Separate
Pleasant Harbor, Washington, August 23, 2043
By Steve Dunn, ABC News, Portland, Oregon
Steve Hopkins is a satisfied soul, a genuinely generous and happy man, still fully engaged and full of energy, ideas, and vision at age 86. I have known him for decades, through my brother, Scott, who is a close friend of Steve, Kay and their whole family.
I had to catch up with him on his 40-foot twin diesel motor yacht moored in the Hood Canal, bordering the Olympic peninsula. Steve and Kay, accompanied by other family crew members, welcomed me aboard bright and early with a spill-proof mug of fresh hot coffee. He was clad in seafaring garb; khakis, Topsiders, a Norwegian fishing hat, and a traditional ribbed navy sweater. While I cast off, Steve moved to the flying bridge and we got underway immediately as we had over a hundred miles to cover before I would disembark at Anacortes. I soon joined him next to the captain’s seat as we eased into the channel against a light breeze and the smell of seawater and a mild whiff of diesel exhaust. Most of our conversation took place as we plied the waters of the Puget Sound heading north to rendezvous with friends in the nearby oyster beds of the San Juan Islands to enjoy a clambake on a long summer night. The name of the vessel is “Miss Kay” for his wife of 53 years. She, along with one of their beloved daughters and two grand-kids, are along for the adventure and fellowship with several lifelong friends and family with whom they share such summer excursions each summer in August. It’s a wonderful break they always look forward to, as the rest of the year Steve is thoroughly consumed with mentoring his younger business partners and the chief executives of their client companies.
Steve’s story is unique and distinctive in the business world, specifically because it is based on generosity and growing companies from a philosophy of giving. His company, and those to whom he provides strategy, guidance, and mentorship, believe in being generous with employees, customers, and community; that giving is the natural order of good business and sound philosophy. The more generous you are, the more profitable and greater your growth. This runs counter to the general view and reputation of business. Most Americans view profit and sales as dirty words and those who pursue such things as evil and greedy. Not so. According to Steve, profit is as foundational to life and happiness as is good food and clean water. You cannot be wealthy without profit and you cannot be generous if you are poor.
The profits to his own business come through advising and consulting other businesses who also follow the same mindset and philosophy. Love your customers, love your employees, love your lenders and vendors and the community you serve and who serves you. Love, in these relationships, is often expressed in the color green. That’s right, good compensation.
Not only does he run a very profitable business, he’s also deeply involved in charities, non-profits, and NGOs (Non-Governmental Organizations). They provide a key solution for many of the businesses he counsels in transitioning ownership from current to successor. Most business owners are exceptionally good decision-makers. Most governments are not. Most societies require those who have to provide for those who have not. This is called social capital. It is provided via two sources: taxes and charity. When given the choice between providing for the needy through taxes, or the opportunity to participate in charitable work where they can choose where the money goes, most business owners jump on the charity option where they can apply their decision-making skills and end-run government waste and graft.
In a seamless mesh with his business, Steve and Kay are jointly engaged with their charitable NGOs on missions of mercy to rescue and emancipate the brutally oppressed innocent pre-teen girls and young women in places like Nepal, Indonesia, Viet Nam, and Cambodia. This they have done with a relentless commitment for over 30 years. This focused passion was triggered many years ago when his mentor, David, who is also a philanthropist dedicated to mission and ministry, connected Steve and family to one of his three main beneficiaries, Corban University. When the very next day, an unlikely coincidence connected Steve’s executive assistant, a native Indonesian from a very wealthy family, to the same mission of rescuing prepubescent little girls from sex trafficking and other evil abuses, he credited it to unqualified divine intervention, and took up the cause between and among a number of individual friends and associates and the NGOs who had figured out how to navigate the politics and perils that come with the tricky and dangerous work of reaching and rescuing these abused innocents. Although he has told this story countless times, he still wells up at the thought of the evil they are fighting and the joy and relief they experience every time even one of these innocent babes is rescued and set free. He says it demonstrates so starkly the idea propounded in Emerson’s essay, “Compensation.” In the same fresh young human life, the wages of the pure dark evil of destroying innocence with sexual abuse and degradation, up against the redemption of rescue, healing, safety, and the opportunity of life redeemed of that destruction. Evil never goes unpunished and good works never go unrewarded.
