Former US HUD Secretary Steve Preston’s God story
Updated: Sep 18
A powerhouse in business and government, Steve’s faith journey starts at age 12. A summer with relatives, and a baptism in a lake at church camp launched a lifetime of inspiring stories. You’ll here about his humble beginnings, an unlikely education at Northwestern University, time on Wall Street, how Omaha changed his life , and his call to serve at the Small Business Administration and as HUD secretary under George W Bush during two separate financial challenges.
At about 27 minutes in, Steve shares an awesome family faith nugget and he’ll also share his personal career commitment not to work just for money, prestige or power.
Finally, you’ll hear about his most recent chapter and how his personal mission statement and his career choice amazingly merged as he accepted the position of CEO of Goodwill Industries.
"Amazing Greats" is a library of interviews with highly successful people who have amazing career and life stories and who share how God has impacted their journey. Hosted by broadcaster Ric Hansen & produced by Klem Daniels. Available on Apple, Spotify, iHeart, Google and our YouTube Channel. Please help us grow our audience by "liking", "subscribing and "Sharing". Thanks so much.
STEVE PRESTON AT A GLANCE
Goodwill Industries CEO • Former U.S. Cabinet Secretary • Business Leader • Christian
Topics
Faith • Leadership • Goodwill • George W. Bush • HUD • SBA • Wall Street • Tim Keller • Northwestern University • Purpose • Human flourishing
His Faith Journey
Humble beginnings → Encounter with Christianity at 12 → Baptism → Family comes to faith → Northwestern University → Wall Street → Faith tested in business → Government service → Goodwill leadership → Serving others through work
This Episode Explores
Steve Preston's unlikely journey from humble beginnings to the White House
His first meaningful encounter with Christianity at age 12
How his faith eventually spread throughout his entire family
His path from Northwestern University to Wall Street
Why he walked away from a promising career at Lehman Brothers
Serving as SBA Administrator after Hurricane Katrina
His experience interviewing with George W. Bush for the HUD position
What Steve learned about leadership from President Bush
His connection with pastor and author Tim Keller
How his personal mission led him to Goodwill Industries
Why work can be central to human flourishing
Learning to trust God through uncertain transitions
Questions Answered
Who is Steve Preston?
How did Steve Preston become a Christian?
How did Steve Preston's family come to faith?
How did Steve Preston get into Northwestern University?
Why did Steve Preston leave Wall Street?
What did Steve Preston learn from George W. Bush?
What was Steve Preston's role during Hurricane Katrina?
What was Steve Preston's connection with Tim Keller?
Why did Steve Preston become CEO of Goodwill Industries?
What is Steve Preston's personal mission?
How does Steve Preston connect faith, work and human flourishing?
What has Steve Preston learned about trusting God?
Podcast Transcript: Steve Preston on Faith, Leadership, Government & Goodwill
Amazing Greats with Ric Hansen
From Humble Beginnings to the White House
Ric Hansen:Welcome to Amazing Greats. It's Ric Hansen here with the awesome life story of Steve Preston, a guy who had very humble beginnings but, with an unlikely early-found faith, ended up going to prestigious Northwestern University, onto Wall Street, Corporate America, and eventually a cabinet position under George W. Bush.
The story is laced with God's blessings, as you will find out on Amazing Greats.
Well, good afternoon to Steve Preston, our guest on Amazing Greats. Good to have you with us, Steve. Thank you so much for taking some time.
Steve Preston:Yeah, I appreciate it. Thank you very much.
Ric Hansen:Quick little introduction here. You're currently the CEO of Goodwill Industries Nationwide, formerly the head of the SBA, the Small Business Administration, also a cabinet member under George W. Bush as the HUD Secretary. You've been on Wall Street, you've been in private business — all of that.
We're going to get into what you've done, and we're going to find out who you are and the impact that our Lord Jesus Christ has had on your life over that period of time.
So welcome. Good to see you.
Steve Preston:Thank you very much. It's good to be with you.
The Oval Office Job Interview
Ric Hansen:Let's jump right into probably what I consider the most intimidating job interview ever. And that would be sitting in the Oval Office with the President of the United States, applying, I guess, kind of applying for a job, right?
So what was that like?
Steve Preston:Well, it was a little bit otherworldly.
I had been through a battery of White House interviews over a very short period of time. Just in terms of the context, we were in the middle of the housing crisis. It was beginning to mushroom. It was early 2008. Of course, at that point, we didn't know how big it would become.
The prior HUD Secretary had resigned, and as we knew it — as the world knew it — it was primarily driven by the housing market and a lot of the issues that we had there.
So I was coming in to be the new Housing Secretary, potentially. I had already been through a lot of interviews that had moved extremely quickly. It was the fastest cabinet appointment process that they had ever done, mostly because of the urgency of getting the role filled.
