For the Christian Guy Who Feels Stuck

This blog post is a little different than other ones I’ve written.

If you’re a Christian guy who has ever at any point wanted to start a business, I hope you get some value from this post.

Or, if you know a Christian guy who’s in that process, I hope you can share my story with him. 

This is for the Christian guy who feels stuck in a 9-5… because I was right there stuck with you for about 10 years.

This is not a paint-by-numbers manual on leaving a job. No such thing exists. And I don’t think how I did it is optimal, right, or exemplary.

But I do hope you can read this and decide what the next step is for you.

 

Quick Context

I graduated college in 2014. In 2015 I finished my graduate degree in HR and started working.

Over the next 9+ years I worked a 9-5 job in 3 different industries, 5 states, and had 5+ different roles. During that time, I got married and my wife and I had 3 kids.

And in August of 2024 I quit my job and jumped full-time into Layman’s Fitness.

 

How Layman’s Fitness Became My Full-Time Thing

In 2021, I started Layman’s Fitness as a blog. I used it to write about the intersection of Christianity and fitness, since I saw a huge gap in the Christian world in how we think about fitness.

At the time, I had wishful hopes that Layman’s would turn into a business. But from a business perspective, I had no idea what I was doing at the start.

I sold some programs for a bit. But I eventually opened them up for free and focused on writing blog posts and newsletters for several years. I enjoyed the writing process, as it allowed me to document and sharpen some of the ideas I was thinking about.

All during that time I kept my 9-5 job. My interest in entrepreneurship grew, and in 2022 my wife and I had amassed four different side hustles. I was in fitness, clothing, sports cards, and Etsy.

In 2023, we found out we were expecting our third child. With 4 side hustles, a 9-5 job, a third child coming soon, and church responsibilities, I had way too much going on.

I evaluated all of the different plates I was spinning. I ended up closing down three of the side hustles and decided to focus on just Layman’s Fitness and see if I could make it profitable.

In December of 2023, I texted about 60 guys that I knew and asked if they knew someone who would be interested in doing a kettlebell coaching program. I told them I’d do it for free in exchange for a testimonial at the end.

8 guys signed up.

From January to April, I worked with these 8 guys on the kettlebell program I was developing. By the end of it, I had a system that worked and testimonials I could use.

In April, I wanted to see if the guys would transition to a paid version of the program. 4 of them did.

In May I was preparing to formally launch the program. At the encouragement from my brother, I joined a coaching program for online fitness coaches.

I’m glad I did. This program helped me drastically improve the sales, marketing, operational and fulfillment structure of my program. It increased the value, deliverability, and quality of it immensely. 

It took an extra two months, but in July I officially launched the program. About 30 people applied, and about 10 guys signed up at the launch.

I was still balancing all of this with my 9-5 job. In August, I realized it was just too much to handle all at once, and I decided to jump into the business full-time.

And now looking back on 2024, I’ve been able to work with about 30 Christian guys in the first year of doing this full-time.

 

Key Lessons

Here are some of the key lessons that I would share with any guy who wants to make a similar leap to full-time entrepreneurship.

 

#1) Write a 5-Year Vision Statement

For years, I was not clear on what it is I actually wanted to accomplish with my vocation.

This became apparent in 2023, when I had 4 side hustles, a 9-5, and with church responsibilities.

I was (and still am) in the Redeeming Productivity Academy, and that’s where I first heard about the idea of having some kind of vision statement.

Frankly, at first I thought a vision statement was corny. I thought vision statements were for business board rooms and white boards near cubicles, not for my little family in a Houston, TX suburb.

But I was living a very scattered life, doing a lot of work in a lot of different directions, and I needed something to be a north star of sorts to filter decisions with. 

So I prayerfully sketched out a 5-year vision, and I crafted one in September of 2023. Here it is: 

To build a household that trains generations and owns productive property. 

 

#2) Get My Household in Order First

Once I had a vision statement, it became pretty obvious for me what the next step was.

And it wasn’t to build a business.

It was to lead my wife and kids in regular family worship.

This was one of those responsibilities I knew I had as a Christian guy, but I neglected anyway.

