business planning – Business as Mission

8 BAM Success Factors to Keep You from Failing

20 June 2026/in BAM Success Factors, Latest/by Jo Plummer

Read this classic blog from our Archives, first published on The BAM Review blog in July 2017.

What helps business mission companies succeed? We asked the same BAM practitioners who shared failure stories to also share what kept their businesses from going under completely.

We asked: If you had to give the top two or three reasons for your overall business success, what factors would you share?

Here is a rundown of their combined responses in a Top 8 list of ‘What Went Right’

1. Build a wider network and community

Mentioned in some form by almost all the practitioners we asked, top of the list is creating a robust network around the business and its owners. These BAMers said that forging strong partnerships and building a community of mentors/supporters was key. Avoiding isolation is vital.

Having world class partners has been essential.

As an owner, share the challenges you face with your board, investors, mentors, etc. Tell the truth, early and often.

Surround yourself with counsel. Stay attached to God and his people either through a church/agency or personal mentor or coach.

I’ve succeeded because I’ve had a spouse that has stood by me through thick and thin, not to mention a relationship with my business partner built on tremendous trust and respect. It’s also been important to have mentors and coaches walking closely with us.

A success factor for me has been being well networked in the wider business community as well as the BAM community nationally.

Integration with the local University has been essential. Strong relationships with key professors has allowed us to get first picks on some of the best students who come to do internships with us and eventually become junior staff members.

Good Research Approaches for Figuring Out Your BAM Business Model

20 February 2026/in BAM 101: Introduction, Features, Latest/by Guest Author

How do you know what kind of BAM business to pursue? That’s a question that we often get from those thinking about building a business as mission company. What’s more, what are some early indicators that a business is or isn’t working? We decided to ask three BAM mentors three questions about how they would go about deciding and evaluating their business model. This is Part 2, with our third question about research approaches.

Read Part 1 here.

What would be some good research approaches to figuring out good business models?

Mike Baer

A workable business model starts with one simple reality: you are meeting a real need that people are willing and able to pay for. That means the first step is not having a clever idea. The first step is identifying unmet or poorly met needs.

Ask basic questions: What problems exist in this community? What needs are not being met—or not being met well? What solutions are inaccessible, unreliable, or unaffordable?

You can use AI tools as a starting point, but be careful. They are often misleadingly optimistic. A conversation with AI can help you think, but it should never replace firsthand learning.

So get out and look. Observe the market—and in many contexts, observe the bazaar. Watch what people buy, what they avoid, what they complain about, and what they improvise. Talk with neighbors and customers. Ask fellow believers—but with caution. Well-meaning people often affirm ideas they would never personally pay for.

Talk with other business owners. Talk with bankers. Talk with local officials. In-person conversations are gold. Online surveys can help too, especially when distributed through community-based social media groups, but don’t mistake opinions for behavior.

If your community has access to solid data—through a chamber of commerce or local development office—use it. And when you think you’ve identified a promising solution, test it cheaply and early. Share samples. Run pilots. Sell before you scale.

This is the value of an MVP approach—a minimum viable product. You will likely need several iterations. That’s not failure; that’s learning. Fail fast and forward: try, observe results, adjust, and try again—before you commit fully to a new enterprise.

Hannah Lau

A working business model is simply identifying a customer group’s problem/need, getting into their ‘world’ by delivering value, and doing it in a way that’s profitable for you. That’s basically it. So the best way to find a business model is to start by understanding your customer. That’s who it’s all about. The more you understand the customer and the ecosystem that surrounds their need, the better you’ll be able to create value for them and deliver it in a way that they will easily adopt.

Some ways to best understand your customer include:

Target segmentation
Ideal Customer Profiles/Personas
Competitive Analysis
Positioning and Customer Behaviour
Distribution realities for the category
Standards and expectations in the existing market

My personal philosophy—tried, tested, and witnessed across 350+ organisations: Lead with product and you’ll be out of the game before you launch. Lead with what your customer needs and you’ll be innovating forever. What I mean by this is that most people focus on the product because they start with an idea, which can easily become obsolete or boring. If we start with a group of people and their needs, and try to find creative solutions to solve those needs (one of them being a product), it will keep us proactive and not reactive in the market.

Grant Smith

When deciding on a business, my recommendation is find out what others are doing and understand their model. It could be that you can do it better. In any business model it is important to understand how your competitors are doing it and then you analysing if you can do it better or there is a gap in the market. There is a reason no company is selling ice to the North pole, so you may have a brilliant idea, but research the opportunity critically.

When deciding on a business model, understand the barriers to entry. If you are importing, what are the import duties and how do you navigate the duty process. If you are in construction, what approvals do you have to attain from the local government and what challenges may you face in achieving those approvals. If you are borrowing money, factor in unexpected delays and budget for additional finance which in theory you don’t think will be incurred. You should have cushions in your financial models to give you wriggle room.

With special thanks to our three mentors for sharing their wisdom in this series.

>> Read Part 1 here

Mike Baer was one of the early leaders in the modern Business as Mission movement. He started his career as a pastor and church planter. After 15 years in the pastorate Mike was led into business where he gradually began to discover the potential for believers in business to bless their communities, evangelize the lost and spread the Kingdom of God, especially among the unreached. Today, Mike is the CEO of Third Path Initiative, an online BAM education resource, a strategic coach to companies in the staffing industry, a podcast host and YouTube content creator, a speaker at BAM conferences, and an author of 10 books. He and his wife Cindy live in the mountains of Western North Carolina (USA) and enjoy their 7 grandchildren.

Hannah Lau began her career in advertising when she moved to Asia as a marketplace missionary. In 2015, she began her journey as a redemptive entrepreneur, building and helping others build businesses that embody the gospel in every area of its operations. She is the co-creator of the Redemptive Business Canvas and the founder of Arukah Works, helping others live out their faith through entrepreneurship.

Grant Smith is a quantity surveyor who has worked with international construction companies and managed his own consultancy practice in the UK for over thirty years. In the year 2000, Grant recognised that construction work in Kenya had a response to poverty, commercially creating fairer pay and apprenticeship opportunities. He committed himself to finding sustainable solutions to transform individuals and societies. Grant is now the CEO of Hand in Hand Group and a director of a Kenyan construction company. Grant is the chair of Hand in Hand Foundation. Grant has had the privilege of being married to Sue since 1985 and has three children he is very proud of. He is a workplace speaker with LICC and the author of The Accidental Social Entrepreneur.

Photo by UX Indonesia on Unsplash

Will It Work? How to Decide on a BAM Business Model

16 February 2026/in BAM 101: Introduction, Features, Latest/by Guest Author

How do you know what kind of BAM business to pursue? That’s a question that we often get from those thinking about building a business as mission company. What’s more, what are some early indicators that a business is or isn’t working? We decided to ask three BAM mentors three questions about how they would go about deciding and evaluating their business model.

If you were deciding on a business model, what questions would you ask yourself?

Grant Smith

Primarily I would suggest, you understand what you are good at. Yesterday is a training ground for tomorrow. That doesn’t mean that you never try new things, but understand your skill set. I have been in construction all my life, I have a degree in construction, I have worked in several sectors and I understand construction. When I attempted farming, I was way out of my comfort zone. When you take a brick and coat it in cement, and you take another brick and coat it in cement, every time you do it, you get a house. Farming is not as predictable, that’s not a reason not to do it, but it is a reason to have an agricultural partner or advisor who can warn you what is coming.

Mike Baer

I would ask some core questions.

First, what real need exists that I can meet better than current solutions? “Better” might mean cheaper, faster, more trustworthy, more accessible, or more relational—but it must be meaningful.

Second, who else is already meeting this need? How many competitors are there? What do they do well? Where do they struggle? Ignoring competitors is not faith; it’s denial.

Third, do I (and my team) have—or can we realistically acquire—the capability to do this well? That includes skills, funding, technology, operational capacity, and support networks. Calling does not eliminate constraints.

Fourth, can this business become sustainable and scalable? Sustainable means it can run without constant cash infusions. Scalable means it can grow its impact—jobs, customer value, community blessing—without breaking the model.

Fifth, can I envision—and eventually measure—Kingdom impact? Profit matters, but so do disciple-making, ethical employment, local blessing, and care for creation. If impact is always vague or postponed, it will likely disappear.

Sixth, will this work give me joy and hope? Not constant happiness—but a sense that the effort is life-giving rather than soul-draining.

Not every question will have a crystal-clear answer at the start. That’s normal. But if you get a strong, definitive “No” to any of them, that’s a signal to stop and seriously reconsider. If the lights are mostly green—even with different levels of brightness—then it may be time to move forward, trusting God to guide your steps and work through the business for His glory.

Hannah Lau

I would ask myself:

What does my (prospective) customer need?
What can they accept/tolerate/be willing to change?
How can I best address that need in a way that is profitable for me?
How do I make it as easy as possible for them to adopt/buy/join?

These four questions are basically four slices of a pie, and you’re trying to figure out the sweet spot, balancing the size of each slice so that all the questions can be answered to a reasonably satisfactory level. If you can’t make it work, then you probably don’t have a workable business model.

How do you know if a business model is working/not working? What are some signs and symptoms?

Hannah Lau

When a business is working, customers or clients will adopt your product or service with little resistance, recognise value, and have no problem paying for it. Conversely, when a business is not working, cashflow is tight on a regular basis and selling is hard and takes convincing your customers. It’s not working when you put too much effort in that only results in minimal customer satisfaction or profitability. In other words, if the business struggles and requires a ton of effort in just to keep five customers happy or just break even, the model isn’t working.

Mike Baer

Every time I’ve launched a new business, I’ve asked two related questions: How will I know if this is working? and How long should I give it? If you can ask—and answer—those honestly and courageously, you’ll save yourself a lot of wasted time, money, and emotional energy.

The simple answer is this: a business model is working if people are buying your product or service at a margin that can produce profit over time. More specifically, are people continuing to buy it, and is that customer base growing? Repeat customers—and more of them—are the foundation of any real business. One-time sales can flatter you; repeat sales tell you the truth.

