3:34– My background
6:08– What life looks like now, post-Popeyes
7:39– About my time at Popeyes
13:14– What is servant leadership? And how do you know it when you see it?
17:32– What faith-elements are at the root of what we are talking about with servant leadership?
2149– What has been the most challenging aspect of you being a follower of Christ in these very high profile positions?
23:31– A word of encouragement
25:10– What is one of the biggest mistakes you’ve made in the past? And what did you learn from it?
27:47– In the hight of your work, how did you balance it all–being a wife, mother, business leader etc?
29:40– What advice would you give to the 20-year-old you?
32:02– What has inspired me to work as a ministry in the marketplace
35:04– The 4:23 Question
Cheryl Bachelder is a passionate, purpose-led business leader. As CEO of Popeyes® Louisiana Kitchen, Inc. from 2007 to 2017, she transformed a tired brand and discouraged organization into a top-performing quick-service restaurant chain. The story of the Popeyes’ success is chronicled in her book Dare to Serve: How to Drive Superior Results by Serving Others. Today, Cheryl’s aim is to help senior leaders understand and implement Dare to Serve leadership in for-profit and non-profit workplaces.
Cheryl’s earlier career included brand leadership roles at Yum Brands, Domino’s Pizza, RJR Nabisco, The Gillette Company and Procter & Gamble. Cheryl currently serves as a director and compensation committee chair at Pier 1 Imports, Inc. (PIR). She sits on the advisory board of Procter & Gamble’s franchising venture, Tide Dry Cleaners. She is active in many ministries developing future leaders: Spring Hill Camps, Crossroad Farms, and CRU. She speaks at conferences such as Work Matters, RightNow Media, Truth At Work Conference, Servant Leadership Institute, and Greenleaf Center for Servant Leadership.
Cheryl holds a Bachelor’s and a Masters of Business Administration degree from the Kelley School of Business at Indiana University. She and her husband of 36 years, Chris, have three grown daughters, two terrific sons-in-law, and two handsome grandsons. Cheryl and Chris reside in Atlanta, Georgia and attend Buckhead Church. They are avid learners, fans of the classical education movement, and can always be found reading a good book.
Full Transcript:
Ray: Well hello everyone this is Ray Hilbert, and I am your host here at Bottom Line Faith. And if this is your first time joining us here at the program, welcome. We are so glad that you have chosen to join us today. If you are a regular listener, welcome back. You know that this is the program that we love to talk to today’s top leaders in the marketplace from a wide variety of field of expertise and areas of thought leadership. The analogy that we use here at Bottom Line Faith is “this is the program where we lift the hood and tinker around in the engine of Christian leadership in the marketplace.” If your regular listener you know that we travel the country and talk with CEOs and entrepreneurs and sports figures and celebrities and really high capacity leaders who are living out their faith in the marketplace. If you’re catching us online and you want to go to the website, got to bottomlinefaith.org and you can see where we have dozens of interviews posted there. If you want to become a regular subscriber scroll down to the bottom of the page there and you can subscribe to the podcast and receive it on a weekly basis. Well, enough of the shameless plugs. We are so excited for our guests today. I’m really honored because I have been a fan of our guests today, Cheryl Bachelder, a former, the former CEO of Popeye’s Louisiana Kitchen. We all know and love their food and love their commercials, we see them all the time. She’s also the author of Dare to Serve: How to Drive Superior Results by Serving Others, Cheryl, welcome to Bottom Line Faith.
Cheryl: Thank you so much good to be here.
Ray: You know Cheryl, one of the things that I’ve really grown to love is leaders who really lead by serving and that’s really your passion. We’re going to talk about that today, but that really does kind of encapsulate what’s most important to you, doesn’t it?
Cheryl: Absolutely, it’s the center idea that I work on teaching and professing for the last ten years.
Ray: We’re going to talk about faith today, and we’re going to talk about leadership. But, folks if you don’t know Cheryl she’s going to be embarrassed, but I’m going to be reading just a little bit of her bio. Listen to this, this is amazing, not only is she the former CEO of Popeye’s Louisiana Kitchen but she has been the president and chief concept officer at Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant for a number of years, A Senior Vice President at the Domino’s Pizza brand, she has worked with Keebler company, Lifesavers, Procter & Gamble and you are actually a product of the Kelley School of Business, right here in Indiana is that right?
Cheryl: Yes. Yes, I am.
