Key Takeaways
- My faith isn't a value listed on a slide. It's the framework I run every decision through.
- I ask a simpler question before revenue and growth: Is this the honest way to do it?
- Atlantic Tech's slower, in-house approach to building software is one of the clearest expressions of that belief.
- My church community in Cheyenne holds me accountable in a way no leadership book ever has.
Most founders talk about culture. I talk about conviction. I'm the founder and CEO of Atlantic Tech, the data intelligence company I started in Cheyenne, Wyoming, in 2020, and my faith isn't a value I put on a slide. It's the framework everything else runs on, how I hire, how I handle a losing quarter, and how I think about what a company owes the people it touches.
Faith Is Not a Sunday Activity for Me
For me, faith isn't a Sunday activity that pauses when the workweek starts. It's the operating system underneath my decisions, the thing that determines what counts as success once the obvious metrics are met. A growing company can hit every number on a dashboard and still fail the test that matters most to me, which is whether it treated the people inside and around it with honesty and care. I've told my team more than once that a business built without that foundation is a business built on sand, no matter how impressive the walls look from the outside.
That framing changes what I actually measure. Revenue and growth still matter because a company that can't sustain itself can't serve anyone. But before I get to those numbers, I ask a simpler question. Is this the honest way to do it? In an industry where shortcuts are easy and rarely visible until they cause damage, that question carries more weight for me than almost anything else on the dashboard.
Where the Cost of a Belief Actually Shows Up
The clearest evidence of a belief system is what it costs you to keep it. At Atlantic Tech, that shows up in decisions where I've traded short-term advantage for long-term integrity. We built our own software instead of reselling other vendors' tools, partly because ownership lets me stand fully behind what the product does and how it was built. I've also been selective about which clients we take on, because I'm not willing to build technology whose downstream use I can't explain in good conscience.
None of this makes the company unusual in the sense of being strange. It makes it unusual in the sense of being unhurried, willing to grow slower in exchange for growing straighter. That patience is, to me, one of the more practical expressions of faith available to a business owner. It's easy to talk about principle when nothing is at stake. The test comes when principle costs you a deal, a deadline, or a quarter of growth, and you have to decide which one you actually believe in.
Am I Building a Company or Stewarding One?
I think of my work less as building a company and more as stewarding something I was given the opportunity to build. That framing comes directly from my church life, where service to others is treated as a discipline rather than an occasional gesture. I carry that same posture into Atlantic Tech, where I take the company's obligations to its employees, its clients, and its home community in Cheyenne as seriously as its obligations to its balance sheet.
I know I fit a familiar pattern among people who'd call themselves a faith-based entrepreneur, building a company where the mission statement and the moral statement are meant to be the same document. For me, that alignment isn't aspirational language. It's closer to a working requirement. A decision that would grow the company but compromise what I believe I owe the people around me isn't, in my experience, a difficult decision at all.
The Congregation That Keeps Me Honest
I'm an active member of my church in Cheyenne, and the relationships built there shape how I show up at Atlantic Tech more than any leadership book I've read. Church membership, for me, is less about attendance and more about accountability, the kind that comes from being known by people who'll ask honest questions and expect honest answers. That accountability travels with me into the office.
It's also part of why I've stayed rooted in Cheyenne instead of relocating the company to a coastal tech hub. My community, in the fullest sense of the word, is there. Building somewhere else would have meant building apart from the people and the congregation that hold me accountable to the values I say the company runs on. My approach to leadership reads to some as an example of purpose-driven entrepreneurship, but staying close to that community was never really a question I had to debate twice.
A Standard I Keep Missing and Keep Returning To
It would be easy to read all of this as marketing language, the kind of founder-values messaging that shows up in press kits and rarely survives contact with a difficult quarter. I'd push back on that reading, mostly because the claims I'm making about faith are modest rather than triumphant. I don't think of myself as a model of it. I think of it as the standard I keep failing to fully meet and keep returning to anyway, which is a different claim than the one most companies make about their values.
That distinction might be the most useful way to understand what faith actually does inside Atlantic Tech. It isn't a feature of the brand. It's closer to infrastructure, the kind of thing that doesn't show up on a product page but determines what the company will and won't do when nobody outside the room is watching. For me, that's always been the only test of a belief that counts.
What I Get Asked About Mixing Faith and Business
Do you require your employees to share your faith?
No. My faith shapes how I lead and what I expect of myself, not a litmus test for anyone who works with me. What I do expect from the team is honesty and care, regardless of where that comes from for them.
Isn't it risky to talk publicly about faith as a business owner?
Maybe, but I'd rather be honest about what actually drives my decisions than perform a values statement I don't believe. I'd rather lose an opportunity than win one by pretending to be someone I'm not.
How do you keep faith from becoming just another branding angle?
By keeping the claims small. I don't describe myself as a model of anything. I describe a standard I keep returning to, and I let the decisions, not the language, do the talking.