Closely tied to this is cash flow. Whether your original projections are perfectly accurate is secondary. What matters is whether money is flowing into the business in a measurable and increasing way. If customers are the foundation, cash flow is the lifeblood. A business can survive bad forecasts, but it cannot survive chronic cash starvation.

Then there is your energy. Startups are hard—that’s a given. But chaos is exhausting in a different way. Separate normal moments (or even days) of discouragement from the deeper question: Do I still experience some measure of excitement, curiosity, or hope as I pursue growth and progress? If everything feels like grinding uphill with no traction, pay attention.

Finally—and this matters deeply in BAM—can you remain faithful to your Gospel commitments? Are honesty, compassion, fair dealing, and relationship-building sustainable in this model? If survival consistently requires cutting ethical corners or hollowing out your witness, something is wrong. The Good News should be revealed naturally over time, not sacrificed for short-term survival.

Grant Smith

How do you know if your business model is working? Well, you have to clearly define what you want to achieve, too many business’s when they start out are over ambitious. I had a friend who took on a coffee franchise, wanted to employ ex offenders, and generate money for his ministry. Running business is hard work, and you may need to focus on one priority at a time. If your focus is employing ex offenders, let that be your measurable, making a profit and a social impact. If you crack that, then you can move to providing finance for ministry.

A recommendation would be, if you are starting a business, appoint a voluntary board of strong people who will challenge you. Each person you appoint to your board needs to bring a skill, whether in finance, or your field of operation or HR or legal or… But the most important quality in a board member is that they share your vision of what you want to achieve. Then make yourself accountable to them. If your ambition is to pay people fairer than the market determines, make that your clear measurable focus. The danger is that you start making money, which you need to do to continue, but you enjoy the profits so much that you may lose the fair employment focus. Your board should keep you to account.

Coming up in Part 2, our three BAM mentors answer our third question:

What would be some good research approaches to figuring out good models?

Mike Baer was one of the early leaders in the modern Business as Mission movement. He started his career as a pastor and church planter. After 15 years in the pastorate Mike was led into business where he gradually began to discover the potential for believers in business to bless their communities, evangelize the lost and spread the Kingdom of God, especially among the unreached. Today, Mike is the CEO of Third Path Initiative, an online BAM education resource, a strategic coach to companies in the staffing industry, a podcast host and YouTube content creator, a speaker at BAM conferences, and an author of 10 books. He and his wife Cindy live in the mountains of Western North Carolina (USA) and enjoy their 7 grandchildren.

Hannah Lau began her career in advertising when she moved to Asia as a marketplace missionary. In 2015, she began her journey as a redemptive entrepreneur, building and helping others build businesses that embody the gospel in every area of its operations. She is the co-creator of the Redemptive Business Canvas and the founder of Arukah Works, helping others live out their faith through entrepreneurship.

Grant Smith is a quantity surveyor who has worked with international construction companies and managed his own consultancy practice in the UK for over thirty years. In the year 2000, Grant recognised that construction work in Kenya had a response to poverty, commercially creating fairer pay and apprenticeship opportunities. He committed himself to finding sustainable solutions to transform individuals and societies. Grant is now the CEO of Hand in Hand Group and a director of a Kenyan construction company. Grant is the chair of Hand in Hand Foundation. Grant has had the privilege of being married to Sue since 1985 and has three children he is very proud of. He is a workplace speaker with LICC and the author of The Accidental Social Entrepreneur.

Photo by Aditama on Unsplash

Messaging With Integrity: Making Meaning Clear in the First Seconds

30 January 2026/in Features, Leadership, Product & Market/by Guest Author

by Sandra Lynn

This month, we are featuring a three-part marketing and branding series, The Clarity Imperative: Building BAM Brands That Drive Impact. Start the year with clarity! Read Part 1 here.

Messaging is not about convincing people to buy from you. It’s about being so clear that the right people recognize you’re for them—before they scroll past.

First impressions happen fast, often across cultures. If your message can’t be understood quickly and repeated accurately, it doesn’t matter how good your product is you’ve already lost them.

This is the final piece of the clarity puzzle for BAM leaders. You’ve clarified your strategic foundation. You’ve sharpened your positioning. Now comes the moment of truth, can someone grasp who you serve and how you help in the first seven seconds, or less?

Because that’s all you get. Three to seven seconds as someone lands on your site, scrolls past your post, or hears your pitch. Just a few seconds to be clear enough that they stay, remember, and act.

For faith-driven entrepreneurs, this isn’t about hype or manipulation. It’s about integrity. Ethical selling shows up as precision, not vagueness.

Why Words Matter More in Trust-Driven Markets

In Western markets, brands often lead with design (graphics and video) and emotional appeal. But in trust-driven, relational markets—especially emerging economies where BAM businesses thrive—words carry more weight than images.

Your prospect isn’t asking if your website looks professional. They’re evaluating whether you understand their world and can deliver results in it.

Messaging is not about convincing people to buy from you. It’s about being so clear that the right people recognize you’re for them—before they scroll past.

AI can generate beautiful visuals and generic copy in seconds. But it cannot understand cultural nuance, build trust across contexts, or speak directly to the specific pain of a business owner in Nairobi, Belgrade, or Jakarta. Only you can do that through words that actually connect.

Translation is easy. Meaning is not. A message that lands perfectly in English might confuse or even offend in another language or cultural context. This is why stripping away industry terms and cultural assumptions isn’t just smart marketing, it’s an ethical responsibility. When you communicate across borders, simple and direct becomes your competitive advantage. Clear messaging also creates space for storytelling—not polished brand narratives, but real stories that signal understanding and build trust across cultures.

The Myth That Ethical Businesses Shouldn’t Be Direct

Here’s a trap many Christian entrepreneurs fall into. They believe that being mission-minded means being soft, indirect, or overly humble in their messaging. So they default to safe, generic language that sounds like everyone else.

But vague messaging doesn’t create humility. It creates invisibility.

When a prospect can’t quickly understand what you do, they don’t assume you’re being modest. They assume you’re uncertain about your value, unclear about who you serve, or trying to appeal to everyone. And in trust-based markets, that kind of confusion doesn’t just lose you a sale, it costs you credibility.

The result? Your message becomes background noise. Polite. Pleasant. Forgettable.

Integrity in messaging is not about soft language. It’s about saying the right thing, to the right people, with enough clarity that they actually hear you. You don’t need to exaggerate. You need to be direct, specific, and truthful about the value you create. That’s not hype. That’s stewardship.

The Reality of 7-Second Decisions

You have roughly 7 seconds to prove your content is worth someone’s time before they scroll away or tune out.

That’s the window you have to answer these questions running through a visitor’s mind:

Did I land in the right place?
Is this right for me?
Do I see the value you offer?
Do I know how to take the next step?

If any of these go unanswered, they’re gone. Not because your business isn’t excellent, but because your message didn’t make meaning fast enough.

This is especially true in cross-cultural contexts where your audience may be reading in their second or third language, navigating unfamiliar business norms, or evaluating whether you understand their local reality.

The Candy Machine Problem Revisited

Remember the candy machine from our first post? Everything looks appealing, nothing stands out, so the customer picks something at random. Next time, they choose something different because nothing was memorable enough to earn their loyalty.

Here’s what that looks like in practice:

Example 1: IT Services

Candy Machine Messaging:
“We provide reliable IT services and customized solutions to support your business goals.”

Clear Messaging:
“We keep small medical practices secure, compliant, and running without tech headaches.”

Example 2: Training & Coaching

Candy Machine Messaging:
“Our programs help people unlock their potential and achieve meaningful growth in their personal and professional lives.”

Clear Messaging:
“We help burned-out nonprofit leaders rebuild focus, energy, and direction in 90 days.”

The first version in each example sounds fine. Polished. Forgettable. The second creates instant clarity about who you serve, what problem you solve, and why it matters.

If your message doesn’t make someone think, “That’s for me,” you’re leaving trust, loyalty, and revenue to chance—just like pulling a random lever on the candy machine.

How to Craft Messaging That Builds Trust Across Cultures

If you want your message to work in seven seconds, across languages, in trust-driven markets here’s what it requires:

Make it about them, not you. Lead with their problem, not your process. What do they care about? What would make their situation better today?

Avoid insider language and jargon. If someone outside your industry can’t understand your homepage in one read, you’ve lost clarity. Have a friend from a different field read your site. If they’re confused, your customers will be too.

When a prospect can’t quickly understand what you do, they don’t assume you’re being modest, they assume you’re uncertain about your value.

Say less, more precisely. In 2026, brevity builds trust. Long explanations signal uncertainty. Short, specific statements signal confidence.

Test for repeatability. If someone hears your message once, can they explain what you do to a colleague? If not, it’s not clear enough. Clarity is measured by whether others can repeat your message accurately.

AI, Translation, and the Sameness Trap

AI tools can now generate marketing copy in seconds. But most of it sounds the same. Generic phrases like ‘tailored solutions’ and ‘proven results’ flood the market because AI pulls from common patterns.

This creates an opportunity for BAM businesses willing to do the hard work of clarity. When everyone else is relying on AI-generated sameness, your culturally grounded, precisely targeted, human-crafted message will stand out.

AI can translate words. It cannot translate meaning. It cannot assess whether your message will resonate in a high-context culture or a low-trust environment. That discernment is yours. And it’s your competitive edge.

Market Like You Mean It

You’ve built clarity into your strategy. You’ve sharpened your positioning. Now, your messaging must deliver on that foundation in the first few seconds.

Stop solving for how to sound impressive and start solving for how to be instantly understandable. Say less. Say it precisely. Make it about them.

When you align your messaging with your positioning, and your positioning with your mission, you create something rare in 2026. You have a brand that is both digitally discoverable and deeply trustworthy. A brand that builds relationships across cultures without pressure or missteps. A brand that turns clarity into Kingdom impact.