Ray: And I know you’ve done a lot more than that, but you’ve had an amazing career particularly in the foodservice market, right?
Cheryl: Well you live a long time you have a lot of interesting work, so yes. I have been blessed. I enjoyed my first half of my career and what’s called package good marketing and the second half in restaurants, and I really found my love when I got to the restaurant business.
Ray: We’re going to talk about business and leadership in just a moment but let’s talk about your childhood. Let’s talk about- what do we need to know about the early years for Cheryl?
Cheryl: well I’m the eldest of four children I was born to Margaret and Max Stanton and blessed to be so. they were incredible parents made a sort of the center of their universe, but they really helped us to be independent. We moved a lot, so we were frequently adjusting to a new place, a new school, making new friends, I think that prepared us well for life. They prepared us for faith and strong values. I often say our dinner table was an education place that prepared us for how we would live our lives.
Ray: Well, so it sounds like faith was a center part of the family and the upbringing and those sorts of things. So take us back what was maybe one of your first remembrances of this whole concept of this faith and work and how it all that play out for you? Where do you first get exposed to some of this thought processes?
Cheryl: My first exposure in faith and work were both of my grandmothers. My grandmothers, both worked and had incredibly strong faith I look back and their type of work, they worked harder than I ever have. My grandmother ran a dairy farm, for example, one of them did. The other one was a very dedicated school teacher. So I got to observe close hand what it looked like to do your calling with enthusiasm and passion and hard work and faith. My grandmothers were quoting scripture to me before I learn how to read. So huge inspiration from generations past.
Ray: How did that then begin to shape as you came early into your career? Right, you go to college, get your degree and so forth but had that type of heritage shape the early years of your career?
Cheryl: You know, I don’t think anyone ever explained to me that the workplace was a place to express your faith values but my dad did it in his life and so I had a lot of examples at home of what it looked like to demonstrate your beliefs and convictions in the workplace. But frankly one of the reasons I talk about it now is because I want people to discover the intersection sooner in their life and not believe that they have this thing called faith and home life that is somehow separate from their faith and work life. I believe that we are all at our best when we live one life. For me, I came to understand that in my forties, I would like this next Generation to learn it much sooner.
Ray: Okay and we are going to talk about maybe some of those examples from your career and so forth, but help our audience to understand what you’re up to now. You’ve obviously written this book Dare to Serve and serving on some boards, but what does life look like for you now post Popeye’s?
Cheryl: Well, the last year has been a lot of fun. I’ve done a lot of public speaking in both faith and secular audiences teaching the principles of servant leadership. Which is suddenly quite interesting to people, ten years ago you couldn’t find five people to talk to about it. But increasingly now with many people publishing about how to put into action. There had not been a book on the practice of servant leadership for thirty-five years when I wrote my book two years ago, and now it’s like they are coming out of the woodwork, and so I’m excited about that momentum, and we’re excited to be a catalyst for that. So I speak, I teach, I serve on boards public and private, and then I do a significant amount of philanthropy work with the proceeds of sales from the company.
Ray: That’s really exciting. So how- if someone is listening to our conversation today and they wanted to find you on the web, how would they do so?
Cheryl: Well, I blog often at cherylbachelder.Com, the blog is called Serving Preforms and gives a lot of examples of putting these principles to work. I also have resources on that site if you want to do a book study or a discussion group on these principles. There is free materials there for you to access.
Ray: Alright, are you ready to get in- I’m ready to talk about some leadership.
Cheryl: Okay, let’s hear it.
Ray: I know this is your passion. So tell us the story- Let’s just start with the most recent story first, at Popeye’s. Why were you brought into the business? What was the condition of the company at the time? What did you begin to instill there and what were the results? Just share the story with us.
Cheryl: Well the Popeye story has been an exciting one. Ten years ago the company was in serious decline, seven years of declining sales and profitability. The franchise owners that own and run the restaurants we’re really in despair over the future of the company. I think most of them didn’t think it had a future. I was sitting on the board of directors at the time, and the CEO resigned, and I thought that we would just go search for a new CEO and we did try that for a few weeks. But the board came and asked me about it halfway into that process if I would consider taking the job. I had done two prior turnarounds of large iconic brands like Popeye’s and really loved the challenge. Almost the more broken, the better, from my perspective and so I was excited about it, my family was excited about it. We decided to join forces I would tell you that we did three things I think in retrospect that really set the performance of the company in motion.
