Welcome to Spotlight! In each issue, we focus on someone who calls Harvest Fellowship home. It may be an artist, a missionary, a businessperson, a teacher or an astronaut. In addition to our featured cover story, previous stories are also archived by year.
2010, 2011.

 

 

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Blaine Wieland

Business & Balance

Sometimes, people think that if they owned their own business, they'd be set. Life would be easy, they would be their own boss, vacation year-round and roll in the dough. Sound too good to be true? According to Blaine Wieland, yes.

Blaine has been an independent businessman his entire life, starting his first company with his father shortly out of high school. There have been several since, some successful, some not. We talked about some misconceptions about business, about the spiritual significance of it all, and how they fit together.

 

editor's note:  Blaine and I are brothers; we know each other's strengths and weaknesses quite well. It was fun sitting down with him while we were visiting our Dad in Florida and asking him to expand on some of his obvious strengths.
 

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brad:  Blaine, growing up in the same household, I learned quite a bit about you and about your style and how you work. I've always admired your ability to cut through the clutter and get to the real issues. You've been in business your entire life, basically. What do you think is the most difficult thing about starting or running a business?

blaine:  I'm always hesitant to give advice when people are talking to me about business ideas because I've just observed over the years there are so many different ways to start businesses and so many different people that do it and so many different personalities. I'm cautious because I'm just aware that I don't really know exactly what's at the bottom of it all. Every individual is so different. You can never be quite sure what creates those differences and how life works for other people, how it can make sense to them from their own perspective.

brad:  Maybe we could simplify it a little. Do you think there are common misconceptions about what people think being in business will be like compared to the way it actually is?

blaine:  I'm always really concerned when I hear people say they want to start a business for themselves because they like the idea of the independence and the freedom. I'm not everyman, but in my experience, just in the few businesses we've started, you don't get more freedom, certainly not initially, and you certainly don't get more money initially. It takes a lot of time, it takes so much work, and it takes so much money to do something in business that, if your reason for starting a business is that you want time, freedom, and money, chances are that's not going to work out well for you. Those are really the things you kind of have to give up. Both of the businesses that my family and I have started have taken more than ten years to equal, in any sense, the return we could have had if we'd just gone out and gotten a good job. brad:  Are there times when you've wondered if it was worth it?

blaine:  Yeah. I sometimes have thought that no one should go into business for themselves unless they absolutely cannot do anything else. If you can possibly do anything else but start your own business, you're probably going to have an easier life. If you ask my kids and my wife, they'll tell you, it's a one-hundred-percent thing. It consumes your time, your mind, your resources. You contextualize all of life through the business that you're starting. It's so much easier maybe to work for someone else and get on the retirement program and get on their health care rolls.

brad:  So, why do you do it?

blaine:  I think I'm one of those people who can't do anything else. Even now, we're starting a new internet advertising company because the business we're currently building is an e-commerce business where we've been selling furniture on the web. For the past eight years, I've been learning how to do internet advertising. So, I find myself now in a position where I could probably go work for a lot of different companies in internet advertising because it's a hot field, everyone's hiring because everyone knows they should use the net to advertise.

If I wanted to make X amount of money, maybe the fastest way I could do it would be to go work for a large advertising agency in Chicago or New York, or a large company that's about to initiate some type of internet strategy and just go to work for them. That would be much simpler than starting a new internet advertising business, which we're about to do. Our current e-commerce business is called Home Reserve. We ship complete sofas, loveseats, chairs and sectionals to consumers all around the USA, and they assemble it themselves in their own home. The new company is called Into The Wild. It too, is an internet business. We'll be providing internet advertising services for clients here in the Midwest and maybe around the country. But I will not make as much money in the next five years doing that than if I just went out and worked for someone else. I do it because I think I'm one of those people who can't do anything else.

brad:  So, when you started Home Reserve, you had no idea that you would need this new business to establish the success of the current business...

