a business. So if you're working for a business, , you're surfing somebody somewhere. It's on us to work hard, to feel connected to those people that we're serving and to try and put ourselves in their shoes and do everything that we can to [00:10:00] serve them well and serve them with selflessness and to understand that impact that we're making on their life so that we go to work every day, knowing man, we do work that matters.

[00:10:10] Scott Maderer: Well, and I've talked to a lot of you. I was in the corporate world for 11 years. And of course I've been an entrepreneur for even longer than that. And the I've talked to a lot of business owners who have the attitude of I pay them. Therefore, they should do it whatever it is.

[00:10:30] And yeah. And they it's the they should just suck it up and do it because I give them money. And that's what you're talking about in here. It's that's not actually why people , that's not where people find connection and joy and purpose.

[00:10:46] So when you talk about purpose, why do you think purpose is so important to the fundamental nature of harmony.

[00:10:55] Grant Botma: Because that's how God created us. That's how we're wired. There, [00:11:00] this whole thing about life, it boils down to maybe just one word and that's love and love is a choice.

[00:11:10] It's not a feeling, it's not an emotion. It's not a thing that we trip on. , it's a choice that we have. And love only happens with freedom and free will. It can't happen with force and when you want to do love you do it the way that Jesus did for even the son of man did not come to be served, but to serve and give his life as ransom for many.

[00:11:32] And isn't that funny? That's the best way to do business as well, right? To serve and to love. If you do those things, you're not only living out the purpose that God has created for you and what's hardwired within you. But you make other people happy and you become an attractive human being that other people wanna be around and you grow the impact on your community, on your family, on the world.

[00:11:55] And there's a lot of joy in that and that's, I. [00:12:00] So let's

[00:12:00] Scott Maderer: talk a little bit about you, you just mentioned talking about employee happiness. We were talking about that and about how there's other things that employees are after than just quote a paycheck. How does this idea of work life harmony apply to quote the owner of the business?

[00:12:19] Maybe a small business owner and how does it apply to the employee that's working. In the business.

[00:12:27] Grant Botma: Yeah it applies the same because the employee and the business owner, if they both care about their work and they both care about their family, they're excited about both. The only difference is a great business owner, a great manager or leader.

[00:12:43] Do all that they can to not only try to have work life harmony in their own life, but encourage work life harmony in the people that they're leading, empower the people that are in their charge to also have work life harmony of their own. That's really important. Leadership is [00:13:00] not about you being in charge of people.

[00:13:02] Hey, I pay you. You work for me as you mentioned, but it's about these people that are choosing to be employed with you to spend a gigantic part of their life with you. Now they are in your charge, it's a responsibility. And the number one thing that you can do to help increase production from your employees, another statistical proven fact is have them answer yes.

[00:13:25] To this question. Does my boss care about me? And if you want your employees, you want your team to say yes to that question so that they perform well. Then put yourself in their shoes, understand how their work and their life may not be fully connected. Understand that the loneliness they might be feeling in this battle for balance and do your best to achieve work life harmony and share that with them and empower them and care for them and find joy and wins when they achieve it as well.

[00:13:58] Scott Maderer: So if you had [00:14:00] to sum up the impact what impact do you hope that this book. Has

[00:14:04] Grant Botma: on others. Yeah the same impact that I believe was different between my. When I was first starting on this work life harmony journey to, to what it is now. And that's just a greater connection with the people that are closest to you, greater connection to your spouse, a greater connection to your kids but also a greater connection to, to work greater connection to that purpose in work, greater connection to the purpose that you have in life and a greater connection to the people that you're serving through work so that when you wake up every day, you don't feel lone.

[00:14:38] You don't feel defeated. You don't feel shame. Like you have to figure out this battle, but it's a beautiful harmony. That's has so many connected parts that are working together.

[00:14:49] You

[00:14:50] Scott Maderer: can follow grant on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn as grant Bama. That's spelled B O T M a. Of course I'll have links to [00:15:00] all of those over in the show notes as well. Grant, is there anything else you'd like to share with the listener?

[00:15:05] Grant Botma: Yeah. Do your best to love others in your life and do that by genuinely putting yourself in other people's shoes, figure out what their needs are, see how you can serve them and just take one small actionable intent.

[00:15:17] Thing from this podcast and try it today. Don't feel like you have to discover or figure out this work life harmony journey. In one day, it has been a journey for me and my wife, and I've made many mistakes along the way, but just something small, something different that you can do today and see if you can build on that every day throughout the rest of this year.

[00:15:35] Scott Maderer: Thanks so much for listening to the inspired stewardship podcast. As a subscriber and listener, we challenge you to not just sit back and passively listen, but act on what you've heard and find a way to live your calling. If you enjoyed this episode please do us a favor. Go over to inspired [00:16:00] stewardship.com/itunes rate.

[00:16:03] All one. iTunes rate, it'll take you through how to leave a rating and review and how to make sure you're subscribed to the podcast so that you can get every episode as it comes out in your feed until next time, invest your time, your talent and your treasures. Develop your influence and impact the world.