The first was we called out what I called The Daring Destination, we had a roadmap strategy on what we do to become a top performing restaurant company. That may sound obvious, but the company was working on a lot of different projects that weren’t producing any performance results. So we picked seven issues that really needed to be tackled. They were hard to tackle like, speed of service, we need to improve our drive-thru, and we said: “We were going to stop being satisfied with mediocre performance, we were going to change the game.” We did that across many strategies marketing, cost savings, speed of service, better real estate and got the company in working order for its owners. We started then secondly really focusing on those franchise owners.
We decided who we were going to serve. You know, most people never even have that conversation. They say “We serve.” Shareholders, employees, and guests; we severe everybody. But you serve everybody and don’t measure anything you don’t really serve any of them very well. So we believe that the franchisees have the most invested and so we decided that we would measure everything. We did by their success specifically their bottom line profitability and that proved to draw us into constant conversations with them about what needed to be addressed and how it should be addressed, when it should be addressed and how much money should be spent and we became great partners.
Our franchisee partnership was rated the best in the restaurant industry with 95% satisfaction on part of our owners. The third thing we did I always emphasize on this, we performed. You know, there are no great leaders or great stories without happy endings in business, and so we performed for those owners, and we measured our sales increases, and our profitability increases methodically to ensure that we never let them down. In the end, we did perform the sales of their restaurants went up 45% the profits more than doubled in absolute dollars. Market shares were up 75%, and we built 200 restaurants a year for the last few years which was top tier growth rate. So turns out even the shareholder were happy. The share price went from $13 to $61 by the end of 16 and then sold for $79 in March of 2017.
Ray: So, as you look back on roughly a ten year-
Cheryl: Ten years, yeah.
Ray: Ten years, right. As you look back over that what is the most fulfilling, there is a lot to unpack in that, but for you personally what is most fulfilling for you as you look back over that ten-year run?
Cheryl: For me personally was the development of our leaders I don’t think there is any greater privilege then growing next generation leaders. So my direct reports and their direct reports, franchise leaders out in the field, I invested most of my time building their capability and coaching and encouraging and thanking them for their work. It’s greatly underestimated how valuable it is to pour into your people and yet we know that our favorite boss, right, is the one that poured into us, spent time with us, took risks on us, gave us opportunities. So I have been teaching that to my team over these last several years. I couldn’t be prouder of the places that they are landing now that they’ve left Popeye’s. It’s literally just finished sending out of terrific leaders in the industry.
Ray: Does it kinda feel like, big sigh mission accomplished, yes we did?
Cheryl: I’m kinda more like a mama bear, like “I’m gonna keep track of my kids.”
Ray: There you go.
Cheryl: I’m going to keep track of their go-forward success because I really think that they are going to those great values and principles that we learned together and put them in play at other companies.
Ray: Yep. So you talk a lot about, and I’ve heard you speak several times, and in your book. This whole concept serving and servant leadership, I guess I didn’t realize it had been three decades. Was that Greenleaves’ work was way back when on servant leadership?
Cheryl: Greenleave is about forty years ago and then Herman Miller, I’m sorry Max De Pree and Herman Miller and then Bill Pollard’s Servant Master were the last to CEOs to write about it.
Ray: Three decades had passed, and now God touched your heart, and you’re writing about it, but you were living it. How- If someone is listing to our conversation right now and they’s heard this term “Servant Leadership” over and over and over again, but maybe they’re having a hard time really putting flesh to that, kinda tire meets road short of thing. Walk us through in your mind, what is “Servant Leadership” and how all we know it when we see it? How will we know when we are living it?
Cheryl: You know, I say servant leadership is simply thinking other more often than you think about yourselves. We all think about ourselves, and we are all worried about self-interest, but in business, leadership to think about others in the impact of your decisions on them is a powerful way to create an interment where people want to be. I think that sounds self-explanatory, but I must tell you when I ask people to describe your favorite boss ever. They quickly tell me all the traits of that person and how well they served them. When I then say are you doing those for the people that work for you? I generally get blank stares; like its a new thought or a new notion. So what does it look like in actuality?
Well, if you appreciate that a boss spent time coaching you and advancing your skills, how much time are you spending coaching and advancing the skills of your team? I ask my team to spend 30% of week advancing the skills of their team. They told me that that was impossible and I said “Well, if that’s impossible we can’t be good leaders, that is a primary job responsibility for our team. So putting into action is what’s hard, not knowing what it is, just think about your best boss. But the challenge is making time. People are not efficient, so if you’re going to dedicate your life to advancing the skills and values of people, you’ve got to spend some serious time and investment on those people.
