Developing a Mission Mindset

I quit my day job on July 3, 2008 to start my own company, Perkline. Exactly 16 years later, on July 3, 2024, we received an offer to buy our business.

Brothers, Brian & Mark Roland

I celebrate my personal Independence Day every July 3rd. This tradition started in 2008 when my brother and I took a leap of faith to pursue our budding start up, Perkline. 16 years later, on the exact same day, we received an LOI to buy our business from a company we truly admire.

One of the many liberties I celebrate every 4th of July is the freedom to pursue my own entrepreneurial ideas, set my own schedule, and honor God with my work. 

In 2008, at 28 years old, I was succeeding in every measurable way. I was newly married, had built our first house, was working for a visionary entrepreneur, earning a six-figure income, and managing my own team.

I had everything, except for meaningful work. As a Christian, I knew that nothing I owned was mine, and pursuing more things in life didn’t bring me joy.

I was working long hours, traveling often, and going into the office on some weekends.

At the end of the day, I couldn’t tell if my efforts had any long-term impact. And if they didn’t, what was the point? While I was living with a mission mindset, I had no mission.

I had accomplished everything, and nothing, at the same time.

It was time for a change.

I'd worked long enough to know that putting my identity in our brand, our product, our customers, or our outcomes would never be enough. I also believed that while God calls us to steward His resources, He is in charge of the results.

If God is responsible for the impact made, then we're simply responsible for our efforts along the way, right?

We decided to test this idea by creating a financial model around our business that supported children and communities in the developing world with a portion of every dollar we earned. Making this commitment was particularly easy, considering we hadn't earned our first dollar yet.

This Impact Plan became our “why” and created a mission mindset for our company, while providing meaningful work, shared purpose, and a sense of community for our team. To our surprise, it even reached the hearts of our customers.

I later learned that our Impact Plan was a form of social entrepreneurship that is underutilized in the marketplace. As it turns out, there are amazing organizations out there like C12 and Faith Driven Entrepreneur who are interested in helping business owners like me apply Biblical principles and leadership insights within the marketplace as a way to honor God with our work, reflect His love to all people, and drive profitability for our stakeholders.

While this makes for a fun stroll down memory lane, it reminds me of our dramatic start.

We officially founded our business in January 2006, but it took 2.5 years for us to get to the point where we could go full time. We reached our first inflection point in mid 2008. I was having trouble managing the daily needs of our start up with my free time, and my brother Mark was ready to start his career after graduating from UC Irvine with his master’s degree in Arts, Computation, & Engineering. At this point, we had a big decision to make. Were we all in with Perkline, or not?

Despite the odds, and with the help of my wife's $36k teaching salary, we got our budding business to the point where our revenue met our living expenses. We took a leap of faith and I provided two weeks notice to my employer. 

July 3rd, 2008 was my last day working for someone else.

Our years-long dream of being full time entrepreneurs came true, and with the Independence Day weekend approaching, you might imagine that we were celebrating - but we weren't.

We were panicking.

Legal Notice

We launched our business in 2006 with the name Perkline. We chose this name because it was memorable, easy to spell, related to our offerings, and most important to me, the .com domain was available!

We felt like Perkline was the perfect name for our employee discount programs.

But while we loved our name, we soon found out that a law firm in New York City felt differently.

A couple of weeks earlier, I received an urgent FedEx envelope at home, requiring us to cease all use of Perkline by July 2nd to avoid legal action.

We were officially in the deep end of the entrepreneurial pool and it wasn't even our first day yet.

We needed to find a new name for our company, and fast! Up Next: "Picking A $1M Brand Name"

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