News

Broken Arrow minister expands his business leadership service

by Kirby Lee Davis
The Journal Record November 20, 2007

TULSA . It's never easy operating a part-time business in the spare moments of your full-time vocation, especially when your primary calling is ministry.

Nathan Baxter, founder of Lead Self-Lead Others.com, which is a Web site based in Tulsa where Baxter offers leadership coaching. (Photo by Rip Stell)

Three years ago Nathan Baxter's wife, Dianne, asked him to mentor a handful of her friends on leadership and business. Enamored by the idea, the certified Birkman International consultant and executive pastor of Broken Arrow's Liberty Church started a series of informal lessons backed by e-mailed assignments and other homework.

To his surprise, the four ladies started forwarding those e-mails to friends, who forwarded the messages on to others. "The next thing I know, I'm doing a workshop and 50 people show up," he said. Seeing and fielding growing interest, Baxter created a regular curriculum for the women leadership training and mentoring program he organized as Pink Strategies.com. This joined with a similar program he'd created to coach ministers, called XPastor.org. Doubled clientele led the one-man organization to establish two audio courses this year for Pink Strategies while leading conferences and workshops in Florida, Texas, Georgia and California. A third course will get its start next month.

All of that adds up to a major diversion in what remains a sideline opportunity for the full-time pastor. "This thing over the last three years has just gotten out of hand," said Baxter, who has coached 206 people over the last three years. "At some point you.ve going to have to get some more people in the boat or you'll never get to the next level."

So Baxter reorganized the businesses as subsidiaries under a new for-profit umbrella he called Lead Self-Lead Others.com. Next year he will take more of an oversight role, retaining direct control over XPastor but turning the other training and mentoring roles over to four certified associates who will be paid by commission.

For Baxter, who often handles this business from Panera Bread tables and booths, this gives the business a structure it lacked while helping him to reduce his workload.

"It's gone from a guy with a laptop, filled with nervous energy, to where I.m creating an organization," he said.

Since Pink Strategies has developed a Mary Kay Cosmetics focus, Baxter also is using Lead Self-Lead Others as the starting point for housewives and other women interested in business or coaching. It's a key growth area, since women leadership clientele that comprise 80 percent of his business.

Leading that effort will be four women he saw through nine-month certification as leadership coaches: businesswoman Melody Lenox, marriage and family therapist Jill Butler, financial planner Andrea Pinkston, and women's ministry leader Kathy Key. "His kind of mentoring of me has helped me clarify some things in myself and become aware of some leadership things in myself that I was not aware that I had," said Lenox, who works at Donna's Fashions as well as her church.

Baxter, who made $20,000 revenue this year from an operation that has required a total $6,000 investment to date, said the associates will receive 90 percent of the revenue that comes from their efforts. "The goal is not to take them away from their current employment," said Baxter. Instead, they will operate the Lead Self-Lead Others training and mentoring needs as a sideline, as he does. "They'll be supplementing their income."

Baxter sees the restructuring as one step toward his long-term goal of assembling 50 coaches over the next four years. He intends to lead certification training every spring. He also hopes to rebuild the Web site for more functionality and style.

"It looks like I created my Web site, which I did," he said. "It's not professional at all."

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