Ray: Do we hesitate sometimes because we don’t fully understand the return on that investment or we just feel like we’ve got so much on our plate? What did you find were the biggest obstacles? You mentioned the time that they’re telling you I don’t have the sort of time, Cheryl, 30%. What were the obstacles in addition to being inefficient, what did they have to overcome?
Cheryl: Well, absolutely time is what everyone references-
Ray: They think that’s it right?
Cheryl: That’s their first thing. But, I actually think they don’t want to spend the time preparing for those conversations. If you knew that you were going to see every one of your team members this week for an hour and a half, you would have to get ready, and you would have to think ahead to what expectations you wanted to set, what questions you wanted to answer, what issues needed to be discussed, debated and decisions made. You would have to be very playful about that amount of time, and I think we’re reticent to invest that much in others. I think somehow we might get our needs might get short shipped if we did that.
The truth of the matter is our needs, if we are truly driving performance in business are only accomplished through these other people and our investment in them. I think the thing I had to keep saying to people is “It does take time. It’s not efficient. You can only grow people that you know.” There’s not a chance you can grow them if you don’t know them. Just pounding that home week after week after week and by the way, I mean know the whole person. I am not afraid to have whole people conversations and teach other leaders to have them. Because I think that’s how we want to live our lives, we want to be an integrated person. I want to know about your family; I want to know about your values and beliefs. I want to know your life experiences good and bad, and I only get that privilege by investing time and listening to you and asking you questions. Over time so that I can pour into your life in a meaning way.
Ray: This sounds an awful lot, to me, like marketplace ministry, right? And so as you reflect upon this model, I don’t want to cheat, but I don’t want to short-change you by saying it’s a technique it really is a lifestyle, it ebbs out of the heart right? You have to love people to lead them right? So, what Biblical principles, what faith elements are at the root of what we are talking about?
Cheryl: So there are three faith elements for me that are central to our faith and central to our ministry. The first one is that every life has inherent dignity and deserves our attention, you know, Genesis 1:27 If God created man in His own image, male and female, then we should all have incredible dignity for those lives that are put in front of us in leadership. That leads me to the central thesis of the New Testament, which is to love the people that we lead.
Ray: Yeah.
Cheryl: That sounds like a feeling word, but it’s really an action word. I think that’s why Jesus made is the central new commitment of the New Testament that we would love one another because love comes from God and that included time spent and grace and forgiveness and patients and all the 1 Corinthian traits for love. Those work in the marketplace and then this idea of serving others with humility from Philippians 2:3 doing nothing from selfish ambition but catching others as more significant than ourselves and investing ourselves in them. Those are the three tenants of dignity, of love, and of service. Our central guardrails to the actions you take in the marketplace, at Popeye’s we evaluating people half on their business objectives and half on how they accomplished their work and we expected them to treat people with dignity we expected loving actions towards people including tough expectations and candid conversations or loving arms and something really difficult happened in their lives. That’s how we served.
Ray: I would just like to touch on one- There is so much there we could have a thirty-minute conversation just on those three points you just made. But you talk about difficult conversations who does this play into loving people well? I find quite particularly Christian leaders sometimes feel like hesitant to have that hard candid conversation. Would you elaborate a little bit? Speak to why that is part of loving someone well, having those kinds of conversations.
Cheryl: Well, you know, I think we want someone to be honest with us, would we not? It’s literally dishonest, and it does a disservice to not tell them the truth. And the truth can look like setting clear expectation on what you need them to do at work. The truth can say you have not delivered on your expectations we discussed earlier and I need you to do that, and you need to share with me any reason why you can’t. Then if a person is unable to step up to the opportunity the greatest dignity I can give them is the truth, that this is not the job for them. People ask me all the time “Do you ever fire anyone in servant leadership?” and well of course you do. Right? It’s the dignity thing to do for the other people in the in the enterprise, if somebody is not able to do the job or not carrying their weight-
Ray: They’re probably miserable anyway, right?
Cheryl: They’re unhappy, the team is unhappy, the company is being held back by lack of performance, and so you can fire people with grace and concern for their interest. You can point them towards things they are better at then this particular job. You can help them land in a better place in life, and they might even, down the road, thank you for that.
Ray: Yeah.
Cheryl: It’s just being, it’s just candor, and it is deserved.
