Ellen White says that at the second coming, some of God’s people will be engaged in business transactions. Join us as we discuss ways business can break down prejudice between the world and Seventh-day Adventists and how God rewards those who take risks for His cause.

ASI 2018: Business Unusual

<p>Ellen White says that at the second coming, some of God’s people will be engaged in business transactions. Join us as we discuss ways business can break down prejudice between the world and Seventh-day Adventists and how God rewards those who take risks for His cause.</p>

<p>Free sharing permitted under the Creative Commons <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/">BY-NC-ND 3.0 (US)</a> license.</p>

Mark Finley

Young Professionals

History & Mission of ASI

Jason Churchwell

Jesus’ first miracle was making juice!

Sean Wycliffe

Developing a Level 7 Evangelistic Business

Calvin Kim

F5 Challenge – Challenging the Status Quo!

Michelle Doucoumes

Danny Houghton

Denzil McNeilus

Brenda Palmer

Gary Rayner

Michael Tuazon

Panel: Business and Finance for Young Professionals and Entrepreneurs

Business Titans of the Bible:  Lessons for the 21st Century Entrepreneur

GW Chew

Starting a Center of Influence

Nathaniel Justin Khoe

Pick Up Your Phone and Follow Me

Eric Walsh

YP Speaker Panel

Your First Profession


My name is Jason. As Kyle said, I work for ADRA now, the Advanced Development and Relief Agency, and I help them with their marketing and development. And then I'm also on a small team that investigates social enterprise opportunities, business opportunities around the world, places where We can start businesses that generate more private funding. So we don't have to be so reliant on government funding, cuz we don't know when those streams of income will dry up. But we wanna continue serving people, the most vulnerable people around the world.

And so if that's your interest and your passion too, come talk to me afterward and we can sit down and discuss those ideas, but that's really what we're interested in at Adra, getting into that space. But today I've been asked to talk about a venture that I worked on before this in Atlanta, Georgia, which is where I'm from, called Press Together. And we were brainstorming ideas to reach the city. There was a big push from the General Conference a few years ago to reach the cities, and it's still going on. And we thought health is the way to go.

And we wanted to go after the wealthy. Often in our evangelistic efforts, we go after poor people. They have an obvious need and we can meet that need. We thought, well, how can we get into the lives of wealthy and influential people who aren't in our sphere of influence? And so I'm not a foodie kind of guy.

I didn't really want to start a restaurant. That's really expensive, but I can make some killer juice And so we developed some juice flavors in my house and we said hey, we're gonna do a juice bar But before we get into that You guys are all here to talk about business and religion and is that Venice at the end of time? No 1 will be able to what? Fire and sew. Oh man, right on cue.

And so what are we all going to do? Are we all going to be unemployed shortly? You know, should we even be talking about this? There's a super interesting quote I want to read to you guys in last day events. And do you remember that parable Jesus tells in Matthew 24, Luke 17?

2 will be sowing in the field, 1 shall be taken to the other left. 2 women will be grinding at the mill, 1 shall be taken to the other left. And oftentimes we talk, and the disciples are like, where Lord? And we're like, Is it where are they taken or is it where are they left? And that's the part we talk about.

Well, there's a super interesting quote in Last Day Events. This is what it says, Christ declared that when He comes, some of His waiting people will be engaged in business transactions. Did you hear that? Like mind blown, right? Some people are going to be doing business who are looking for Jesus coming when he comes.

I don't know how it's going to work. It says some will be sowing in the field, others reaping and gathering in the harvest, and others grinding at the mill. So I'd encourage you, now is a great time to start a business Some of God's people will be doing business at that time So we decided we're gonna open a juice bar in Atlanta. So we looked everywhere And it's like thousand square feet in Atlanta 5000 bucks a month and they want you to sign a 3 to 5 month lease. Kind of expensive to start out of the gate, and we're trying to operate on this lean startup model, right?

Friends and family financing, the best kind. And so we find this little store, it was a coffee shop, in a high-rise that's just off the strip, Peachtree, if any of you are from Atlanta, Peachtree Street is kind of like the main street, and Buckhead, and Buckhead is like the premier part of Atlanta. It's where all the wealthy guys are. And so we find this high rise that's kind of just off the strip, But there's tenants there like Salesforce, the Securities and Exchange Commission, Fannie Mae, Wells Fargo. But the building is only like half full, there's no street parking, it's terrible.

I had to be convinced to go into this spot. They said, hey, we'll let you come in here for $350 a month, And we'll only make you sign a 6 month lease and you can just go month to month afterward. So this is like free, right? It's cheaper than a shared kitchen. So I'm like, we can at least figure out the business model, refine it, start doing some deliveries and things like that.