Make it about them, not you. Lead with their problem, not your process.

Messaging with integrity isn’t about playing it safe. It’s about being brave enough to be clear. Because the people you’re meant to serve deserve to find you and they can’t find you if they can’t understand you.

Market like you mean it. Lead with clarity. And let your precision become the bridge between their problem and the solution you were called to provide.

Want support or inspiration to build clarity into your marketing? Grab free tools, templates, resources, and other faith-focused items: https://bit.ly/bamgear

Read Part 1 here.

Read Part 2 here.

Sandra Lynn helps values-driven businesses gain clarity, scale effectively, and generate predictable revenue across borders. Specializing in brand positioning, market entry strategy, and digital messaging—especially for emerging markets like the Balkans and companies entering US markets—she works with mission-minded leaders who need to cut through the noise and communicate with precision. With seven international businesses launched and over 20 years serving clients across 17 countries, Sandra brings battle-tested expertise to the challenges of cross-cultural marketing, lead generation, and global growth, helping marketplace leaders bridge the gap between purpose and performance through clarity that can drive growth. Ready for strategic support? Connect with Sandra at www.linktr.ee/digitalme for her site, socials, blog, and video channels.

Photo by Andreas Rasmussen on Unsplash

Positioning is a Choice: Why Focused Brands Win in 2026

23 January 2026/in Features, Leadership, Product & Market/by Guest Author

by Bruce McKinnon & Sandra Lynn

This month, we are featuring a three-part marketing and branding series, The Clarity Imperative: Building BAM Brands That Drive Impact. Start the year with clarity! Read Part 1 here.

Brand positioning is not about what you want to say. It’s about what your customer needs to hear in order to choose you.

This matters more than ever in 2026. Interbrand’s Best Global Brands report puts a $3.6 trillion value on the world’s top 100 brands—but the real lessons lie in why some are accelerating their lead. The pattern is clear in that brands built on focus and distinctiveness are pulling ahead. The rest are being filtered out—by both people and algorithms.

For BAM leaders building businesses across borders and cultures, this isn’t abstract brand theory. In trust-based, relational markets where your mission carries weight but your budget doesn’t, positioning is the difference between being chosen and being overlooked—and between creating sustainable value or overextending trying to serve everyone.

Positioning Starts With Decisions, Not Statements

Too many mission-driven businesses confuse positioning with purpose. They lead with why they exist rather than why a customer should choose them. The result? A brand that sounds inspiring internally but confusing externally.

Positioning is not your mission statement. It’s the lens through which every business decision gets made. For SMEs, your positioning isn’t a marketing flourish—it’s the core of how you compete.

When a Balkan marketing agency was offered a project outside their core expertise, their positioning gave them the answer. If it doesn’t align with who we serve and what we do best, it’s a no. That clarity protected their reputation and freed them to pursue more aligned opportunities.

Brand positioning is not about what you want to say. It’s about what your customer needs to hear in order to choose you.

When you position with precision, you’re not limiting your impact. You’re making your impact understandable and repeatable. And in faith-driven enterprises, this precision becomes an act of stewardship—because every confused prospect is a missed opportunity to create the relational and economic value your business was designed to generate.

In BAM contexts where you’re operating across languages, cultures, and economic contexts, this focus is critical. A message that tries to mean everything to everyone ends up meaning nothing to anyone. Worse, it obscures the very Kingdom impact you’re working so hard to create.

The Hidden Cost of Doing Too Much for Too Many

One of the most common positioning mistakes we see is the belief that breadth equals credibility. Business owners think that offering more services or serving more markets makes them more valuable. In reality, it makes it harder to choose.

When a potential customer hears that you do so many things well, they wonder what you’re really best at and can’t determine if you’re the right fit for any specific problem.

Interbrand’s research confirms what effective marketers have known for decades: focus creates the freedom to be creative. The brands accelerating their lead—NVIDIA, Uniqlo, Shopify—didn’t scale by doing everything. They scaled by doing one thing exceptionally well, which then gave them permission to expand with precision.

For BAM businesses, specificity about your core offering is what builds trust faster than breadth ever will. And trust is the currency of relational impact.

Strong Values Don’t Equal Strong Positioning

Here’s where many faith-based businesses get stuck. They assume that having Kingdom values makes them distinctive. It doesn’t.

We see this all the time. A company leads with “we’re a Christian business” or “we operate with integrity,” and they expect that to set them apart. But your customer isn’t comparing you to unethical competitors. They’re comparing you to other capable, even faith-based, businesses who can also solve their problem.

Your values tell customers how you operate. Your positioning defines how they perceive and choose you. These are two different things.

Too many mission-driven businesses confuse positioning with purpose. They lead with why they exist rather than why a customer should choose them.

Being ethical, mission-minded, socially-responsible, or Kingdom-focused is your foundation. But, it’s not your differentiator in the marketplace. Your customer isn’t choosing you because you’re running a values-driven business. They’re choosing you because you solve their problem better, faster, or more reliably than the alternatives.

This doesn’t mean you hide your mission. It means you lead with excellence and value creation, then earn the right to share your values. Instead of an organization saying “We want to bring the gospel new places” they could say “We equip professionals to thrive in their careers while living out their faith with confidence”.

Distinctiveness in trust-based markets comes from delivering results so consistently that your reputation becomes your competitive advantage—and your witness becomes credible because your excellent work is undeniable.

How Clarity Creates Trust

In emerging and relational markets, confusion doesn’t just cost you a sale, it kills your credibility. If a prospect can’t quickly understand who you serve and how you help, they move on. And these days, they’re moving on faster than ever.

Interbrand’s new “Role of Brand Index” measures how much a brand itself drives customer choice—and the data shows that a well-defined brand creates commercial value. The stronger your brand’s role in shaping decisions, the greater its impact on revenue and resilience.

For BAM leaders, this is where positioning becomes an ethical responsibility. If your business exists to create both economic and spiritual flourishing, then every layer of confusion in your positioning is a barrier to someone’s progress. Focused positioning doesn’t shrink your impact. It sharpens it. It allows you to serve deeply, build relationships that last, and create value that compounds over time.

Building for Discovery and Connection

Your brand must be both digitally discoverable and personally trustworthy.

As a BAM leader, you’re already thinking about this. You need to reach customers in difficult markets. You need to show up when people search. You need to build credibility across cultures and make your business understandable to people who don’t share your language or context. These aren’t separate problems. They’re all part of the same positioning work.

Search engines and social platforms reward brands that communicate consistently and clearly. If someone can’t quickly understand what you do and who you serve, your business won’t show up in their results searching online or asking an AI tool. Precision isn’t just good marketing anymore. It’s a technical requirement for being found.

Your mission amplifies your impact, but your excellence earns you the right to be heard.

But, you still need storytelling, emotional resonance, and cultural fluency for human connection. Stories should entertain, educate, and inspire action, guiding potential customers through their buyer’s journey. In cross-border BAM contexts, this also means stripping away any language or phrases that don’t translate. Terms like ‘turnkey solution’, ‘cutting-edge’, or ‘best practices’ mean nothing when translated to Serbian or Portuguese. It means understanding regional and cultural pain points deeply enough to speak to them directly. It means being both findable and understandable, not just inspiring.

The brands currently winning are the ones optimizing to be specific enough to be discovered, and compelling enough to be chosen. For faith-driven entrepreneurs, this is where strategic excellence meets Kingdom stewardship.

Putting Positioning Into Practice

If you’re ready to position your brand with the kind of focus that drives growth and impact, here’s what it requires.

First, define who this business is not for. I know this feels uncomfortable. Choosing a specific audience doesn’t mean you care about others less. It means you’re positioned to serve some people deeply, rather than everyone poorly. This is how sustainable, relational impact actually happens.

Second, articulate your unique value. Not what makes you different because you care more. What makes you the best choice for solving a specific problem for a specific customer. Lead with your economic value proposition. Your mission amplifies your impact, but your excellence earns you the right to be heard.

Third, say no to opportunities that dilute focus. Every time you expand outside your core positioning, you weaken what’s driving your growth. Stewardship means protecting the focus that makes your impact repeatable.

Your Path Forward

The fundamentals of branding haven’t changed. What’s changed is how fast you need to deliver on them. In a marketplace now flooded with AI-generated content, generic offers, and overwhelmed buyers, a well-defined position is the only competitive advantage that lasts.

Positioning is not self-expression. It’s disciplined decision-making. It’s the filter that lets you build a brand customers understand and choose—even when they have many other options.

The brands currently winning are the ones optimizing to be specific enough to be discovered, and compelling enough to be chosen.

For BAM businesses operating globally, your path forward is to lead with excellence, root it in focus, serve with relational integrity, and let your mission amplify the impact you’re already making.

When you align your positioning with both your economic value and your Kingdom calling, marketing stops being a necessary compromise and starts becoming the mechanism that drives transformation—one choice at a time.

For a deeper dive into brand strategy and the latest report: Interbrand – Best Global Brands

Read Part 3 here.

Bruce McKinnon is the founder of The Brand Arrow, helping SMEs build brands that drive commercial growth through clarity, focus, and strategic positioning. Bruce speaks at conferences around the world on the subject of brand strategy and is regularly invited to lecture at business schools. He is also a Course Director for the Chartered Institute of Marketing and an accredited speaker for the Vistage CEO network. In 2019 Bruce published ‘What’s Your Point?’ containing the proprietary Brand Arrow framework, which won the silver medal at the US Business Book Awards (Axiom) and was shortlisted for the UK Business Book Awards. Connect with Bruce at bruce@thebrandarrow.com.

Sandra Lynn helps values-driven businesses gain clarity, scale effectively, and generate predictable revenue across borders. Specializing in brand positioning, market entry strategy, and digital messaging—especially for emerging markets like the Balkans and companies entering US markets—she works with mission-minded leaders who need to cut through the noise and communicate with precision. With seven international businesses launched and over 20 years serving clients across 17 countries, Sandra brings battle-tested expertise to the challenges of cross-cultural marketing, lead generation, and global growth, helping marketplace leaders bridge the gap between purpose and performance through clarity that can drive growth. Ready for strategic support? Connect with Sandra at www.linktr.ee/digitalme for her site, socials, blog, and video channels.

