Thomas Noon On What It Means To Live In Prayer
Anything and everything you need to partake in this journey called life have already been written. It's all in The Bible. This is the testimony of today's guest, Thomas Noon. Thomas is the CEO and Founder of Catalyst Cohorts and C-Level Services. His work is centered around helping CEOs and entrepreneurs scale their business and improve their relationships. Thomas shares personal stories and testimonies on how God has led him in life and in business to help people. He also talks about an exciting innovative new tool for spreading the word. Hear Thomas's story and see how living in constant prayer and listening to God's Word can open opportunities.
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Thomas Noon On What It Means To Live In Prayer
I’m with someone who's living a better story. Thomas Noon is coming to us from Virginia. He's the CEO and Founder of Catalysts Cohorts. He's also the President and Founder of C-Level Services. He works as a fractional CFO to help between 6 and 8 companies in their responsibilities, managing their business and financials. He's also brought together a cool group of CEOs in the area called Catalyst Cohorts. These are CEO-level founders and executives who want to share their books and talk about not just the principles of business but also the foundation of biblical principles. It's a cool combination that you don't see every day. Thomas, welcome to the show. Thanks for being here.
Thanks for having me.
Before we get in about your story, I like to rewind the tape and go back. I've found that a lot of times, our lives and our passions are formed at a young age. When you're a kid is when you don't have the blinders on of the world around you. What you like then is probably who you are as a person. When you were super young, what are some of your first memories and passions that you had as a child?
I grew up a long time ago, number one. My parents were older when they had me. This was in 1949. They had both been married before. My dad was divorced and my mom had lost her husband in a mining accident. All of my siblings are half-siblings and only one of them ever lived with me and that was my brother who was eight years older. He didn't have much to do with me. I didn't get along with my dad. By the time he was seventeen, he was out of the house and joined the Army.
My dad worked in a brick plant. My mom never worked a day in her life and she smoked. It was the way it was then. We lived in a little house on the outskirts of Charleston, West Virginia called Pocatalico. I was lonely and precocious. I was probably ADHD. I was too much for my parents to handle so they just let me run and roam. At 6 or 7, I'm spending time in my room dreaming. I had a little toy cannon. I learned how to shoot matchsticks at my little toy soldiers and I figured all that out. I ran around in the woods. I remember stepping at snakes. Baby snakes run around. This is out in West Virginia so these are copperheads. I remember my mom got bitten by a copperhead and ending up in the emergency room.
That was me growing up. I didn’t have close friends because they were far away. They were around the country. I remember walking down this dark gravel road to get to the bus to take me to school every morning and bring me back. A lot of the time, I was in my own head to think and I was always planning how to do things. Ultimately, that’s me now. I'm not your typical accountant. I went to Iowa State University as a Chemistry major. As a junior, I figured out I didn't want to sit in a Chemistry lab. I always walked by the Business building. I stopped in and change majors. The first thing I could choose was accounting because it started with an A so that was my career counseling. I’m the first one in my family to go to college. At that point, I got married and had a child. Therefore, I figured I better settle down and pay attention. I got good grades and I got a job in a Big Eight CPA firm.
We talked about the DiSC profile before we launched. Walking down the dirt road, stepping in the copperhead pit, even though you had a brother who was eight years older, it might explain how you got you got to be the high D and high C in the DiSC profile.
A high D and a high C is called a creative mindset. I'm always looking at the future and trying to figure out how to bring it to pass. I'm a high D so I think I'm right, and I'm a high C so I know I'm right. I'm okay with being wrong. You have to prove me wrong because once you prove me wrong, I'm righting it. Accounting was good for me because it was detail-oriented. Once I got into the industry, it was good for me because it was strategic planning, trying to figure out where we wanted to go as a business, setting up systems or processes, and a way to reach that. That's what I do with clients.
The nice thing is they're all in different industries. I've been in public accounting, retail, large businesses and enterprises, even as a part of a bigger business. I've been in small Christian-owned businesses, turnaround situations in publishing and investing. I came to this area and I worked for Pat Robertson and managed a private equity fund. We had an office in Beijing, Hanoi and Hong Kong. I'm over in China in Beijing and Shanghai looking for businesses to invest in. I started technology companies.
What did you learn about that, Thomas? A lot of people, if they're early in their career, might be feeling like they're a fish out of the water and saying, “How did I get here? I don't know if I'm in alignment.” It's sometimes hard to figure out that alignment until you go through the motions and travel to Beijing and work for a small company and a big company. What did it take for you to discover where your perfect lane was? What would you recommend to other people how they could figure out what the perfect lane for their life looks like?
