Tag Archive for: think tank

7 Fruitful Practices for BAM and Church Planting

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BAM companies are usually very diverse, each business with its own unique features. However, through research into real experiences of BAM and Church Planting, some shared commonalities emerged in the following fruitful practices:

1. Contact

Make sure that the business provides regular contact with the focus people.

Intentionally create a business that provides regular contact with those with whom you are hoping to share the gospel – whether they are employees, customers, suppliers or others. A bakery business owner estimates that they have a chance to meet an average of 100 people a day. Christ can be made known to staff, suppliers, and customers through business activities. One employer who hires local women who come from difficult home lives seeks to help those women achieve a greater quality of life. Another BAM company provides business opportunities and income for local Christian leaders, encouraging them to stay and carry on the church planting work rather than moving away for employment to support their families. An agricultural business enables local Christians to do church planting work by training them in an egg production business. In this model they also help the trainees set up the businesses which provides contacts for them, as well as an income. This agriculture business also provides church planting training to the locals as part of their strategy.

Although the business is usually the context in which contacts are made and relationships started, several BAM practitioners (BAMers) mentioned that conversations about spiritual matters typically take place outside of the workplace. However, in other cases BAMers reported that these conversations start naturally through a shared work environment. Read more

Why Integrate Business and Church Planting?

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There are some good reasons to combine business and church planting. Indeed, combining the two did not just begin when missionaries could not find visas to live in closed countries. Instead, there has been a natural merging of business, church planting and the presentation of the gospel throughout church history.

The apostle Paul himself was a tentmaker, or small business owner. He supported himself and saw this strategy as being beneficial for church planting. For example, among the Thessalonians, Paul “Worked night and day in order not to be a burden to anyone while [he] preached the gospel of God” (1 Thessalonians 2:9). This example was needed to teach the Thessalonians that they also were to work and not be idle (2 Thessalonians 3:8-9). In Corinth, Paul did not accept payment from the people in order to clarify the message of the gospel, making it clear that the his preaching was not tied to financial gain (1 Corinthians 9, 2 Corinthians 12). Yet Paul’s tentmaking was not absolute; he would accept support and be “fully devoted” to preaching and teaching where there was support and when the context was appropriate (Acts 18:5). Read more

Getting Started: Essential Metrics for your BAM Company

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Every business is unique, metrics need to be tailored to the company to reflect the company’s unique goals, context and challenges. That said, there are certain metrics which should be monitored as a minimum by any business. These essential metrics are all aimed at ensuring the owners of the BAM company are able to answer for themselves the key questions:

  • Are we doing what we set out to do?
  • Are we being responsive to God’s call and the Spirit’s leading?
  • Do we have the cash we need to operate and meet our commitments and is it likely that we will continue to be solvent in the coming year?
  • Are we being good stewards of the money that has been invested with us?
  • Are we caring for and developing our employees?
  • Are we damaging or helping the environment?

Not every business needs dozens of charts and numbers to answer these questions. In many cases the answers will be obvious. However, a few carefully selected, measured and reported metrics can help bring clarity. The following list contains recommendations for how to cover these questions. Read more

Making Sense of the World of Metrics

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Measurement and metrics can be deceptively simple. We pick an aspect of our business and ask some basic questions about it, for example:

  • How many tables did each of the servers take care of each day?
  • How many sales calls did each of the sales staff make each day?
  • What is the company’s net profit each month?
  • How many people viewed our latest Google ad last week?
  • Which of our products gives the highest profit and which gives the lowest?

Answering such questions can help a manager understand a bit more about the business, however, there is a lot more to establishing metrics than simply asking and answering a few questions. It matters a great deal that we ask the right questions, that we get correct answers in a timely fashion and that we analyze the answers carefully then apply what we have learned.

Why are you measuring?

Metrics can be used for a variety of reasons. Purpose drives design, that is the design of the measure changes depending on how it will be used. Sometimes the desire will be to assess the state of the business for a one time decision that needs to be made. Other times the goal will be to establish a base and ongoing input for process improvement and management.  For example, a loan company will likely make an assessment of the business for a simple yes or no answer to the question “Is this company capable of repaying the loan?” Or an outside owner may want an answer to the question “Is management accomplishing its objectives?” However, an internal manager is likely to ask questions such as “Are we on track with our sales plan and if not, how can we get back on track?” The manager’s question is likely to be a process question, looking for diagnostics. The investor’s question is to make a one-time decision. The outside owner’s question falls somewhere in between, sometimes it would be a matter of replacing the manager and other times—one hopes—it would be aimed at helping the manager improve performance. Read more

Measuring the Impact and Performance of BAM: Intro to Metrics

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Business as mission is hard. Very hard! Missionaries with little business experience but plenty of vision start businesses and struggle. Experienced business people start businesses in new countries or cultures and struggle. Too many business as mission (BAM) companies wander in the desert aimlessly. They need a compass to guide them—something to remind them of their direction and tell them if they are on track. Well designed and implemented metrics can help.

Metrics are measures. They are like the control panel on a car—the gauges, lights and dials that tell you how fast you’re going, how much fuel is left and whether you’re headed for trouble. You can drive a car without a fuel gauge or a speedometer, but you will likely run into serious trouble before too much time has passed.

Measures can be numbers, stories, graphs, or generalized reports. These metrics provide an insight into what’s really going on inside the operation. That matters to all who are working hard to see the business achieve its purpose—to glorify God. Read more

Capitalizing Growth-Stage SMEs: Profile of a BAM Investment Company

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Excerpt from the recently published BAM Global Think Tank report on Business as Mission Funding. 

Transformational SME – BAM Investor Profile

Transformational SME (TSME) was established in 2001, after two and a half years of market research and business plan development. Their goal is to capitalize growth-stage SMEs with patient, strategically integrated financial, intellectual and human resources to achieve economic, social, environmental and spiritual impact in the Arab world and Asia. 

TSME is a BAM company, composed of an investor-capitalized fund, which operates as a Bare Trust under UK law, and a professional fund management company registered in Canada. TSME provides primarily mezzanine loans to carefully screened, Christian-owned and managed SMEs which through genuine business as mission seek to achieve the so-called “quadruple bottom line”.

In addition to mezzanine finance, TSME provides mentoring and coaching to investee companies and a variety of technical advisory services, for example, pre-investment consulting to start-up companies, and a range of input to strategic mission partners such as mission agencies wishing to engage in BAM. They also engage in strategic talent search for key professional roles within BAM companies. Read more

Approaches to Business as Mission Funding

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Excerpt from the recently published BAM Global Think Tank report on Business as Mission Funding.

The word ‘funding’ refers to the spectrum of financial resources required for a business venture through the normal life-cycle phases of every business: start-up, growth, maturity, and decline. It includes a range of monetary sources, each with attributes unique to each stage of growth. Funding takes on many shapes and sizes, from self-funding to crowdfunding, microcredit to bank loans, and seed funding to venture capital.

Broadly speaking, the subject of funding includes sources, structure, application and management of monies in all areas of the business. In the context of business as mission, perceptions and actions relative to both the business and the capital should be informed by Biblical principles.

In a broader context, funding is distinguished as being financial capital – such as debt or equity – alongside other forms of capital input, such as intellectual, human, social, spiritual, infra-structural and natural.

BAM funding models

Traditional sources of business as mission funding parallel those in typical business funding. In the majority of cases, profitability is the key issue that drives capital to those companies most likely to achieve viability. For most investors, profitability is a non-negotiable measure of success. Read more

Tag Archive for: think tank