So I developed 5 flavors of juice just 5. That's all we had in my kitchen And we we have this grand open we had kind of a soft opening where we started selling it and learning the system of making Juice we have this grand opening and my friend Jared Thurman. He had a panel yesterday He and I opened this juice bar, So we're there making juice all night. We put on our suits. We had our family come out.

We have this grand opening. We're giving away samples. I think even Jared's mom was there, his wife was there. And it's kind of slow and we start getting a little bored. And so we hired this other evidence guy.

His name is Brian. And he and I are back there and we're like, well, we wanna start expanding our line, so maybe we should try some almond milks. And we bought this press. A press is like 2 and a half tons of pressure. And so we fill this press bag with this almond mush, and we filled the bag wrong.

We filled it from the bottom, and you're supposed to fill it from the middle and fold the ends in and Literally like I'm in my soup bag. They were trying to make this almond milk So we put it in the press and it starts pressing and because we filled the bag wrong. It starts shooting out the front Now when I say shooting I'm standing in front of the machine and Brian's right here, it starts spraying us in the face. So we both jump to the side. Jared's behind me, ringing up a customer right here.

The almond milk hits him in the back of the head and he turns around to see What's going on and it sprays into his eyes and so Jared's like down out of commission like going to the sink to wipe his eyes Well, there's a lady buying juice at the register I'm like 6263. This was this was a large African-American lady taller than me, standing at the register, and almond milk is just showering down on her. No joke. I mean, it went like 3 tables back. And she stands there, and she just freezes, and she starts screaming.

Grand opening. So everyone starts grabbing towels and running everywhere, trying to wipe it all up. And I run around the counter, and I'm giving her towels to wipe herself up, and she's wiping her face, and she stops, and she looks at me, and she says, Do I look like you? She puts the towels down and goes straight up to the women's restroom. And this is how it got started, our grand opening at Press Together.

Now I wish I could tell you that was the last bad thing that happened. Our best-selling juice was this juice it was called gringo. Gringo is what they call American people down south of the border, right? It was this citrus based green juice and it had a little jalapeno in it. Well I don't know if any of you like jalapenos but some jalapenos are super hot, some aren't so hot.

We're like cold pressing jalapenos, right? Well, I mean, we're making the most premium juice you can buy. This is organic, 100%, it's cold pressed and it's raw, unpasteurized. So we press these jalapenos and we're still figuring out the recipes. I put twice as much in this batch as should have been in there.

So everyone's coming down and we're sampling, sampling, sampling, and now I'm like, you should try this juice. I mean this was a unique juice, you couldn't get this juice anywhere else. It was like my custom recipe. And people taste it and their face turns red and they start coughing and they're like sputtering and they're like losing their voices. And they're like, what's in this?

And I'm like, it's a little jalapeno, a little splash of jalapeno. A little splash, right? Well, what happened was it was the best marketing thing that could have happened to us because they went and told everyone about it. And it really taught me an important lesson about marketing in life. And that's that often we want to blend in with everyone else, right?

Maybe we want our clothes to look the same, our social media page to look the same. But if we want to do something that makes people remark about us, if we want to do something remarkable, we got to do something a little different, right? And so they shared this experience. So everyone's coming down from the building, like I got to try this jalapeno juice. Where is it?

Everyone's telling me about it. It's super hot. We toned down the jalapeno in there and that ended up being our best selling juice. We still have it almost every day. And so this is how we got started.

So we had this 1 store. We expanded there. We did some more juices. I think we did about 8 or 9 and we started making smoothies. We got into acai bowls, like immunity shots.

We tried raw food for a while. I mean, we tried everything, just seeing what would work. About 9 months later, we opened a second store. Then a year after that, we opened a third store And the Lord was really blessing. Things were going well.

We were delivering to companies every week. We were going to some farmers markets. And so as time went on, we had this lady who was ordering juice from us in these really odd amounts. We started making these cashew milks and she'd order like 10 at 1 time. And we're like, that's not really the most healthy thing, you know, to just be drinking all this cashew milk.

And so we started trying to find out, you know, what was going on. This lady was married to the trainer of the Atlanta Hawks NBA basketball team. And she'd order all this juice when her husband would go on these NBA trips Because I guess she didn't want to cook and they were more filling Well, her husband comes home and is like hey, what's that? He starts drinking some he ends up losing like 60 pounds You think like, you know professional trainers of athletes. They'd be the most healthy.

No, not necessarily. He's like, this stuff is amazing. I gotta get my players to drink this stuff. So he brings us down to Phillips Arena and puts a cooler, pressed together cooler, down in the locker room of the NBA players. And so we're delivering to the Hawks every week, and he says, hey, let me introduce you to my friend over at the Atlanta Braves, which is our Major League Baseball team.

