Most Christian businesses won’t exist in ten years. Not because the market is hard, and not because God isn’t in it — because nobody knows they exist. Cody and Esther Cottle break down the five marketing fails they see Christian entrepreneurs make again and again, plus the bonus one they think does the most damage: using Jesus as a marketing strategy.

They built a marketing agency, shut it down at the peak of it, and grew the Christian Entrepreneur Club to nearly 700 members. This is what they got wrong first — the $7,000 website that did nothing, the years of posting with no strategy, the message so broad nobody could tell what they actually did — and what changed when they stopped chasing the next wave.

Chapters

0:00  Cold open

0:41  Welcome — the five marketing fails

1:40  Bonus fail: using Jesus as a marketing strategy

6:07  Fail 1: thinking a website will magically bring customers

17:39  Fail 2: posting randomly, without a strategy

27:15  Fail 3: marketing to everyone

36:22  Fails 4 & 5: confusing messaging, and doing it all yourself

41:07  Cody’s own biggest marketing fail

45:13  Take ownership of the message

49:37  Where to find us

Send us Fan Mail

Support the show

Get your ticket to our upcoming Revival In The Marketplace Conference

✝️ Sign up here for our FREE weekly Bible study every Wednesday 

🔥 Are you looking for a community of Christian business owners you can learn and grow with? We want to invite you to learn more about our Christian Entrepreneur Club with over 600+ business owners and growing. 

👉 Click Here To Join Our Intro Call

📲 Follow The Club on: Instagram 

📲 Follow Cody on: Instagram

📲 Follow Esther on: Instagram

Watch the video version on YouTube (Click Here)

If this episode blessed you, please leave us a review and share it with 3 people who need to hear this message!

Everyone has a microphone in their pocket, and culture is clear about what to do with it: build a following, build your brand, go viral, make it all about you. The trouble is that you can do all of that, watch the numbers move, and never once have God's hand on any of it.

Esther's first solo teaching makes the case that the follower count was never the measure — that real influence is what happens where nobody can double-tap it, and that “good” and “God” are two different explanations for the same result. If your numbers aren't moving, this will read as permission. If they are, it will read as a question.

Chapters

0:00  📱 Should Christians Be Influencers?

2:13  🪞 A Subculture That Sounds Like the World

4:16  🔍 Influence Isn't Your Follower Count

5:57  ⚠️ Growing an Audience Without Growing Character

7:44  👑 Nobody Is Built to Hold Glory

9:01  🚨 Influencing Thousands, Discipled by No One

11:28  ✝️ What Jesus Did Instead

12:46  🙏 Building With a Pure Heart

14:28  🎭 You're Living Two Separate Lives

15:47  🏷️ The Brand Built “For Jesus”

18:19  📈 There Is a Science to Going Viral

19:48  📉 Doing It Right When People Unfollow

21:27  🌱 Let God Bring the Increase

23:33  📬 Maybe It's the UPS Driver

25:47  🕊️ Just Be Faithful

27:27  🤝 The Christian Entrepreneur Club

Send us Fan Mail

Support the show

Get your ticket to our upcoming Revival In The Marketplace Conference

✝️ Sign up here for our FREE weekly Bible study every Wednesday 

🔥 Are you looking for a community of Christian business owners you can learn and grow with? We want to invite you to learn more about our Christian Entrepreneur Club with over 600+ business owners and growing. 

👉 Click Here To Join Our Intro Call

📲 Follow The Club on: Instagram 

📲 Follow Cody on: Instagram

📲 Follow Esther on: Instagram

Watch the video version on YouTube (Click Here)

If this episode blessed you, please leave us a review and share it with 3 people who need to hear this message!

Every entrepreneur has a Goliath. The competitor with 10x your ad budget. The debt that grows every time you check it. The launch you keep pushing back because deep down you don't believe it'll work.

In this episode, Cody breaks down 1 Samuel 17, the story you've heard a hundred times in Sunday school, and pulls out two decisions David made before he ever threw a stone. First, he refused to fight in Saul's armor, the best equipment in Israel, because it wasn't tested in his hands. Second, he refused to let Goliath dictate the terms of the fight, because the battle was never his to win alone.

If you've been trying to build your business by copying someone else's funnel, someone else's pricing, someone else's playbook, this episode will show you why that armor is slowing you down instead of protecting you. And it'll help you find the sling God already trained into your hand in the years nobody was applauding.

Your giant isn't actually your problem. Fighting him someone else's way is.

