Business Labs Program Overview
A Redemptive Business Lab is a 2-night (42-hour) in-person experience designed for early-stage founders of for-profit businesses to accelerate and deepen the health and growth of their leadership and their venture. The time is designed towards the specific needs and opportunities of the founder while also providing meaningful intersections with peers, mentors, and program team members.
The gathering will be fast-paced and fully-scheduled. Founders will leave with fresh ideas, practical tools, new relationships, and critical feedback from peers, mentors, and the program team. We will protect time at the end to synthesize and create action items for the return home.
Check out our past Labs — Winter 2023 and Fall 2023 — and continue reading below for more details about the Business Labs experience.
Who will participate? Is this for me?
Redemptive Business Labs is for early-stage founders of for-profit businesses to grow their leadership and their venture, in and with a community of believers.
We are looking for ventures that are:
Post-hunch, meaning you have established revenue
Early-stage, ideally within first 5 years of operations
Actively pursuing traction and growth in what they are building
Pursuing their mission through scalable business models
Designing innovative solutions in their respective sectors and/or addressing a critical cultural issues through a redemptive lens
Led by Christians who are…
Aiming to embody the gospel in their work
Humble and teachable
Working full-time on their ventures
Seeking an accountable community to grow in their faith together
Bottom line, we are looking to build an active community of venture builders; even if you do not meet all of these criteria, we would still encourage you to apply.
What can I expect from the experience?
For participating founders, our hope and aim is to meaningfully contribute to:
Your growth and health as a leader. We want to help leaders grow in their commitment to redemptive entrepreneurship
The growth and health of your venture. We want to see exceptional businesses led by exceptional founders embodying the gospel in strategy, operations, and leadership
Your connection to a life-giving, venture-building community
Given the formational nature of these experiences, our hope is that volunteering mentors and founders alike leave feeling refreshed and inspired.
Here is a rough break-down of our time together at the Lab:
Day 1 (Founders and Lab Team Only): Arrivals, Dinner, and Personal Story Sharing
Day 2 (Founders, Mentors, and Lab Team): Introduction to the Redemptive Frame, Venture Presentations*, Strategy and Operations Panels, and Mentor 1:1s (each participating founder will deliver a 4-minutes pitch their venture to their peers and mentors)
Day 3 (Founders and Lab Team Only): Leadership Session, Reflection and Synthesis, and Departures
Location and Logistics
Events currently take place at Big Easy Ranch in Columbus, Texas, about 90 minutes east of Austin.
Founders will be asked to contribute $350 towards programming. Accommodations and meals will be graciously covered by the Ergon Foundation. All attendees are responsible for transportation to and from the event.
Expectations of participating founders and mentors
PRESENCE: We will cover a lot of ground and we want to make sure you get the most out of your time in the program.
It will be important for you to go ahead and block the time in a way that allows your team and family to know that you will be unavailable while you are away. Programming is scheduled from early morning until the evening, and it will be frustrating to you and to those depending on you if you think you can run up to your room to tackle emails in between sessions. You will have just enough time to make a quick morning or evening phone call home each day, but that’s about it!
We host a tech-free environment during the program so that you can be fully present with each other and the content. We will provide workbooks for each gathering and you can certainly bring your own notebook/journal of choice. We discourage the use of computers, tablets, and phones. We consider it a gift to retreat from our devices as we engage in deeper thought, conversation, and fellowship with one another - we hope you will, too!
PARTICIPATION: The quality of the experience is largely dependent on the level of participation from each of the founders (you!).
With your cohort, we will have a few intentional times of group sharing and reflection, and have found that this format is key to building your shared experience together. We know that there are varied comfort levels here, but we encourage you to be an active contributor in both sharing and active listening.
You will have the opportunity for 4 one-on-ones mentoring sessions. Mentors will look to you to drive the questions and discussions. During informal times and meals, take the initiative to walk with or sit next to a mentor you’d like to get to know better. They will welcome it.
CULTURAL INTELLIGENCE: Submitting ourselves to honest humility and self-awareness will allow all members of the community to flourish.
Honest optimism > Glossy Pitch. The old adage applies strongly to our mentors who may have the ability to give: “ask for money and you’ll get advice, ask for advice and you may get money.” Our mentors expect to help with your biggest challenges, not get pitched, and they understand not everything is working perfectly.
Consider your cohort. There’s an intentionally humble way amongst our community and you don’t want to stand out for the wrong reasons. If you’re long winded, be concise to create space for others. If you’re typically first to speak, make sure to listen. If you’re ‘in the majority’ in some way, create space for the voice of others.
Value diversity. Don’t assume everyone’s theology, socioeconomic, social or other background is exactly the same - in fact, assume that it’s not! Our central hallway is belief in and pursuit of a personal relationship with Jesus Christ, and beyond that, we are hopeful to widely represent the body of Christ and learn from each other in humility.
Act virtuously. We believe our community’s collective witness is best understood by our way of life, not merely the work we do. We hope that our events and program are a clear representation of a group of people that embody the theological virtues of faith, hope, and love and the cardinal virtues of wisdom, moderation, courage, and justice. This applies to everything as lofty as the courage to have an abundance mentality with donors and connections to hyper-practical decisions such as moderation of alcohol consumption at a Praxis event.
Why Redemptive Labs in Austin?
Here’s how Redemptive Business Labs (designed by Praxis!) fit within the Praxis story. Praxis, a non-profit organization based out of NYC, is twelve years into their own startup journey and are very intentionally building a movement and community toward the shared pursuit of Redemptive Entrepreneurship.
We strongly believe that there is a way of starting and growing ventures that is largely under-practiced, undefined, and full of promise. In our conversations, most Christian founders and funders have a hunch that they are called to a more comprehensively faithful and sustainable approach to their work of venture building and impact creation. But the aims and practices of such an approach are unclear — mostly because they just haven’t seen it practiced. We believe the Praxis community can and will create a line of sight to just such a way of leading and building — which we call redemptive entrepreneurship.
When we call something redemptive, it means someone is giving or sacrificing to restore something or someone to its proper place. Redemptive founders (read: YOU) are those who, being deeply spiritually formed, generously surrender their personal and organizational power for the sake of others. A redemptive enterprise “spends itself” on behalf of the world more than on its own behalf. Organized to “bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim freedom for the captives, and release from darkness for the prisoners” (Isaiah 61), the redemptive enterprise seeks to embody these truths to its customers, workforce, and partners. The founders, and ideally many of the funders, are led by the Spirit to create sustainable value while leaving opportunity for others (gleaning), and to operate regularly with grace and forgiveness.
Our time together will be built upon deepening your imagination and accelerating your practice of redemptive entrepreneurship in the dimensions of strategy (what you build), operations (how you build), and leadership (why you build). No truly redemptive venture can ignore any of these, as they all must work together for redemptive purposes.
We encourage you to take 15 minutes to read through the 2024 Praxis Community Letter for greater context and for clarity of the vision we have for you as you enter this community. All of your Praxis experiences are built on this foundation.
— The Praxis Team