The idol of the business is letting the business become your identity, your source of hope, your solution to everything else that isn't working. I did this twice. The first time nearly destroyed my family. Josh and I started a web design agency with a newborn, a two-year-old, mountains of debt, and total inexperience. We believed that if we could just get traction, everything would get better. It didn't. We got worse. More broke, more desperate, more disconnected from each other and from God. The breakthrough didn't come through a better strategy. It came when I finally stopped and looked at what was actually broken. The business was a symptom. I was the problem. When I started working on who I actually was, what I was good at, what I was built for, the business started to change. Not because the strategy changed, but because the person running it did.
When we launched our web design agency, I was pregnant with my second child and had full peace about the calling. I expected God to bless it. Instead, Josh and I entered one of the hardest seasons of our lives. We were broke, disconnected from each other, barely keeping the business alive, and trying to hold everything together through sheer will. I believed if I could just get the business working, everything else would follow. It didn't work that way.
This episode covers the idol of the business itself: putting your hope in the business, letting it become your identity, building your whole life around making it work, and believing that once it does, everything else will be okay. I trace two distinct seasons where I fell into this. The first nearly wrecked my marriage. The second was subtler, after I'd already learned this lesson once, which is the thing about idols. They come back. And the second time I didn't even see it coming.
- Business becomes an idol when you believe that getting it right will fix everything else in your life. That logic is the trap. The business can't carry that weight and neither can you.
- When you're putting your hope in the business, God stops opening doors. He doesn't bless the grind mindset. He waits for you to come to him first before the business ever gets better.
- The grinding never works the way you think it will. More hours, more pressure, more isolation just produces more disconnect, more depression, more anxiety, and the same revenue problem.
- You can't fix the business before fixing yourself. I had to figure out who I was, what I was good at, and what I was built for before the business had any chance of working the way I needed it to.
- Joy and peace don't come from a functioning business. They come from trusting God. Romans 15:13 you trust him, you get joy and peace, you overflow with hope.
- The lesson doesn't always stick. When I launched Clear Authentic Brands, I slid back into the same idol without realizing it. Six months of grinding before I recognized what I was doing.
- God does not want you to sacrifice your marriage, your kids, your home life, or your rest for the business. He calls you to steward well AND to keep first things first.
What does it look like when business becomes an idol?
It happens when the business stops being a vehicle for your calling and starts being your identity. When the revenue goes up, you feel like you're worth something. When it goes down, you feel like a failure. When you're grinding at 11pm because stopping means facing something you're avoiding.
In our early years, Josh and I were trying to fix everything through the business. We were broke, disconnected, struggling. And my belief was: once this works, everything will be okay. Once we have income, our marriage will be okay. Once we have clients, I'll feel okay about myself. That's the idol. The business as the solution to everything else.
The problem is the business can't carry that weight. It was never designed to. When it becomes your hope, your identity, and your measure of worth, every bad month becomes an identity crisis. Every slow week feels like a verdict on who you are. And the pressure you put on it to be all of those things makes it harder to run, not easier.
I thought if I could just get the business working, everything else would fall into place. That is the lie that kept us in the cycle longer than we needed to be.
Amy Dardis, Episode 21What actually turns a struggling business and marriage around?
For us, the turning point came when we stopped trying to fix the business and started looking at what was actually broken. And what was actually broken wasn't the strategy or the pricing or the niche. It was us.
I had to do the personal work first. I went through a process of figuring out who I actually was. Not as a business owner, not in a role, but as a person. What I was good at. What I wasn't good at. What I was built to do. What God had specifically put in me. I had been trying to run a business without that clarity, which is like trying to build a house without a foundation.
Once I had that clarity, my role in the business changed. I stepped out from behind the scenes and into the client-facing work I was actually built for. I stopped doing the things I had no business doing and started doing the things only I could do. And the business started to change. Not because the strategy changed. Because the person running it did.
The order matters. Identity first. Then business. Most people try to do it the other way around.
How do you put God first when you're really struggling to keep a business alive?
I thought I'd learned this lesson. After the first hard season, I had years of clarity. I understood the order: God first, family second, business as a vehicle for the calling. And then I launched Clear Authentic Brands and within six months I was right back in it.
I was grinding 12-hour days, trying every platform, running ads, taking online courses, doing everything hustle culture said to do. And I was praying every day. Crying out to God. And still operating entirely in my own strength. Prayer and self-reliance coexist all the time. The tell is whether you're actually stopping to listen, or whether you're asking God to bless the plan you've already set in motion.
The second time was subtler because I had the right language. I could talk about building the business God's way. I could articulate the framework. But I was living the old pattern underneath all of it.
What I've learned: the idol of the business doesn't disappear when you get the clarity once. It has to be fought consistently. The goal isn't to defeat it permanently. It's to recognize it faster every time it comes back.
