The Legacy Business: Practical Insights to Assembling a Life Worth Passing on to Others

By Mike Fransen

It has been said that when we are born, we look like our parents, but when we die, we look like our choices.

After everything predictable has gone up in smoke, the reality has quickly set in that the stakes and penalties for misplaced energy and choices have never been higher.

Drawing on his wisdom midway through life, the author reaches down deep to help others look to God to help them correct their path to move toward a Christ-centered legacy business. He considers questions like:

How can you become more purposeful as a leader, father, husband, son, brother, and friend?

What can you do to find more purpose and fulfillment in life?

How can you let the Lord into your heart to do your work?

The author emphasizes that while a misstep could cost you your marriage and family, it will almost invariably rob you of your ability to pass on a Godly legacy for those you leave behind.

He also notes that we all eventually come to realize we are in the legacy business. But it’s up to you to decide whether to be intentional about the way you live.

• Language: English
• Publisher: WestBow Press
• Release date: Mar 25, 2022
• ISBN: 9781664260177

Mike Fransen

Mike Fransen is an executive in the commercial real estate industry, focusing on the office sector. He became a leading expert in building teams that create and operate cutting-edge spaces that best connect humans together. In both his professional and personal interactions, he came to fully appreciate, observe, and study many of the themes this book contemplates. He and his wife, Stacey, consider their role of raising their two daughters to be their most important. This family of four loves Jesus, traveling, and investing in the lives of others.

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Copyright © 2022 Mike Fransen.

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Scripture quotations taken from The Holy Bible, New International

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ISBN: 978-1-6642-6016-0 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-6642-6015-3 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-6642-6017-7 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2022904299

WestBow Press rev. date: 3/25/2022

To

my parents, Lu and Karen, and grandparents, Paul and Alma, who showed me how to love God and others. This book was made possible thanks to my amazing wife, Stacey, who makes me infinitely better and encourages me like no one else does. This book was written to our two beautiful daughters, Audrey and Sophie, who inspire and amaze me every day with their spirit and servant hearts.

Finally, this book is released to all of those who, like me, realize that life isn’t perfect or easy, but we can do so much more if we step out of God’s way and allow Him to take us to places we could never go to on our own.

Contents

Preface

Chapter 1 Two Men: Big Impact

Chapter 2 Avoiding an Identity Crisis

Chapter 3 Be Dependable

Chapter 4 Life Is a Team Sport

Chapter 5 Don’t Waste the Valleys and Don’t Forget God on the Peaks

Chapter 6 Put It All On

Chapter 7 Attitude of Gratitude

Chapter 8 Work Hard

Chapter 9 Generosity: Holding on Loosely

Chapter 10 Just Own It

Chapter 11 Get out of the Boat and Keep Your Eyes Up

Chapter 12 Excellence in Everything

Chapter 13 Energy Giver

Chapter 14 Diffusing Bombs

Chapter 15 Intentionality

Chapter 16 Satan Is No Dummy

Chapter 17 Don’t Be So Selfish

Chapter 18 Strength in Humility

Chapter 19 The Little Stuff Is the Big Stuff

Chapter 20 Can I Get Your Attention Please?

Chapter 21 Marching Orders

Chapter 22 Knowing My Place on the Vine

Chapter 23 Managing the Mist

Chapter 24 Selective Amnesia

Chapter 25 Teachable Moments

Chapter 26 Humor Me

Chapter 27 Spiritual Emotional IQ

Chapter 28 That’s Encouraging

Chapter 29 Throwing Seed

Chapter 30 Grappling with the Whats

Preface

In 2006, as a second-year business school student, the three of us who led the Christian club embarked on an ambitious quest to host a conference for top business school students for the purpose of encouraging one another to pursue our faith and business careers together, in that order. It was an amazing moment in my faith journey as I saw God open doors and do incredible things. The seed we planted has since continued and grown beyond what any of us imagined. But I also realized that being part of something like that would obligate me to live out a life that reflected God’s difference in it. For the next fifteen years, I set out to build a faith-anchored family and career while riding life’s waves of ups and downs. Somewhere in that season, the idea for writing this book took shape, inspired by God’s increasing and not so subtle pressing to let Him finally have full control of my life and this next chapter. He has a way of clearing our lives and calendars when He is ready to take us to the next level. Thanks to personal and world events and the right mindset, that calendar cleared out, and I set out to gather my thoughts for this book before any more time elapsed. I needed to get these truths in my life down on paper so I could become more purposeful as a leader, father, husband, son, brother, and friend. The more time I have had to intersect with people in this season, the more I have discovered a universal aching we all have to find more purpose and fulfillment that we then can pass along and share with others. The nagging question I must answer each day is, will I let Him into my heart to do that work? My prayer is that the number of daily yeses increase exponentially in this second half of my life.

1

Two Men: Big Impact

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T here I was sitting with my family in a pew in the front of my maternal grandparents’ church in northern Colorado, a place I had visited and attended my entire life when not home in Oregon. But this time I was there to celebrate the end of my grandpa’s life at his funeral. As far as I was concerned, him being part of the Greatest Generation could not be more appropriate, and I could think of no one greater besides him and Grandma. He, like so many of his era, had done it all: grown up in the Great Depression, fought in a world war, done a little of everything professionally, raised a family, and was a hero to many, including me. On this day, as I looked around a packed room, the pastor asked everyone in the room who was personally led to Christ and discipled by Paul (Grandpa) to stand. I quickly lost count of the diverse group of those on their feet. I remember quietly commenting through tears to my wife that I could almost hear audibly in that service, from heaven, the biblical phrase all Christians aspire toward, Paul, well done, thou good and faithful servant.

I was an ambitious twenty-seven-year-old at the time, getting ready to head off to business school, and it was a pivotal moment where I was compelled to flash-forward fifty years and start to really internalize and envision how I wanted that memorial service moment to play out for me. I wanted it to be like this, no matter where business took me. I had not yet learned about the business school definition of return on investment (ROI), but there was no financial number I would ever study or see that could touch what I saw in that room. Grandpa was not famous or wealthy by the world’s definition, but he was highly influential. And of all the many great things he had done in his eighty-three years, having a life and value system anchored in Christ led him to what I have come to appreciate as his great achievement: starting and growing the legacy business.

Somewhere in that same moment, I had another realization. That legacy business, by definition, could and needed to be a generational family business. All of us had unique gifts, shortcomings, and life maps, but being highly influential with eternal perspective was something that could be common to all of us.

Just over two years later, as I was finishing business school, I received a call from Dad and Mom while walking out of a great little restaurant in New Haven, Connecticut. Dad had been a little under the weather for my graduation a few days prior, and a visit to the doctor once back home revealed the dreaded diagnosis of cancer. Up until that moment, it had been that horrible disease that happened to others but had never been a significant part of our family. I still remember just going numb standing there, not even sure what to think next. But as I watched Dad (and Mom) battle, like so many others, riding the incredible emotional roller coaster of this disease, I saw another hero of mine reveal unshakeable faith, courage, and strength. He was determined to not waste his cancer, as he called it, and to use his journey to its fullest and most positive extent possible—mission accomplished.

Six years after the initial diagnosis, I sat on another front-row pew, this time in our home church in Oregon, for the celebration of Dad’s life. Once again, I glanced around the packed room with the same thoughts I had had almost nine years earlier at Grandpa’s service. As an amazingly talented and underappreciated high school math teacher (and yes, mine, for freshman-year geometry), Dad sometimes had trouble deciding if that investment of time and a career had been influential. But I knew better. Everyone in that sanctuary did. From humble beginnings living in a divorced home, left to fend for himself many days, to getting a master’s degree, to going to