In this episode:

• Why "proven" strategies can still be the wrong armor for you
• What your unseen years were actually training you for
• How to stop measuring your giant by the world's scoreboard
• The declaration David made before he ever picked up a stone

Send us Fan Mail

Support the show

Get your ticket to our upcoming Revival In The Marketplace Conference

✝️ Sign up here for our FREE weekly Bible study every Wednesday 

🔥 Are you looking for a community of Christian business owners you can learn and grow with? We want to invite you to learn more about our Christian Entrepreneur Club with over 600+ business owners and growing. 

👉 Click Here To Join Our Intro Call

📲 Follow The Club on: Instagram 

📲 Follow Cody on: Instagram

📲 Follow Esther on: Instagram

Watch the video version on YouTube (Click Here)

If this episode blessed you, please leave us a review and share it with 3 people who need to hear this message!

Everyone talks about building the business. Almost nobody talks about what it costs to carry a vision the people closest to you cannot see — at the dinner table, in your marriage, and in the pew on Sunday morning.

Cody and Esther on why the people who love you most still won't understand what God called you to, why that was never the betrayal it felt like, and what Scripture says isolation quietly does to your judgement. Plus the honest part: how you actually go and build the room you need.

Chapters

0:00 🎙️ Nobody Warns You About This Part

0:47 💬 The Conversation Nobody Has

2:28 📊 What the Numbers Say

3:18 🚗 Living Ahead of Everyone Around You

6:57 💍 The One Who Can't See the Weight

9:08 🎭 What Men Don't Say Out Loud

10:10 🦃 The Thanksgiving Table

13:50 🪞 Whose Approval Are You Building For?

15:21 🤝 The Room You Actually Need

19:51 ⚠️ Scripture Calls It a Wisdom Problem

22:28 📖 Moses, Elijah and Paul Were Alone Too

26:10 🧭 When You're the Only One Carrying It

29:38 💒 Build It Together

31:51 ✝️ Your Room Is Ready

Send us Fan Mail

Support the show

Get your ticket to our upcoming Revival In The Marketplace Conference

✝️ Sign up here for our FREE weekly Bible study every Wednesday 

🔥 Are you looking for a community of Christian business owners you can learn and grow with? We want to invite you to learn more about our Christian Entrepreneur Club with over 600+ business owners and growing. 

👉 Click Here To Join Our Intro Call

📲 Follow The Club on: Instagram 

📲 Follow Cody on: Instagram

📲 Follow Esther on: Instagram

Watch the video version on YouTube (Click Here)

If this episode blessed you, please leave us a review and share it with 3 people who need to hear this message!

James & Becky Zheng had the Bentley, the Audi, the million-dollar home — then lost 80% of it in a single year and filed for bankruptcy. The problem was never their work ethic. It was what they'd quietly started worshipping.

They walk through how ambition and accolades became the idol — and what broke open when they stopped measuring their worth by the fruit. The month James stopped working entirely became the highest-earning month of an eight-year career, and they went on to #1 in the world out of 400,000.

Chapters

0:00  🎙️ Meet James & Becky

5:14  💔 From abandonment to a Father

6:37  🎓 “I thought I was too smart for God”

10:00  🍇 Chasing the fruit, not Jesus

12:17  ❓ The question that changed his career

18:13  🌱 Why growth is the design

25:30  💌 The least romantic recruitment ever

28:31  📋 Rick Warren & the 11-point list

30:51  🙏 True faith feels like nothing

33:56  😭 Six months of crying — the vision board

41:49  🏎️ Bentley to bankruptcy

47:05  ⚒️ Work ethic isn't enough — the soil, not the seed

53:10  🛑 “Take a Sabbath” — a month, not a day

58:39  📈 The turnaround year

1:03:23  🔥 Revival won't start in the church

1:07:00  🙌 The prayer & sign-off

Send us Fan Mail

Support the show

Get your ticket to our upcoming Revival In The Marketplace Conference

✝️ Sign up here for our FREE weekly Bible study every Wednesday 

🔥 Are you looking for a community of Christian business owners you can learn and grow with? We want to invite you to learn more about our Christian Entrepreneur Club with over 600+ business owners and growing. 

👉 Click Here To Join Our Intro Call

📲 Follow The Club on: Instagram 

📲 Follow Cody on: Instagram

📲 Follow Esther on: Instagram

Watch the video version on YouTube (Click Here)

If this episode blessed you, please leave us a review and share it with 3 people who need to hear this message!

Half the church calls AI the mark of the beast. The other half runs their whole business on it. Cody and Esther think both camps are dodging the question that actually matters — and the answer cuts closer to home than either side expects.

