Christian Ray Flores here,
First, an opportunity.
This is for you if you’re a founder, business owner or CEO without a big internal marketing team or an agency on retainer.
Which usually means your marketing underwhelms you. No strategy or system behind the social. A website that undersells you. Little or no video. No clear direction holding it together.
If the fit is right, you can have a strategist and a full team working fractionally, at premium level, for less than the cost of one full-time hire.
I’m looking to get started with 2-3 people this fall. If that’s you, click here and let’s talk.
stop giving back
I first heard this on Rabbi Daniel Lapin’s podcast and it reframed the concept for me.
If we call charity “giving back,” it implies we were taking everywhere else. That life is zero sum. That scarcity is the normal condition and generosity is how you make up for it.
Daniel Lapin’s argument is that generosity is a way of being, available at any level of income. It comes from a mind that sees enough and wants to share it.
Three places I watch this play out.
the poor
Last week I heard that a family at our Ascend Academy was going hungry. A single mom raising three daughters on $50 a month. Talk about impossible.We mobilized our local crew and food was delivered the next day. The kids already get a meal at the academy. We’re working on an ongoing plan to cover nutrition for the rest of the families. If you want to help, reach out.
This is Cristina, responding to a table covered with food for her family.
in business
Most business in human history was small business. Not multinational, not globalized.You exchanged something valuable for pay, but the relationship was as valuable as the service or product. How you treated others mattered just as much.
I treasure my clients as friends. There are agreements to honor, but obligations are only the minimum framework for a relationship.Our motto is to overdeliver against what we promised. I’ve handed a client two months of work at no charge, just to support our alignement for the long term.
with friends
Friendship is the least transactional relationship we have. Even here, the more generous you are with your time, your attention, your curiosity, the better the friendship gets.
True friendship will cost you or it’s not true or it doesn’t last.
You’re overflowing onto other people instead of sitting at the center of your own world.
That draws in people who live the same way.
Celebrating small victories. Showing up when they’re in trouble. Mourning with them when they lose someone or something.
Nobody is giving anything back. We’re acting the way we actually are, which is whole.
Giving back is a flawed concept. Giving for the sake of giving is a better one.
“It is more blessed to give than to receive.” - Acts 20:35