Resources mentioned
- Ep 20 — Idols in Entrepreneurship: When Good Things Take God's Place — Series intro: what an idol is and why this matters for entrepreneurs
- Ep 22 — The Idol of Your Own Strength — Next in the series: trusting your effort over trusting God
- Free Hiring Resources
Full transcript
In today's episode, we are kicking off our series on idols in business and the specific ones I personally have stories about that I've wrestled with. Today's episode: we are diving into our business being an idol and what it looks like when we put business before everything else, before God, before family, before joy and peace. The definition of an idol is an object or an abstract concept that is given a higher priority than God. It's something that we rely on for blessing, help, or guidance instead of God. It's anything that consumes a person's heart, imagination, or devotion more than God. It's any good thing that we elevate to a position of being the main thing in our life.
God is supposed to be number one in our heart, our mind, our soul, our strength. God says: you shall have no other gods before me, do not make for yourself an idol, put nothing before me, seek me first with all your heart. And in business in life, business is very consuming. It is very distracting. Now I love business. I love the world of entrepreneurship. I love how businesses run and operate. It is a beautiful way for us to use our God-given giftings to develop, contribute, impact, make a meaningful difference in this world while providing for a family and connecting in relationships. Business truly is amazing and I am so passionate about it. An idol is not something that is necessarily bad, but it is the level of importance and priority and influence and power that we give it in our life.
I have given my business everything. And this is not something I have only struggled with once. When I first left the corporate world and went into being a full-time entrepreneur, I was very excited, as most of us are when we start our business. And I had no idea what I was getting myself into. I left the corporate world when I was in my first trimester of being pregnant with our second child. I had been praying for this door to open for the last year. God affirmed it through different connections and relationships. I had absolute peace that I was supposed to leave my job and go full-time in the business. I really believed that as soon as I went full time, gave it all of my time and energy, the business was going to grow and flourish and excel.
I figured that since God called me to it, it was going to be blessed, doors were going to open and God was going to make a way. And I ended up going into one of the hardest seasons of my life that lasted for quite a few years, significantly for at least the next year and a half. I was emotionally and relationally immature. I was a young mother. I was a young wife. I didn't know myself very well at all. I was trying to navigate a marriage where I was married to my business partner. We were trying to navigate our business, our marriage, being parents of young kids, our own spiritual journey. None of it was going well. It was a very, very stressful time.
Both of our approaches honestly was that our business was the source of our frustration. If we could just get our business figured out, then everything else would get better. Fix the business, alleviate the stress, bring in income, create margin, create space, give us room to breathe so we could be more present with our kids, more present with each other. This is a very normal, logical way of thinking. We didn't have enough leads coming in, didn't have enough income. We were so broke. Overdrawn personal accounts, overdrawn checking accounts at the same time. Barely enough money for food. It was so stressful. We just felt like failures every single day.
We also had a two-year-old, a new baby, and Josh and I were just completely not on the same page. This season of my life had very, very little joy and basically no peace. I was raging on the inside. So angry at myself, at my life. I was seeing tendencies in myself that I did not like. I did not know how to communicate what I wanted. I did not know how to be real or vulnerable with anyone, including my husband. This season was filled with anger, bitterness, resentment, disconnect, stress. I don't think we ever laughed. We were so serious, so stressed, so consumed with this business because nothing in our life was working. And we just felt like: if we figure out the business, we'll figure out everything else.
We would get up and work all day long. I would never rest. We would not have fun. We would not relax. Just grind, grind, grind. Because honestly, we felt this pressure: we didn't deserve to rest. We didn't deserve to take a break. We didn't deserve to have fun because we hadn't earned it. We were failing each other. We were failing our family. We were failing at everything. And when you're failing, the only thing to do is work harder. And that just did not work out. That continued to lead to more disconnect, more depression, more anxiety, more struggle. And the people around us started to notice. Something is going on. Because at this point, we were isolating ourselves.
It's easy to get to a point where you're so ashamed, so embarrassed. You feel like everybody else has their life figured out and you don't, and it's just hard to be around other people because you're just faking it, pretending. You don't want anyone to know how bad things really are. Our business wasn't working, our marriage wasn't working, our home life was not good. I have journal entries from this season of my life of just day after day: God, please help us to make enough money to buy food. Please help us to figure this out and have fun and love each other. Why is this happening? Where is my sin? What do I need to learn through this that I'm not learning? Help me learn it faster so I can get out of this mess.
It was a downward spiral, then hitting a rock bottom, really, really dark, ugly place. And then a very slow journey back up. I didn't know how to put God first. This difficult season really was the first time I had ever hit rock bottom. And it was the first time a lot of really bad things that had been running my life surfaced. All of these mindsets and thought patterns and habits and this anger and this bitterness and this inability to connect, it was all buried and I was blind to it until I went through this season. This very, very ugly season was me finally looking at myself in the mirror and really seeing the mess that I was. I honestly thought I had it pretty well together, and I really didn't.
And that was the beginning of change: seeing this ugly mess before me and being like, okay, I have some work to do. It's time to get to work. Through that, God started to heal and restore and break through and show me who he created me to be, show me my strengths and my giftings and what I was good at. And I had put all of this hope in myself and in our business, that if I could just figure out my business, everything else would work out. And what God taught me through this process was that I had to first figure out myself before I was ever going to have a chance at figuring out my business.