Ray: Jesus talked about speaking the truth in love-
Cheryl: Yes.
Ray: And it really is, where is that coming from is it vindictiveness or are we really serving with love? And I love what you are talking about.
Cheryl: Well much like we do with our children.
Ray: That’s right
Cheryl: You don’t let the three-year-old eat the whole cookie bag. You know, that would not be in his interest, right? And the same thing is true at work. We don’t let allow things to happen that are not in the interest of the person and in the enterprise we’ve been asked to lead.
Ray: That’s great stuff. So, let then talk a little bit about some of the challenges you’ve had over the years, as it relates particularly to living out your faith. What’s been the most challenging aspect of you being a follower of Christ, in very high-profile positions, in very large companies where’s the challenge in all that’s been for you? As it relates to your faith?
Cheryl: Well a couple of things. Until you’ve been challenged your faith has not been developed-
Ray: I like that.
Cheryl: So, I’m thankful for the challenges. I would tell you one challenge for me was getting fried from KFC as president, in a very public fashion, cover of the business section of the newspaper saying, “KFC President was been replaced,” you know that is a pretty ugly headline. When you pride yourself in doing good work and carrying about the people and that was a bit of a crisis of my confidence, not my faith but of my confidence. So learning to let God walkthrough trails and tribulations and staying surrendered through those. It is much easier to surrender when things are going well then it is when you are not happy with the outcome. So I think I always open up my hands to remind myself to keep my palms open and not clinching opportunities, because they don’t always turn out like you had hoped, you don’t always perform like you’d wish, and sometimes you learn lessons the hard way, like everybody else does. So, I think that has significantly grown my understanding of surrender.
Ray: What I really liked about what you just shared there that was this distinction between your confidence was shaken, not your faith, and maybe we can pause for just a moment. I’d like you to pass along a word of encouragement. There is somebody listing to this conversation right now, maybe they’ve stumbled along it, or maybe they’ve got their headphones on, running on their treadmill, listing to it on their iPhone, or whatever the case may be. Maybe listing to it in their car and they are really discouraged right now, and they’re like “I’m going through something really hard, my business isn’t going like I’d like, my marriage it’s going like I was hoping it would be, or whatever. Help them to understand the difference between the confidence and being shaken in the their faith. I mean how would that work for them? Give them an encouragement right now. This is great.
Cheryl: Well I believe when you’re confidence it shaken you go back to the Creator and have a chat and reconnect with why He created you and what He thinks about you, not what you think about yourself. I think that is hard for all of us to believe that God loves us as much as He does but I have absolutely experienced encouragement from revisiting God the Creator and the bumper sticker “God doesn’t make junk.” Just reminding ourselves that, no He has a plane, what’s happening right now is the refinement, I love that verse about gold being refined by fire, and I think your fiery trails refine you the most and what refinement means it that it draws you closer to Him, the draw you closer and somehow our successes let us drift from Him.
Ray: Well, Paul talked about “Lord, don’t give me so much that I become boastful and arrogant and don’t give me so little that I’m tempted to steal,” right?
Cheryl: Yes.
Ray: That’s that tension that we are feeling between success quote and failure as the world would have it defined. So as you look back over the course of your career rather be in the Popeye’s position or maybe another role that you had. What would you say was one of the biggest mistakes that you made, that you’ve learned from and what did you learn from it?
Cheryl: Well, its related to what we were just talking about because the mistakes that I made when I was at KFC largely came from not being confident in my convictions about how to lead. I was always looking around trying to lead like everybody else and trying to look like my boss and trying to practice whatever they told me to practice. I now talk to leaders about early in your career figure out what you believe your principles are for leadership, your convictions and getting those cemented so that you’re not swaying in the wind. A simple example I’d give you is, I really believed that we should steward the business enterprises for a long period of time. That isn’t a very popular notion today. The average CEO is a two and a half of your CEO. I really didn’t want to be one of those. That’s different than culture today and to say that I’m working on three to five-year plan and to ask a board to invest in a longer view that is typical. Takes courage it is far different than the rest of the people that you are looking towards. You have to know why you stand on that principle to put it into play. So the same as servant leadership I think the first time I talk to my board about servant leadership they said “As long as you’re making your numbers you can lead however you want,” right?
Ray: Right.
