The Asset You Already Own

Ninety marketplace leaders came to Topgolf for our Q3 gathering. The keynote was Eric Goodman. He runs three companies: a paper and chemical manufacturer, an IV hydration practice called Elevation Health, and Mountain View Services, which supplies food and medical equipment to several hundred group homes for adults and children with developmental disabilities.

He didn't come to talk about any of that. He came to talk about a question he couldn't answer for years, and the wrong answer he nearly acted on.

The wrong answer

Eric was where a lot of people in that room are. The companies worked. The question was what they were for. He had already decided what to do about it: sell the companies and go into mission work full time. He told his wife first.

He was two years into The Master's Program, Bob Shank's course on putting faith, work and calling in the same frame. He was still turning it over. So he took a week off: no calls, no email, out of reach of his businesses for the first time in his working life. He journaled, prayed, walked, and read. At the end of it he sat down with everything he'd written.

The week pointed the other way.

Those businesses had become my idol. My existence was based on those companies.

The businesses weren't in the way of the mission. They were the mission. He was the one in the way.

Stepping back took a couple of years of unglamorous work: boundaries he actually held, an office he gave up. The proof arrived on an ordinary Monday, when he went around the table with his managers and not one of them needed anything from him. He describes crying in the meeting. They thought something was wrong.

Nothing was wrong. The team was running it. He was free.

If you're a business leader

The instinct to serve often shows up as an instinct to leave: sell the thing, retire early, go do something that counts. Eric's week of silence pointed the other direction.

What his companies give away now mostly isn't money. It's warehouse space that ministries run their offices out of. Delivery capacity that already exists. Storage. Employee hours he pays for. More than a hundred organizations now run on capacity his companies were paying for anyway.

None of that required selling anything. It required a different question.

Not what can I afford to give? That one only ever has a dollar answer. Ask what do I already have that could serve? It's harder, because nothing on a balance sheet is labeled for it. No asset register has a line for a loading dock that sits empty on Saturdays, or a workday your people spend somewhere else while still on your payroll. Eric found those by looking at his companies as a set of capacities instead of a set of numbers. Look at yours the same way and most of what you own turns out to be usable twice.

If you're a ministry leader

The instinct to ask usually shows up as an instinct to ask for money. That is almost never the most valuable thing on the other side of the table.

What is: a warehouse with room in it. A logistics team that moves freight every day. A CFO who could read your books in an afternoon. Buying power. A bench of people who already know how to do the thing you're struggling to do.

Those assets are mostly invisible from the outside, so nobody asks for them. The conversation defaults to a donation, and both sides leave real value unused.

So change the ask. Go in knowing what you actually need. Not a number, a capability. Name it. What you're asking for may cost your partner far less than a check and be worth far more to you.

Both halves of that trade were in the room at Topgolf. That is most of what our gatherings are for.

See our upcoming gatherings

Three things he sent the room home with

He didn't arrive at these in the abstract. He went back through the hardest stretches of his life and concluded that the variable which changed the outcome was how he had chosen to think about each one.

• Don't ask "why me." Ask what it's teaching you, and what you'll do with it.
• Stop spending energy on what you don't understand. Spend it learning something new instead.
• Romans 12:2 — let your mind be renewed. He couldn't get through the assigned reading, so he started listening on his morning walks. Thirty books in, he's still going.

Watch the full keynote

He wrote the whole thing down in a book called What's Your Mindset? He brought thirty copies to Topgolf and signed every one, on the condition that each person read it and then hand it to someone else who needed it.

The version above is the short one. Eric tells it better. The parts we've skipped are worth your time, including why he opened with Forrest Gump.

Watch Eric Goodman's Q3 keynote on YouTube