I'd only gotten a call a couple of weeks before that about the job. I did not know the President well. I'd been in group settings with him, but mostly around a big table on issues with a lot of different people, mostly agency heads working through the head of OMB or the policy groups or other kinds of principals.
Time with the President is not always that common.
The setup to the interview is what a lot of us have seen on television. There are these two armchairs in front of the fireplace, flanked by two couches. And it was just the two of us in those two chairs. There was nobody else in the room.
I don't know that I thought of it as being intimidating. Like I said, the time in history was unlike anything that most of us had ever experienced in our lifetimes. We were concerned about the survival of the financial system. This role was going to be kind of in the middle of it.
And couple that with the fact that I was sitting next to the President, who was making a decision based on his role in the middle of that.
So it would probably be less about being intimidating. It was incredibly humbling and incredibly weighty. I felt the sense of being overwhelmingly present, and I felt the potential need and the potential calling that I was facing.
Ric Hansen:Yeah. How did you feel like you were up for the task? I mean, this was a pretty monumental moment. And here you were, asked to come in and be a key part of that solution, right?
So was that intimidating?
Steve Preston:Yeah, so it was clarifying. Let me call it that.
I had very clearly what the requirements for the job were. I'm not a typical HUD Secretary. I don't have a background in poverty housing or homelessness or any of those types of issues.
But if you'll recall, this was a time when the issue was all about the mortgages and the mortgage markets and how those were priced and how they were trading, and the impact that a lot of the disaster in that market was having on broader financial markets.
Well, I understood credit. I'd been an investment banker. I understood markets. I'd been a CFO, and I had run a large, complex government agency that was in the credit business, which was SBA.
So for me, I could see how all of those dots connected.
And then the other thing was, I had run a federal agency in the middle of a national disaster, and I was sort of used to the pull and tug of the media, the need to be able to communicate in a certain way.
So as much as it was daunting and as much as it was humbling, I could very much see myself in the role. I felt like I knew who I needed to be in that place.
And on so many levels, I probably felt more blessed than anything.
Was God in the Middle of It?
Ric Hansen:Was God there with you? Was the whole thing driven by the Holy Spirit — the weight of all of this, and you being prepared for it?
Steve Preston:Oh, for sure. I mean, that's the only way I can think of any of this.
A few years before that, I was the quintessential dad of five little kids, living in a suburb of Chicago at a company, with parents from an unbelievably humble background.
And here I was talking to the President of the United States about a cabinet position in the middle of a major crisis.
So there was no other way to make sense of it.
You always sort of feel like, "This is just me you're talking to, right? This is all there is. There ain't no more."
And so you always have that sense — or certainly I always had that sense — of the role being much bigger than me and being a lot about a lot more than me, but also the need to be mentally extremely present in what was going to be called for and what I needed to do.
The other thing I want to say is that there were a lot of people at the table, and there were people who bore a lot more responsibility during this process. Certainly the Secretary of the Treasury, Secretary Paulson, or the head of the Fed, Chair Bernanke. These were people who were really on the front line with big teams.
So this wasn't me alone. There were people who had great experience and great gravitas and who were really instrumental in moving the situation forward for our country.
I was sort of layering my contribution onto that team.
Hurricane Katrina and the SBA
Ric Hansen:This is just, in some ways, just blows me away, to see someone put in that position.
And that's not the first position you were in the hot spot, because just prior to that you were head of the SBA, which at the time was post-Katrina, right?
So this is hot spot number two that we're talking about here. Let's jump back quickly and talk about Katrina.
Steve Preston:Yeah. So it's funny. When I was interviewing for the job with the President, he said, "Why would you want this job?" You know, in the middle of this national crisis.
And I said, "Well, people thought I was crazy when I took the SBA job."
And he said, "Well, you were."
He kind of chuckled.
And I said, "That's why we come here. What better could it be for you to have been blessed with a pathway that gave you experiences and knowledge and competencies throughout your career, and then all of a sudden be put in a place where you can use it to help people?"
And when you're in the federal government, the scale is so enormous that if you can do things well and it works out, the impact is so huge.
So I came into the SBA at a point — it was 10 months after Katrina.
What most people don't know is that the SBA does a lot of things for small businesses, obviously, but the SBA also is the lender to homeowners who've lost their home in a natural disaster.
So they were making most of the loans at the SBA to people to rebuild their homes, as well as people to rebuild small businesses.
And 10 months after Katrina, very few people had gotten their loans. It was sort of like the machinery, the operational side of getting those loans made, had kind of collapsed under the weight of the demand.
And I was asked to come in and effectively get in there and fix it and get that capital out the door.
Which ultimately became not only essential for people to be able to move their lives forward, but it was sort of the first big infusion of capital into the region to actually get economic development going.