blaine:  Yeah, absolutely.

brad:  Do you think that's common in business? That you start at one point and end up at another?

blaine:  Yeah, I think it happens a lot. Again, I'm not everyman. I don't have all the experience, and I'm so aware of what I don't know. I'm almost more aware of what I don't know. That's the problem with getting older. You begin to realize you don't know a lot of things. It's so much easier to start businesses when you're younger, and you're a little bit more self confident. But definitely I think the ability to change and to morph a business and to adapt to its needs is essential. When I started a furniture manufacturing company with my brothers and my father in the early '80s, we started out selling to a lot of state-run facilities. Then, there were budget troubles in a lot of the states we were selling to, and our sales were cut in half from 1981 to 1982 because the funding sources stopped. We had developed these products for colleges and state facilities, and the market just dropped out from underneath us, and so we had to morph that product and begin to sell into healthcare facilities and hospitals.

We didn't know at the time that there was going to be a huge health care explosion, with hospitals being built all over the country. We just knew that our sales had been cut in half. We were looking for new revenue sources, so we morphed the product lines, changed fabrics, changed designs, and made them desirable to hospitals. And that's really where the growth was in that company for the next 15 years.

And in this new company, Home Reserve, it was a bit the same sort of thing. We thought it was a furniture company, and in the end it turns out it's an internet advertising strategy. And so we had to learn how to do internet advertising. It used to be we thought you just put up a web site and people by using Google and other search engines would find you. But that only worked for maybe 2002 and 2003, and then there were just too many web sites out there. You just couldn't get your web site to the top, so you had to find other strategies to enable people to find your sites. Almost overnight, you had to become specialists in internet advertising, which we had no experience in, and really had to spend the next eight years learning.

brad:  Everyone's ideas and interests are different. It seems, often, businesses are built up on people's hobbies—something that they really like to do. I know in my field as a photographer that's really true. Many people like photography, so they decide to build a business around it, and especially in recent years, it seems like everyone is starting their own photography business. Many of them find out later that the lustre goes off their photography passion because their business has become all about sales, technology, contracts, paying the bills, etc. It often loses some of the fun that intrigued them in the first place. It seems that people who want to start a business should probably be prepared to have it morph a lot if the end result is going to be a successful business.

blaine:  Yeah, I think the first thing that an entrepreneur has to ask himself about his business every morning when he wakes up is what does the business demand of me today? Which is exactly really the opposite of what you do in a hobby. I play the cello as a hobby, and I play the songs that I want to play, when I want to play them, for as long as I care to do so. And when I get bored or my interest changes, I'll stop songs right in the middle or change to different tunes. It's just totally to serve my own interests and desires. And it's very different with a business. There's tax law and legal and accounting and sales and marketing and human resources and healthcare plans and facilities and rents and expenses and tracking all this stuff, and monthly filings, and then you've got payroll, and so much gets added onto what was perhaps an original hobbyist interest that you realize the hobby is just this smallest little part of it, and there's all this management and administrative duties that are added onto it.

So if you're not asking what does the business demand of me today, and then just go in learning that. You may hate accounting, but if you start a business, you're going to become an accountant. You're going to have to learn about income statements and assets and liabilities and cash flow. Banks are going to want to see that stuff to loan you money. Maybe you started a hobby because you like doing a certain thing, and now you're out talking to banks about borrowing money and they want financial statements and you're working with lawyers and accountants and it's become something very different. Entrepreneurs and hobbyists are not the same. An entrepreneur is just really driven to a certain vision they have of a thing and they're just willing to do anything to fulfill that vision.

brad:  If, then, from your experience, people who end up being successful in business are pretty much all consumed by it, how does a person then take all of that intensity, all of that commitment of time, all of that focus and have that play into a spiritual life as well? Is it spiritual in itself? Some might argue that whatever gifts a person is given can be applied in a spiritual way. What about that thing inside of us that makes us want to feel as though we're doing something of spiritual significance?

blaine:  Well, I've always been really afraid of compartmentalizing my life, dividing it into categories and dividing my time and my day into categories, some of it spiritual, some of it secular, some of it business, some of it family. I've never wanted to do that because, obviously, we live every moment under God. I just don't think it works to compartmentalize it and to reserve certain motivations to certain areas. I think everything we do, every moment, has to be in view of the fact that God is watching. There is an ultimate purpose, there's a reason beyond any economic value by which our lives are being judged. You could become the richest man in the world and fail horribly in everything but your economic duty, and I just don't see that as a successful life.

