Chaos Is Raw Material: Gary Harpst on Building a Business and a Life With Purpose

Gary Harpst says he has never really had a job. Not in the sense most of us mean it. Growing up in northwestern Ohio, surrounded by farms, he learned from a father of few words that work could be something you enjoy. That lesson has outlasted the farm, a software company, and a seventh decade of life.

It also set up a question Gary has wrestled with for more than forty years: where does my own diligence end and where does trust in God begin?

A Bible Study, a Partner, and a Premise

In his late twenties, Gary was a fairly new believer. He and a few men met for Bible study and kept asking the same thing: how do we make following the Lord part of everything we do, and not just a Sunday experience? An older man in the group, Jack, who would become Gary's business partner, offered an answer that stuck. Running your own business, he said, is a great way to get closer to the Lord.

So they built a company on that premise. Gary was 29. He is quick to say he doesn't think of himself as entrepreneurial. What he wanted was a life where his faith was either serious or not at all. The company started as TLB, later renamed Solomon Software, and its initials carried the conviction behind it: this business is for the Lord.

The timing helped. The year was 1980, and the IBM PC was about to arrive. The company grew into a software firm with 450 people and 60,000 clients around the world. In 2000, Gary and his partners sold it to a competitor. Within about ninety days, the combined company was in negotiations with Microsoft, and the deal rolled up from there.

The Burden That Feels Different

After more than two decades of growth, you might expect a leader to speak with settled confidence. Gary speaks instead about a tension he still hasn't fully resolved.

"What is the role of my own effort and being diligent, and what is the role of faith? I don't claim to have a magic answer. But I can tell when I'm carrying the burden. When I sense that this is up to me instead of up to the Lord, it just feels different on the inside."

That inner signal is worth noticing. Many of us know it: the tight chest, the late-night rehearsing of problems no one else can fix. Gary treats it as information, a cue to stop and ask whose weight he is actually carrying.

He also credits business itself as the training ground. Faith, he says, is like a muscle. It grows when it is stretched beyond its current strength. Some people are pushed in one area of life, others in another. For Gary, it was work.

"I just never felt like I was smart enough, good enough, or understood the things I needed to understand. And it led me to lots and lots of prayer and lots and lots of time in the Word."

Why We Get It Backwards

Gary points to Scripture to explain why trusting God rarely feels easy. Moses, convinced he was meant to free the Hebrews, struck down an Egyptian on his own and found God had a different plan. Abraham and Sarah, waiting on a promised child, tried to speed things along through their servant. We tend to do it our way, Gary notes, and the Bible is full of examples.

He sees the same pattern in how we read familiar verses. "I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me" is true, but we sometimes picture a jolt of supernatural power before we set off. Gary's response is simple: Christ is your strength, and your part is to follow him. Pray, and the road may still be hard. He often asks fellow believers, "What Bible are you reading?"

The upside of that humility is protection. If we are paying attention, Gary says, a moment of getting ahead of our skis corrects us before it hardens into pride.

The Practices That Hold It Together

Asked what keeps him both humble and confident, Gary's answer is plain and unglamorous. Time in the Word, because "your mind goes everywhere and the Word brings you back to truth." Prayer. And people.

His business partners doubled as his spiritual accountability. On the days Gary was weak, they held him up, and on their weak days he returned the favor. Add a spouse and a church family, and you have what he calls the network that sustains you. We were not meant to do this alone. God said as much at the very beginning.

Gary, an engineer by temperament, offers an analogy from chemistry. Hydrogen and oxygen combine into water, something neither predicts on its own. Scripture, fellowship, prayer, and work combine the same way. "You get life," he says, "something that no one by itself predicts."

The First Thing God Made

A few years ago, while writing a book called Built to Beat Chaos, Gary was rereading Genesis 1. God speaks to him through the text itself, he says, not through dreams or prophetic words. Asking what he could learn about the God in whose image he was made, he noticed something for the first time. The first thing God created was not light. Before light came a formless, empty earth.

Bringing order out of chaos, Gary concluded, is God's main business, and so is bringing love out of selfishness. We were made with dominion in mind, and he believes God designed it that way because in the stretching we come to know him. It still brings him to tears, he says, that God could do it all himself and chooses to work through us.

Finishing Strong, With Purpose

That insight reshapes how Gary sees the season he is in now. He is in his seventies, with grown children and four grandchildren, leading a newer company focused on the faith dimension of leadership development. He has no plans to coast.

"Chaos is not a problem. Chaos is just raw material sitting there ready to have purpose applied."

He tells his children that the business sale left some capital, but capital is not what he most wants to leave them. He wants to leave them purpose, with the money as a means to pursue it. And his word to every reader, from young professionals to seniors, is this: you may retire from a job, but you never retire from purpose.

What to Do This Week

Gary's story suggests a few practical moves for Monday morning:

Notice the weight. When a problem feels entirely on your shoulders, pause and ask whether you are carrying what belongs to God.

Name your chaos. Pick one messy situation at work or home and ask what purpose could be applied to it, instead of what could make it disappear.

Call your people. Find one or two believers who will pray with you and tell you the truth. If you don't have them, start looking this week.

Rewrite your purpose for this season. It may look different than it did five years ago, but it is still there.

Gary's life suggests that even with limited mobility, even over coffee in a nursing home, there is always a way to sow God's goodness. We don't retire from that. We just find new ground to plant it in.

Gary Harpst, CEO of LeadFirst, is known for his fusion of faith and work, fostering agile organizations. With four decades of experience, he founded three successful businesses, one of which merged and was sold to Microsoft. He has authored three impactful books, and educated on business-faith intersections.

As a veteran Christian CEO, Harpst's journey encompasses business trials and growth. His latest book, "Built to Beat Chaos," makes the biblical case that we are all created to overcome chaos. In fact, the biblical definition of leadership involves bringing order out of chaos. Chaos is not our problem but our purpose.

LeadFirst, under Harpst's guidance, provides a faith-driven leadership operating system that equips leaders to integrate faith, business management, and leadership development.

Your website: https://leadfirst.ai/

Your social media handles:
Company LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/leadfirstai/
Personal LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/garyharpst/