Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): Hello It’s the Christmas season and we’re excited that you’re here with us today for this 40th episode of the culture profit. So to kick things off, I brought my literal cup of cheer. If you’re listening to audio, I’ve got a styrofoam cup that has a cup of cheer written on it. So it is pretty awesome. Inside I’ve got some corny Christmas jokes. So I’m going to read one. Let’s see what we get here. One night, a Viking named Rudolph the Red was looking out the window and said to his wife, “It’s going to rain.” His wife asked, “How do you know that?” He responded, “Because Rudolph the Red knows rain, dear.” my humor is usually more dry, but I guess, this is shaking it up a bit. You want to take one? Let’s see.

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): So, what did one snowman say to the other snowman? I don’t know. Christa, do you smell carrots? boy. I was going to say that’s corny, but I guess that’s carroty. So, our goal with this show has always been to prove that putting people first is best for business.  Every 10th episode, Matt and I give a personal update on our lives as business husband and wife co-founders of our software company Mogram. So today, as we’re in the Christmas season season, you can see my red shirt. We want to talk about how our faith in Christ intersects with our business. So both of us are members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I grew up as a member my whole life.

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): I was baptized when I was eight and we are very engaged in our religion and feel very strongly about what we’re doing as members. Yep. And we met in college. We were in the same ward attending the same church congregation. That’s how we originally met. And when I was 19, I was able to go serve a mission for two years and learn Spanish.  I was in Texas in the panhandle area. I lived in Amarillo and Lach and also over in New I lived in New Mexico for a while and was able to meet some pretty cool people and eat some great food and learn Spanish out there which was really very very meaningful.

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): Lots of challenging days and fun days. Being able to tell people about Jesus Christ and his mission here on the earth. Are you looking at me? Sorry. I should have had something ready to say. I just thought you were going to go into No, that’s  So, being that we’re approaching the Christmas season, we wanted to talk about how our religion and our faith in Jesus Christ connects with starting a software company and what that experience has been like for us. We’ve got five kids at home. We both work at home and we’ve been building this company from the ground up for over two years now. So, I want to start by telling a story.

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): in spring of 2022. So, this would have been about six months before I quit my job for us to both fully invest in this endeavor. We took our whole family out to Colorado for I think it was about three days, a little vacation out there and we ended up going to this town on the west of Denver.  There’s a whole bunch of little railroad towns throughout there. Georgetown. Yep, that’s the name of it. So, we were in this little mining town. There was a hotel there. We got to ride this historic train which was pretty cool. But we had this very unexpected experience at the hotel. Of course, all the kids wanted to go to the pool.

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): We could have had just as much fun if we would have not gone anywhere and just booked a night at the hotel here because they wanted to swim so we’re sitting in there and I go in the hot tub and it was kind of crazy. There was way too much chlorine. I don’t know if you remember stinging so bad. I don’t think I’ve ever experienced that.  It was like a fog in the room and my eyes were feeling the amount of chlorine in the room. I don’t know. They did not care. They were just having a blast. So, we’re in there for a while. I get in the hot tub and then, some other people come in the room and this gentleman, he was a little bit older.

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): he sits down in the hot tub, and next thing you know, we’re having this conversation, and he’s asking us where we’re from and what we do. And I told him that I was publishing a book, and it was just about to come out in the next couple months.  and he proceeded to tell me how he founded multiple different businesses throughout his career and told us some pretty cool stories about challenges that he’d overcome, people that he was able to help in ways that he was able to give back.

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): and he just started bearing his testimony about Jesus Christ and partnering with Jesus Christ in all of his business endeavors that he always made an effort to have faith in him and look for ways to be an instrument in his hands to help other people.  And some of that was with customers or with employees or random people just because of his ability to help as a business owner. And very directly at the end of the conversation, my eyes were just burning at this point from sitting in that super hot tub with way too much chlorine.

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): I could barely even see him with my glasses fogged and everything, but he just looked at me very directly and said, “When you start your business, partner with the Lord.” And that was just such a powerful moment because Kristen and I had been talking about launching Mogrim and starting to make a game plan for that.  and we’ve always worked very closely on things and we’ve always had faith in Christ, but I don’t think we’d had that purposeful conversation about how we can make Jesus Christ a partner in our business efforts. I think that Christ cares about our salvation more than anything else, but I definitely think he cares about what’s happening in our lives as well and our ability to do good and help others.

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): So I do think it’s important and that he does care about our success and happiness. Yeah. And that’s something we wanted to do from the very beginning and that’s where we came up with Mobriam gives back.  So, we wanted a scalable way to make a difference, like I said, from the very beginning because, some companies maybe they wait until they’re very profitable to start their foundation or some kind of giving back program or service hours with their employees. We wanted to do that from the very beginning before we even had customers and very purposefully did that in a way that was both possible with the money.

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): I mean, we need to be able to survive as a business, but in a way that we could do good from the very beginning. We wanted that to do good. And so, Mobam Gives back as we were kind of developing this, we decided to partner with Church World Service. We loved the idea that if someone donated, they would know exactly what their donation is going to.  And so, Church World Service, they have these gifts that you can purchase such as four chickens for a family in Tanzania and they have several different options for people in the United States as well, but things that bless families all over the world to be both self-reliant, which we love.

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): We feel very strongly about self-reliance and to just bless their communities to have their needs met, clean water, food, and we know we’re not the only people on this earth. We’re very blessed here in Logan, Utah, and in the United States, and there are a lot of people in other countries around the world who really struggle. and so it’s really cool that from the very beginning of our business, we were able to set up a way for our clients to be involved in doing something good for the world. and so we’ve set aside a portion of our profits to fund this program and our clients are able to give back credits every month that they’re a customer with us. So they’re determining what those credits go to.

