When our team heard this story about Red Dot (a metal manufacturing company in Texas), we knew we had to share it. Sometimes the success of business can have a lasting ministry impact. Thanks to Red Dot for sharing this story of outreach.
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It started simply enough. In the summer of 2004, a group of men from Red Dot, a family-owned metal building and manufacturing company in Athens, Texas, attended a Leadership Summit.
It would prove to be a pivotal moment in the lives of not only members of the Bush family — who own Red Dot — but in the lives of their employees as well.
“We heard Jim Collins discuss ideas from his book, ‘Good to Great,’” recalled Lee Bush, former company president and current member of the board of directors. “That talk and his book gave us a vocabulary to articulate how to grow and what would be important to us as we grew. ”
Lee’s son, Ted Bush, who was then president of Red Dot Buildings, cast a vision of a work environment where greatness was possible, where employees could not only prosper, but flourish, where the impact of their success could be felt not only locally, but globally.
Working with a leadership team, Ted, who is now chairman of the board of Red Dot Buildings and president of Red Dot International, crafted a mission statement sharing his vision of what he wanted people 100 years in the future to know about the company.
“They ended up with a statement saying, essentially, ‘Our purpose is to please God by turning our success into lasting significance – and we want the entire family of Red Dot to be part of that,’” recalled Lee. “It kind of blew me away.”
A program called Red Dot 100X was born. The multi-faceted program utilizes Red Dot’s financial successes to fund humanitarian outreach projects at home and overseas. Red Dot 100X, which is directed by Lee’s other son, Tod Bush, offers aid to “neighbors in crisis” in the surrounding community, provides financial support for large humanitarian projects both at home and abroad, and invests in the lives of employees.
For the first several years of the 100X program, Red Dot, in partnership with Buckner International, sent scores of employees to locations across the globe: Guatemala, Peru, Honduras, Russia, Romania, Ethiopia, and Kenya. Many of these one- or two-week trips – funded entirely by Red Dot at no loss to an employee’s vacation time – involved working in orphanages in an over-the-top way.
When the worldwide recession hit two years ago, Red Dot was forced to tighten its belt. While the international facet of the 100X mission does remain intact (Red Dot currently sponsors a girls’ transitional home in Peru), it had to be scaled back.
“As director of 100X, Tod took the position that we would use this time to focus more on our employees,” said Lee. “So we’ve offered marriage retreats and are planning a family conference. We also put more emphasis on local community works. Now, when the economy turns and we have the resources to do it, we’ll do an ever better job of ministering to others who are vulnerable in the world.”
Ted Bush puts it succinctly: “As Red Dot prospers, so do our employees, so do our neighbors, so do others around the world. We really do consider it a privilege to be able to multiply what we’re given – and then give it back.”
How can you please God by turning your sucess into lasting significance?