Cheryl: They didn’t share my convictions for servant leadership they just liked the outcomes. Right? So learning that I have that conviction no matter what, right, and being unwavering. Probably the best line I learned early on from somebody was “Live your life for an audience of one, and if you’re not just living towards your convictions, as guided by your heavenly father, you are going to blow in the wind and stray from those convictions in the marketplace.”
Ray: Yeah, Colossians 3 right? “Whatever we do, do onto the Lord and not as onto men.” and so I can place myself into that conversation that you had the confidence of those conventions, that it was the right thing, and the results were hopefully just going to fall into place but if not you could still walk away knowing you’re an authentic leader. Regardless of results.
Cheryl: That’s correct.
Ray: That’s beautiful, that’s fantastic. Well, Cheryl as a busy, busy person, right? Even know you’ve got a lot going on. But in the height of your work how did you balance it all? Spouse, a parent, demands on your time, meeting with leaders, what was that like for you? How did you balance it all?
Cheryl: Well, first it’s about your convictions. I always planned on being married raising a family. I never debated or discussed otherwise. Meet my husband at twenty-four and married shortly thereafter, we’ve now been married over thirty-seven years.
Ray: Congratulations.
Cheryl: So, you know, if you believe that is a central principles in your life, that’s what you make sure you attend to in your life. I’m not a big fan of work-life balance world. I don’t think it was very helpful because on any given day we were not balanced. We were helping each other out, my husband and I both worked really hard to keep our home on track and our work on track. We took turns, we helped each other, our parents helped us, our neighbors helped us and each day, I called it one day at a time. If taken a lot of the principles out of the AA manual, right? Because that one day at a time conversation that you have when you’re fighting off addiction is the same conversation, you ought to be having if you’re drowning in work, right? You’ve got to figure out how to get your priories straight one day at time and laughter, my goodness. One morning I got up, put on a beautiful silk suit for a board meeting and my daughter threw up all over it. You just have to go “Oh, wow! Back to the drawing board, we go.” You know, and so not every get so crazy that you can’t just laugh.
Ray: We can’t take ourselves too seriously, right? Because this too shall pass, whatever it is. So, as you look back if you could go back and advise your twenty-year-old you and give counsel and advice to the twenty-year-old Cheryl, what would you say?
Cheryl: I actually get to do that just about every day. I have a thirty-one-year-old, a twenty-six-year-old an a twenty-four-year-old, so we talk about life often. The one thing that I’m talking about with my two girls that are married is not to get sucked into the “You’ve got to do it all.” you know this, particularly for women, this idea you can do it all is really a myth, and all you end up is very, very, exhausted and sad, if you try to do it all. You never fell good about your family or yourself. So, I talked to them about making conscious choices about where they spend their time, taking breaks for resting and rejuvenation. Developing their faith as much as they are developing their skills. Putting their family first and the one thing, looking back, that I wish I would have understood the value of margins and those days where you’re young, married, with lots- big kids responsibilities and a lot of career. You just feel like you don’t have enough time and if you could breathe, take a deep breath and have a little bit more margin in life, you’ll actually be better at all of those things. But it’s a very hard lesson to learn. I think I learned it later in life
Ray: Sounds to me like it is also about living in the moment too.
Cheryl: Be here now, its one of the things that I learned from one of my bosses is that I think it’s great advice, “Is to be right in the moment you’re in”, rather it’s with the three-year-old or a board member or a person that works for you, in any of those places, “be fully attentive to the moment you’re in.”
Ray: The thing about that passage where Moses is talking to the Lord and the Lord is asking him to go speak to Pharos, right? And he says “Well who should I say sent me?” He didn’t say tell them I will be, tell them I was,” He said “Tell them I am.” and that’s living in the moment right?
Cheryl: I think that’s a great way to describe it.
Ray: So, maybe you can take away something from our conversation today.
Cheryl: I’ll take that one home with me.
Ray: Well, Cheryl, gosh, we call this the fastest thirty minutes on air, and we’re way down the pathway, nearing the end of our conversation. I just have a couple more conversations for you. But is something that was really important to you that you had in your note or in your heart today that you wanted to makes sure that you pass along to our listeners that we haven’t talked about yet?
