When the founders of Bandwidth sat down for dinner in 1999 to figure out what kind of company they wanted to build, they made a decision that most business owners never make. They agreed that their corporate culture needed to mirror who they wanted to be as people, not the other way around. So they wrote down their values in order. Faith first. Then family. Then work. Then fitness.
Work made the list. But it came third.
That’s a harder choice than it sounds, especially when you’re building something from scratch, and the pressure to pour everything into it is constant and loud.
The founders of Point B made a similar decision, but they came to it through pain first. They’d both come out of a traditional consulting world where people were treated like machines, working well over a hundred hours a week with no say in where they went or how long they stayed. When they started Point B, they built it on one simple idea. Take care of your people, and your people will take care of your clients. They said every person in their firm had intrinsic worth and value, and they meant it practically, not just as a statement on the wall.
One employee stayed for 19 years. When asked why, he didn’t talk about salary or career growth. He talked about the fact that when he adopted a son with significant special needs, Point B wrapped around his family before they’d even known him for a full year.
That’s a value system lived out in real time.
Here’s what’s interesting: when people complimented the founders on the culture they’d built, saying it was genius, they pushed back. They said they basically borrowed it from the Bible. They didn’t call it Christian. They just said, this is how we treat each other.
That’s worth sitting with for a moment.
What are you building your life on?
The question underneath all of it is the same one Solomon spent an entire book wrestling with, which is this: what are you actually building your life on, and will it hold?
Solomon had more than the founders of any company could dream of. A palace filled with gold, a kingdom at peace, a list of accomplishments that spanned architecture, music, literature, and national leadership. By any measure available to him, he was winning completely and without competition.
And then he wrote Ecclesiastes, where he described all of it as hevel. A Hebrew word meaning vapour. Like smoke. Like a cloud that looks solid from a distance but passes straight through you when you reach for it.
He said four things will disappoint you, even when you do them right. Pleasure will leave you hollow. Business wisdom, even when perfectly applied, doesn’t always produce the expected result, because, as he puts it in chapter nine, the race doesn’t always go to the swift or the battle to the strong. Justice in this world is unreliable, where the righteous sometimes get what the wicked deserve. Everything you build, you eventually leave behind to someone who may or may not deserve it or protect it.
That’s not a cynical view of life, it’s an honest one, from a man who ran every other experiment first.
And the reason it matters for how we think about money and work and building things is this: most of us are quietly running the same experiment Solomon ran. We’re hoping that if we can just reach a certain number, clear a certain amount of debt, and achieve a certain level of stability, we’ll finally be able to breathe. We’ll be more present, less anxious and more like who we want to be.
But the philosopher Blaise Pascal described the tragedy of many successful people as the fact that they never actually learned to enjoy life, because they were always living to enjoy it later. He put it plainly: we never live, we only hope to live. We’re always preparing to be happy, but we never actually are.
“One more dollar.”
John D. Rockefeller was asked at the height of his earnings how much money was enough to feel complete. His answer was: “One more dollar.”
That’s a miserable way to live, and yet it’s the default setting for most of us if we’re not careful.
The statistics around entrepreneurship make this even harder to ignore. Entrepreneurs are twice as likely to suffer from depression as the general population, ten times more likely to experience bipolar disorder, and twice as likely to have suicidal thoughts. There is a real cost to placing the full weight of your identity and purpose in one place, and work was never designed to carry that.
This is exactly what FLOW is built around addressing. Not just the practical side of money, the budgeting, the debt snowball, the retirement planning, though all of that matters and all of it is part of the picture. But the deeper question is what you believe money is for, and what you’re actually working toward when you pursue financial freedom.
Proverbs 22:7 uncovers the truth about debt in a way most financial advice doesn’t. The borrower is a slave to the lender.
Financial pressure affects marriages, sleep, how you show up for your kids, and how you treat strangers. It’s not a small thing. But clearing the debt without changing the belief system underneath it just creates a new version of the same cycle.
Matthew 6:24 says you cannot serve two masters. You’ll love one and resent the other. That’s not a warning designed to make you feel guilty about wanting stability. It’s a description of what happens when money moves from being a tool you use to being the thing that drives you.
Solomon’s conclusion, after testing every alternative, was simple. Your heart will be restless until it finds its rest in God. Satisfaction isn’t found in success. It’s found in the right relationship with the right source.
The founders of Bandwidth understood this. The people at Point B built a company around it without even putting a label on it. And FLOW exists because this conversation needs to happen more, in community, with honesty, and with the Bible as its foundation.
You can keep waiting for your circumstances to settle down before you deal with what’s underneath them. Or you can start from a different place.
Join the movement: https://faithdrivenentrepreneur.org/
Watch the full video here: Session 3: Don’t worship work
Credit: Faith Driven Entrepreneur