So, yeah, that was also an interesting ramp and an interesting consideration process. That probably was more jolting in some ways than HUD, because I walked into that right out of the private sector.
Presidential Transitions
Ric Hansen:Yeah, your first experience with government, and it's in the middle of a difficult situation, let's put it that way.
But then there was the other kind of interesting thing that you don't see much written about you on this, but you were also involved with the transition team for Mitt Romney, which actually turned out that you didn't need to transition much because he did not win the election.
That must have been a great responsibility, too.
Steve Preston:So one correction: I wasn't head of that transition team. The head of the transition team was actually Mike Leavitt, who was in the Cabinet with me in the Bush administration.
And then I had a significant sort of lane in that.
My job was working to design the 73 days between the election and the inauguration, and work through all the things that would need to happen — how to advance the agenda, what the new President would spend his time on, how to go from election to hitting the ground running and having that impact.
That was remarkable.
There had been very little done on that historically. There wasn't a lot to look at that had been documented to say, "How does a President-elect really ramp into power, and how do they do it most effectively?"
Because it's a very complicated, relatively brief period of time.
You don't have members of the Cabinet. You don't have your policy positions completely refined. You haven't been able to reach out to groups. You have to figure out what foreign leaders you're going to contact and how you're going to engage internationally.
It's a really complicated period of time.
So we really started, in a lot of ways, with a blank page. We worked with a couple of external resources and other people who were very knowledgeable, who'd served in prior administrations, and built out that game plan.
And then we gave that game plan after the election to a nonprofit so that any future President-elect — and in fact, any nominee, because any nominee actually goes through the transition process — could look at our work and build on that work.
And now that work has been used to inform virtually every election since then. It's been built upon, expanded, and made richer.
So it was very, very exciting to be in the middle of that. It was a tremendous learning experience to be able to lead that effort and kind of design it.
But it's been really gratifying to see what has become of that work and how it's been expanded and how it's been used in future transitions.
Ric Hansen:Yeah, I had no idea. So both Republican and Democratic sides — both just kind of use that information?
Steve Preston:There's an organization called the Partnership for Public Service that I now sit on the board of, actually. Their whole mandate is to support effective government.
They focus very hard on a number of things, one of which is effective presidential transitions.
After that transition process, they actually stood up a center called the Center on Presidential Transitions. They staffed it, they took that work, they expanded it, and then they opened that up for both nominees and their transition teams to come in and learn from history — who's done it well and what's worked and what hasn't worked.
And it's very much a nonpartisan process where they engage people from either side.
The hope is, look, irrespective of who is elected, that individual is going to be the leader of the free world. And they have to be on their game for a lot of reasons. Irrespective of what we think about their policies, they have to be able to govern effectively.
And the whole goal of this is that they can enter the role with as much strength as possible.
Steve's Perspective on Mitt Romney
Ric Hansen:What's your biggest takeaway, your biggest reminder of Mitt Romney? Just off the top of your head, what was Mitt Romney like for you?
Steve Preston:So I didn't know him well personally. We were based in Washington and they were kind of on the campaign.
I have interacted with him a handful of times over the years.
I think just incredibly competent. He was a business person. He really invested himself in understanding the depth of the policy issues and the decision-making process.
He wanted to read the materials and make good decisions.
So I think he would have just been a deeply competent, deeply effective, and also very pragmatic President.
Steve's Perspective on George W. Bush
Ric Hansen:We're talking with former cabinet member under George W. Bush and now CEO of Goodwill Industries, the amazing story of Steve Preston.
What about George Bush? Your takeaways on George W. Bush?
Steve Preston:Oh my goodness.
He is a man I deeply, deeply respect. And I have seen him up close.
He is a man of deep principle. He believed that the institution of the presidency was bigger than any person, that he was a steward of it, and that when he was in the role, it was not about him, but it was about his charge to serve.
He knew often that the decisions he was making were unpopular. But if he believed that they were right, he made them anyway.
In fact, it was really interesting in one of the Cabinet meetings during the financial crisis after Barack Obama had been elected. Obviously, there were a lot of barbs coming toward him.
His comment to the Cabinet, sort of paraphrased — I don't remember the exact words anymore — was basically, "Look, we've got big shoulders. We can handle this."
It was our job to make all the tough decisions then so that when the new President came in, we'd done as much heavy lifting as possible when we handed over the reins to him.
There just was never — I'm sure — it just wasn't about the politics in those tough places. It was about doing what was necessary.
And he did have big shoulders on those types of issues.
I would also say some of the handful of interactions I had with him are some of the most powerful memories I'll have in life.
And they were all around either dignifying me as a leader and understanding how important my role was, or bringing the team together to really make sure people were focused on the criticality or the importance of the work — that nothing else mattered. We had to get this done because it was the right thing to do.