Cheryl: Well, the one thing that I wanted to share is what has inspired me to work these many years as a ministry in the marketplace. I read this quote for Mac Stackhouse who is the professor of theology at Princeton University, and he wrote a book called On Moral Business, it really gave me a lot of guidance on my convictions. But he said in the opening forward “Increasingly business leaders will be the stewards of civilization.” and I didn’t sleep for three days because what he went on to describe is many of our institutions is failing. You can point to the schools, the government, the family and maybe it will lie upon your business to steward civilization forward for our Heavenly Father and that has kept me up and out of bed running around work enthusiastically for a very long time. Not that business is the only we minister, but it could end up being a really important one. Here is one of the things I’ve seen live, I’ve done business in twenty-six countries. A restaurant is a united nation of diverse people and diverse backgrounds of all faiths, and I have seen that we are able to work together and develop a better place together. While many of the institutions suggest that is not possible and so I want to encourage people to see business as a stewardship of civilization and to invest, if they are called to business, to invest their energy to that end.
Ray: That is a beautiful word picture, the united nations and we have that common goal, we have that common thing, right? And keeping that in mind there. That is really a beautiful analogy.
Cheryl: Well you know Christ commented us to love others, including those not like ourselves. I was reading this morning about some of the things He was saying back to the Sadducees and Pharisees, and He was very clear that the comment “to love others as I have loved you.” is for everybody and every country where we have the opportunity to touch them.
Ray: I’m going to contemplate that, that’s really good. Will you mention that book title? It was On Moral Business and who wrote that again?
Cheryl: Max Stackhouse wrote the forward, and it is an anthology of ethics and business. It is a great primer for people who want to study the thesis of workplace ministry.
Ray: That’s really good, and it will get you out of bed in the morning more so than just driving a stock price, right?
Cheryl: Absolutely.
Ray: Is to know that, oh, no pressure here, but the Lord may be calling us to be cornerstone of His Kingdom in the marketplace.
Cheryl: Yes, He does.
Ray: Can you believe that we are at the end of our time together?
Cheryl: It went really fast.
Ray: I’ve got more questions, I’m sure you’ve got more notes. Cheryl, there is always one question at the end of every interview, and it is what I call my 4:23 question, it’s based out of Proverbs chapter 4, verse 23 and it is where Solomon writes “ Above all else, guard your for from it flows all of life.” So, what I would like to ask you to do is take a moment and reflect. You have a chance- Let’s just say it’s the end of your time this side of entirety and you have a chance to gather your family, your friends, your loved ones, those who are most precious to you and you have a chance to pass along one piece of advice. So, I’d like you to fill in the blank for us as we wind down our time together. Above all else, what advice would you give, above all else…
Cheryl: Above all else love one another for love is from God. The Woman at the well, Christ approached her knowing all her sin and said “follow Me and sin no more.” and there is no greater story of what we are expected to do as His representative on the side of the Kingdom.
Ray: “Love one another and love one another well,” that’s John chapter 4.
Cheryl: And love is from God.
Ray: That’s beautiful. Cheryl Bachelder, thank you for being our here at Bottom Line Faith and would you mind one more time sharing the website where our listeners can find you, your blog, order your book, learn more about servant leadership? How will they find you?
Cheryl: Absolutely, my blog is called Serving Performs, and it is found at www.cherylbachelder.com c-h-e-r-y-l-b-a-c-h-e-l-d-e-r.com.
Ray: I hope to get another conversation with you. I just feel like we never got to scratch the surface on it. Thank you for being here today.
Cheryl: My pleasure. It’s been delightful.
Ray: So, folks it is conversations like this which is why we do the program here at Bottom Line Faith. So if you’re a business leader today, you could be a parent, you could be a teacher, it really doesn’t matter. Then I think our time together today would have been well with while. Cheryl, before we end the program any closing words or encouragements, you would like to pass along?
Cheryl: No. But I love that idea of being encouraged.
Ray: Be encouraged. Well, folks, this wraps up another edition of Bottom Line Faith, the program where we like to lift the hood and tinker around in the engine of Christina leadership. I would encourage you to check out a copy go Cheryl’s book, Dare to Serve: How to Drive Superior Results by Serving Others available at bookstores, Amazon[com] and pretty much anywhere you would get your reading materials. Also, she will be speaking at the 2018 Truth at Work conference, which is scheduled for November 9th, at least we’re hoping that still the case. We’re excited. We’re going to see you right?
Cheryl: Yes, absolutely
Ray: I have been telling everybody how excited I am that Cheryl will be one of our guest speakers this year. So, be sure to check that out as well. Until next time I am host here at Bottom Line Faith, Ray Hilbert, encouraging you to faithfully serve the Lord in the marketplace. God bless, and we will see you next time.