This is the line between good stewardship and spiritual laziness: why refusing to use AI might be the real failure, the danger nobody names (it's built to agree with you), the one thing that decides whether it's pulling you toward God or away from Him — and what a Christian must never, ever hand to a machine. Faith and strategy in the same room, as always.

⏱️ Chapters

0:00  🤖 Mark of the Beast, or Better Tool?

1:06  ⚙️ Tool or Threat?

5:18  🎯 The One Line AI Can't Cross

6:45  📖 A Better Tool for the Word

8:26  🪞 AI Is Built to Agree With You

11:49  😴 Stewardship or Spiritual Laziness?

15:36  🚜 Multiply It, or Dodge the Work?

19:03  🙅 What You Must Never Outsource

20:55  🔥 Build Better Than the World

22:12  🙏 Submit It to God

Send us Fan Mail

Support the show

Get your ticket to our upcoming Revival In The Marketplace Conference

✝️ Sign up here for our FREE weekly Bible study every Wednesday 

🔥 Are you looking for a community of Christian business owners you can learn and grow with? We want to invite you to learn more about our Christian Entrepreneur Club with over 600+ business owners and growing. 

👉 Click Here To Join Our Intro Call

📲 Follow The Club on: Instagram 

📲 Follow Cody on: Instagram

📲 Follow Esther on: Instagram

Watch the video version on YouTube (Click Here)

If this episode blessed you, please leave us a review and share it with 3 people who need to hear this message!

"I'll never do business with a Christian again."

If you've ever heard those words, or worse, been the reason someone said them, this episode is for you.

Cody unpacks a hard truth every Christian entrepreneur needs to sit with: the way we operate in the marketplace is either pushing people toward Jesus or away from Him. There's no neutral. When you put the fish on your business card and then cut corners, lowball, or burn a client, you're not just losing a deal. You're shaping how the world sees your Father's brand.

Working through Matthew 5:38-42, Cody breaks down three lessons that separate Kingdom business from business as usual:

Always do what's right, even when it costs you. Cody shares the story of a man who took his system, his slides, and his training, then sent his team to poach his clients, and what his mentor taught him about taking the high road instead of settling the score.

Go the extra mile. The one mile the law required built no reputation. The second mile, the one nobody could demand, is the only one that ever did.

Give freely. Revival is breaking out in the marketplace, and wealth is moving into righteous hands. But it gets entrusted to the generous, not the cutthroat.

The vision is bigger than avoiding a bad reputation. Imagine a world where even non-believers say, "I'll only do business with a Christian," because they know we hold ourselves to a higher standard.

We play for an audience of One. And God cares how you build your business.

Send us Fan Mail

Support the show

Get your ticket to our upcoming Revival In The Marketplace Conference

✝️ Sign up here for our FREE weekly Bible study every Wednesday 

🔥 Are you looking for a community of Christian business owners you can learn and grow with? We want to invite you to learn more about our Christian Entrepreneur Club with over 600+ business owners and growing. 

👉 Click Here To Join Our Intro Call

📲 Follow The Club on: Instagram 

📲 Follow Cody on: Instagram

📲 Follow Esther on: Instagram

Watch the video version on YouTube (Click Here)

If this episode blessed you, please leave us a review and share it with 3 people who need to hear this message!

In 1956, The Strangest Secret put a number on it: of 100 people who start at 25 with the same dreams, only five build the life they imagined. The success principle Napoleon Hill and a century of teachers chased? It was God's all along.

This is the framework Cody's lived by for years: why sincere Christians drift into the 95%, the one tool most believers walk past, and the four things that separate the five — awareness, desire, accurate thinking, discipline. Get honest, and go be one of the five.

Chapters
0:00 🎯 The 5% Question
0:52 📉 100 Dreams, Only 5 Winners
2:36 🧠 Not Luck — Not Even Psychology
3:47 📚 The Godfathers of Success
6:00 ✝️ Borrowed From Scripture
9:42 🪞 The Part Most Christians Walk Past
11:16 🚗 Why You Suddenly See That Car
13:04 ⚓ Four Ways to Take the Wheel
15:08 🔍 An Honest Look in the Mirror
18:25 💭 Don't Believe Every Thought
20:01 🌒 What You Do When No One's Watching
21:40 🏁 Be One of the Five

Send us Fan Mail

Support the show

Get your ticket to our upcoming Revival In The Marketplace Conference

✝️ Sign up here for our FREE weekly Bible study every Wednesday 

🔥 Are you looking for a community of Christian business owners you can learn and grow with? We want to invite you to learn more about our Christian Entrepreneur Club with over 600+ business owners and growing. 

