From marketing and missionary work to launching the nation’s leading raw honey company, Nathan Sheets has always brought an infectious, childlike spirit of creativity and adventure to everything he does.
Growing up, Nathan developed a love of the outdoors at an early age. He was also a born entrepreneur, creating a little business selling mistletoe with his brother when they were young. After a few more forays into business with his dad and brother when he was older, Nathan went to college, graduated, and settled in Texas, where he met his wife, Patty.
From the very beginning, Nathan and Patty decided to put God first in their finances. “When Patty and I got married, the very first check that we wrote out of our joint checking account was our tithe,” he says. “We did it to make the statement that everything we have is the Lord’s. We didn’t do it with any grand vision of what that would become; it was just an act of faith.”
Nathan still has the check and displays it in his home as a testament to his kids about following the principles of biblical generosity.
An innovator for global missions impact
While managing an ad agency he’d started with his brother, Nathan became interested in beekeeping and brought home his first hive. In true entrepreneurial fashion, Nathan soon bought a small honey business and ran it as a side business.
But a pivotal mission trip soon put both his career in advertising and his honey business on hold. Sponsored by E3 Partners, the trip made such an impression that he felt called to join the staff after he returned. So, he joined E3 and became a full-time missionary.
One night, he and a friend were reviewing photos of a missionary using posters to explain the gospel to a group in Haiti. Nathan was playing around with a Rubik’s Cube at the time and mused out loud, “Wouldn’t it be cool if we could take the pictures on the poster boards and put them on this cube?” That night, his friend mocked up a prototype of the concept, and they introduced it the next day to the CEO of E3, who immediately recognized its potential.
Eventually, E3 launched the Evangecube as an easy, portable evangelism tool for mission groups worldwide. It’s gone on to reach millions for Christ in countries around the globe.
During this time, Nathan started an in-house agency at E3 to promote the cube and help fund ministry work. That’s when a major E3 supporter challenged Nathan to come up with an ad campaign to “make Jesus as famous as Tony Romo in Texas.”
The result was I Am Second, a campaign which launched in 2008 featuring real people who shared their first-person accounts of spiritual transformation. IAmSecond.com went viral and became a global movement that has impacted thousands of lives for Christ.
A pivot for generous business impact
All this achievement didn’t come without its drawbacks. Nathan’s success got the best of him, and he faced a crisis of faith. After 12 years in ministry, he needed to find a way to start over – spiritually and financially. Could his side-hustle honey be the ticket?
Nathan reordered his priorities and dedicated his business to the Lord. To remind himself that God owns everything, he printed a business card with his title: Chief Steward. Then, in 2010, with Patty’s encouragement, Nathan approached Walmart about buying his honey. Within weeks, he had his first purchase order for $107,000. “What we were hoping for in an entire year, God did in one order,” he says.
Nathan and Patty called the company Nature Nate’s Honey Co. after the nickname he’d acquired in college as an outdoorsman and avid nature lover. With a focus on offering consumers the purest raw, unfiltered honey in the business, Nature Nate’s has become the number-one branded honey company in the U.S., generating annual revenue in the hundreds of millions. In 2021, the company was acquired, and Nathan transitioned from CEO to serving on the board.
Lessons for maximizing kingdom impact
In his role as Chief Steward, Nathan says he learned some important lessons about maximizing his kingdom impact. Among them are:
Be generous. Nathan’s corporate mission was simple: “I want to help people.” He fostered a culture of generosity in his business by paying above-market wages and covering 100 percent of health insurance. He also started Honey Gives Hope, which funds research grants for bee health, supports various women’s and children’s charities, and provides honey to food banks, hospitals, ministries, schools, and other charities.
Be strategic. While he was CEO, Nathan worked with his NCF team in North Texas to help him make non-cash gifts of Nature Nate’s totaling about 20 percent of his holdings. “It was a really cool way to increase our giving on a large scale,” Nathan says. To accomplish this, NCF worked closely with one of its supporting organizations, NCF Charitable Trust.
Later, NCF Charitable Trust was able to participate in the sale of Nature Nate’s along with the other owners. When the dust settled, Nathan was excited about the result. “It capitalized our donor-advised fund at NCF with significantly more money for giving than if we’d sold first and then gave,” he says.
“I think NCF is a great vehicle for people to be able to be strategically generous,” he says. “If you can donate equity in your company, you’ll have funds that you can still steward and make an impact in the kingdom.”
Be part of a generous community. Since 2010, Nathan has been a part of a C12 business group, a close-knit community of generous business owners. “C12 shifts the perspective of being head of a for-profit company trying to make money to being the CEO of a company that God has entrusted to you,” he says.
NCF also helps keep him plugged in to a generous community. “The community of NCF and guys like Joel Smyer [president of NCF North Texas] who are constantly gathering people together to help them maintain their journey of generosity is really important,” Nathan says. “Without that, it’s easy for me to slip into my own self-comfort mode and just think about me.”
What’s next?
With some of his former partners from EvangeCube and I Am Second, Nathan is working to produce a movie adaptation of the book, A Skeleton in God’s Closet. As an impact investment in partnership with Impact Foundation and NCF North Texas, the $40 million-dollar project aims to be a high-quality film with A-list talent. Meet Nathan and learn more at the NCF North Texas Impact Investing Symposium on Friday, February 28.
“This is what my partners and I have been doing for 24 years – finding creative ways to have conversations about the gospel,” Nathan says. “I’m so excited about the impact this movie will have for Christ.”
Connect with your NCF team to explore opportunities to maximize your impact.