Photo by Mason C on Unsplash

Clarity Before Growth: The Competitive Advantage in BAM Marketing

16 January 2026/in Features, Leadership, Product & Market/by Guest Author

by Sandra Lynn

This month, we are featuring a three-part marketing and branding series, The Clarity Imperative: Building BAM Brands That Drive Impact. Start the year with clarity!

If people cannot quickly grasp who you serve and how you help, nothing else in marketing matters. This year, more than ever, the gap between effort and results will widen—not because businesses lack faith or values, but because customers cannot quickly understand who the business is for, what problem it solves, and why it matters to them.

In the world of BAM and faith-based enterprises, we are fueled by multiple bottom lines—striving for spiritual and social impact along with economic excellence and environmental sustainability. We carry a heavy, beautiful vision. But as we step into 2026, I expect to see a recurring challenge: brilliant, mission-driven companies struggling quietly, not because their product is bad or their mission is weak, but because they are doing marketing backwards.

In reality, marketing isn’t an afterthought or a random activity. It is the foundation of your business. It is the stewardship of your message.

Companies like this still treat marketing like a megaphone they pick up at the end of the process to tell the world they exist. In reality, marketing isn’t an afterthought or a random activity. It is the foundation of your business. It is the stewardship of your message. If your brand is the bridge between a person’s problem and a God-given solution, then every bit of confusion in your messaging is a barrier to that person’s flourishing. You need to give them the answer for when they ask: Why you?

The Activity Trap

Too many businesses start with the wrong questions because they aren’t trained to think about marketing strategically. They say things like:

We need better social posts and followers
We just need to get more engagement
We have no pipeline, we need more leads

These aren’t strategy issues, they are activity questions. If you start here, you’ll go in the wrong direction fast. You might find yourself stuck in a visibility loop—lots of noise, plenty of Likes, but low conversions and much disappointment. In the hyper-automated and AI landscape now, more activity is no longer a competitive advantage, only radical clarity is.

Reframing Marketing as Clarity Work

Marketing isn’t just a series of campaigns, it’s the mechanism by which your business moves forward. It is a business-wide function, not a department. And it’s where selling begins. Your message is the first handshake, the first moment of trust, the first reason someone considers working with you.

If you were building a house, you wouldn’t pick out the curtains before you poured the foundation. Yet I see organizations spend thousands on social media campaigns without a lead capture system or a clear message in place. The result? Wasted budget, low conversions, and a disappointed team.

In the hyper-automated and AI landscape now, more activity is no longer a competitive advantage, only radical clarity is.

Strategy comes first. Effective and measurable results must start with clarity. Before you build, before you sell, and certainly before you spend your development budget on an app or a product, you must establish a clear marketing strategy.

This matters more than ever this year. You’ll need many more leads than before to make the same number of sales. Without distinct clarity and focus, you’ll spend more and gain less.

The Authority Gap in Mission-Driven Business

One of the most common reasons BAM marketing struggles is that leaders rely too heavily on the mission to do the heavy lifting, neglecting the excellence required to compete globally.

Being a faith-based company is your why, but it is rarely the customer’s why for buying. To market like you mean it this year, you must lead with your brand value proposition. You must be best in class, not just best in mission or social enterprise.

If your messaging leads with features instead of value, you’ve created what I call the candy machine problem.

Picture a vending machine filled with candy—everything looks appealing, everything tastes sweet, so the customer shrugs and picks any one. Next time, they choose something different because none of it mattered enough to remember. When all the options blur together, choice becomes random.

If you don’t clearly position yourself as the best for something, you’re just another pleasant option in an overcrowded machine. Interchangeable. Forgettable.

Being a faith-based company is your why, but it is rarely the customer’s why for buying. To market like you mean it this year, you must lead with your brand value proposition.

The hidden cost of this approach is brutal, especially in emerging economies where marketing budgets are lean and trust-building takes longer. Every dollar spent on vague messaging could have moved someone closer to a decision. Every piece of content that tries to appeal to everyone dilutes your team’s focus and trains the algorithm to show your work to no one in particular.

True clarity work makes you memorable because of your excellence, which then earns you the right to share your purpose. Serving people well requires being findable, understandable, and consistent.

Solving the Wrong Problem

Most businesses misdiagnose what’s holding them back. They think they need more traffic or more leads. But the real problem is almost always messaging.

Here’s why—if you’re unclear about how to articulate your brand value or position your business as distinct, no amount of traffic will convert. In the digital space—especially in social selling—your only tools are the words you publish. If those words don’t carry the weight of your unique positioning, they become just another piece of digital clutter.

And, clutter is invisible. Social platforms have shifted from direct selling to brand discovery and buying research. Old marketing mindsets won’t survive in this environment. Staying and growing in the marketplace will take more. As recently heard by C12-Triad, “To scale, you need clarity that’s repeatable, visible, and non-negotiable.”

This challenge intensifies across borders. A message that feels clear in a Western market might confuse or offend in Southeast Asia or Africa. Strategic clarity means stripping away industry jargon and cultural idioms to focus on universal human needs and specific local pain points. When you do this well, local brands can outperform global competitors—not despite their focus, but because of it.

Why Clarity Feels Hard (And Why It’s Worth It Anyway)

If you’re a faith-based business owner, you may already feel this tension. You know clarity matters, yet when it’s time to actually narrow your message, something inside you resists.

First, there’s the fear that choosing a specific audience means abandoning others. But here’s the truth: choosing a specific audience doesn’t mean you love others less. It means you’re positioned to serve some people deeply rather than everyone poorly. Clarity is not exclusion. It’s focus.

Second, there’s the humility trap. Many Christian entrepreneurs downplay their capabilities, soften their language, and hide behind “we just want to help” instead of saying clearly what they’re the best at. But humility is not hiding your light. Clarity about your expertise honors both God’s gifting in you and your customer’s need. When you obscure what you do well, you’re making it harder for the people you’re meant to serve to find you.

Finally, clarity requires courage. It requires you to stand out, to say no to opportunities that don’t fit, to risk being misunderstood. Your message doesn’t need to be loud. It just needs to be clear. And that clarity is not ego. It’s stewardship.

Because unclear marketing isn’t just bad business—it’s poor stewardship of the resources, opportunities, and calling you’ve been entrusted with. Every confused message is a missed connection. Clarity is the loving thing to do. It serves your customer by making their decision easier and serves your mission by ensuring the people who need you most can actually find you.

Your message doesn’t need to be loud. It just needs to be clear. And that clarity is not ego. It’s stewardship.

Clear messaging is your competitive advantage in a crowded marketplace. It’s how you build trust across cultures, earn attention in under seven seconds, and create impact that lasts.

When you align your messaging with your mission, marketing becomes the engine that drives your impact globally. Know what you’re saying, know who needs to hear it, and market like you mean it.

Want support or inspiration to build clarity into your marketing? Grab free tools, templates, resources, and other faith-focused items: https://bit.ly/bamgear

Read Part 2 here.

Sandra Lynn helps values-driven businesses gain clarity, scale effectively, and generate predictable revenue across borders. Specializing in brand positioning, market entry strategy, and digital messaging—especially for emerging markets like the Balkans and companies entering US markets—she works with mission-minded leaders who need to cut through the noise and communicate with precision. With seven international businesses launched and over 20 years serving clients across 17 countries, Sandra brings battle-tested expertise to the challenges of cross-cultural marketing, lead generation, and global growth, helping marketplace leaders bridge the gap between purpose and performance through clarity that can drive growth. Ready for strategic support? Connect with Sandra at www.linktr.ee/digitalme for her site, socials, blog, and video channels.

Photo by Aubrey Odom on Unsplash

10 Guiding Principles for Business as Mission

19 August 2024/in Features/by Staff Writer

BAM Global is celebrating its ten year anniversary in 2024, having been formally founded in 2014 on the foundation of earlier network-building efforts. To celebrate, we are posting a new 10 x Series this month; sharing some of our top 10 favourite BAM-related resources and inspirations. This is one of our favourite 10 x lists, the classic 10 Guiding Principles for BAM from the Lausanne Occasional Paper on Business as Mission.

Introduction

A good business as mission business will, by definition, have many of the characteristics of any well-run business. A kingdom business must be profitable and sustainable just as any other business. Integrity, fairness and excellent customer service are characteristics of any good business, not just a business as mission venture. As such, while important, those characteristics will not by themselves necessarily point people to Christ. A kingdom business begins with the foundation of any good business, but takes its stewardship responsibilities even further.

What follows is a list of principles that should underpin a business as mission business. First we list the basic foundational principles that must exist in any good business. Following that are the principles that distinguish a good business as mission business.

Foundational Business Principles

1. Strives to be profitable and sustainable in the long term

Profit is an indication that resources are being used wisely. It indicates that the product or service being produced and sold does so at a price that covers the cost of the resources, including the cost of capital. For most businesses, profits are fleeting, and never a sure thing. It is common for businesses to experience periods of low profit, and even negative profit. Thus it is important to take a long-term view of profitability. Occasional windfalls are often what will sustain a company through periods of financial losses. For that reason a well-managed business will use extreme care when considering whether and when to distribute profits. Profit, and its retention, is not necessarily an indication of greed. Read more

Business as Mission: Working Together for God’s Glory [Infographic]

18 January 2024/in BAM 101: Introduction, Latest/by Jo Plummer

As we start the new year, we are revisiting some foundational material on what business as mission means. Here’s a helpful summary infographic.

Click to Download

Created by the Lausanne Movement and BAM Global for our Lausanne Business as Mission Network page.

Adding Salt: How to Build and Manage Teams That Work

28 September 2023/in Features, Latest, Leadership/by Guest Author

by Bernie Anderson

My name is Bernie Anderson and I have the honor of taking over the BAM blog for the next several weeks. I am a certified business and nonprofit consultant with Growability® – read more in my bio below.

