One Man's Mission to Find Work, Purpose, and Meaning for Millions

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That's Upfaithandfamily.com. Sex, politics, IVF, mental illness. I bet you have rarely, if ever, heard these topics discussed in church. And I bet you've got questions about them that you'd love to ask a pastor. Well, there's a podcast that tackles these taboo topics. I'm Pastor Mike Novotny with Time of Grace Ministry and in my new podcast, Taboo Questions with Pastor Mike Novotny, I answer questions from people just like you as I open up the Bible to give answers that point people back to the truth and especially to our Savior Jesus.

To listen, just search Taboo Questions with Pastor Mike. This is Lee Habib and this is Our American Stories, the show where America is the star and the American people. And we love work. Work is good. Work gives us meaning and purpose. And where does work come from?

Of course, it comes mostly from private people starting businesses and employing people. Up first, a man who knows a lot about work. His name is Bob Funk and he founded Express Employment Professionals, a staffing business that he built over four decades. Here to tell the story is Bob himself.

Many call him the Minister of Work. Take it away, Bob. My dad had a dairy, born in 1940, and he went broke in the dairy business in 1945, but he kept four cows. And my mother had a nervous breakdown when I was two, so my sister trained me and kept me. We were going broke on the ranching.

It was a financial pressure. She was at a prayer meeting at the church and she just passed out and my grandmother put her in a saint asylum. And so dad went to visit her one Sunday afternoon and she said, I'm not crazy like these folks that are in here.

You know, get me out of here. And so dad got her out and the doctor said, you know, just lay quiet for a while and you'll snap out of it. She basically took care of me until mom got well. And she was two years older than I was. And mom had her nervous breakdown when I was two.

She was four. But she got in the first grade when she was five. And so she came and taught me everything because mom was laying in bed, you know, 24-7.

And so she would come and teach me everything that she had learned in school that day. So by the time I got to be five years old, they tried to skip me two grades. They tried to put me in the third grade instead of the first grade and my mother wouldn't let them.

Then they said, well, let me skip him with just one grade. And mom said, no, we're not going to let you do that either. And the doctor told mom, you go get a job, get your mind off of the finances. And so she had worked in a grocery store when she was a little younger. So she went to work in a grocery store for free of charge for groceries.

And so we had we had really some nice groceries. Dad then went to work as a maintenance person on the highway department. He had a sixth grade education, but he loved his cows. Dad was a true dairy farmer.

He just loved those cows. They ate better than we kids did. In high school, I had four shirts all the way through high school and three pair of Levi's. But we had a real small community.

The town was only three hundred and thirty people. In my my grade school class, five of us were cousins out of the eight of us. And so it was just a small town and we had to go 10 miles north of 10 miles south to high school.

I think I had 56 in my high school class and it was a real wonderful experience. I started playing tennis when when I was young because mother working at the grocery store, there was a tennis court right beside it. And to keep my sister and I apart, she decided I should work at the grocery store and help her, you know, stack cans and stuff. So I picked up a racket and started playing tennis. And I tell these anybody in town to play me in tennis. And so when I got to high school as a freshman, I started playing tennis. And of course, ended up number one after about a year and a half. And then when I went to college, I played number number one the last two years in college and tennis as well.

But that was because of circumstances when I was young that my mother let me play tennis, some tennis court inside the grocery store. Being from a small town, the pastor we had at that time, I didn't know Billy Graham from Adam. And he he he encouraged all of us to go to the Billy Graham Crusade in Seattle. If someone had told me when I was 20 years old that life was very short and would pass just like that, I wouldn't have believed it.

And if I tell you that, you don't believe it either. I cannot get young people to understand how brief life is, how quickly it passes. It seems like yesterday I was in school. And as an 11 year old, I knew that I had plenty of sin in my life. And so at his crusade, you know, his style was to invite people to make a commitment spiritually in their lives. And so I thought, if I don't make a commitment, chances are our bus is going to turn over and I'm going to die tonight anyway. So I had better make the commitment tonight. So I made it made the commitment. And of course, it turned my whole life into a spiritual environment. And that's when I decided I'd be going in the ministry. That was his third crusade, by the way.

He started in Los Angeles, went to San Francisco and then came to Seattle. Well, I started working for wages when I was 14, and we worked from six in the morning until 10 at night, seven days a week. Work was never difficult. It was just I thought it was a lot of fun. I had a lot of energy at the age of 14. So I work on a farm with baling hay and shoveling manure. I think it was a challenge to see if I could do it better than anyone else.