People don't see that on the outside, obviously.
You never walked away from a meeting not knowing who had the ball, not knowing who was important, and not knowing what he thought the right thing was.
Ric Hansen:All characteristics of a great leader, right?
That's great to hear all of that because, like you say, we don't hear that side a lot of times. Your insight is really appreciated.
Steve Preston:Let me tell you one other thing.
We often saw him — or the public often saw him — on that podium when the press was coming after him on something. And those were not his best places. I think that was a zone he was uncomfortable with at times.
And I think people had this impression of him based on the way he sort of looked in the press.
But I've got to tell you, there is no one on the team that would have said anything but that he was an incredibly bright, incredibly thoughtful and well-reasoned person.
There are very few people I've ever met in my life — and I've worked on Wall Street, I've worked in a lot of places with a lot of really smart people — I have met very few people who can look at a very complex situation and sum up the essence of it as quickly and as smartly as he can.
I think that was also something that not everybody would have seen.
Humble Beginnings
Ric Hansen:So let's jump back to the humble beginnings of Steve Preston, because it was very humble.
As you kind of alluded to earlier, you came from a large family. It was, I think, your words — rough and tumble, with a bunch of siblings who were at each other at times, but a loving home.
So tell us a little bit about all that.
Steve Preston:I probably wouldn't have said the siblings were at each other's throats, although we all had our moments, of course.
My parents both grew up very, very poor.
My father grew up in Appalachia. He was the ninth of 11 kids, born in a coal-mining camp. They lived in this little kind of four-room shack with no heating, no electricity, no running water, often not enough food and often no shoes.
So that kind of thing.
He quit school after ninth grade and went up to work in the foundries in Ohio.
My mother grew up in post-war Germany during World War II, then suffered post-war hunger and poverty.
So they both came together, having been really tested through very difficult upbringings.
We didn't have a lot, but we also always knew we had a lot more than they had.
We always had this sense of where they had come from and how hard they were working to make life better for us.
And we also had wonderful relatives from those two backgrounds. It was loving and big personalities, and it was sort of rich.
But I had two older brothers and two younger sisters.
My two older brothers were pretty wild. They were kind of living into their youth, and I was coming up right behind them.
I knew a lot of things as a 12-year-old that I'm still amazed at today. I was exposed to a lot of things at a very young age.
Discovering Faith at Age 12
Ric Hansen:So there was no Christianity involved in that, other than just good moral character?
Steve Preston:No. I knew my father had grown up in a very fire-and-brimstone environment. He had rejected it many years earlier.
There was a stint when we were really little where we went back to a church for a while, but that wasn't for very long.
So we weren't really attending a church, and the family wasn't really religious.
Ric Hansen:So your turnaround moment happened actually pretty early on in life, and that was after a visit to a relative.
Who is the relative, and how did that all come about?
Steve Preston:My mother had an opportunity to go back to Germany to visit her family, which had only happened like once a decade.
So she brought my two little sisters with her. My two older brothers were old enough to kind of take care of themselves. I think one of them had a job.
And here I was. I was 12 and I was sort of the tweener.
So they sent me off to relatives in Ohio, my dad's sister, and she had a son who was about my age.
They were strong Christians.
And that was really my introduction to the faith in a way that was meaningful and life-giving, and with people who really saw their lives as being about who they were in their faith.
Ric Hansen:Was there a moment during that time that you'd say you developed your relationship with Jesus, or was it more of a process?
Steve Preston:It's interesting. When I went there, I felt like I always had this belief in God, but I didn't really know what to make of it, where to go with it, or what it meant.
And so I walked into this situation where people lived it every day.
I was schooled in some of the tenets of the faith, and certainly there was an absolute moment where I said, "This is where I'm making a decision."
It was very real and very powerful for me.
I felt like I had gone from one place to the next.
So yes, it was very much of a defining moment.
Next June, it will have been 50 years.
Ric Hansen:Wow.
Steve Preston:So yeah. Well, you probably thought I was 40 by looking at me, but that's not the case.
Ric Hansen:Were you baptized at that point?
Steve Preston:I was. I was baptized in a lake at a summer church camp.
Ric Hansen:Interesting. Quick side note: my son was the same deal — summer camp in a lake — and was baptized there as well.
So then you came back from this trip and you were kind of the sole person with faith at that point.
How did you survive, or continue to nurture your love of God during that period of time in high school and all of that stuff that took place at that point when you returned?
A Twelve-Year-Old Interviews Pastors
Steve Preston:Man, I look back at that time and I'm just amazed it all worked out.
I was a pretty gritty kid. I was pretty tenacious.
I came home and said, "This is who I am now."
And I knew where I was heading in life. Before I left, I understood that I needed to be on a very different pathway.
So a couple of things happened.