This is Part 4 of a series. Read Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3.

Thank you for following along with this month with this series on business basics. My prayer is that this series of articles will be an ongoing resource for your BAM project.

Like baking a great loaf of bread, we build every organization with three simple ingredients: leadership, marketing, and management.

If leadership is the flour and marketing is the water, I consider management the salt.

While prepping the dough for my loaf of sourdough this week, I mulled over the necessity of salt. Why does bread need salt? In theory, it’s possible to create a loaf of bread with just flour and water, give it some time to ferment the natural yeast, and a perfectly serviceable loaf of bread should appear.

But, without salt, nothing about the loaf of bread will be right. It will have the wrong flavor, texture, and consistency. Salt regulates the yeast, strengthens the dough, and brings out the beautiful complex flavors of a great loaf of sourdough. Salt is essential.

Like good management in your business.

Many consider management in basic terms of resources, operations, and finance. And it’s true, all this is involved. But the heart of management is people. Management is the salt of your business because management is the most human element of your business. Continuing with the Growability® Business Operating System as a model, think of management as having two parts:

1. Empowering Teamwork

2. Equipping Managers

Empowering Teamwork

The diversity of your team creates a diversity of opportunities. Many BAM teams are cross-cultural by nature. All BAM teams will bring together a variety of strengths and personalities that make your business unique. Community creates and expands creativity. An excellent team is also critical for capacity. Teamwork facilitates both multiplication and stability in your business. Never forget, God delights in and blesses common unity and teamwork (Psalm 131). Joy is an overflow from quality human relationships.

Global business has a reputation of building teams of human beings in some of the most inhuman ways. We hear horror stories of companies who entice employees with the promise of high pay, but to keep the pay coming, workers must sacrifice their humanity. Golden handcuffs, indeed. While paying your team their value is important, it’s not everything. In his book, The Heart of Business, former Best Buy CEO Hubert Joly says:

“The carrot and the stick are pervasive and persuasive motivators. But if you treat people like donkeys, they will perform like donkeys.”

Your BAM project should be different.

Marketing and Generosity: Sales and Solutions for Human Flourishing

21 September 2023/in Features, Leadership, Product & Market/by Guest Author

by Bernie Anderson

My name is Bernie Anderson and I have the honor of taking over the BAM blog for the next several weeks. I am a certified business and nonprofit consultant with Growability® – read more in my bio below.

This is Part 3 of a series. Read Part 1 and Part 2 here.

The day I landed my first “grown-up job” I was pretty excited. It was Summer of 1985 and I had graduated high school. I was not entirely sure what was next in my life, so I took a gap year before figuring out college, university, trade school, or something else. I landed a job in a local shop that sold books and music, two of my favorite things in this world, to this day. For a year, I thrived as a salesclerk. People would come into the store wanting a new series to read or a new album to listen to — and I could authentically help them with that problem. Sales was a satisfying job because I was serving people by being generous with my knowledge of books and music.

We sometimes get jaded with age.

Over the years that love for sales waned, mostly because I hated being “sold to” (and there are a lot hucksters in this world who do just that!) The slick used-car or door-to-door salesperson, trained to be psychologically manipulative, conning you into spending money on things you don’t need.

Later, we were just-married, and I was seeking work to pay bills, I interviewed for a sales job at a mattress store. The first question the manager asked was, “Are you willing to do what it takes to make a sale? Would you lie to a customer, telling them there’s only one mattress left and you will lose it unless you buy now?”

I said “no” and walked away.

In my mind, marketing and sales was a “necessary evil” for running a business.

Yet, marketing is the second simple ingredient in your BAM project and it’s non-negotiable. It’s at the heart of all business. You must take your valuable product to the market. This is unavoidable.

Sales is about prioritizing your customer and solving their problem

In the Growability® Business Operating System, there are two critical aspects of marketing:

1. Prioritize Your Customers

2. Automate Your Sales

Here’s where many of us need a mindset change. Read more

Setting a Course: How to Clarify Vision and Implement Strategy for BAM Pioneers

14 September 2023/in Business Planning, Latest, Leadership/by Guest Author

by Bernie Anderson

My name is Bernie Anderson and I have the honor of taking over the BAM blog for the next several weeks. I am a certified business and nonprofit consultant with Growability® – read more in my bio below.

This is Part 2 of a series. Read Part 1 here.

Like many American kids growing up in the 70s and 80s, my parent’s car always had a copy of the Rand McNally Road Atlas under the seat. In fact, I’m certain my parents still keep one.

Our family habit was road trips to obscure points in middle-America, and sometimes I could sit in the front seat. That meant I took on the position of navigator. In my family, the navigator’s job was to hold the Atlas, make sure we stayed on route, and warn the driver (always my dad) of upcoming turns or changes in directions. It all felt so important. Indeed, sometimes it very much was. A more reliable GPS has replaced the Rand McNally Road Atlas in the lap of a 10-year-old navigator. But the fact remains: Navigation is a crucial part of any road trip.

Navigation is the primary task of leadership in a business.

Every business leader should know two things:

Where we’re going
How we’re getting there

In my consulting work with Growability®, we provide clients with a “business operating system” built on the three simple ingredients of every organization: Leadership, Management, and marketing. I can’t understate the crucial nature of each of these.

Let’s begin with the most foundational element.

Leadership is your business’ navigation system.
Leadership is the flour in your bread.
Leadership is the seed and the branches of your tree.

Leadership health is critical. Leadership toxicity will kill a business.

There are two critical tasks for leadership in your business.

1. Clarify vision

2. Implement strategy

Business and Bread: Build your BAM Project with 3 Simple Ingredients

7 September 2023/in BAM 101: Introduction, Features, Latest/by Guest Author

by Bernie Anderson

My name is Bernie Anderson and I have the honor of taking over the BAM blog for the next several weeks. I am a certified business and nonprofit consultant with Growability® – read more in my bio below.

Flour. Water. Salt.

Three of the most basic ingredients imaginable.

Yet, when properly combined, processed, and timed, these three ingredients produce what might be the perfect food: Crusty, soft, sourdough bread with complex flavor and texture.

Yes, I was one of those COVID-shutdown sourdough people. And I’m still at it three and a half years later.

I started simple. Created a starter.

Fed the starter until it was active.

Made a few discard recipes.

Keep that starter alive and flourishing.

I was well over a year in before I started creating actual sourdough loaves without added yeast.

Then I went in deep.

The magic of sourdough is the chemical creation of natural yeast. And it really is a miracle. Flour, water, and salt, mixed with a fermented starter made of a living fungus (yeast) and a living bacterium called lactobacillus. They work together to eat the sugars in the flour. These living creatures basically poop acid – a tasty, savory acid that puts the sour in sourdough. When the fungus and bacteria finish their feast and have suitably relieved themselves, the dough is ready and baking can begin.

The result is a crusty, airy, flavorful loaf of delicious. The complexity of flavor and texture in a loaf of sourdough is a veritable miracle given the simplicity of ingredients.

It’s possible to complicate the recipe. Add sugars and oils, preservatives and shelf stabilizers. But complexified breads are rarely as good as simplified loaves. Three simple ingredients, with time and a specific process, will bring extraordinary results.

The simple believe everything, but the clever consider their steps.

Proverbs 15:15

Like anything in life worth doing, starting a business is difficult. Starting or running a BAM project adds more complexities. But, one of the biggest stumbling blocks for entrepreneurs is overcomplicating the essentials. You can read thousands of business books, take hundreds of online courses, attend seminars, and even go to University and get an MBA – but the simple ingredients for starting a business stay the same.

And that’s exactly what makes a BAM project both exciting and daunting!

Business done right makes life better for everyone involved, from customer to employees to the community where it lives. Let’s simplify your BAM project by extracting the essential ingredients for starting and running a business anywhere in the world.

Every business, no matter how large or small, simple or complicated, grows from a combination of these three simple ingredients: Read more

Starting Lean: Soft Launches Help Avoid Hard Landings

30 July 2023/in Features, Product & Market/by Guest Author

by Mike Baer

Adapted from material developed for a Third Path Initiative training module.

A very common story among highly excited entrepreneurs goes something like this: get a great idea, build the product, go whole hog to market, wait and lose a lot of money. It’s equivalent to the leadership anti-mantra “ready, fire, aim.” I call this the “emotional/entrepreneur syndrome” where any action is preferred to analysis and patience.

Contrast that with a less common but much wiser approach. Get an idea, test the idea, check out the landscape, build a sufficient product to try out, go lightly to market, listen, and adjust. Boring? Not at all…unless you just get off on failure.

This approach has been called many things over the years. It’s not new. Soft opening. Soft launch. Lean startup. Trial and error. Jesus put it this way:

For which of you, desiring to build a tower, does not first sit down and count the cost, whether he has enough to complete it? Otherwise, when he has laid a foundation and is not able to finish, all who see it begin to mock him… – Luke 14:28-29, ESV

Out of context, I admit but true nonetheless. Take your time and do it right.

Here are the steps I’d use if I was doing another startup. After my initial ideation, testing the market, and market research, I’d:

Develop a Minimal Viable Product

This is a concept not created but made popular by Eric Ries in The Lean Startup. A “minimal viable product” or MVP is defined as:

…that version of a new product which allows a team to collect the maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least effort.” – Wikipedia

… a development technique in which a new product or website is developed with sufficient features to satisfy early adopters. The final, complete set of features is only designed and developed after considering feedback from the product’s initial users. – Techopedia

In other words, don’t try to create the perfect website, application, food, widget. Instead, build just enough, barely enough, the minimum to actually go to market. You will improve and update and complete your product later but for now I just want my car on the track. Read more

How Does Spiritual Impact Intersect with Your Product or Service?