The drive factor I learned when I was very young. Because my dad worked from eight in the morning to four thirty, milked cows at six in the morning, came home, milked four cows at night. Mom worked at the grocery store till six thirty, seven o'clock every night. So our whole family was accustomed to a good work ethic and a hard work ethic.

But it never it never occurred to me that it was really a bother. It was always a privilege. And you're listening to Bob Funk tell his story about work. And of course, he's the founder of Express Employment Professionals. When we come back, more Bob Funk story here on Our American Stories. This is Lee Habib, host of Our American Stories, the show where America is the star in the American people.

And we do it all from the heart of the South, Oxford, Mississippi. But we truly can't do this show without you. Our shows will always be free to listen to, but they're not free to make. If you love what you hear, consider making a tax deductible donation to our American stories. Go to our American stories dot com. Give a little.

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That's Upfaithandfamily.com. Ever had questions for your pastor but felt awkward or embarrassed to ask them? Maybe questions about sex or politics or IVF or mental illness? There's a podcast for that. I'm Pastor Mike Novotny with Time of Grace Ministry and in my new podcast, Taboo Questions with Pastor Mike Novotny, I answer questions from people just like you. I open up the Bible to give answers that point people back to the truth and especially to Jesus.

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Let's pick up where we last left off. Our whole family was accustomed to a good work ethic and a hard work ethic, but it never occurred to me that it was really a bother. It was always a privilege to work and a privilege to, even if it's late at night, I had a cousin. Adolph worked from six in the morning until, and he milked till midnight every night. So consequently, I'd stay up there and try and talk to him and help him until about 10 o'clock every night. Adolph had not had a day off in 17 years until I became 17 years old, and he had confidence that I could milk his cows for him.

So he took four days off and went and saw some cousins in Nebraska. But he was a worker. I mean, he could outwork me every day that he was there.

We'd go shovel gravel. I couldn't keep up with him. That irritated me a little bit because I was a young rascal that's 17, 18 years old. I should have been able to outwork him. I had a hay crew in the summertime when I was 16, and I had three other kids that I was trying to work.

They didn't like me very well because when you start working at six in the morning and get done at midnight, the work ethic has been instilled since I was extremely young. It never hurt anybody in my mind to work hard long hours is a privilege, even in this business. I have told many of the employees, I may not be as smart as you are, but I guarantee I can outwork you. And sometimes the extra work that you put into it gains a lot of extra experience and extra revenue streams. And of course, playing that much athletics, being number one is the only place to be.

No one remembers who was number two. So today we're number one basically in light industrial office services business nationwide. And I think we're number six in overall business professional and so forth in the U.S. at this time. And business is very competitive. Business is like athletics. You have all these competitors out there, just like in athletics you have all these other players out there. So business is competitive and so you have to sharpen your mind. You have to sharpen your day in order to compete, learn what to do different in order to succeed.

And only in America can you do what we've done because other countries are controlled by so few. But in America, you can start small and if you want to be competitive, you can compete with the biggies if you want to. Just depends on how long you want to work at it and how hard you want to work at it. So yeah, it's a privilege to be number one at whatever you do.

Of course, you have to work hard to stay there because there's others that learn your techniques and want to be number one as well. It's just like athletics, not much different at all. I think, for example, Future Farmers of America teaches you some basics that help you the rest of your life. I would not have been able to go to college if it had not been the scholarships that I earned through the FFA program because we had no money at all. And then, of course, I was able to earn enough money in the summertime. So that was a privilege to get that degree, which, by the way, they honored me by giving me an honorary doctorate degree. And I had I had a little bit of fun with that because you got six, seven thousand people there for graduation. And I basically said, you know, I remember in college, the A students were always the ones that that were bragged on, you know, that were the preferred student.

Let me put it that way. And so when I was in college, I was not a preferred student because I was playing tennis and so forth. But so I said to them in my speech, you know, I need to tell you that I was in the one half of the class that made the upper half possible. And you can see those professors just just cringing on that front row.