I think you've got to manage the family and relationships and the duties to your mom and dad and your church and everyone. The way that you love your wife is certainly of far more value than how successful your businesses ever becomes. I've tried never to compartmentalize. So my attempts to build businesses have never been divorced from my desire to find God. When you plant a seed into the ground and it grows into the thing it's supposed to be—like a yellow flower seed grows into a yellow flower—you think, oh, it became what it was supposed to become. It didn't try really hard to do that—it just was it's thing. That's how I try to live my life: Just to become the thing that it seems I was created to be. Not to force it, not to desire it because it gave me status or position, just simply because it was a fulfillment of my function.

brad:  Has it felt like a very natural thing?

blaine:  Yeah, felt very natural, very right. I've never felt like I needed to go establish a new business and run over against my wife's wishes or against my father's counsel, that I've always been able to get the blessing of all the important people in my life. I never felt as though I needed to work against any of that. I'd be very cautious of doing anything in my life if my father and my brothers weren't in support of it.

brad:  I've heard Pastor Paul Mowery say that if you're trying to figure out what God's will is for your life, take a look at the things you love to do, the things that come naturally to you, the things that you want to do. Those things are probably a pretty good indicator of where you ought to end up in terms of the work that you do.

blaine:  I really agree with that. I think that's one of the reasons I've been able to go to Harvest Fellowship for these many years, I saw such consistency in Paul and most of the leaders. They were really desiring to live their life in a very authentic, genuine, consistent, nonhypocritical fashion. They didn't guild the lily. Paul wears casual clothing, and he doesn't try to be something he's not, even if people try to change him. There's just a real authenticity in that. I know some people have come to the church and have said that Harvest, or Paul and Sheri should be more this-way or that-way, but I've always seen a spiritual honesty in that that I've admired and have really tried to model in my own life. Paul, in many ways, has been more of an example to me in the way he lives his life than what I've picked up in specific elements of his teaching. I think that's the way it works: We model people that we admire.

brad:  It's kind of the way we learn, isn't it? You respect someone not because of what they say, but because of the way they live and the way they actually apply things to their life.

blaine:  Yeah. And if I could expand on that a little, Harvest is kind of an unusual place. We're not that well organized—we never have been—because most of us aren't driven in that sense. We are really looking for an authentic relationship with God, and authentic relationships are kind of messy. Like if you examine the relationship you have with your wife or with your husband, you love them, and yet you can fight, you can be upset, you can react so violently so quickly, and that's with the person you have the deepest relationship with. Harvest has that certain kind of disorder to it that's really authentic and really beautiful and really wonderful. Churches sometimes fail, I think, in trying to organize the life out of things. And at Harvest, we certainly have not done that; I've always liked that.

brad:  You and your wife, Cathy, have done the accounting for the church for as many years as I can remember. Do you remember when you started?

blaine:  In the early '90s, I think. We took it over from Frank and Linda Van Order.

brad:  I've always liked the fact that finances are not talked about a lot at Harvest. We don't really take a lot of collections. The boxes are there, people can contribute, but there's not a lot of talk about it. I really appreciate how you and Cathy have assisted with that and made it just work, quietly, in the background. I have some idea how much time has gone into it. I really appreciate that, and I know many others do, too.

blaine:  Yeah, thanks.