20 July 2023/in Features, Product & Market, Stories/by Jo Plummer

It goes without saying that the product or service you develop will be tightly interwoven with your missional goals: social, economic, environmental and spiritual. We can learn a lot from mainstream business about how to most effectively develop products and market share that will turn a profit and create economic impact. We can also learn much from the social enterprise movement and other socially responsibility companies about how products and services integrate with both social and environmental impact. But business as mission integrates a fourth bottom line, that of spiritual impact. In what ways does the product you develop or the service you offer intersect with the spiritual impact of a BAM company?

We asked four BAM practitioners in very different sectors in different parts of Asia to share why they chose their business and how it connects with the spiritual goals for their business:

Extreme Sports Equipment – Wholesale and Distribution

For us it’s impossible to separate our products from the impact we want to have as a business. First of all we want to make sure that all our products have integrity. We use the finest quality materials to make our equipment. Factories here tend to use a lower grade of materials when mass producing this type of equipment. We asked our manufactures to use the highest grade of materials possible and have a good standard of quality control in place. We pay more, but we feel that supplying top-quality equipment is integral to our credibility and our message. We also include graphics and images on our equipment that have a gospel meaning behind them. Every graphic has a story and we include booklets with our products that explain what the images mean and essentially tell the gospel. We are actively engaged with the extreme sports community here, we sponsor competitors and hang out with the people who are into our sport. We’ve started a kind of church among this group, we go where they all gather together and we do a bible study there, we regularly meet with a core group of 20 to 30. We send representatives from our company out as they do product distribution to other cities and they are able to build relationships with community leaders and begin to disciple them. – Jon and Dave

Language Academy – Education

I have a passion for training and my wife loves to write curriculum, so taking over a Language Center was a natural fit for us. It was a struggling company at the time, but we could see how it had potential to make an impact in the Muslim nation we are in. People from all over the Middle East come here to learn English and other languages – we offer five languages all together. Some of our staff work exclusively within our Academy, others teach part-time and very intentionally engage in evangelism and church planting work, much of that out of the relationships they build through the center. Education and training work is a great environment in which to be a witness for Jesus and share biblical ideas since we get to spend intensive time with our students. We also have a children’s language program that mostly focuses on English teaching, since the demand for that is so high. We go into Arab Schools and teach children from 4 to 18 years, mainly immigrants from Middle Eastern countries, many coming from difficult situations. The English language represents hope for the future for them and we get to build really good relationships with whole families. We talk in our classes about religious beliefs, for instance at Christmas we were able to share all about who Christ is. We also get to go and drink coffee with the parents and make friends outside the classroom. – Steve Read more

The Value You Offer: How to Create a Value Proposition

10 July 2023/in Features, Product & Market/by Guest Author

by David Skews

The value proposition is a clear statement of what value you offer, to whom, and in what way. It is different from a mission statement because it focuses on differentiation, or the compelling reason why customers should choose you and not your competitor.

Over the next few years the forces of competition will intensify – even for BAM businesses. Although there is growing evidence that some businesses can offer a premium product or service and simultaneously reduce unit cost, this ‘increasing returns’ phenomenon is a mainly a characteristic of the knowledge economy (e.g. for an internet based service where the variable cost is very small). Usually a business has only two positioning choices: increase margin by lowering costs and charging what the market will bear, or increase margin by premium pricing based on a distinctive value proposition, consistently delivered, which gives customers a compelling reason to purchase.

A value proposition must be written in clear language using simple words, so that all your employees can work out the things they must do to deliver it consistently. A clear proposition will make resource allocation choices easier for you. When money is tight, you will want to spend on the things which maintain or extend your value proposition. The value proposition will also act as an attractor for new customers – it will define your position in the market and give you a reputation and therefore a brand. It will unify the actions of your board and employees and it will act as a deterrent to competition; the key to becoming a “price setter” in the market because you can then control your margin.

Your value proposition must answer these questions:

What are the specific products or services you are going to offer, including a clear statement as to what is special about your product/service?

What exact needs or wants does it satisfy for customers, considering very carefully things like how will they use it, what will they expect it to do for them, and what is it made up of? Read more

Compelling Reasons for Business as Mission That are Still Relevant Today

3 January 2023/in BAM 101: Introduction, Integration, Latest/by Staff Writer

This month we are exploring different motives a missional entrepreneur may have for pursuing business as mission as their strategy of choice. To set the scene, here is a classic introduction to BAM as a strategy from the Lausanne Occasional Paper on Business as Mission. Published nearly 20 years ago, these arguments are as compelling and relevant today as we still seek ‘God’s Kingdom come’ — through business.

A World in Need

The world holds fresh opportunities and challenges for the global Church. In regions where Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism are dominant and where 90% of the world’s unreached peoples live, you also find 80% of the world’s poorest populations. Unemployment in these countries ranges from 30% to 80% and it is even higher among Christian minorities. Furthermore many Christians and others in Sub-Saharan Africa and Latin American are living in poverty because of lack of jobs and unjust economic systems.

Over the next 20 years, more than 2 billion people will enter societies where there are few churches and very few jobs.

What should be the response of the Church and particularly Christian business people to such challenges?

What the poor want is not aid, but jobs – real jobs, not subsidised ones. This is the dignity and self-reliance they deserve.

Business as Mission – a Renewed Call

There is a wave of thousands of Christian business people from all continents who are experiencing a dynamic move of God as part of a renewed call to His kingdom work. God is on the move in Latin America, Asia, Europe, North America, Africa and the Pacific regions, calling His global church to rediscover His heart and intention for business.

God established the institution and practice of business as a means of fulfilling His creation mandate to steward and care for all of creation. He is releasing the power of business to aid in the task of fulfilling the great commission making disciples of all nations. God longs to be glorified through our business activities.

Business people are being challenged to look anew at their business activities as an expression of their calling and service to God. They are being affirmed in their vocation as business people and used as instruments for extending God’s kingdom. God has led a growing number of business people to think strategically about how they can integrate their skills and experience in business with the task of world mission. God is calling many more business people, from all nations to go to all nations, in this new paradigm of mission. Read more

Get Started Growing: Maximizing Startup Success

14 December 2022/in Features/by Guest Author

This December marks 8 years of regularly posting content on The BAM Review Blog. This month we are sharing some past posts on practical BAM topics that you might have missed. First published in December 2017 as the first part of a series.

by Stu Minshew

On the theme of ‘maximizing BAM success factors’ we’ve invited guest authors to highlight what they consider key factors contributing to success and growth for BAM practitioners. Previously we’ve covered ‘breaking through your growth ceiling’ for an established business. But what if you are a startup? What if you have a business idea and want to know how to maximize your success from the get-go? We asked entrepreneur and CO.STARTERS trainer Stu Minshew to share what he’s learned about maximizing startup success in this five part mini-series.

Part 1: Get Started Growing

Starting and growing a business is a calling from the Lord. If you ask anyone who has done it, they will tell you how exhilarating it can be, but also how it sometimes seems overwhelming and impossible. The truth is that it doesn’t have to be this way. Yes, it always requires hustle and flexibility, but taking a few simple actions can equip you to overcome obstacles to starting and growing your business to a level of sustainability.

During this series, we will explore these steps, but before we get to those, we need to discuss a few foundational points.

Foundational Point 1: Startups & Small Businesses Have Different Needs

In 2016, The Bureau of Labor in the United States shows that about 50% of businesses make it five years, while only about 30% make it past the ten year mark. If this is the reality, then starting a business doesn’t look like such a good idea. Read more

Three Stories: How BAM Goals and People Goals Fit Together

7 December 2022/in Latest/by Jo Plummer

This December marks 8 years of regularly posting content on The BAM Review Blog. This month we are sharing some past posts on practical BAM topics that you might have missed.

We asked company leaders to share how their goals as a BAM company fit with their goals for their people, and how that influenced their business planning and development.

Three BAM practitioners share from very different industries on how their strategy for their staff connects with their overall strategy to be a Kingdom-focused company.

IT Company in South Asia

We work hard to manage expectations upfront that the company exists only because of Jesus and has been dedicated to bringing glory to God. So 100% of our staff are aware of our high level BAM goals in that sense, but mostly just the around 15% of believers connect fully. The other 85% connect to our Kingdom goals of renewing our industry, providing meaningful work, raising up leaders worth following, and so on.

We spent years passionately praying for, discussing and trying to understand God’s purpose for the business. Saying that a business exists to make money is like saying I exist to breathe oxygen and keep blood flowing through my body to stay alive. We all have a purpose and calling as individuals and I believe we do as businesses as well.

We continue to seek and refine our purpose. It is an evolving thing with God revealing new layers and aspects, again, just like us as individuals. So in our early startup phase we spent an absurd amount of time navel-gazing, trying to understand the “WHY” and our employees saw this and see it today. They know they are a part of something bigger than themselves. Most of them acknowledge that Jesus is an important part of the company even if they don’t agree or like that. They know we don’t have it all figured out and fail often. But they have seen the process of us passionately seeking God, doing our best to follow God and simply asking them to, “Follow us as we follow Jesus”. Read more

Scarcity versus Abundance

25 August 2022/in Features, Latest/by Guest Author

by Don Simmons

Many of us suffer from a “scarcity” mindset in which we believe that life is a finite pie and if one person takes a big piece, there will be less for everyone. Counter to this is an “abundance” mindset in which there is plenty available for everyone.

The Apostle Paul challenges the scarcity mindset in his discourse on sowing and reaping in 2 Corinthians 9:6-10. As you read, you will see words like generous, abundant, abounding, increase, and enlarge—which are an obvious contrast to the limits of scarcity:

“Remember this: Whoever sows sparingly will also reap sparingly, and whoever sows generously will also reap generously. Each of you should give what you have decided in your heart to give, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver. And God is able to bless you abundantly, so that in all things at all times, having all that you need, you will abound in every good work. As it is written:

‘They have freely scattered their gifts to the poor; their righteousness endures forever.’ [Ps 112:9]

Now he who supplies seed to the sower and bread for food will also supply and increase your store of seed and will enlarge the harvest of your righteousness.”