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): They’re picking which things they want to fund and then Moim is funding those different purchases. Church World Service, if you haven’t heard of them before, it is a 501c3 nonprofit and it was founded just after World War II. There were 17 different Christian denominations that came together to found this and as a faith-based organization, CWS supports communities around the globe through just and sustainable responses to hunger, poverty, displacement, and disaster. So, we like those focuses and giving our clients the opportunity to choose what they’re most passionate about and what they want to support within those different topics. Yes.

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): and CWS. They also have 70 more than 75 years of proven performance. They’ve established global giving infrastructure and have focused on solutions for specifically hunger, poverty, displacement, and disaster.  We’ve seen a lot of that happen in our world these days with Ukraine and the Middle East and there’s a great amount of need and we love being a part of doing something even in the small sense for people who are struggling in that way. yeah and the next thing we wanted to talk about was partnering with the Lord in our business.

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): We wanted there to be a giving back component that could scale. We also wanted to embed principles of righteousness and goodness, I guess, within how our business would operate. and I wanted to share just a couple scriptures from the New Testament. So, in John 8:12, we read, “Then spake Jesus again unto them, saying, I am the light of the world. that followeth me shall not walk in darkness but shall have the light of life. And then in his sermon on the mount in Matthew chapter 5 verse verses 14- 16 we read ye are the light of the world. A city that is set on a hill cannot be hidden. Neither do men light a candle and put it under a bushel but on a candlestick and it giveth light unto all that are in the house.

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): Let your light so shine before men that they may see your good works and glorify your father which is in heaven. So Christ, he’s the light of the world and as disciples of him, followers of him, we have some of that light and we can share that light with others. And so how that applies to MoRim with our mission and values. I want to just share that with you. So Mob’s mission is to measure and improve employee happiness at great companies.  So we help automate review requests to glass door Indeed and other platforms and monitor and manage all of that public facing feedback. so that’s a big piece of what we do and our values are the behavioral guideposts. They’re the things that help us make decisions and how we design our processes and how we operate as a business.

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): on our website you can read this but the moving culture is seen in the actions of team members pursuing our mission. We strive for excellence and seek to make the world a brighter place. Our team members are talented, ambitious, ambitious professionals and our value set is an acronym for the word  service, harmony, integrity, nimbleness, and expertise. The five points of the Moving Star symbolize our values. So, we’ve got that little star icon for the Mobering logo, which also ties into ratings and reviews. So, Christa, you want to go through the So, for service, our focus is acting with kindness and care towards customers and each other.

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): Harmony. Play your part. Win as a team and have fun along with Exercise integrity in all you do, and Nimble. Challenge the status quo. Decide and go. And expertise. Trust what you research, and always keep learning. So, these pieces of our values are things that we strive for all the time. and we want our employees and people that we work with to know that that’s what we stand for and that we want to have integrity in everything we do. We want to be honest. We want to have fun along the way and we try to be efficient in the decisions that we make and act on them and move forward. and then always keep learning and that definitely doesn’t mean that we’re perfect or we get everything right all the time.

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): if something goes wrong, we want to fix it. We want to make it right. And we want to continuously be striving for good outcomes. We want to be honest and have integrity in our decision- making and our behaviors, but also integrity, meaning quality and reliability in the work that we produce and the product that we have. So, yeah.  And I think this is something like Matt said, we are not perfect individuals and hopefully this episode doesn’t make you think that we’re very self-righteous or something, but these are all things that we strive for and want others to know that’s what Mob is striving for. That’s what we are striving for as individuals.

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): And we are very grateful to have a savior that brings light to the world and helps us when we have our own struggles, which everyone does. So that’s very true. and honestly, just kind of as we’re wrapping up here, this past year, I mean, our youngest son, Zach, he’s just over one year old. He was born with a cleft lip and a cleft pallet.  and was diagnosed with a genetic disorder called Shaw Gibbs syndrome. And he’s had a lot of different things, four surgeries, over 100 different medical visits in his first year in life. And that coinciding with our second year of operating mim has been very intense.

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): I think for me at least it’s prompted a lot of growth, sometimes uncomfortable and painful in some ways but I don’t know what I would have done without Jesus Christ being able to feel his love and support.  We’ve felt so uplifted from so many different people who have prayed for our family and prayed for Zach and definitely working together with you, Christ, and being able to support one another.

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): It’s for us. Even if this business failed, which we don’t think it will because there’s so many great indicators that things are going exceptionally well and we’re very excited for 2025. We know that the most important thing is following Jesus Christ and being honest and in all of our dealings. But we’re very optimistic and very excited for the opportunity that we’ve had to come this far and we will work as hard as physically possible to keep things moving and to do right by our customers and to continually develop the product to produce exceptional results. So, it’s been quite the learning and growth experience. Yeah.

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): And also at the time of this recording, it is haw Gibbs Syndrome Awareness Week. And so go ahead and look up their website. It’s a Shaw dash I’m going to have to spell it for you, but look up XI BBS Shaw Gibbs Syndrome. They are just trying to increase awareness and research around it.  And we love our son Zach so much and he has been such a huge blessing for our family. He definitely has some struggles and we want to help him as much as we can and we feel that peace can be found at any time and in any circumstance through Jesus Christ. and that’s I think the last thing I’d like to say. so merry Christmas everyone.

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): Remember the wise men, they sought after Jesus. And today, wise men and wise women still seek after him. have a great Christmas season. We’ll see you next year. Merry Christmas.