The greatest joy, accomplishment, and pride in life is their family. Their two daughters and one son have been close forever and always. They’re all well-established with their own families and pursuits, of course, but they’re never that far apart. They wouldn’t miss spending holidays together, especially Christmas, and birthdays are never neglected. In fact, they’re a cause for major celebration every time.
The Hopkins still make their home in Lake Oswego, Oregon where for over 50 years Steve has led the strategic growth, development, long-range continuity plans for well over a hundred successful businesses including his own. He credits the thriving success of these companies to generosity and servant attitude he learned from some of his earliest mentors and clients when he moved into the business transition consulting field. He recalls musing to Kay one evening as he made the observation that virtually every one of his engagements was with believers and followers of Jesus. He noticed the motives and attitudes of these business owners as grateful, and generous to their employees and customers and the communities they served. It quickly became clear that he should expand the solutions for transitioning and selling businesses to include charitable giving with Kingdom purposes and missions. Clients responded enthusiastically, as this approach aligned with their values, purposes, families, and their hearts’ desires.
This unique approach led naturally to a generosity movement, empowering business owners to do good while doing well. Most were quite wealthy with more than enough to provide themselves comfortable retirements, to provide inheritances to their posterity, to benefit their loyal employees, and to provide generously to people in need, both at home and abroad.
Steve and Kay, who both grew up in large families, have a multitude of friends, many of whom they met and developed relationships from the very business owners to whom they have been such a great help, and from whom they have gained such wisdom and benefits. Their kids and grand-kids are integrated with all of it. The Hopkins say there’s no clear distinction between business, personal, and social relationships. The nature of all facets of their work is very personal, whether developing and growing a business, planning for next generation takeover, estate plans and inheritances, or pursuing freedom, emancipation, and healing for enslaved human beings. It all requires total transparency, open communication among groups and individuals, and tons of trust and confidence. Another way of saying human bonding and friendship.
Steve says he knows his clients better than their doctors. Better than their attorneys, CPAs, bankers, or any other trusted advisor. It’s what happens when people open up about what really, truly matters to them. Most professional advisors approach them with the assumption that their money is the most important thing to them. It is not. Their families, employees (often considered and treated as family), friends, life purposes, and commitment to doing God’s work and ministering to the needs of people who need them always come before the money. Yes, the money is important, but only to the extent of what money can do.
It is a pleasure and joy beyond anything he’s ever experienced to see how generosity and caring and giving and teaching and speaking into the lives of younger people coming along the river of life, transforms and multiplies into even greater abundance. It works just as the master, the greatest teacher ever, said it would work. Steve continues to be amazed by his younger partners’ and proteges’ eagerness to learn and grow and live in obedience to what has been spoken into his own life by the wisest, most experienced business and professional people he’s had the good fortune to know and model. He says it reminds him of how deeply impressed he was upon his epiphany in his MKE course many years ago about thoughts and words actually being things, very powerful things, to the extent that words literally become flesh. He says it should not have been such a surprise to him since it so clearly states in scripture that the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. Of course word becomes flesh. Best to choose them with great care and deliberation.
While it looks easy now, things have not always been so idyllic. There has been much struggle, many challenges, and scores of setbacks along the way. Like losing a key position as a vice president and corporate executive many years ago, disappointments with performance and commitments of former business partners, family struggles when he had to essentially abandon business pursuits to focus on his teenage son’s needs. Too many details to even matter. The important point is resilience; the will and ability to grow through these struggles and emerge intact on the other side with greater knowledge and wisdom to inform the next stretch, or set of rapids, on the river of life.
At this point, there’s no indication of slowing down or moving out of this mainstream of teaching and reaching and guiding and giving. It is too rewarding and awesome to ever grow boring or tiresome. That said, if anything fortuitous should toss his boat on the rocks, or otherwise end his ride, plans and preparations have been long set to keep the enterprise and operation moving right on into the future without the slightest disruption. It’s a major theme to what his life’s work and mission have been all about.
Traction Distraction 