This Guy Tips Strangers $10,000 After 9-Figure Exit

**Daniel Berk** (0:00)
Some people would see 100 million and think, wow, that guy did something right.

**Dean Sweetman** (0:04)
Yeah, but what if you're giving half of it away?

**Daniel Berk** (0:07)
And so when Excel KKR acquired Tithe.ly, are you at liberty to disclose the amount that that acquisition was for?

**Dean Sweetman** (0:13)
Yeah, it's not in the public sphere, but it's in the hundreds of million zone. How can you not bless that person, you know, if you have the means? And so I don't know if you've seen, there's this cool thing, I think it's Instagram still, but that's the tips for Jesus, where they're literally leaving like $5,000 tips. So now I get to the point where everything I own is not my own.

**Daniel Berk** (0:34)
That is Dean Sweetman. He spent 30 years as a pastor, then in his 50s, he built a software company for churches and sold it in a deal worth hundreds of millions of dollars. In this episode, he tells me his actual net worth. He walks me through exactly where every dollar sits, and he tells me about the one thing he does the same week, every wire hits. Before he even touches a cent of it, something that most people in his position would actually call insane. There's also something he does to strangers in airports. We'll get to that. I get to talk to founders just like Dean inside of Hampton, a private network for high growth founders who are doing 25 million a year on average. If that's you, you need to check out joinhampton.com. Now, let's get into the show. I'm Daniel Berk. Here's Dean Sweetman on Moneywise.
Dean, thanks so much for joining us today on Moneywise.

**Dean Sweetman** (1:21)
Great to be here.

**Daniel Berk** (1:22)
I'm excited to learn a bit about who you are and to really elaborate on some of what you've done. I think before we get into anything, what you built, I think is more of a payment processor that happened to serve churches. Is that how you would describe it to someone?

**Dean Sweetman** (1:39)
Yeah.
We started out in 2015 with the express goal of making giving easier for the local church. And so that was the mission still is today, although we do some other things these days that we'll probably chat about. But essentially, how can we facilitate easy, fast, inexpensive giving solutions for the local church? And we got going strong in 2015

**Daniel Berk** (2:07)
And when you launched in 2015, did you have any inkling that it would one day become what it has now 11 years later?

**Dean Sweetman** (2:15)
Yeah, not really. I mean, I had pretty big plans.
And I came from the side of the business side of church, understanding how churches function, how income and revenue and expenses work inside of a church grotcho. Not dissimilar to a business, but with some nuance. And then I just became a quick study around payments and moving money. And I had this experience that I tell the story. Back in 2013, I walked into a Starbucks. The iPhone had come out. The app store was just taking shape. And the Starbucks app, you know, I put it on my phone. I put my credit card in the app, which back then was pretty bold. And then I went to this local Starbucks and held up the barcode and out came the ticket. And the girl really didn't know what, you know, we both didn't know what was going to work. And so the ticket comes up and I'm like, man, church giving should be that easy.
And so that was kind of the early seeds of the idea. And then we officially got going in 2015

**Daniel Berk** (3:16)
And you were a pastor for 30 years before launching Tithe.ly, correct?

**Dean Sweetman** (3:20)
Correct. Yeah, I did about 10 years based in Australia, grew up in Australia, did missions into Asia and Africa for about 10 years, support myself through real estate development and other, other ways. And then in 96, family, we moved to Atlanta, Georgia to plant a church, brand new church, kind of a modern evangelical, pretty standard church that you might see these days. But it took off, did very well.
And then, but I was always fascinated by business. I always loved business. I always kind of thought one day I'd be back. What I didn't realize is that my love for God and the preaching of the gospel and the growing of the kingdom and business would collide in this way in which I've been working in the last 10 or 11 years, which is essentially creating increase in revenue streams for the local church so they can fulfill the mission.