Number one, my aunt called up my father and said, "I know you may not be aligned with this, but I need you to promise me you're going to take him to church."
So I came home, and my dad said, "Your aunt's called me. I know what you're going through. It's a real high. It's a feeling that's not going to last. Don't talk to me about it. Don't ever try to convince me to become a Christian."
"But I have promised her that I will take you to church, and I will do that."
So the rules were set very, very quickly.
Once again, he grew up in an environment that was, like I said, hellfire and brimstone, and I think it left him with a very bad taste.
So I got a phone book — the old phone books in those days — and I looked under Baptist churches because that's what my relatives were.
I started calling up pastors as a 12-year-old and interviewing them.
Let's just say my interview questions were probably characteristic of a 12-year-old trying to ask a pastor about their church.
Some of them didn't really act terribly charitably, actually.
Except one guy said, "You know what? Why don't you come visit us? We'd love to have you at the church, and you can test it out for yourself and see if this is the right place for you."
And I said, "Well, sure, I'll do that."
And I went, and that's where I started going to church.
There was a guy there who was in my junior high school. I didn't really know him well, but they lived not far from us.
Eventually his family started taking me to church.
Ric Hansen:So your dad was off the hook at that point?
Steve Preston:Well, after a while, yeah. He definitely put some work in there for a while.
He took me for a while, but he was faithful. He took me every week.
And by the time church came out, he was waiting on the corner every week and never complained or never said anything.
My dad was never a complainer, but he did what he said he was going to do.
A Family Comes to Faith
Ric Hansen:Any of the other siblings? What were the siblings thinking at this point? Did they follow along in any way, or did they look at you and say, "Whoa, what's going on with Steve?"
Steve Preston:I think that was kind of my thing, and they did their thing. I'm not sure that they paid much attention to it.
My brothers were older and I was kind of the younger one, so I'm not sure they paid a lot of attention, although I was very close to one of my brothers at the time.
What did happen is when I got my driver's license, I started taking my younger sisters to church, and both of them came to faith.
And that was really wonderful.
What was interesting was, all of a sudden, we had two older brothers who had sort of lived large in high school in their own ways, and the three of us who came to faith were living a very different life than the two older brothers were.
When I was about to go to college, I felt this incredible burden that it was my responsibility to ensure that the whole family had come to faith.
I just felt like it was my job.
I remember praying, "God, how can you? I'm going to be gone next year. Who's going to do this? I've got these two little sisters. They're young."
So that Christmas, my parents came to a candlelight service.
Then, as the school year was coming to a close, my mother said to me, "You know, we really see the good influence this has had on you and your sisters. And we want to make sure that your sisters can continue to go to church. So we're going to take them every week, and we'll come with them."
And through that, my father came to faith, or renewed his faith.
Then what happened within a year — within a year of my leaving for college — one of my brothers accepted Christ in the military. He was in Okinawa.
He came back, he evangelized my mother, he evangelized my other brother. My father had already made a decision.
And within a year, all seven of us were believers.
Ric Hansen:Oh my God. What a story.
Steve Preston:It was really, I think, the first time I realized that it wasn't me.
I wasn't calling the shots.
God is faithful. I can trust Him. He has a plan.
It wasn't about me. It was about Him.
And it was something I will always carry with me.
It allowed me to build a different kind of trust than I ever had before.
Ric Hansen:Wow, what a story. I love that.
Steve Preston:My father became an elder in the church. My one brother's a minister. He has been for probably 40 years.
Ric Hansen:No way. Almost 40 years.
Steve Preston:Yeah. It's incredible.
Northwestern University
Ric Hansen:That's the one I had not heard. I did a lot of research on you to figure everything that had happened in your life, and that was one I did not see.
So that's one of the nuggets I had hidden away for you.
But you were, as well as being a faithful young guy, also a very good student.
You took pride in learning, and I think that ended up being kind of the cornerstone of what became the rest of your life, really, right?
Steve Preston:Yeah, it's funny. I threw everything I had into school.
I can still remember getting a report card and thinking, "Wow, I can get these grades. I should really start working harder."
And that sort of coincided with when I came to faith.
So I focused really heavily on my studies. I became very committed to various extracurricular activities. I was an athlete.
I just really invested myself heavily in all of those things.
I felt that I grew through that, I learned through that, and it opened up my perspectives.
Somehow I didn't know how, but somehow I knew that if I was faithful in that place, God would use it.
I didn't really know how, but I knew I needed to be.
Because I realized I had certain capabilities, I wanted to be a good steward of those.
So I worked very hard. I worked very, very hard in high school and into college.
Ric Hansen:Unbelievable.
And that's the other thing that is amazing — the unlikely opportunity for you to go on to Northwestern University, one of the most prestigious colleges in the country.
You didn't choose just to go to college; you went to Northwestern.
