The LYNAY Business Manifesto
Love Your Neighbour As Yourself (LYNAY), where your customers are your neighbours in business.
God wants you to live an eternal life of creativity, abundance and authority with Him. However, an intelligent spiritual enemy, who is determined to cause death, poverty and destruction through deception, rebelled against God and broke our original connection with Him. God restored that broken connection and revealed the Path needed to return to an eternal life filled with creativity, abundance and authority alongside Him — but only if you choose to accept it with faith.
This Path is Jesus Christ, the Son of God who is still alive today. Starting the Path means changing the way we think and accepting Him as our Lord and Saviour and His gift of salvation. Walking the Path involves loving others as ourselves in all areas of our lives.
As entrepreneurs, this includes loving our customers as ourselves. One way we can do this is by operating the internal part of our businesses like a ministry and modelling that ministry on the ministry of Jesus. This means solving our customers' problems, helping them receive life-improving transformations, teaching and sharing the gospel of the kingdom along the way.
To be extremely clear, this does not imply that Jesus sold healing, biblical teaching, preaching or anything He did to help people. Nor does this imply that we should sell anything of that nature. We are only taking our business (that already sells products and services that God would be happy for us to sell) and running it in a way that applies Christ's teachings and models His actions. It also does not suggest that business is the only way or area in life to love others as ourselves. It is just looking at one of many areas of an entrepreneur's life where this commandment could be applied and what that would look like.
To do this, making money cannot be the business focus. Customer success stories are the business focus. Money is simply a receipt we receive when we successfully serve a person through our business (even if they pay before they receive the service, as that payment is still up for refund until an expected result is delivered). That receipt can then be used to serve more people (whether that's more customers, our friends and family, the church or complete strangers in need).
When profit is the focus, our quality of service to customers can be compromised and money can become an idol. When sustainably serving as many customers as we can is the focus, our quality of service stays high, we stay aligned with the teachings of Jesus and profits get generated anyway as a side effect.
The seed we must sow to produce the fruit of customer success is wisdom. Wisdom is the proven ability to apply knowledge and skills rightly. Stewarding wisdom (yours and your team's) for the service of customers is the job.
The reverence of God is the beginning of wisdom.