👉 Click Here To Join Our Intro Call

📲 Follow The Club on: Instagram 

📲 Follow Cody on: Instagram

📲 Follow Esther on: Instagram

Watch the video version on YouTube (Click Here)

If this episode blessed you, please leave us a review and share it with 3 people who need to hear this message!

Everyone’s chasing the business plan — the step-by-step someone else “made it” with. But what if what your business actually needs isn’t a better plan, but a God plan?

Adam and Cassie walked away from a guaranteed six-figure career with nothing but a word from God and a pile of credit-card debt — and watched Him provide at every turn. This is the honest conversation about what it really costs to build your business God’s way.

Chapters

0:00 🎬 Business Plan or God Plan? (cold open)
 0:35 🏷️ Meet The Collective — Building With Zero Inventory
 6:12 ✨ Excellent, Not Perfect
 7:27 🎖️ From Drone Operator To Apparel
 20:26 ⏱️ Six Days In — Walking Away From The “Safe” Career
 26:11 🙏 The Order Nobody Else Could Fill
 30:24 🚪 A Favour Isn’t For You — It’s For Others
 33:10 🔥 Excellence Is The Ministry
 37:53 ⚙️ When You Scale Fast, Things Break
 40:58 💍 Building As A Married Couple
 49:42 💭 “Will You Dream With Me?”
 53:22 🧭 Breaking Conformity — The Ceiling Nobody Sees
 59:52 🚑 The Truck In Kuwait — A Word 7 Years Early
 1:10:53 📜 The Blueprint For Blessing

Send us Fan Mail

Support the show

Get your ticket to our upcoming Revival In The Marketplace Conference

✝️ Sign up here for our FREE weekly Bible study every Wednesday 

🔥 Are you looking for a community of Christian business owners you can learn and grow with? We want to invite you to learn more about our Christian Entrepreneur Club with over 600+ business owners and growing. 

👉 Click Here To Join Our Intro Call

📲 Follow The Club on: Instagram 

📲 Follow Cody on: Instagram

📲 Follow Esther on: Instagram

Watch the video version on YouTube (Click Here)

If this episode blessed you, please leave us a review and share it with 3 people who need to hear this message!

You can be building a real business, on fire for God, plugged into a solid church — and still feel completely alone. Every Christian entrepreneur knows the two rooms: the church that doesn't quite understand your ambition, and the business world that leaves Jesus at the door.

Cody and Esther Cottle tell the story behind the Christian Entrepreneur Club — the gap that started it, the word from God that led them to walk away from their business, and the conference it became. It's what happens when you stop trying to build alone.

Chapters 
0:00 🔥 The Room That Changes Everything 
1:46 🏙️ From 50 People To A Movement 
2:54 🕳️ Successful, Faithful — And Totally Alone 
4:18 ✝️ Nobody In That Room Talks About Jesus 
5:07 🌱 When Your Ambition Makes People Uncomfortable 
7:08 🙏 Am I Holy Enough To Want To Build? 
8:24 💍 Dream With Your Spouse — Or Crush Her Dreams 
11:20 🏖️ Playing With God On The Playground 
14:01 🔑 We Shut The Business Down First 
17:11 🫀 A Vision For The Weary Builder 
21:13 💸 "It'll Cost $100K. Be Obedient." 
22:40 ⛪ An Altar, Not A Stage 
24:30 💥 The Testimonies We Didn't Expect 

26:55 🎟️ Come To The Mountaintop (Oct 14–16)

—

👉 Revival in the Marketplace 2026 — October 14–16, San Diego, at the brand-new Gaylord Pacific Resort. Tickets are more affordable than ever, and for the first time the doors are open to leaders and pastors too. Grab yours: christianentrepreneurclub.com/conference

Doing business God's way, every week. Subscribe so you don't miss an episode.

Send us Fan Mail

Support the show

Get your ticket to our upcoming Revival In The Marketplace Conference

✝️ Sign up here for our FREE weekly Bible study every Wednesday 

🔥 Are you looking for a community of Christian business owners you can learn and grow with? We want to invite you to learn more about our Christian Entrepreneur Club with over 600+ business owners and growing. 

👉 Click Here To Join Our Intro Call

📲 Follow The Club on: Instagram 

📲 Follow Cody on: Instagram

📲 Follow Esther on: Instagram

Watch the video version on YouTube (Click Here)

If this episode blessed you, please leave us a review and share it with 3 people who need to hear this message!