Founders Advisors was honored to hear from founding senior pastor of Church of the Highlands, Pastor Chris Hodges. Based in Birmingham, AL, Church of the Highlands has 26 campuses throughout Alabama and into Columbus, Georgia. Pastor Chris is also a New York Times Bestselling Author, co-founder of Association of Related Churches (ARC), and founder & chancellor of Highlands College. With a track record of leading one of the fastest growing and most influential churches in America, he brought his wealth of knowledge and experience to Founders to shed light on principles of organizational excellence.

A few key takeaways from our time with Pastor Chris on building a healthy, thriving business:

1. Clarify the Measurable Win – What is our “it” and how will we know when we have achieved “it”? Does the whole team know what our “it” is?
2. What Will We Do to Accomplish the Win? – Create a system to accomplish this vision. A system is designed to deliver vision. Don’t fall in love with your system, fall in love with your vision. It’s not really what you’re trying to accomplish that makes you great, it’s the way you deliver it.
3. Is it Working? – Don’t wait until something is totally broken to fix it; implement time for preventative maintenance. If you don’t know why it’s working when it’s working, you won’t know how to fix it when it’s broken. How do you evaluate results? -Collect the data, evaluate the results, celebrate the wins, confront the facts, then get better. 
4. What are the Keys to Success? – You can’t create a culture; you can only be it. People don’t remember what you do, they remember how you made them feel.
5. What is Most Important Right Now? – “What one thing, if it got better, would make the biggest difference? If you don’t know the answer, you are not living a focused-enough life.”

Thank you, Pastor Chris, for your wisdom and impact on us all!