I had a major life impact at 29. I was the first in my family to go to college. I'm very competitive. I'm going to figure out the rules of the game, practice it and win. I always played baseball and softball. I was in a commercial softball team as an accountant, which is unusual. I was a planner. Growing up, I was good at being bad because I never got caught. I can see into the future, all the things and all the options that go together to this act that I'm going to do. I’m going to make sure that I don't get caught. The worst kind of person you can be is someone who never gets caught for doing bad things. I'm in public accounting, I’m married, I have two kids and I'm doing bad things. I disgusted myself.
I got to a point in life where I said, “Nothing is working. I'm a manager for a Big Eight CPA firm. I'm married, I have two kids, and I'm a bad guy.” I quit everything. I quit public accounting. I quit my family. I said, “I’m going to start over. I don't know what to do.” I’m interviewing for a job and the guy I'm interviewing with witnesses to me in the interview about Jesus Christ. His boss rings in and he's the president of the company and he witnesses to me. I go home with a pad of paper, which was all handwriting then, on the negative side of that were all that religious crap. I took the job because it was a good job. I can remember looking at these two men in their day-to-day life. I've never seen that before.
I heard a similar story here in Colorado, the same concept.
Living In Prayer: When reading the Bible, don’t just read the words. Ask questions. What do these words mean?
I said, “That must be it.” I didn't know how to do it. I'm sitting there in this business, we're growing, it's active, a lot of stuff going on. I'm waiting for somebody to say, “Would you like to accept Jesus as your Savior?” I don't know-how. In the meantime, I've met a woman I knew from public accounting and I'm trying to convince her to marry me. We're going out and we're both broke. We're trying everything. We’ve tried transcendental meditation. We tried this and that. We’re going, “Maybe it’s churches.” We're going to all these different churches and she finally said, “Yeah.” She knew it. In the church, I said, “Do you want to get married?” She said, “We can't get just married. We have to go through premarital counseling.” We happened to be at the Lighthouse Church in the area. I said, “I'll do anything. How do I win this?”
On the first session, the pastor looked at my wife and said, “Have you ever accepted Jesus Christ as your Savior?” She said, “Yes.” She had done it in the car a couple of weeks ago. She never told me about it yet. He said, “Tom, how about you?” I said, “No.” He said, “Would you like to?” I said, “It's about time somebody asked me.” I accepted Christ. We got married and that changed my whole paradigm. Nobody had to convince me that the Bible was inerrant. It's true. I knew it. The miracle in my life is one way, I accepted Christ and then I was a different way.
You’re truly reborn. That's always had a negative connotation, at least for me in my upbringing. Now that I understand it, it's like, “You come in as a worm and you leave as a butterfly.”
That's the change. I was 29 years old. Everything started exploding. I started my first group of guys reading the Bible together. We didn't do it in the business environment because it was owned by a bigger business. When had to do it offsite. That was the start. I'm trying to analyze what God's telling me to do.
Let's go off topic a little because we're going to go into the 201, 301 conversations now. Since you've done a lot of Bible studies through your life, then and now, is there any story in the Bible that jumps out to you that says, “This is the one that changes my perspective on life.” Is there something you've studied or one that sticks out for you?
That's a ten-year journey. I'm detail-oriented. When I read my Bible, I'm not just reading the words but I'm asking the questions in my own head, “What do these words mean?” I have a good memory. I remember a lot of Bible verses. The Holy Spirit brings those back to my remembrance and it contextualizes it within the whole realm of Genesis. I'm driving to church years ago and this verse that I've memorized is a navigator in the 2:7 program many years earlier, 1 Thessalonians 5:17, pray without ceasing.
I remember thinking, “I can't do that. How do you pray without ceasing?” I'm riding to church for a meeting and the Holy Spirit said, “You big dummy.” I know that's the Holy Spirit because he knows me well. He says, “Don't memorize scriptures in context.” 5:16, rejoice always. Pray without ceasing. Give thanks that this is God's will for you and Christ Jesus. He says, “I am talking to you all the time. You have the radio turned on to the wrong channel. I'm talking to you. You have the ability and the option of listening to me.” These are the sons of God, those that are led by the Spirit. “I’ll lead you, you just have to listen.”
