Matt DeYoung has been a business leader for nearly twenty years. He is co-founder of Breakthrough Leadership, has helped start six startup companies and has been a consultant for clients such as Walt Disney, Universal Studios, Target, NASCAR, and the NBA.  He is also a committed Christian who recognizes the importance of identifying values in one’s life. “We have a Top Ten values list for our family, a values list for our business, and I have a personal list of values for myself. One of my top values is freedom. It’s important to me to have an impact on every-thing that I’m doing. That can be frustrating as an entrepreneur because you may have the freedom financially to do what you want to do, but not have an impact at home. So it’s not just financial freedom. I used to think I wanted to have a business that made a lot of money and didn’t require other employees so that I could have total freedom in operating it. What I got was the opposite of freedom. I was always the one on the hook for everything. The buck stopped with me. I was doing very well financially. I was working for Walt Disney, Universal Studios, Target, the NBA and others, but I actually hated my life because I wasn’t getting the kind of freedom that I wanted. I had to really rethink what freedom meant to me and what it meant was the freedom to work on things that I found interesting and work with people who also wanted to have an impact.”

Like many of us. Matt thought having the money to do whatever you wanted gave a person freedom, but having a lot of money comes with its own set of burdens that can easily tie one down. “To not have to depend on anyone is a kind of freedom, but it’s not the freedom that I’m pursuing now. I want to have an impact on the world and to do that you need other people.”

When a person operates their life according to a set of real values, there are always times where sticking to your values will cost you something. Matt DeYoung agrees: “I have three recent examples of this. One actually occurred today. There was an opportunity within a health-care system to do some consulting. We had several conversations and I tried to perform due diligence to figure out if I could help them or not. But I’m always looking for definition of success meaning, if we put forth the effort, put in the time, invest the money, what kinf of success are we looking to achieve. I’ve learned that at some point people will disclose their definition of success. Unfortunately, it often comes up too late when a client has unmet ex-pectations, but they are expectations that were unspoken. So I was listening for that, and this went on for about four, or five weeks and, then today, I had to tell them I don’t think this is a good fit for me. I realized that their focus was much narrower than mine and it wouldn’t be a good fit for me because I wouldn’t have the freedom to bring everything to the project that I wanted to bring.”

“Another time,” DeYoung continued, “involved working with a company to build their sales team and it really seemed like a great opportunity. This was about three months ago. And I was very excited about it, and it was very lucrative for me. I mean it was the kind of situation where the money adds up very, very fast. So I was very excited. But once I got inside the com-pany, I realized that there was a level of dishonesty happening and I had to say I’m sorry, I can’t continue.

Anyone who interacts with others a lot in today’s world soon realizes the need for ongoing inspiration. There is too much negativity out there and we live in a time when we are constantly bombarded with it. “I’m a learner and I look at books as mentors. I’m always reading. Also, I made a commitment about four years ago to read the Bible every day. If I haven’t spent time in the word it’s kind of a failure of a day. That may sound like a cliché, but if you knew me you’d know that’s very important. Another thing is that I think anyone whose twenty years older than me is someone I can learn from. They don’t always know that they’re mentoring me, but I really enjoy sitting down with people who, for example, have been married for twenty years longer than me or who have been in business for twenty or thirty years. If I had to pick one person who has made a dramatic difference in my life I’d say Dan Mohler. A lot of people don’t know who he is because he doesn’t try to be in the lime light. You can look him up on YouTube and he is someone who is very clear in his view of the Bible and where people can get off track. He’s a pastor in Pennsylvania and he doesn’t actually care if he’s famous or not. He doesn’t need a mega church. He is the guy who has made the most significant impact on me. I would love to sit down and talk with him.”

Matt and his wife Sarah

Having a solid core of values limits us in some areas, but frees us in others. “One example of that for me is if I was just concerned with making the most money, I would be better off on one of the coasts. I’m about sixty miles Chicago, but my income would probably be much better in Chicago and probably even better if I lived on one of the coasts, like Manhattan or L.A. Or the Silicon Valley, but we wanted to raise our family near our extended family and we feel we are where we’re called to be, but that value, that choice, limits our finances. Another thing is if didn’t have spending time with my family as a primary value, I would put in a lot more hours. I enjoy working and I could easily be consumed by it. I could become a workaholic, but I get a kind of sick feeling when I know I’m trading off time with family. My girls are nine and twelve so that’s pretty young, but I’ve also seen how twelve years can go by really fast.”