And honestly, it’s embarrassing to think about how busy I was while I wasn’t doing family worship.

I had 4 side hustles, a 9-5, church responsibilities, and I wanted to run a business full-time… but I wasn’t regularly leading my family with the Word and prayer.

We started doing family worship regularly each morning during breakfast. It was slow and sloppy at first, but the kids caught on.

We did this for months before I was confident it was established. And then I looked to the next thing, which was starting a business.

 

#3) Start By Doing it For Free

Providing a free service seems counterintuitive at first. But this ended up being one of the best decisions I made.

When you offer something to someone for free, you’d expect everyone to say yes. But not everyone does (I had 50+ no’s).

I learned all the non-price related reasons someone didn’t want what I was offering… and there was a lot. Product-market fit, trust, interest, clunky systems, etc…

This showed me who my customers actually were and what problem I was solving for them.

I also learned if I actually liked doing the work itself. Without money or payment, the only thing motivating me at first was the work and the results I was seeing with my clients. I learned I liked both.

Lastly, when you do something for free, there’s a test you’ll have to pass… and that’s seeing if someone who is doing it for free will turn into a paying customer.

If someone says yes in that scenario, I think that’s an indicator that what you’re doing is actually valuable. And I had a handful of guys who did, to whom I will be forever thankful.

 

#4) Build An Exit Plan

There are a lot of practical questions on how to leave a job… like insurance, 401k, a steady paycheck, paying the bills, etc…

Here’s how I thought about it:

How long could I provide for my family & keep my business going if my business made $0? 

The answer to that question depends on your own risk profile.

So what I did was calculate what my family’s average monthly expenses were and what my businesses’ monthly expenses were.

Then, I calculated how long I could go just using savings if my business made $0.

I’m risk adverse, so I wanted that number to be at least 9 months.

This meant a lot of saving for a very long time. And I’m glad we did that.

 

#5) Invest in Coaching

Due to my own pride, one of my tendencies is to think that I can do things without help. That’s a very costly mistake if you’re trying to start a business for the first time.

One of the best things I did in this entire process was invest in coaching.

This started in 2023 when I worked with a productivity coach, who gave me some of the basic frameworks to help me prioritize what was actually important.

This continued again in 2024 when I invested in a coaching program for the business side of online fitness. I invested in that in May, and 3-4 months later, I was able to quit my job. 

In 2025 I plan on investing in another coaching program for another part of the business.

A coach can take you where you want to go in less time. 

P.S. If you have fitness goals you want to accomplish, here’s how I can help. 

 

Caspian is Calling

There were so many points along the journey that I thought about quitting. Too many to list out. 

To say “don’t quit” felt cliche. So instead, here’s what I told myself:

Don’t be a Pittencream when Caspian is calling 

Pittencream is an obscure character in C.S. Lewis’ book The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. He gets a paragraph of airtime, but in some ways, that little paragraph changed my life. 

I wrote an entire post on Pittencream (read it here), but here’s the a semi-condensed version. 

In The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, King Caspian leads his sailing crew on an eastward adventure. 

But at the end of the voyage, the crew became restless. At their last stop before the end of the world, some of the crew started to second guess whether or not they wanted to continue. 

Caspian called them all to courage and to keep going. 

But one sailor actually did quit… his name was Pittencream. 

He quit because he was afraid. 

Pittencream wasn’t sure what he would experience if he sailed to the end of the world. No one had been before. And all the “what-ifs” made him flake at the finish line. 

And that fear gave him big time regrets.

Pittencream lived the rest of his life on an obscure island, where he told the people there about how he actually made it to the end of the world.

He lived in his own lies for the rest of his life… and he actually started to believe them. 

I saw myself in Pittencream.

Just like him, the deepest temptation I ever felt to quit was right at the finish line… right when Caspian was calling, and when courage was needed the most.

I knew that if I flaked, I probably never would do it. And like Pittencream, I’d be the guy telling false stories of things I wish I would have done.

I didn’t want to be that guy. Even if it failed, I wanted to be able to tell my wife, my kids, and their kids a true story.

If you’re a Christian guy reading this, and you feel stuck… the first place to start is to remember that the Spirit of God is inside of you.

And He’s calling.