Wealth Creation: Making More Pie

What Paul seems to suggest is that giving leads to abundant blessings so that the giver is not depleted, but rather added to. The addition should not be misunderstood to be for our own benefit, but it is given so that we can continue to bless others. The same principle can apply to harnessing the power of investing to increase the wealth in our worldwide economy. Read more

Matching A Steward Investor’s Goals with God’s Goals

18 August 2022/in Features, Latest/by Guest Author

by Don Simmons

In my previous post I offered the good news of engaging in worldwide missions through investing into missional businesses.

In order to effectively move capital from where it is stored up (retirement accounts, charitable funds, savings accounts) to where it is in short supply (SMEs in emerging markets, corrupt communities, or impoverished lands), we need to reconsider our personal investment goals.

What are your investment goals? If you are like most people, your goals probably include high financial return, minimal risk, and tax avoidance. Have you ever thought about why you have those particular goals?

What do you believe matters to God? Frequently people respond by saying that the Great Commission and the Great Commandment matter to God. Have you ever considered that your investments should be aligned with God’s objectives and His purposes since He is, in fact, the true owner of your investments?

What is the connection between our wealth and the kingdom of God?

The familiar story of Jesus’ conversation with the Rich Young Ruler, in which he asks him to sell everything and give to the poor, challenges the common blindness we exhibit when viewing the connection between our wealth and the kingdom of God.

Fiduciaries are obligated to manage another’s resources according to the true owner’s wishes. As God’s fiduciary, managing God’s resources, we must do some hard work and think through questions like these:

1. Does my portfolio look any different than someone’s who does not proclaim Jesus as their Savior?

If we are merely investing to achieve financial returns and protect our holdings either for our own comfort or to pass on to our children, then we are not investing any differently than the majority of investors on the planet. We cannot ignore Jesus’ teaching on Mammon in Matthew where he challenges the assumption that a person can serve both God AND Mammon. Read more

God’s Steward Investor and the Great Commission

11 August 2022/in Features, Latest/by Guest Author

by Don Simmons

I want to challenge those of us who have achieved basic financial competency and have plans in place for our investments to earn financial returns. If we truly believe that God owns all of our resources, we must believe that includes our investment holdings as well.

We need to become God’s steward investor, one who is charged with managing His resources for His purposes. He is the true owner, and we are his managers, his oikonomos. An oikonomos, in a Greek household, was the manager of the owner’s resources. As God’s oikonomos in the 21st century, the investments under our management are actually assets that belong to God himself.

An oikonomos commits capital with the expectation of furthering the kingdom of heaven on earth. These steward investors do this by seeking to achieve not only financial returns, but also positive spiritual, social, and environmental impact. A steward investor knows first and foremost that they are a fiduciary, managing someone else’s resources.

Fulfilling the Great Commission through Investment

Inherent in the term “Business as Mission” is the word mission. Ever since Jesus sent out the seventy-two into his harvest field, and then charged the believers gathered after His resurrection to go and make disciples of all nations, many followers of Jesus have accepted the call to go as missionaries.

Often willing to risk what’s familiar for what’s foreign, what’s comfortable for what’s complicated, what’s predictable for what’s problematic, men and women stake their lives on God’s faithfulness to go ahead of them and produce fruit from their ministry for His kingdom. Read more

God’s Steward Investor: Investing for Eternal Impact

4 August 2022/in Features, Latest, Stories/by Guest Author

by Don Simmons

To the BAM Global audience: thank you for the chance to engage with you this month through a series of blogs dedicated to themes of investing God’s resources for eternal impact.

I have been a financial planner for over three decades and a follower of Jesus during my entire career. In recent years, God has opened my eyes to truths I cannot escape regarding the role we all have to play in connecting our financial resources with God’s eternal purposes. In short, I have come to believe that we are all God’s resource managers, his fiduciaries, and as such we are to become his steward investors. Simply put, we must move beyond financial competence to proactively investing God’s resources to achieve His eternal purposes such as the Great Commission. We must not simply invest for our own temporal financial goals.

What is a Steward Investor?

A steward investor is a person who acknowledges that God owns it all and seeks to invest in a way that accords with God’s purposes.

By definition, a steward is a manager of someone else’s resources. It derives from the Greek word oikonomos, who was the manager in an ancient Greek household. A steward knew he didn’t own anything but had an obligation to manage the resources and affairs of the owner as the owner himself would.

All of our resources—financial and otherwise—have been given to us by God, the true owner. God tasks us as his stewards with managing those resources according to His values, goals, and precepts communicated in scripture.

While many of us value “good stewardship” of our finances, making sure we live on a budget, save, and give generously, most of us have not considered how to steward our investments. Read more

2 Company Leaders Look Back: Financial Planning Highs and Lows

25 July 2022/in Financial Planning, Latest, Stories/by Staff Writer

Read this classic blog from our Archives, first published on The BAM Review blog in November 2016 and republished for the Summer Series 2022.

When we have a major decision to make, we often ask those around us for input. Sometimes we follow that advice and other times we don’t. Occasionally we might look back and wish we had followed the advice we received from others. Hindsight is a beautiful thing!

Drawing on the wisdom of others can be helpful and the benefit of hindsight is illuminating. With those two things in mind, we asked a couple of well established BAM leaders for their advice about financial planning. We asked them to share what has been fruitful and has enabled them to grow companies that are doing well. We also asked them to share the lessons they’ve learned the hard way and what they would do differently in hindsight.

Hospitality Company

Company A is a Hospitality company with 125 employees, it has two owners and was established 12 years ago.

What financial planning have you done to grow your company to the place it is today?

The growth of our company over the past five years has been quite substantial. We have seen our revenue increase 475%, and our earnings grow 540%. Though our financial planning was not the driver of that growth, it was certainly the foundation. Without the steps we have learned and taken over the years, we would not have been able to facilitate the amazing growth we have seen. Read more

5 Risk Factors Guaranteed to Doom a BAM Business

11 July 2022/in Features, Launching & Landing, Learning from Failure/by Guest Author

by Larry Sharp

Read this classic blog from our Archives, first published on The BAM Review blog in January 2016 and republished for the Summer Series 2022.

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly: Stories from the Frontline

Last year I was leading a seminar in a conference in Arizona, when a local business owner asked the question, “Are there no failed BAM businesses?” While I readily agreed there were, I began to think about the question in a more profound way. What is the “good, the bad and the ugly” of real life BAM business experiences – those that demonstrate that there are BAM failures along with the successes?

Over the past 10 years, I have observed risk factors for BAM enterprises which should stimulate every stakeholder in the BAM community towards better recruitment, better preparation, better deployment and better accountability. Many a sports leader, military hero, or young entrepreneur has demonstrated the oft-quoted statement of Benjamin Franklin, “Failure to prepare is preparing to fail.” And that is true in the Kingdom business endeavors of today.

So what are these factors and where are the stories which help us understand basic principles for launching and landing well in a cross-cultural business? How do we best start companies designed to work out the Great Commandment and the Great Commission? How can we improve so that there will be fewer failures and a greater chance of successful transformational businesses in the areas of the world that need them the most? If these five risk factors don’t actually doom your BAM company, not paying attention to them will seriously endanger it… at the very least! Read more

9 Keys for Successful BAM Deployment

21 June 2022/in Features, Launching & Landing/by Jo Plummer

Read this classic blog from our Archives, first published on The BAM Review blog in February 2016 and republished for the Summer Series 2022.

Here are 9 Keys for Successful BAM Deployment that have been themes shared over and over by experienced BAM practitioners and mentors. These are principles and practices observed over years of listening to BAM pioneers, writing BAM stories and collecting information about how to do BAM. Many of these Keys have been shared by BAMers and BAM leaders over the last few weeks as we have explored the topic ‘Launching Out and Landing Well’ – they come out in the stories, snippets, and teaching we’ve shared, as well as in the BAM Think Tank research we’ve been drawing on.

1. Walk with God

Abide in Christ. It’s essential to be connected to the Vine, a growing disciple of Jesus, if we are to bear fruit! That means spending time listening and talking to God in prayer and being attentive to His calling and direction for your life. It means growing in Godly character as you are rooted in His word, and opening up to spiritual input from others. Prayer is mentioned over and over by BAMers as a foundation stone for BAM in practice, at all stages: preparation, launch and continued growth. Having a sense of call and leading from God is another often cited core driver for BAMers. Spiritual formation through discipleship and teaching is a life-long pursuit – whether through books, sermons, devotional materials, courses, retreats or intentional relationships. Making yourself accountable to peers or elders that will challenge you to grow in Christ-like character is another way to keep soft and open to the refining work of the Holy Spirit in our lives. Read more

10 Guiding Principles for Business as Mission

16 June 2022/in BAM 101: Introduction, Integration, Latest/by Staff Writer

Read this classic blog from our Archives, first published on The BAM Review blog in January 2015 and republished for the Summer Series 2022.

A good business as mission business will, by definition, have many of the characteristics of any well-run business. A kingdom business must be profitable and sustainable just as any other business. Integrity, fairness and excellent customer service are characteristics of any good business, not just a business as mission venture. As such, while important, those characteristics will not by themselves necessarily point people to Christ. A kingdom business begins with the foundation of any good business, but takes its stewardship responsibilities even further.

What follows is a list of principles that should underpin a business as mission business. First we list the basic foundational principles that must exist in any good business. Following that are the principles that distinguish a good business as mission business.

Foundational Business Principles

1. Strives to be profitable and sustainable in the long term

Profit is an indication that resources are being used wisely. It indicates that the product or service being produced and sold does so at a price that covers the cost of the resources, including the cost of capital. For most businesses, profits are fleeting, and never a sure thing. It is common for businesses to experience periods of low profit, and even negative profit. Thus it is important to take a long-term view of profitability. Occasional windfalls are often what will sustain a company through periods of financial losses. For that reason a well-managed business will use extreme care when considering whether and when to distribute profits. Profit, and its retention, is not necessarily an indication of greed. Read more

Let’s Make Business as Mission Both Global and Local

11 October 2021/in BAM is Global, Latest/by Guest Author

As part of our continuing series on ‘BAM: A Global Glimpse’ we revisit this article by Joseph Vijayam.