I'm tearing up a little because my son who was nineteen got into a fire at his apartment. He was cooking a HelloFresh meal and he puts the bread crumbs in the pan and it caught fire. He did what you or I would have done. He put it underwater and that's not the right thing to do. It blew up in his face and turned everything black including his face and hands, 2nd and 3rd-degree burns. The meaning of "Pray without ceasing,” was the night before the surgery, my mother prayed all night. She's a very religious person. She got it from my grandfather and passed it to us. I'm sure I was the one that strayed the most and came back to the fold. Every sheep has to stray a little bit from time to time and I certainly did. I prayed and my mom prayed. We were able to get tens of thousands of people praying because I posted this through LinkedIn. It's amazing to me that when I asked you of any possible verse you could pull, it's that one.
It’s always like that. I can't tell you how many times I happened to be reading a verse and then something that day was relevant. I could have been reading anything. For me, that was a start. I heard the Holy Spirit talk to me before. It’s not a voice. I know what he's saying to me. A few years before that, I had my first job out of public accounting. I'm in this new environment. I'm a new Christian. I'm 29 years old and my assistant controller is 42 years old. His name is Don, a German. He had a bad temper. He’d blow off to people. I would say, “Don, you can't blow up to people here. You can’t do that.” Ultimately, he did it again and again.
I'm walking in to terminate him. I sit down and before I can say a word to him, the Holy Spirit says, “Tell him about the parable of the sower and the seed.” I'm arguing at that point in my head with the Holy Spirit, “No, I'm here to fire him.” The Holy Spirit is saying, “No, you're here to tell him about the parable of the sower and the seed.” I said, “Don, let me tell you about the Parable of the Sower and the Seed.” I told him and then the Holy Spirit said, “Asked him what kind of soil he is.” I'm still arguing, “No, you don't understand. I have to terminate him.” “Ask what kind of soil he is.” I'm this 29-year-old kid and this 42-year-old man who has a bad temper. I'm setting down and I'm asking him, “What kind of soil are you?” He starts crying. He accepts Christ. He stays for another couple of years. He then moves to Florida to take care of his mom. That doesn't happen to me. It's infrequent. This was the next thing for me. I'm reading in Revelation and it says, “The bride has made herself ready.”
What does that mean?
How does the bride make herself ready? I didn't hear a voice. Now, I'm on my own. That started this 10, 12-year journey of how do we make ourselves ready? The best I can figure out is Matthew 24, “This gospel of the kingdom will be preached to all the world as a testimony and then the end will come.” This was the shockwave, 2 Peter 3:11-12. 2 Peter 3 is talking about the end times and Jesus Christ coming back. It says, “Because this is going to happen, this day is going to come, what kind of people ought we to be looking for hastening?”
We're not supposed to just be looking for Matthew 24. We're supposed to be hastening. We're in this divine-human cooperative. God is sovereign. He can do anything he wants to but he's chosen this divine-human cooperative. We're going to be involved in that process. I don't think the day has been set because we haven't done our job. Is it going to be 2,600 or is there going to be some way sooner? We figure out how to add something from outside the closed system to accelerate that gospel getting to every person in the world.
Living In Prayer: God is talking to you all the time. You just have the radio turned on the wrong channels.
Here's something I know. I'm always looking at all these things. I know there are more smartphones in the world than there are people. You're doing this technology thing to celebrate the gospel getting out. I know that Elon Musk has another business called SpaceX where his plan is he's going to put up low flying satellites so that they'll be a ring around the world where broadband and Wi-Fi will cover every square inch of the globe. You can be out in the middle of the Pacific Ocean and have 4G.
Google has a project called Loon to compete with that with high-flying balloons. That signal is going to be everywhere. That was the genesis of the Journey Story. We're creating a technology that we're calling Glory Maps. The issue is translation. The reason that the gospel is flowing is that we took this concept called people groups. It’s a great concept for a while but that in Greek is more often translated as Gentiles. If you read 2 Peter 3, “God's heart is for every person.” It's not for groups of people. It's for every person. I have shared the gospel with the group and I got myself in trouble with the company because I asked them to put their heads down and raise their hand if they accept Christ.
My HR manager, what can he say? He’s Jewish. It's one on one. You're sharing your story. You're sharing your testimony. In Revelation 12:11, “We overcome the enemy because the blood of the Lamb is the word of our testimony and we don't love our life even to death.” That’s why we're dangerous because we don't love our life even to death. We’re willing to share our stories. Glory Maps know where everybody who holds that smartphone is. If you have the Journey Story app, all of the stories about finding and following Jesus from that area will come up.
My a-ha was when my two-year-old grandson was using the smartphone. He knows how to use a smartphone. He knows how to push buttons and find stuff. The Journey Story will allow stories to be found and they'll have geo positioning for the stories but also data. As a user, you'll be able to see all of the data of people who have access to stories and all of the subsequent data. People who have access to the stories and invite other people who accepted Christ and invite other people. All of those layers will show your impact and on the map, you'll see these lights around the world of people who you caused to be on the app.