Steve Preston:I had no idea.
I got one of those little cards in the mail from Northwestern.
My guidance counselors didn't really know much about schools outside of Wisconsin.
I lived 45 miles from the University of Wisconsin, which was a great state school, and that was sort of the apex of what people did.
There was one of those old Barron's Guides in his office, and I would go look up schools. I'd get these little postcards and look up schools, and it would say how competitive they were.
I got the postcard from Northwestern, and my dad said, "Well, you know, that's not that far away. And by the way, I don't want you going to the East Coast to any of those other schools because they're going to put ideas in your head."
So I looked them up in the Barron's Guide. I couldn't believe it. They were rated very highly in terms of competitiveness and other things.
I said, "Gosh, I don't even know what this school is."
I asked my guidance counselor, and he said, "I don't really know anything about it."
We were a hundred miles from the school, but he knew these two schools in Wisconsin that were phenomenal.
My dad knew somebody. He was working in the service department of a car dealership, and he said, "I know somebody who brings their car in where their son goes there. Maybe I can connect you with him."
Sure enough, my dad connected me with this guy who was a junior.
I went for a weekend visit, and it was like, "Oh my gosh. Who are these people? Where are they from?"
It was a whole different experience than I'd ever had anywhere before.
I knew it was something just different.
I applied early decision. They told me in my interview, "I'm not supposed to tell you this, but you're going to get in."
And through Pell Grants and other scholarships, I was able to afford it.
I still look back at that and think, "Wow. That was a three-by-five card and a little bit of research and a couple of conversations, and one thing after another, I was there."
Ric Hansen:Wow. Wow. I think God might have been involved in that one, too.
Steve Preston:Yeah. None of us knew what we were doing.
My family didn't know colleges. My friends' families didn't know colleges. My guidance counselors didn't know a whole lot.
It was such a rich experience for me.
It really opened the world up for me, I believe — getting into Northwestern, going there, doing well there, learning what the world was about, and seeing a little bit about what the possibilities were, which obviously opened up along the way.
Wall Street and Lehman Brothers
Ric Hansen:And then off to Wall Street, which was kind of your first entrée after college. Is that correct?
Steve Preston:Yeah. I went straight to business school out of college, and there was a company in Chicago that offered to put me through business school.
It was a bank. Then I rotated through different departments, and they placed me in New York.
From there, I went right over to Lehman Brothers in 1985.
It was the go-go '80s on Wall Street.
I thought about that, and I thought, "You know what? I just turned 25."
It all happened so quickly, and it's sort of hard to imagine in a lot of ways, even looking back on it.
Faith on Wall Street
Ric Hansen:How did you manage to maintain a spiritual life inside kind of a crazy, cutthroat Wall Street career?
Was there conflict along the way?
Steve Preston:I had learned from my parents that I was a very hard worker.
I invested myself completely into that job.
I wouldn't say that I was a person who had a lot of balance in life. I worked seven days a week.
The '80s was a booming time. The firms weren't that big; they really hadn't grown to meet the need as much.
The atmosphere at those firms was really challenging.
I worked with wonderful people. They were very talented. I was learning a lot. I loved the people I worked with.
But it was a time when you were seeing things like trading scandals, hostile takeovers, and the mantra of "greed is good."
I was pulling all-nighters all the time.
It was really hard at first, and I just didn't know what I was doing.
I was new to the industry, and I'd find myself in a board meeting with a partner two months into it, talking about whether they should sell the company.
The learning curve was very high.
So I realized a couple of things.
I realized it was a wonderful environment for me to learn and grow, that I was very, very lucky to have that job, and I needed to make sure to treat it as such and understand what that meant.
I loved the work. I loved what we did. I thought it was so interesting.
But what I did find pretty early on is I sort of had to mentally lay out principles for myself.
They were principles I sort of prayed through.
I remember saying to God, "Look, I'm not going to do anything for money. I'm not going to do anything for prestige, and I'm not going to do anything for power in terms of career decisions."
I committed that those would not be the drivers of who I am or what I do.
That was big for me because I'd never had money before.
Just a couple of years before that, I wasn't sure how I was going to pay my bills, and now I was in a situation where I had more money than I needed.
I'd never really had position, and I'd never really had those things before.
But I also very quickly felt like I saw the dark side of those things and how they didn't deliver for very powerful, very wealthy people.
I kind of saw who they were behind the scenes.
And all of that was very healthy as I was sort of evolving as a professional.
Leaving Wall Street
Ric Hansen:A real-life story of incredible success from humble beginnings and a relationship with Jesus at a very early age.
We're talking with Steve Preston.
At about the time you were going to be named partner, you walked away from all that, which some people would say, "Well, that's crazy."
But it wasn't crazy in light of those insights that you had already kind of developed, right?