Because that was the truth. My grade point average was only 2.9. On my master's program, I had almost a straight A, but my undergrad was only a 2.9 grade. But I could just see those professors say, oh, Bob, don't don't don't say that, you know, because I encourage everybody to get as high grade as possible. But there's common sense in life. And we see this in our business that the real intellectual people have a difficult time in life. The ones who have common sense, work ethic, integrity, values are usually the most successful.

The average millionaire in America had a 2.9 grade point average. It's probably because, you know, we know we have to drive ourselves harder to overcome maybe the intellect. I've always said to hire people who are much smarter than you are and they'll help you to be successful. But you have to have a lot of common sense, particularly in business. You have to see what other competitors are doing.

You have to see what you're doing on a daily basis. You have to see what your value system is in your company. That's why I love the cattle business.

I love it because the people, because of their integrity level. We have sold about 260 million dollars worth of cattle, probably. And out of that 260 million, we've had less than a million dollars of bad accounts receivable. And they come to the ranch, they sign their name and their address and a handshake.

That's all it is. There's no big contracts, but they're just quality people that have integrity. And a company is only as good as their people.

It's not because they have better ideas. I've seen many companies fail because they had great ideas but they didn't have the right people. I've seen many companies succeed that didn't have the best ideas, but they had great people. And loyal people through thick and thin because they were stuck with me. That's really the only reason that we succeeded.

Young people ask, what do they need? They need integrity first, work ethic second, and of course a drive third in order to succeed. But you've got to have integrity.

If you lose your integrity, you've lost most everything. And you've been listening to Bob Funk and he is the founder of Express Employment Professionals and has employed and connected workers to work for generations. And so many hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people he found work. And my goodness, did he know what work was. Working for wages began when he was 14 at his cousin Adolph's farm. I worked from six in the morning till ten at night every day of the week, he said.

I wrote about Bob in Newsweek and I wrote this. God demanded that his people work six days a week. Adolph, his cousin it turns out, required seven. It was from his cousin and his mother and dad too that Funk developed a strong work ethic that would guide his life. And by the way, that story of asking for his first day off in 17 years, he gave that responsibility to a 17-year-old because he wanted to visit cousins in Nebraska. And so without that cousin Adolph, who knows what would have happened to Bob Funk and without his mom and dad. And when we come back, more of the life of Bob Funk, a man who many call the minister of work, here on Our American Stories.

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How do we go about supporting government leaders when we may not want to vote for or support any of them? Do babies who die in the womb go to heaven? Are there only certain reasons in the Bible that are valid for divorce? Is IVF an option for Christian couples? I'm Pastor Mike Novotny and these are just some of the topics I tackle in my new podcast, Taboo Questions with Pastor Mike Novotny. I answer questions for people just like you on essential topics that are not often discussed in church.

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Happy riding! And we continue with our American stories and Bob Funk's story. Let's pick up where we last left off. There's people who try to cheat their way to the top and that's certainly a short-lived. It'll catch up with you. Enron, good case in point, great big company. We've had some oil companies, you know, that have not been on the level and they're just not around anymore.

It'll catch up with you eventually. And when I started in the personnel business, we had some terrible, unscrupulous competitors in Seattle. Then the worst one we had was here when I moved here to Oklahoma City. And it took us five years to get him out of business, but we did, it finally caught up with him. It just doesn't last in America.

I'll tell you another little story about America. I was with a prince in Austria at a dinner one night and there were some people at our table and we told them the story about starting out with $5,000 and $150,000 borrowed money. He said, you can't do that in Austria. If you don't belong to six families here in Austria, you'll never be successful.

And that's what people don't understand. Sometimes we have so many opportunities, people don't know which direction to go. When we had the offices in Russia, Igor came for training and we took him to a grocery store.

This was right after the wall fell. And he came back and he said, too many decisions, too many decisions. He said, I even have to make decisions on which socks I'm going to wear in the morning. But he said, too many decisions. In a socialist country, you only have one color of suit.

You only have one color of pants. You only have one or two decisions to make every day. Too many decisions, he said.

And we do. We get a chance to make many decisions. The story goes that you have seven opportunities in your lifetime and sometimes you take them, sometimes you don't. But the average is seven opportunities in your lifetime. So I've been fortunate to walk through the doors of maybe five. I've still got a few left.