That's deep. Talk about gamification.
I used to work with Pat Robertson. This is a hotbed of businesses’ mission. I recognize that I'm probably 2 or maybe 3 relationships with the head of every mission organization in the world. I know somebody that knows somebody that knows the head of Campus Crusader. They had a navigator for whatever mission. We will give the Journey Story to every mission organization, every church, every non-profit for free. They will be able to set themselves up as a partner and have people who they give the app to choose them as a partner. That Glory Map will accumulate all of the information that they caused.
We've paid for funding for translating a Jesus film in a couple of different languages in India. You could be in a Jesus film in India and you have somebody who subscribes and say, “Tell us what happened on this app. Why don’t you share it with your family?” That family will maybe know somebody else that's in a different country or maybe they've got friends that have gone to Saudi Arabia and worked for some Saudi Prince that got stocks or whatever. That's the Journey Story. I then figured, “The Journey Story will have some layers.” We're going to have an incognito version of the Journey Story because there are some places in the world where if the government knew you were doing this, you'd be dead. We'll have to have an incognito.
The other thing is people need the Bible. My prejudice is the Bible will never be translated into every language. It's too expensive. It's going to take a long time. It’s hard as it is to translate the Jesus film. It's a multiple of that to translate the whole Bible. We're doing an app called Jesus 24/7. We're going to animate Bible verses and not Bible stories. There are 33,000 Bible verses. I hope Jesus comes back before we have to animate all 33,000 Bible verses.
That would be an interesting feed because I was thinking of a future upgrade in the 77Pray app. Instead of a random paragraph where you read it, the animated version coming in through an API would be cool.
Our brains are built for videos. Our brains are built for visuals. That's why about 80% of all activity on the internet now is video. We learn by seeing, text and also touching. Different people have different ways of learning. Jesus 24/7 will be linked up with The Journey Story. They'll have access to Bible verses about finding and following Jesus.
I love what you're talking about because it sounds like you and I have both been pulled on this journey. When you hand the keys over to a different driver, it's wild where the car takes you. What do you think is driving you to do this? If you were to go inside and think, what is it that caused you to want to do these two apps?
God made me do it. Elijah was out in some wilderness, in a cave, praying to himself because he's all by himself. God said to him, "You're an idiot. Out of all these people, you're one of the hundreds." I understand because I was one of the founders of a local Christian Chamber of Commerce. We did it as a group and it was successful because there was a group of people doing it. We then met other people with Christian Chambers of Commerce around the country. God had told somebody to do this and they thought, "This is mine. I have to do it." That was the difference. We didn't think of it as, "I have to do it." We thought, "We're part of a group that's going to do this."
A partner and I started early on and we disrupted the med spa industry and created a franchise. When we started, laser hair removal was a medical procedure done by dermas and plastics. We learned how to do it and follow the med rules as business guys. We then created a franchise and it’s been all around the country. It exploded. We certainly sold it. What happens is me seeing you on LinkedIn and us connecting and then you're doing this, that's a part of God's voice. In John 10, it says, “The sheep hear my voice and they know my voice.” We know His voice is coming to us in different ways. One of the main ways is the Bible. That gives us the foundation so that if anything comes out that's different than that, we know it's false. This is true.
I'll have something that I say on my Thursday morning or my Tuesday morning Bible studies. It'll be, “God's voice is coming through me to one of the other people in the group or from them to me.” I was leaving breakfast with a friend of mine and I said, “Joe, you got to meet Jim.” I looked over and I said, “He's walking down the street right there.” I didn't know where he is. I just know Jim was going to be there. God put it in my heart to say, “You need to meet Jim,” and there he was. I was in Beijing on business and they said, “You should meet XYZ.” We called him and XYZ was out of the country. I go from Beijing to Hong Kong to Hanoi. I'm sitting at breakfast in Hanoi and somebody says, “There's somebody over this other table that you got to meet.” It was the guy from Beijing. That's God's voice.
Living In Prayer: God’s voice comes to us in different ways.
It's interesting because I've been in artificial intelligence for salespeople for several years and it's right at the tip of the spear. It's still an unknown area. What comes up at the conferences I've been to or the events I do or on one-on-one calls is the ethical side of AI. Someone programs the bot to make a decision. What worries me is that you see half the people in the world now look at the world from their own set of human eyes making human-based ethical decisions. That could be 360 answers for one answer where God's truth is the truth. If we're going to be that heavily reliant upon AI in Amazon, Google Cloud, and everything that we do, then there needs to be a new position called the Chief Ethics Officer that oversees all of that. I keep seeing a lot of people get back into their Christian roots because they see where the world is headed. How do you address that deep question?