Steve Preston:Yeah. I was probably about a year away from when the whole machinery kicks in and you kind of get placed before the leadership to determine if you're going to make partner.
Everything was working out well for me.
I had developed an increasing conviction that I needed to be on a different pathway.
I was looking at what a lot of my clients were doing in terms of building and growing companies, doing great things for their customers and developing organizations.
And I thought, "You know what? I want to be doing what they're doing."
For banking, even though I was moving into sort of a rarefied zone, it was going to be a lot about bringing in new clients and bringing in fees, and the job was changing.
It just didn't feel like the right thing anymore.
So I started looking at different opportunities.
A particular opportunity that I had turned down, probably a year before, kind of stayed in front of me.
It was moving into the financial leadership of a company that was growing very quickly and making acquisitions.
I was going to be the in-house financial leader to manage it.
The CFO had been a product partner at Lehman Brothers, so I knew him very well.
The job was going to be in New York. In fact, it was in the same building I was working in.
I was about to get married. I knew the CFO, so it all kind of felt like it worked really well.
As I was about to accept the job, the CFO who was hiring me left unexpectedly because he got this massive opportunity.
The leadership came and said, "The job just got better, bigger. We need you more than ever, but we need the job to be in Omaha."
We had this fun young professional life in New York. We had dreams of having this great continuation of our world.
And it was sort of like, "Wait — Omaha? You want me to...?"
It was one of those situations where I knew if I had known about Omaha during the process, I would have never even applied.
In fact, I had an interview in Omaha, and I came back and unfortunately told my new wife, "Thank God the job's not there. I'd never want to live there."
Which she remembered.
But by the time that all happened, I was completely convicted that this was the right role for me, in the right next step.
I resigned from Lehman. They really thought I was nuts. They had conversations with me, asking, "Are you sure you know what you're doing?"
They countered with this great job in London.
I told my brand-new bride, and she said, "Omaha, London. Omaha, London. What am I missing here?"
But it turned out to be a great time in our lives.
It was a wonderful role that I loved.
Moving out of New York City, we were both in our early 30s and knew a lot of people and had our own worlds.
Moving to Omaha gave us a chance to just have each other and have our first child.
We were part of a church plant.
And I really believe it set me on a development pathway to become a very different kind of professional and a very different kind of leader than I would have had on Wall Street.
I truly believe it established my wife and me in our marriage in a way that would not have happened otherwise.
Tim Keller and Redeemer Presbyterian Church
Ric Hansen:You had a connection with Tim Keller, the author and pastor of Redeemer Church.
Tell us about your connection with Redeemer Church in New York. How did you connect with them, and how did that impact your life?
Steve Preston:That figured in very prominently with that period of time at Lehman Brothers, when I ended up moving up in the firm and then out.
I was living in New York City.
There was not a great, rich church environment in New York at the time.
Some friends of mine that I knew from another church said, "You really should try out this new church. It's just getting off the ground. There's this great pastor there called Tim Keller."
I went to the church and saw a few other people I knew.
I don't even think we had 200 people at the time. It was less than a year old.
And we all sat there in the pews saying, "This guy's talking to me. Oh my gosh, he completely has diagnosed who I am. Somebody told him."
Ric Hansen:Yeah.
Steve Preston:He was remarkable in understanding the New York professional and how we viewed the world, the race that we were on, how empty it was, and how we needed to think about it as people of faith.
At the time, it felt like a lot of the evangelical churches were super heavily focused on winning converts.
The mainline churches in town were heavily invested in serving people in need.
And Tim brought those two things together, and even more powerfully, the need for spiritual formation within each of us to be able to do what we're called to do.
All of that was rooted in really good theology.
It was the first time anybody had really laid out to me, "This is what the Bible says, and this is what it means for who we are. This is how all of who we are come underneath this and are driven by this."
It was incredibly informative.
And I just love seeing how much writing he's done over the last number of years.
Ric Hansen:I've read a few of his books as well. Maybe you can connect me with him for my interview.
Steve Preston:Yeah, that's right.
Ric Hansen:He's wonderful. Like you say, so relevant. Even as a reader, I sense that he had me figured out. He was talking to me.
Steve Preston:One of my best Tim Keller stories is when I was being interviewed by the President in the Oval Office for that HUD job.
He asked me how I met my wife.
I told him that I met her at Redeemer Presbyterian and mentioned Tim's name.
And he said, "You know, I think that's the guy that preached the 9/11 sermon when I was there. And that's one of the best preachers I've ever heard."
So, in fact, it was.
And I gave the President The Reason for God, and it had just come out.
The President had Tim and his wife, Kathy, to the White House and has connected with him over the years.
He has read, I think, most of what Tim has written.
Every time I see him, he mentions Tim Keller to me.
So it's become sort of a fun point of intersection that I have with President Bush.