Matt DeYoung has an interesting and somewhat enlightening view on where America is today, “If you ask me if this the country that I thought it would be, the answer is not at all. Just from a business perspective, the landscape keeps shifting all the time. From 2013 until now there have been huge changes. They can’t seem to make up their mind about the penalties you have to pay if you don’t participate in affordable healthcare. Also, technology companies are really being put on trial for how they use our data. I get an idea of where I can fit in within the busi-ness landscape of our country and then everything shifts again. I have different examples of that and then, on top of that, I often work with traditional industries that intersect with technology. It’s just always changing. My dad actually works out of California right now even though he lives outside of Chicago. He sent me a message the other day and he said, ‘I’ve been going to this restaurant for a while, but now I don’t know what restroom to use. Both of the doors just say ‘Restroom” instead of saying men or women. We don’t participate in the traditional healthcare program, we have alternative healthcare. Our kids are still in school and we can’t even make a long term decision about what their education look like because every year it changes dramatically all the time.”

One of the reasons things change so much in today’s world is that they’re not based on locked in values anymore. “I think it’s important to have a realistic point of view in life. Some people might say I lean towards a pessimistic rather than optimistic point of view. So what I’m about to say is not just rose covered glasses, but I actually see our country as the glass half full. Even though we just talked about the constant change and there is a lack of real issues, I also think that there is a massive opportunity for spiritual revival. I don’t see a country moving away

from God because that assumes that God has nothing to do with it. I actually see that His plan is happening which means we’re moving closer and closer to heaven. I think if you can look at it that way you see people who are confused about their identity and hurting . The constant change is also a fantastic opportunity. I see that’s there’s a revival happening and the marketplace is part of that and it drives everything that I do.”

“There are people six or seven miles from us who are detained with no rights. They have families and businesses and they’re sitting in prison just waiting to talk to a judge via video. The laws are real, but yet the system just feels irrelevant. I think our legal system is still the best in the world but history repeats itself and there have were times where Paul was writing in the Bible while he was in chains. In some of the cities at that time born with deformities were often just taken outside the city and thrown in a pile. If there was a mom who wasn’t able to have a child, she would go out and grab one from the pile. It’s disgusting but today we just dispose of them and we feel okay about it because you know it’s done in the doctor’s office. Just as in Paul’s time, a city whose values were based on image and perfection went to the extreme where they just didn’t value human life, and that’s what we do today. There have been political powers and systems that at some point just got so messy that life was irrelevant and we’re that way today, but that’s why I think there’s an opportunity for Christians to be a real witness, especially for men in the marketplace. I say this all the time. So many people say the problems are so big, what can I do? And then I ask them what they do for a living. If they have a company of some kind, whe-ther it’s a sole proprietor or a company where you have a thousand employees, they are making a difference in those people’s lives. You can start a business so easily now and that is impacting people’s lives — you actually put bread on their tables. The laws are going to change you know, the landscapes going to change but the fact is you can have an impact on people by providing basic needs and in the face of shifting values that is a great opportunity. People are becoming more and more spiritual. I had a woman tell me this yesterday that our world views were very different. She adamantly rejects Christianity, but yet I’ve been to this woman’s house and there’s evidence of spiritual seeking everywhere. She’s seeking because she recognizes the emptiness. She doesn’t agree with me at the moment and that’s fine. Maybe she had a bad experience under the label of Christianity when she was young so now she needs a different label to grow spirit-ually, bur if she keeps honestly seeking she will find the truth. Perhaps, because of the political landscape and the shifting values and because of the extreme nature in which we prioritize image, there’s a spiritual hunger now more than ever before. And that can be a very good thing.”

For people like Matt DeYoung spiritual growth is the bottom line and that is why he is a man of value.