So they're like, hey, we want to get our players more nutrition. They need to recover better. What do you have? So We brought in samples for them. They're like, hey, we love it.

So we met the chefs, and we put it down at Turner Field at the time. And so we had the Hawks drinking our juice, the Braves drinking our juice. And back at that time, the Hawks were number 1 in the East. Now you know they're down at the bottom, but they're not getting juice anymore. And so That's what happens.

So the Lord was really blessing what we were doing. We hired all Adventist young people working their way through high school, college. We had some refugee kids who were on scholarship to go to Adventist school. We gave them a job over there. And so that's kind of how we were doing it.

Now, how do we do mission work out of a juice bar? All of our shirts on the back of them said, Jesus' first miracle was making juice. And people were like, man, that's a dope shirt. Like, where do I get that? And I'm like, it's a true story.

And they're like, what? And so I say, yes, in John chapter 2, go check it out. And people who never had any idea that that was in the Bible. We started these things called Juice and Learns, where we would go to companies and we would give away free juice if they'd all come listen to a health talk that we would give. And so Jared or another guy would give a presentation, like 30 minutes, and we'd talk all about the Adventist health message, how to live like the Adventists in the Blue Zones.

And we give the whole presentation. They didn't even necessarily know we were Adventists, but a whole bunch of them would line up in the end, and they'd want to talk to us because they had different health challenges. And of course, we'd tell them, you know, we're Adventists, and we'd share these principles with them. And so we started doing that. We actually hired someone who got paid a lot of money.

And I think this is a business for any of you. If you have a product to go around and give health talks at businesses, they have money set aside for health and wellness that will pay you to do that. So we did those. We didn't necessarily have great controversies and desire of ages and GloVe tracks on the table. My wife and I wrote a health book and we'd give that out at different events.

But a co-worker of mine would always have books on hand to share. But he would tab certain pages and he would highlight things. And so as we got to know people, he would give them to them individually and tell them, hey, I highlighted some stuff in here that you've been sharing with me. I think this would be really helpful to you. And so it was more like a Waldenzian thing, where we thought we had the best juice in the world.

Waldenzians have these rare silks and jewels and things like that. And they would share as they had opportunities. And That's kind of how we did things at Press Together. Recently, as was mentioned, we sold it to the Nevada Utah Conference. My friend is a pastor there.

He's getting his PhD and trying to figure out how to reach millennials in the cities because we're all leaving the church, but not everyone. Amen? Some of us are still here and we want to reach out to other people. And so he's like, hey, how can I reach Millennials in the city? I want to start a juice bar.

And so I reached out to him. I said, hey, if you need any advice, let me know. And he said, well, we'd love to franchise kind of what you're doing. Well, I'm a for-profit. You know, the church is a non-profit.

And I think that was a little too much for them to figure out how to do. I said, why don't we just sell it to you guys? He said, okay. They're going to open the first 1 just outside of Salt Lake City. Then I think from there they're going to try to go to Las Vegas and continue to expand throughout the Nevada Utah Conference as a way to they're going to hire canvassers and people with their literature program to come work there to provide some more income for them and then minister to people in the local community.

So we're super excited about that. We had a couple come over from the Middle East North Africa union who wanted to start a ministry there, a COI, to reach people in a closed country where you can't be open about evangelism. We trained them for a couple of weeks. They took everything back, and now there's a juice bar open in 1 of these closed countries. And so we still are in touch with them But all this from literally hardly any money from friends and family in a building that we had no business being in We thought we'd be there for 6 months.

I told Jared like 3 months. I'm out of here and It ended up being our best store for the For all 3 and a half years we were there, we had some great friends there, and the Lord really blessed. And so I would just encourage you, start small, put it in the Lord's hands, and He'll cause it to grow and expand to reach more people for His kingdom. And so thank you for your time and appreciate your prayers as that ministry continues to go forward in Utah now. If you would like to learn more about ASI, please visit www.asiaministries.org.

Or if you would like to listen to more free online sermons, please visit www.audioverse.org. Dot audioverse dot org

Back to Menu

Series

Young Professionals

Jesus’ first miracle was making juice!

Description

Parent Series

Parent Conference

Sponsor

Recorded

Other Teachings in Series

History & Mission of ASI

Jesus’ first miracle was making juice!

Developing a Level 7 Evangelistic Business

F5 Challenge – Challenging the Status Quo!

Panel: Business and Finance for Young Professionals and Entrepreneurs

4 more

Business Titans of the Bible: Lessons for the 21st Century Entrepreneur

Starting a Center of Influence

Pick Up Your Phone and Follow Me

YP Speaker Panel

6 more

Your First Profession

Sound Doctrine