In 2013 I was on a business trip in Jakarta. One afternoon my host asked if I would join him for a gathering of believers in his office building. To my surprise, this was not a small gathering of believers; it was a full-fledged worship service with songs, intercession, testimonies, and a short sermon with over 100 people in attendance. During the time of testimonies, people were sharing about their needs, including those at work, home, and in their communities. One of the business owners in the room shared that he sees himself as a pastor to his co-workers. At that moment, I realized that here in one of the megacities of Asia, weekly church service had taken a new form. The venue was a business conference room, the people in attendance came as individuals rather than families, significant time was spent in sharing of testimonies by new believers, and the time of their meeting was on a busy weekday. Every aspect of the event perfectly fit the needs of first-generation believers working in high rise offices in Jakarta.

Though the purpose and function of the Body of Christ have remained the same, its local form has changed from age to age and from one culture to another. What I experienced in Jakarta was a unique expression of the local church that is ideal to the city of Jakarta for this generation. If the gathering of believers can take different forms, can our approach to bringing people into the Church be just as creative and specific to their situation? Not only do I believe that it can, I think it is essential. Read more

Scaling BAM Companies for Impact: Models of Partnership and Ecosystem Building

27 November 2020/in Features, Latest/by Guest Author

During our November Webinars last week for the BAM Global Congress Pre-Series, Mats Tunehag had the privilege of interviewing eight BAM leaders in a series of three Fireside Chats, on the theme of building ecosystems and networks that will help BAM companies launch and thrive.

As part of this series, Mats interviewed Tom, Dwight and Joanna, here are some excerpts from their Fireside Chat Interview:

Mats: Joanna, in your experience, through starting a BAM accelerator and running your own business, what are some key lessons you’ve learned when it comes to building an ecosystem or support system for growing a BAM business?

Joanna: First of all, do not discourage someone from being part of your ecosystem, even if you don’t think it’s what you need right now. It’s about building relationships with different parts of this ecosystem for the long term. Secondly, learn and teach. We have to learn from others, and we also have to pass on what we know with the relationships and partnerships we are developing.

Mats: Dwight you’ve been doing BAM for several decades now, tell us about the nature of your companies?

Dwight: We are committed to establishing businesses, typically technology based businesses with 50-500 employees, in unreached cities in Asia. We are committed to seeing strategic, but reasonable, great commission results in unreached cities of more than a million people and less than 2% Christian. Typically we see house bible studies started and growing beyond that, but each location is different… If we don’t see both the financial returns and the great commission stuff happening, we will exit from a business.

From Idea to Impact: Accelerating Communities of Kingdom-Minded Entrepreneurs

31 October 2020/in Features, Latest/by Guest Author

During our October Webinars this week Mats Tunehag had the privilege of interviewing six BAM leaders in a series of three Fireside Chats, on the themes of each day: Start-up BAM, Fruitful BAM and Long BAM.

On day two, on the theme of Fruitful BAM, Mats interviewed Matthew Rohrs and Yvonne Otieno. Yvonne is an award winning entrepreneur and CEO of Miyonga Fresh Greens in Kenya. Matthew is the CEO of Sinapis Group, a Kingdom-minded business accelerator and entrepreneur academy operating in eight countries.

Here are some excerpts from their Fireside Chat Interview:

Mats: Matthew, Sinapis is 10 years old this year, congratulations. So tell us, how do you integrate faith into your programs?

Matthew: Sinapis is an entrepreneurship training and acceleration organization. We have a variety of programs to help entrepreneurs build capacity. Then over time we build vibrant long-term alumni communities where entrepreneurs can do business with one another, solve problems together, grow in their faith, and grow in their application of what it means to lead a Kingdom business.

The name Sinapis is the Latin word for mustard seed. So when we think about that gospel story of how the smallest seed in the garden grows to become one of the largest plants and the birds of the air come and perch in the branches, we think that is an interesting picture of the kind of impact that a gifted Kingdom-minded entrepreneur can have. They start out with a small seed of an idea, and that company then grows and grows. As that company begins to have more influence, this image of the birds perching in the branches is a beautiful picture of what happens with their employees. The impact that a company can have on the employees and then their dependents and others in the community…

On the question of how we integrate faith into what we do. At the programmatic level, we gently, respectfully, but very intentionally integrate God’s truth into our programs. We’re very open to share with people that there’s biblical content and we want to talk to you if you are not a follower of Christ, what would it mean to consider following Him? And if you are a follower of Christ, how do you step in, with passion, to this beautiful calling to the marketplace?

We think our alumni communities are actually the greatest opportunity for long-term spiritual investment, to walk with entrepreneurs over time, just like Yvonne. We help them and support them in the integration of their faith into the business, but also the continued growth of the company as their challenges become more complex.

Mats: Yvonne, you are one of those mustard seeds! How did going through the program change you and the impact on your various stakeholders?

How We Integrate Business and Mission: In Planning and Daily Operations

27 October 2020/in Features, Latest/by Guest Author

During our October Webinars this week, Mats Tunehag had the privilege of interviewing six BAM leaders in a series of three Fireside Chats, on the themes of each day: Start-up BAM, Fruitful BAM and Long BAM.

On day one, on the theme of Start-Up BAM, Mats interviewed Annie and Peter.* Annie is the CEO of a manufacturing business in Southeast Asia and Peter is the CEO and Co-Founder of a BAM Investment Company, with experience mentoring and investing in scores of BAM businesses over 20+ years.

Here are some excerpts from their Fireside Chat Interview:

Mats: Peter, in Business as Mission we talk about having a positive impact on multiple bottom lines, for multiple stakeholders. When should you start planning for impact on the four bottom lines, financial, social, environmental and spiritual?

Peter: Think of a number line with negative numbers to the left and zero in the middle, which marks that day, the fateful day when you open your doors for business. Then the positive numbers are to the right that mark the years as time passes. I would say that you start planning for this quadruple bottom line impact at minus 3 or minus 2 years on that number line. In other words you have to start doing that, before you start trading. Once you start trading, all sorts of pressures will overtake everything else in the business.

Now planning for that doesn’t mean it will play out the way you thought it would. Being able to adjust and pivot is the reality of BAM, so you are going to need to modify those quadruple bottom line impacts, but start early.

Mats: And, how do you monitor progress towards that integrated impact?

Peter: How do you measure it? Realise that not everything can be measured quantifiably or numerically. A lot of measurement in BAM companies is qualitative, especially the relational side of things. I know many might think in terms of hard numbers when it comes to things like numbers of people that have come to know the Lord, or various other spiritual impact metrics. However, that’s very hard to do, and runs the risk of taking things into your hands and out of the hands of the Holy Spirit. It doesn’t mean you don’t focus on those things. You can plan for and document activities that may lead to that impact. But in terms of the progress of the Kingdom in people’s lives from a spiritual point of view, largely that is out of our hands. The other thing I think you can measure is what I call redemptive impacts, on things like poverty and justice issues… We advise people to develop a very rigorous commercial plan, and also a very rigorous spiritual impact plan. Read more

Tag Archive for: business planning

1. Build a wider network and community

What would be some good research approaches to figuring out good business models?

Mike Baer

Hannah Lau

Grant Smith

>> Read Part 1 here

If you were deciding on a business model, what questions would you ask yourself?

Grant Smith

Mike Baer

Hannah Lau

How do you know if a business model is working/not working? What are some signs and symptoms?

Hannah Lau

Mike Baer

Grant Smith

What would be some good research approaches to figuring out good models?

by Sandra Lynn

Why Words Matter More in Trust-Driven Markets

The Myth That Ethical Businesses Shouldn’t Be Direct

The Reality of 7-Second Decisions

The Candy Machine Problem Revisited

How to Craft Messaging That Builds Trust Across Cultures

AI, Translation, and the Sameness Trap

Market Like You Mean It

by Bruce McKinnon & Sandra Lynn

Positioning Starts With Decisions, Not Statements

The Hidden Cost of Doing Too Much for Too Many

Strong Values Don’t Equal Strong Positioning

How Clarity Creates Trust

Building for Discovery and Connection

Putting Positioning Into Practice

Your Path Forward

by Sandra Lynn

The Activity Trap

Reframing Marketing as Clarity Work

The Authority Gap in Mission-Driven Business

Solving the Wrong Problem

Why Clarity Feels Hard (And Why It’s Worth It Anyway)

Introduction

Foundational Business Principles

1. Strives to be profitable and sustainable in the long term

by Bernie Anderson

1. Empowering Teamwork

2. Equipping Managers

Empowering Teamwork

by Bernie Anderson

1. Prioritize Your Customers

2. Automate Your Sales

by Bernie Anderson

1. Clarify vision

2. Implement strategy

by Bernie Anderson

by Mike Baer

Develop a Minimal Viable Product

Extreme Sports Equipment – Wholesale and Distribution

Language Academy – Education

by David Skews

Your value proposition must answer these questions:

A World in Need

Business as Mission – a Renewed Call

by Stu Minshew

Part 1: Get Started Growing

Foundational Point 1: Startups & Small Businesses Have Different Needs

IT Company in South Asia

by Don Simmons

Wealth Creation: Making More Pie

by Don Simmons

What is the connection between our wealth and the kingdom of God?

1. Does my portfolio look any different than someone’s who does not proclaim Jesus as their Savior?

by Don Simmons

Fulfilling the Great Commission through Investment

by Don Simmons

What is a Steward Investor?

Hospitality Company

What financial planning have you done to grow your company to the place it is today?

by Larry Sharp

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly: Stories from the Frontline

1. Walk with God

Foundational Business Principles

As part of our continuing series on ‘BAM: A Global Glimpse’ we revisit this article by Joseph Vijayam.