One of the things early on that started this ten-year time period is I'm going into Barnes & Noble. I'm looking at books in the business section and I'm looking at the books in the religious section. In the business section, I see this book that's facing me and it's called Marketplace Christianity. I looked at that and I said, “How could that be in the business section?” I’m a speed reader so I took it and I speed read it and I thought, “This is good.” My pastor said, “Why don’t you teach a Sunday school on this? These are Christian principles in running a business.” I said, “Fine.” High D, high C. It used to take me about an hour per minute that I’m going to talk to prepare because I didn't want anything to come up that I didn't know the answer to.
I'm going in ten minutes before the first Sunday school and I sit on the corner and I'm ready. I’ve got twelve weeks of prep. I got all twelve weeks laid out. I’m waiting for people to start coming in. I had a strange thing happened to me. I had this download. This is stuff I hadn't prepared. I get up and start talking and I'm still getting the download. I had twelve weeks of stuff to tell them. We're in a war. The New Testament says, “Israel being in Egypt and coming out and coming into the Promised Land is an example for us to learn from.” If you look at Joshua, it says, “You're going and occupy your Promised Land. Your Promised Land is going to be every place your foot steps.” What God was telling me is this is a territorial power. Your Promised Land is now every place your foot steps. When I'm in that Bible study, that's my Promised Land. When I go out to eat, I look at that restaurant and that's my Promised Land. I am occupying the space.
That's a great mindset flip. When the world is going south, you go north.
When the waitress comes and she says, “My name is June. I'm here to serve you.” I say, “Hi, June. We're going to bless this food before we eat. What is there that I can pray about that would bless you?” Do you know how many times I've got someone saying nothing? Zero. I was early for a meeting and I stopped at a breakfast place. I went in and sat down and this waitress came and she was in a bad mood, I could tell. I said, “What’s your name?” I don’t remember her name. I said, “I'm going to bless this food. Is there anything I can pray for you about that would bless you?” She started crying. I don’t know if that had an impact on her long-term but I occupied that territory.
We should continue this dialogue because we have started to explore the grounds here. We're running out of time. We’ll put this on pause, put it on ice, and regroup on another day because part two is going to be equally as powerful as part one. This is a fabulous dialogue.
Thank you, Chad. Email me and we can set up a time and figure out what works for you.
We've been talking with Thomas Noon. It’s an amazing conversation. It makes me realize the understanding and remembering verses in the Bible. I was brought up Christian. I read the verses. Genesis 7:7 talks about Noah and his family going into the ark. There's very much power in being able to understand exactly what it says. I've got some huge takeaways from this conversation. I appreciate you sharing your story with everybody and I look forward to bringing up part two to be continued.
I'll tell you about PCMD in the next session.
That's the setup for part two. We'll catch you on the next episode. For now, I'm signing out.
Important Links:
LinkedIn – Chad Burmeister
About Thomas Noon
He helps small to mid-sized business owners and start-ups grow the value of their businesses. The statistics for small business is rather dismal- huge failure rate, lack of solid sustainable growth, and increasing stress and complexity.
Started a contract CFO practice to help these business owners overcome these forces working to crash businesses, and found success, but personally could only touch a few owners at a time.
So he formed Catalyst Cohorts (www.catalystcohorts.com) to expand the number of business owners who have access to the expertise, tools, and relationships they need to survive and scale.
His personal faith has played a major factor in his own success over the years and helped him not only in business but also in integrating his family and other interests into his view of true success.
He has been a: CPA Manager for one of the Big 4 international CPA firms.
Founder of the premier Med Spa Franchisor in the US, Started a software company that was sold to Borland, Managed an International Private Equity FirmBeen a CFO, COO and President in a broad range of industries planned and founded an early B2B Internet company in the mid 1990’s, and started C-Level Services to counsel many business owners both in their personal finance and how to accelerate the value of their business.
And now he started Catalyst Cohorts to disrupt the Peer to Peer CEO industry is career has included successful stints as CFO, COO and President of startups to Enterprises with $300 million in sales. He noticed a recurring theme in business owners’ failure and started researching the foundational statistics of small businesses. What he found both SHOCKED and SADDENED him. From this study, he purposed to discover and develop a disruptive solution that would have broad appeal to a large number of small to medium business owners and change the course of BOTH their business’s future and their personal heritage! Hence Catalyst Cohorts was born.