That was huge mindset shift number one: coming face to face with the fact that I had no idea who I was, no clue about my own identity as an individual, as a Christian, as a child of God. None of it. And by finally recognizing that I didn't know, and then just getting to a place where I'm like, okay, I can start here, I can start working on this stuff, I can start figuring out what am I good at, what do I enjoy doing, what is fun, what's causing me to be angry all the time, what do I believe, what do I want in my life?
I started to focus on me getting better mentally, spiritually, emotionally, relationally. Starting to work on my marriage outside of my business. Recognizing that I was not a good mom and I needed help, needed mentorship, needed guidance in what it meant to be a healthy parent. I started to work on these areas in my life that had nothing to do with my business. And through that process, our business started to turn around because I started to figure out what I was good at, I started to change the way I approached people, I changed the way I approached relationships. I needed to get my life figured out. Those other areas were far more important than my business.
I had wrapped myself up in the idea that my business was the answer, my business was the hope, my business was what was going to change everything. And if I could just grind it out long enough, if I could just figure all of that stuff out, then I could worry about all this other stuff and get it fixed. And it ended up being the opposite. God said: no, seek me, come to me, let me do a work in you. Recognize how much of a mess you are. Surrender this importance and this power that you have let your business have over your marriage, over your identity, over your parenting, over your home life. And then allowing it to get better and to heal and to fix my business in the process.
There are two verses that really stayed with me and held me through this season. Romans 15:13: may the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in him, so that you may overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit. I had no joy and no peace. None. That did not define my life at all. And this verse says: may the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in him, which means the only way I was going to get joy and peace in this season was to trust in him. And when I did that, I was going to overflow with hope. I was putting hope into my business and I had no joy and no peace. But this verse says: put your hope in him, put your trust in him, and then you're going to overflow with hope, and your life is going to be filled with joy and peace.
This verse became a battle cry: what does it mean to really live like that? What does that verse mean for my life? Where am I putting my priorities? Because when I was putting my business before everything else, my life was literally crumbling around me. I was choosing to grind and to work and to stress over joy and peace because my hope was in my business. Then God reminds me: my hope needs to be in him. That is where joy and peace come from. I desperately wanted joy and peace in my life, in my home, in my business. I didn't want to walk around having to pretend that things were okay. I wanted them to actually be okay. And in this grinding season, God wasn't opening doors in my business. He wasn't allowing these things to happen. Because if he had rewarded this mindset, rewarded these bad habits, I would have never learned. I would have continued to be this empty, angry, stressful person.
The second major season was when I launched Clear Authentic Brands. Something new, trying to get off the ground. It was so easy to revert back into the grind. I have to make this business work. I have to work 12 hours a day. And so I was. Working 12 hours a day, wasn't eating throughout the day, wasn't working out, wasn't leaving the house, wasn't making dinner until seven, eight, nine o'clock at night, barely able to have a conversation with my children because I was so consumed with this business. While my life was not the mess it was before, it was still easy to revert back to these old habits. It didn't last nearly as long because it's one of those things where it's like: oh yeah, I remember this lesson, I remember God has seen me through this before. What did I learn last time? Oh yeah, I needed to look at myself internally, look at what kind of mom am I being, what kind of wife am I being, what does my home life feel like? Make sure all of that is good.
The lesson was easier and faster to learn the second, third, fourth, fifth time around. But just as we grow and get away from that season, we kind of forget, kind of forget how intense it was and how the habits that led us there to begin with return. So once again, choosing to grind and trying to put my hope in my business instead of remembering: okay, nope, God, you are the one who calls me to this. If you call me to this, I'm going to do everything I can to work hard and have good boundaries and make the most of my time, to steward well, to use my resources to the best of my ability. But at the same time, you do not want me to sacrifice my marriage or my kids or my home life. You don't want me to sacrifice my rest or my time with you or to ever forget, even for a second, that you are the one who provides everything I need.
If this is part of your plan, if this is part of your will, that this grows and this flourishes and this succeeds, I can trust you in this season that whatever you're teaching me or shaping me or preparing me for, it's for my good. And I believe that. So I don't need to freak out, I don't need to doubt, I don't need to put all this hope in my business because my hope is actually in you. And if you want this to succeed, you're going to open doors, you're going to make a way. Even if there's a waiting period, even if it doesn't work the way I think or the way I want, I trust you enough to know that I want your plan more than I want my plan. Your way is always better. Your ways are higher than my ways, your thoughts are higher than my thoughts, and you're sovereign. You are God, you are powerful, you are all-knowing. You love me and my family more than I could ever comprehend. And you're not trying to hurt me. So my hope will not be in what I think this business can do for me. My hope will be in the fact that even in this season of building, this is my life, and I don't want to look back and regret even for a second how I spent it. I want to look back on this season and know that I trusted you through it and found joy and peace along the way because I overflowed with hope because my hope is in you. So as always, you can learn more at clearauthenticbrands.com. That's all for this episode. See you in the next one.