The Market as Mission

My wife and I own a business together, called Doerksen Editing. While originally we dealt in English editing services, over time, our offerings evolved to other things, like simple website design. I started Doerksen Editing back when I was freshly graduated from seminary and in desperate need of every additional cent I could find to help pay for food and rent and over time my wife has largely come to take the reigns. She has always been the more talented editor between the two of us, anyway.

The first client we ever had was Chris. His company worked out of Waterloo and did search engine optimization and marketing for small to mid-sized businesses. He needed someone proficient with English to look over the content he was producing to make sure that when it went out, it was clean and professional. As Shannon and I were living mainly off of dried pasta and whatever can be fried with rice at the time, we happily jumped at the opportunity to meet that need.

Whenever I thank the Lord for the people he has put into my life over the years, I pretty routinely think of Chris. He was a Baptist, in the best of ways. When he was first starting out, he had made a promise to himself that if he was going to run a business, he was going to do it as he figured a Christian ought to. That meant to him that he would always make an effort to see and treat his employees as people. When one was struggling either in life or with their work, he would go out of his way to help them. While there were a few people he had to let go over the years, in each of those cases I was impressed by how hard he tried to work to make sure that did not happen.

Chris was also highly selective when it came to taking on new clients. Every time a new business approached him, he would spend time researching them first. What was this business like to do work with? How did they treat those around them? How did they treat their employees? I asked him one time why we went to these lengths, and he told me that since it was his job to help promote other businesses, he didn’t want to be responsible for promoting toxicity in the marketplace. And so, if after getting to know the company he decided it wasn’t going to be a good fit, he would politely decline, explaining that as they did not share a vision, he knew he couldn’t do his best work for them. Fair enough.

To Chris, the marketplace was his mission field, and that reflected how he ran his business. How he treated his employees, his collaborators and his clients was just as important to him as his bottom line, and that is a message that has impacted me to this day.  This was not to say that Chris was afraid of a little competition, in fact, he thrived on it. Instead he simply always understood the goal of his business to be broader than to simply profit.

I think there is a lie we have largely bought into that tells us that in order to be successful in business we have to focus purely on getting money. A lie that tells us that if we widen our gaze past that dark and narrow path, we can expect in time our company will certainly crash and burn. Working with Chris, I can say his business is still making him and his family a living over a decade later. Working with him to put together different content for his clients, I can say the same for most of them, and they largely operate in the heart of Southern Ontario, likely the most cutthroat market Canada has.

Could Chris have earned a bit more if he thought of his employees as expendable and took on the worst of the clientele that came to him? Maybe, but at the end of the day, I have never met a single person who was not impacted for the better by Chris. I have never met a single person who did not think highly of him. I could see Chris’s faith playing out in the world around him and making it a better place. There is a lot of value in that as well. If you make a living either way, I know which option I would choose.

The more I think of it, it is a little horrifying to think that the only purpose of a business is to profit. Your business is where you will spend most of your waking hours for decades. Your business will be one of the major ways you define yourself over your lifetime. With your business, you are impacting people. With your business, you are creating something bigger than yourself. If after all that time, all that effort, all those interactions are narrowed down to only “I did it to earn money”, what a waste of the largest chunk of your life that would be. Making money, and earning a living is a major part of any business, to be sure, but you can still do that while also building something worth building as well. You can still do that, while also living a Christian witness to the world around you.

There will always be another corner to cut. There will often be an employee that it will be easier to discard rather than work with. There will always be sketchy things you can do, and sketchy people you can work with for a few more cents. But more likely than not, as Chris taught me, you will make a living either way. So why not choose to live in a way that leaves the world better off?