brad:  So, to wrap up these thoughts, then, business is harder than what people think it will be, it is different than what they think it will be, it will probably not provide for them the things that they thought it should. Would you say that there are still reasons to risk it, to try it?

blaine:  Yeah, I certainly have been glad to have started the businesses we have had. A lot of them, even the ones—I'm involved in now—I wouldn't say have been runaway successes. I'm just aware of the difficulties that are facing us. I am glad for the opportunities that we have. I feel somewhat like—to use a sports analogy—I'm in a position to complete the game, and we could possibly score some runs and win the game. We're in the position to do that. We are not there yet, but I've been satisfied with life as we've lived it. I would say that if you are really considering starting a business, that it would probably be really good to bring someone alongside of you that has some experience closely associated with what you're trying to do, and maybe they could become a partner or just take over some of that very heavy burden of all those other details, and kind of leave you free to lead and create.

brad:  I don't think I know anyone who has been in business who doesn't have a story to tell about how difficult things were at one point or another or at many points. I really like your focus on trying not to separate secular from sacred. When I think of what it takes to build a business and try to make it successful, it kind of looks to me like trying to live a Christian life in general, you know? It's kind of fraught with risks and perils and disappointments and highs occasionally, but mostly it's just kind of something you persist in and you learn as you go. In the end, you're better than you used to be, and hopefully you're close to what it is that God had intended for you all along.

blaine:  I often think about that. I liken it to when you first have a child, and that's a big change in your life, and that kid gets sick, and so you're up all night, and then you have to go to the office or go to work the next day, and you haven't slept, and you haven't eaten well. And yet you have to be responsible in that next day to all your relationships and the place where you work. And in a sense, you have to function when you're so tired, and you're so discouraged, and you're so out of sorts, but you just have to continue to be responsible. And it's like that in business where, some days, I'm so frustrated, and I'm so discouraged, and it's taken so much money, and there's so much trouble, and yet you still have to be creative, and you still have to lead and inspire other people. You still have to put out emotionally when you're just so dry and dusty on the inside yourself. And it makes you always aware of the beauty in simply being faithful to your responsibilities, that maybe it wasn't so much that you moved the business ahead that day, but you still gave of yourself to other people when you felt absolutely horrible and, you know, you didn't make a dollar, but you were faithful to someone else or to your employees that day, and they didn't know what a wreck you were, and maybe there's some spiritual good in that.

brad:  It sounds like unselfish living. Our goal—our Bibical mandate, really—is to live unselfishly and to try to devote our lives to the welfare of others.

blaine:  G.K. Chesterton talks about how, in order to enjoy life more and enjoy things more and enjoy people more, we have to become smaller ourselves, because when we do that, everything around us gets bigger and more glorious and more awesome. But it's when we shrink that that happens. And I think early on in life we have this idea that we're just going to expand our self-concept and our ego over everything, and that's what eventually going to give us happiness. We're going to have more power, money, influence, fame than anyone else, and that's what's going to create this glorious, rich, deep life, when really it's completely the opposite. It's losing yourself, it's giving yourself away, it's becoming smaller. Letting everyone around you grow in stature and size in everything and be more in awe and wonder of everything and everybody that's in your life that creates the truly rich and grand experience. And it's completely the opposite what we start off thinking in high school.

brad:  He's one of those guys I would like to sit down and talk with some day! Thanks, Blaine! I appreciate your time and work on behalf of Harvest.


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Blaine Wieland's current businesses include HomeReserve.com, an internet company selling ready-to-assemble sofas, loveseats, chairs and sectionals that are shipped across the United States and Canada, and a new company, IntoTheWildAdvertising.com, an advertising agency specializing in internet advertising for companys interested in expanding their reach on the web.

This story is part of a series called Spotlight on the Harvest Fellowship website. As new stories are added, you can check out other people's stories on the archive page.

Story & Photos by Brad Wieland (except for factory photo provided by Home Reserve)

 

published 03/01/2011