I turned it on to 80 in May. I started an oil company three weeks ago. And I stayed in the pulpit, I probably would not have had the opportunity to minister to so many people. And I think we're in the seven million range now that we've helped find jobs. But it's not just those that we find the jobs for. It's the other millions of people that come to see you looking for help. And you have to help them, too. You may not find the right spot for them right at that time, but you have to give them hope and encouragement. And when I first got into the business, I was trying to help them spiritually as well. And so consequently I couldn't interview as many people as some of the others. After a year, my boss, who was a fine Christian man, came to me and he said, I understand you're trying to help them spiritually, but we do have to make a profit in this business.

I said, oh Gordy, I do understand. So I would bring them in after hours and on Saturdays and counsel them separately, if they were looking for spiritual advice and spiritual help that would help them in their lives. We do have to make a profit in this business. If you're a bank writer, you're not going to be ministering to many people.

So our mission was to help as many as possible and to help them spiritually if they were looking for spiritual help. Well, my personal belief is that it's much, much more fun to give money than it is to take money. And if you're going to be in our business, you've got to be a giver. The rewards of giving are much more meaningful than making money.

Money has never been my motivator. And when I do interview people, I ask them what their motivator is. Is it work environment?

Is it prestige? Of course, ego. Or is it money? And usually people who are motivated by money will rip your organization apart because of jealousy, trying to climb the ladder to get over somebody, not caring about the other person. But life is about other people, not about ourselves. And that's an old biblical principle that it's much more pleasant to give than it is to take. Takers usually are very unhappy people.

I've interviewed many millionaires. There are very few of them that are very happy because they were self-centered, looking out for themselves. And so giving not only money but time and effort and communication is extremely important if you're going to be satisfied and happy with your life.

It's just a part of life that is so much fun to watch others with giving. It's fun to help people find a better job so they make more money, but to watch them grow is so much fun. To watch franchisees grow, and some of them make a lot of money, but most of the franchisees we've brought into our system, we look at their heart first, then their values, then their drive, then the end result becomes money.

They do better than the rest. Reagan once said that the best social program in the United States is a job. And that's true because it gives them pride, gives them encouragement, gives them a purpose for life, gives them opportunity, and gives them a lot of self-esteem when they have a job, no matter what the level of the job happens to be. So I've told our people that we're in the staffing ministry. And we're in the ministry because every person that comes in looking for a job is insecure. They need encouragement. They need hope.

They need compassion. And that's what the ministry is all about. I was having a shoe shine the other day, and this gentleman introduced himself. And he said, you don't remember me, but you placed me 22 years ago on my first job out of college. And now I'm a state farm agent. And he said, I stayed on that job for five years. And then I was at a commencement service a few months ago, and this gentleman tapped me on the shoulder. And he said, you found me a job in 1979. Now I'm retired, but he said, you found me my job.

Of course, I can't remember many of those people that I've placed. But that's the point is that you're in the ministry of helping people. As Zig Ziglar once said, the more people you help, the more money comes running at your door.

In our case, that's the point. We try and help as many people as possible because financially it also helps to grow a company. And a terrific job on the production, editing and storytelling by our own Greg Hengler. And a special thanks to Bob Funk. I love what he said at that graduation speech. I was in the one half of the class that made the other half possible. But he understood properly the role of the intellect in our lives, and it plays some role.

But my goodness, the things that matter most, integrity, hard work. That's Bob's ministry in the end. Of course, that encounter with Billy Graham, we heard just a snippet. Graham led so many people to the Lord.

Bob Funk was one of them. It changed his life. It's why he had a heart for this work.

Why he called his work a ministry. Bob Funk story, the co-founder of Express Employment Professionals, here on Our American Stories. We've all got a thing, an obsession. For some of us, it's vintage fashion, our cars, anything we can collect. They all live under one roof, eBay. It's where closets get filled with statement pieces and vintage finds. Where must-have sneakers wait for you. And designer handbags are the real deal. On eBay, doors open to stacks of the rarest trading cards.

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That's the powerful packing of American Express. Ever had questions for your pastor but felt awkward or embarrassed to ask them? Maybe questions about sex or politics or IVF or mental illness? There's a podcast for that. I'm Pastor Mike Novotny with Time of Grace Ministry and in my new podcast, Taboo Questions with Pastor Mike Novotny, I answer questions from people just like you. I open up the Bible to give answers that point people back to the truth and especially to Jesus. To listen, just search Taboo Questions with Pastor Mike. Go to PowerStep.com slash OAS and use code OAS for 15% off your first order.