When God Seems Silent
Ric Hansen:Tell me, there are so many points in your life where God has obviously shown up, where He's had a huge impact on you as a leader and as a business guy.
Is there a time along the way where you said, "Where's God in this?" Maybe an unanswered prayer?
Steve Preston:Yeah. How much time do you have for that?
Let me say two things.
Number one is, I think when leaders or other people have discussions like this, sometimes it can feel like, "Well, it was all packaged and it all worked well. This is just something that's tied up in a bow."
And it's just not.
I fall down every day. I've had personal failures.
We get to talk about how everything worked out, but really it's being humble throughout difficult journeys that I think really builds us as people of faith.
Through every one of those transitions — when I left Lehman, when I went from the private sector into the government, when I decided to go into the nonprofit world — those were periods of very difficult seeking.
Sometimes very quiet transition, where I've said, "Is this going to go anywhere? Is anything going to change here? Am I going to see something that I feel called to here?"
The other thing is, when I've gone through times of difficulty, leaning on Scripture, leaning on God's Word, leaning on God's Spirit during those periods of time have instructed me in a much deeper way, in a much richer way.
They have built me into a stronger leader, a more resilient person, and a more persevering person in a lot of ways.
I've had those kinds of situations where I've just said, "What is going on here? And how am I going to get through it? How could this be good?"
And it's in those places — either where you're feeling attacked or feeling overwhelmed, or just feeling like there's nobody out there — for me, anyway, those places have been much more formative.
When I look back on those, much like that situation before I went to college when my family came to faith, they've been places where I built trust and built confidence in who God is in my life, in His provision and in His purpose.
Goodwill Industries: Putting Brains and Heart Together
Ric Hansen:So now you're CEO of Goodwill Industries.
That's a whole different switch from everything else, but you talk about putting brains and heart together for a project.
This has been kind of the wonderful merging of the two.
Steve Preston:Yeah.
When I was a single guy in New York, I spent my weekends with kids in the city.
I came from a big family. I loved kids.
I would go and work in parts of the city through a couple of different programs and do mentoring and tutoring.
It was just a huge blessing to me. It filled my heart like nothing else did at the time.
Fast-forward 20 years. I'm running HUD, and I'm in the agency that probably has the most significant poverty mission in the government.
I see homeless people. I see people on public assistance. I see people in public housing.
And I realized that those are the kids that I worked with 20 years ago who hadn't gotten out — either because of their circumstances, external factors, or bad decisions, which are easy to make when you grow up in terrible circumstances.
So I began to focus my time, my volunteer time and much of my philanthropic efforts on working with adults who just need to get their lives back.
People who are facing a long life ahead of themselves but didn't really have hope for a different kind of future.
I wrote a personal mission statement for myself.
And I actually pulled it up while we were talking, so let me read it.
It was:
"To lead and grow a company whose stated mission is to help develop difficult-to-employ people, helping them to flourish, grow, and find economic livelihood, transforming their lives and helping to improve their communities."
I spent about 18 months trying to figure out how to fulfill that mission.
I talked to private equity firms and said, "Could we buy a company and employ a lot of people with challenges? Are there companies that focus on this?"
I really wasn't getting anywhere during that 18 months.
And then I got a call to be the CEO of Goodwill.
I didn't really know what Goodwill did.
And I actually turned them down on the spot.
A couple of weeks later, the senior recruiter called me up and said, "I think this is what you want to do."
She told me about the mission.
Goodwill is the largest provider of workforce development services in the nonprofit world.
Our founder, 120 years ago, committed his life — he was a man of deep faith — to helping people overcome obstacles in their life to be able to reach, in his words, their fullest potential and to live an abundant life and to flourish.
That's how we have evolved.
And I'm like, "I think this job is my mission statement."
I couldn't believe it.
It's this combination of being part of a business enterprise — and I love running businesses, I love the stuff of business — with the outcome on the other side: helping people, mostly adults, find a different trajectory in their lives, become self-sustaining, and find greater dignity through their work and community.
To be able to contribute and experience all the wonderful things that lead to human flourishing, which is what every one of us wants.
And work is so essential to human flourishing.
So that's how I got there.
I've been there for almost three years — or almost four years now.
Closing
Ric Hansen:I really appreciate your time, Steve. This has been enlightening and fun.
You are an amazing guy, so I really appreciate your time here today.
Thank you.
Steve Preston:Well, thank you. It's been a lot of fun spending time with you.
Ric Hansen:All right. God bless you.
Steve Preston:God bless you, too.
Ric Hansen:Well, thanks for joining us on Amazing Greats — life stories from successful authors, actors, athletes, musicians, and leaders like Steve Preston.
If you like this episode, please share it with a friend or hit like and subscribe to Amazing Greats.
God bless.
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