61 - Balancing Business Success and Spiritual Growth | Alan Barnhart

Imagine giving away half of your business profits to charity. Not content with that, you give up ownership of your company by transferring 99% of the shares into a charitable trust. That’s what Alan Barnhart did. “I want to be good in business, and I’m competitive but I wanted to make sure that if we were successful in business, it wouldn't hurt us spiritually.” So, he balanced business success and spiritual growth by giving it all to God, the true owner of the company.

Alan Barnhart joins us today to talk about his pursuit of business with a purpose and of being called by God to use his engineering and business skills to serve the kingdom. Having led Barnhart Crane & Rigging to definitive success for the past decades, Alan never lost sight of the lessons about money he learned from the Bible early on.

Key Points From This Episode:

• What did Alan learn about money from the Bible?
• As the business flourished, how did Alan and his brother/business partner put safeguards in their life so that they will not fall into the trappings of wealth and affluence?
• What are the critical aspects of business that helped Alan grow the business steadily through the years?
• Alan’s advice to business owners on how to incorporate and structure the giving component of their business.
• What has been the impact of 37 years of giving for Alan, for the company, and for the beneficiaries?
• Alan reflects on the question: Is it harder to give away money than to make money?

Tweetables:

“I wanted to make sure that if we were successful in business, it wouldn't hurt us spiritually.”

“If God chooses to prosper the business, we're going to see that as an opportunity to further the kingdom as opposed to further our lifestyle.”

“People say it’s a really bad strategy to jettison 50% of our profits but we give away 50% of our profits; we take the other 50% and use it to grow the business, and God has given us plenty.”

“It's essential to include God in the equation while investing in the business.”

Links Mentioned in Today’s Episode:

Barnhart Crane & Rigging

Kingdom Companies Group

The Grove

The Kingdom Investor Podcast on LinkedIn

About Alan Barnhart

Alan Barnhart is the CEO of Barnhart Crane & Rigging. He grew up working in the steel-erecting business his father founded in Memphis, Tennessee in 1969. During high school and college, Alan and his brother, Eric, worked summers as ironworkers and crane operators learning the business from the ground up. In college, Alan studied civil engineering, coursework that would serve him well after joining the business full-time in the early 1980s. Barnhart Crane & Rigging has grown to be one of the largest Heavy Lift and Heavy Transport organizations in the United States with more than 40 locations across the country and a nationwide reputation for solving problems.

Alan, Eric, and their families decided to give 100% of their highly successful business to charity to keep wealth from taking over their lives. About 50 percent of all company earnings are donated immediately to charity. The remaining 50 percent is used to grow the business. And in 2007, they gave the entire company to National Christian Foundation. Though they still run their daily operations, the brothers will never reap its accrued value; they kept none of it.

Alan and his wife, Katherine, have six children and reside in Tennessee.