This article draws from a conversation between SEO consultant and podcast host Jeremy Rivera and entrepreneur, professor, and author Brad Poulos on the Unscripted Small Business Podcast. Brad teaches entrepreneurship at Toronto Metropolitan University and consults to businesses in the $5–50M range across North America.
There’s a question every Christian entrepreneur should sit with — not just as a business diagnostic, but as a discipleship question.
Brad Poulos, who has spent fifteen years teaching lean startup and business strategy at Toronto Metropolitan University, puts it this way:
“If you can’t go to Barbados and sit on the beach and you’re making money, you do not have a business. You own your job.”
— Brad Poulos
It sounds like a business question. But for those of us who follow Christ in the marketplace, it goes somewhere deeper.
If the business cannot function without you present for every decision, every client call, every quality check — then you haven’t built a company. You’ve built a system in which you are the irreplaceable center. And that raises a question worth praying through: is this the kind of stewardship God calls us to?
Stewardship Is Not the Same as Control
The parable of the talents in Matthew 25 is one of the most entrepreneurially vivid passages in Scripture. The master gives each servant resources — not equal amounts, but each according to their ability. Then he leaves. He doesn’t manage over their shoulders. He trusts them with outcomes and returns to find what they’ve made of what he entrusted.
Notice what the master doesn’t do: he doesn’t make himself the only person capable of moving things forward. He delegates the outcome. The servants who honored the trust were the ones who ran with it, took the risk, and multiplied what they’d been given.
The servant who buried his talent — the one who played it safe, kept everything close, couldn’t let the resource operate without his direct management — was the one the master rebuked.
We can build our businesses the same way. When we hold every decision, carry every relationship personally, and structure our companies so that nothing works without us — we may tell ourselves it’s dedication. But it might be closer to burying the talent than multiplying it.
The Barbados Test, Reframed
Brad’s test isn’t really about Barbados. It’s about whether you’ve built something that can carry the mission beyond your own capacity and availability.
For a Christian entrepreneur, that matters theologically. God gives us abilities, opportunities, and resources to be multiplied — not bottlenecked through our own insistence on personal control. A business that can only function when you’re present is a business where the work of your hands is limited to what your hands can personally touch. That’s a ceiling on impact, not just on income.
“Don’t delegate tasks — delegate outcomes. Give someone a result to own. A-players figure out the tasks.”
— Jeremy Rivera, Unscripted Small Business Podcast
Brad describes what he calls the Vancouver test. When a team member came to him with a problem during his years running businesses across the Americas, he’d ask: “What would you have done if I was in Vancouver last week?”
They’d answer. He’d say: do that.
What he was doing was something deeply consistent with a Kingdom-minded approach to leadership. He was treating the people around him as capable. As trustworthy. As people equipped to solve problems and exercise judgment — and investing in their growth by giving them room to do it.
That’s not just good management. That’s discipleship in the marketplace.
Getting the Right People in the Right Seats
Brad introduces a framework with real wisdom for faith-driven leaders building teams. He distinguishes between organic roles — the ones that need people who can own an outcome and find the path — and mechanistic roles — the ones where consistency, reliability, and faithful execution within a defined lane are exactly what’s needed.
His example: a McDonald’s franchise. The fries are figured out. You don’t need an entrepreneurial innovator in the fryer. You need someone who executes faithfully and consistently — in Toronto the same way as in Shanghai.
There’s something theologically honest here. Not every person in your business is called to the same kind of contribution. Some are called to ownership and initiative. Others are called to faithful, excellent execution. Both are forms of stewardship. Both are honorable. The mistake is putting one kind of person in the other kind of seat.
“Knowing which ones are which, and then being able to find the right values in people to get them in the right seats on that bus — that’s what makes a really good leader.”
— Brad Poulos
For a Christian business owner, that right-seats question has a spiritual dimension: what is each person on your team actually called to contribute — and are you creating the conditions for them to do it?
When the Business Depends Entirely on You
Jeremy shared something honest during their conversation. Over twenty years in SEO — freelance, agency, in-house, his own projects — he’d had stretches where he was paying himself poorly as his own employer. Putting everything in and getting little out, because the shop had exactly one person in it: him.
That’s a familiar story for Christian entrepreneurs who feel the pull to carry it all. We can baptize overwork in the language of faithfulness. We can tell ourselves that our involvement in every detail is care, not control. We can mistake irreplaceability for indispensability — as though God’s work in and through the business depends on our personal presence at every decision point.
It usually doesn’t.
The business that frees you from daily operational necessity isn’t less dependent on God. It’s often more so — because it’s dependent on a team of people who are each being equipped, developed, and trusted to steward their part of the work.
The Profit Motive and Faithfulness to Mission
Brad makes an observation about outside investment that’s worth sitting with from a faith perspective. Once investors are in, he says, profit becomes the only motive. Mission, culture, the long game — all of these become negotiable in ways they weren’t before.
“The profit above all else motive doesn’t serve society particularly well. It serves investors well. It doesn’t serve employees well.”
— Brad Poulos
For entrepreneurs whose mission is grounded in something beyond return multiples, this matters practically. Staying bootstrapped — or being very intentional about the values of any investor you bring in — is a way of protecting the integrity of what you’re building. Not every outside capital structure is incompatible with Kingdom values. But some structures make faithfulness to mission structurally harder. Knowing that going in is wisdom.
Three Questions Worth Sitting With This Week
Not just strategically — prayerfully:
- Can you step away for two weeks, fully? If the answer is no, what does that reveal about how you’ve structured your stewardship? What would need to change?
- Are the people around you in the right seats? Are there people in your organization who have more to contribute than you’re allowing? Are you giving them outcomes to own, or only tasks to execute — when they’re capable of the former?
- What is the business actually for? Not just as a mission statement — but as a lived operational reality. Are the decisions you make day to day consistent with the purpose you say drives the work?
The Barbados test isn’t really about a beach. It’s about whether you’ve built something that can carry the work further than your own two hands can carry it. For the entrepreneur who follows Christ, that’s worth building toward.
Listen to the full conversation: Unscripted Small Business Podcast — Brad Poulos on Building SMBs That Run Without You
Watch: youtu.be/VZiorkvdUkM
Brad Poulos: bradpoulos.com · confidentoperator.com
Books: The Small Business Operator’s Manual · Most Problems Solve Themselves · From Pitch to Payoff
Podcast: Unscripted Small Business · Host: Jeremy Rivera