Redemptification: Recent Episodes
Redemptification
Creating Connection: The Power of Unique Overnight Stays in Dispersed Hospitality with host John Marsh and special guests Ash Marsh and Ty MaloneyWelcome to “The Redemptification Podcast,” where we delve into the creation of meaningful, transformative experiences in small towns and communities. Hosted by John Marsh, with guests Ash Marsh and Ty Maloney, this episode explores how “Unique Overnight Stays” can transform brief visits into immersive, memorable experiences and is an important part of the Dispersed Hospitality concept.
In today’s episode, we explore the art of crafting environments that resonate deeply with people. John Marsh shares how their team discovered the profound impact that a well-thought-out experience can have, even in the smallest of towns. The idea that a single restaurant in a town of 3,500 could become a cornerstone of connection led to the development of the “minimum viable experience.” This concept, introduced by Ty Maloney, emphasizes creating weekend-long experiences centered around great meals, intentional design, and thoughtful hospitality—turning a short visit into a cherished memory.
Ash Marsh, with her deep understanding of hospitality, challenges the impersonal nature of traditional service models. She advocates for a more personalized approach, one that makes guests feel as if they are being welcomed into a home rather than processed through a system. The essence of hospitality, as Ash sees it, is about anticipating needs, creating comfort, and fostering a sense of belonging, whether in a home or a unique overnight stay.
Through this series, you’ll gain insights into how to create spaces that not only serve but also invite people to be part of something special—whether it’s a community, a story, or a transformative experience. Join Ash, John, and Ty as they explore how to build places that leave a lasting impression, turning visitors into lifelong friends in the world of Dispersed Hospitality.
Insights & Inspirations John Marsh (01:00): the whole team started realizing if we built these things in a small town, even a town of 3,500, a restaurant could make a huge difference. But we were limited. If people had to drive in, have this experience and drive out their stay was really short. And Ty, you kind of, I think were the one that brought up the idea of this MVE minimum viable experience where you go into a town, you have a great meal, you stay overnight, you have a great day, another meal, and go home the next day, kind of like a Thursday to Saturday thing. * Ty Maloney (02:04): what we did realize is that most people, a lot of people travel not only around experiences they’re seeking out but around meals. And so really once you have three great meals at this point, you are at a point where hey, you have to have somewhere to stay. And so we have worked with a number of communities to start thinking about that. How do you create an experience that’s really a weekend long and you can drive a lot of economics around a weekend experience, especially one that’s integrated with intentionality. * Ash Marsh (04:37): Like you said, I tried to think of a specific hotel or a specific place I had been or experience I attached that to and I kept coming back to the best hospitality experience is in my home, or it’s in the home of someone that just is caring for you and is aware of you and serving and loving you. And so I believe that that’s the best definition that we have in hospitality as I thought of you before you got here. And that is what I try to do in my home is what I want to do in any of the areas that we’re serving in our community. You’re just waiting for your turn and they’re clicking all the information in the computer and it seems like they’re hacking a major mainframe. It takes a while. There’s a lot of clicking and moving and I mean, I don’t know what they’re doing, but once they find your registration, you could be 10 minutes from actually getting a key. * Ash Marsh (05:44): It seems like you’re confirming, and you asked me this, you’re like, what are they doing? I’m like, well, they’re confirming your information. You’re like, but why even go through all the trouble of giving you the information ahead of time to be served that way? To only have to continually reconfirm it? And there’s something about that that doesn’t happen to you when you go to someone’s home. If I invite you to my home, I’m not going to open the door and say, are you so-and-So okay, and here’s your list that you filled out for me. Can we go through these before I let you in the door? And before I tell you what room you’re in, can we verify your bed and your type and your this and your that? When you’re leaving, when you’re, and it’s like we make it so impersonal, we take the individual out of that and we make it about the system becomes the priority. And it’s like that’s what we’re having to serve at that moment. And it’s like how do we make our experience here with unique overnight stay different from that? And why do we believe that that transaction has turned into the norm whenever we get most places, even the best places? We even talked about that, * John Marsh (06:52): Right? I mean, we think about this as if that was a Marriott property and she clicked and clicked and clicked and I could feel the heat of the six people behind me wishing I would get my key and get there. And I’m turning around going, sorry guys, I’m standing here. I want to go as fast as you want me to. And we even talked about Blackberry Farms, which we’re talking about at the very top of the food chain here. You pull in there, everything’s going good. Hey, Mr. Marsh, Mr. Marsh, hey Mr. Maloney, Mr. Go in. But you still sit down and they’re going to go through some paperwork with you. And one thing I was wondering, Ash, it just came to me one, I don’t think I felt that way at the high line in New York when we went to that 40 room hotel there, they came up to us, remember it was a little cubby kind of in the foyer. They didn’t have enough room for you to stay very long. Hey, it was an armoire in the foyer and they pulled their iPad out and click, click sign. * Ash Marsh (07:48): Maybe it wasn’t, but they were like, we need to get out of the way. That’s right. But I was actually thinking when you were asking me why they were able to develop a check-in system whenever I was with Diane at the CTCA, that was so easy. And that was for cancer treatments and it was literally the kindest interaction and we were so overly prepared for the whole gamut that you knew you were going to have to do. Do you have your paperwork? Did you have your card? Are you, but we didn’t have to have it. And we’re like, oh, we didn’t even know what to do, then it’s like we have free time now to actually go do something. And so I think about those things and that’s when you’re talking about the minimum viable experience, what do we actually offer that is just amazing that people see that it’s not just we thought about you before you got here. It’s not that we’re not going to feed you well and entertain you well, but it’s like when you value your time, your time is precious * John Marsh (09:20): I mean if you want to know what we want to build is land-based cruise ships. * Ty Maloney (10:47): Well, it’s funny you guys, I mean I do think the guest has to be prepared. That’s one thing I do think in any hospitality organization, whether it’s a restaurant or a resort, a hotel, is that in order to have a great experience with the guests, the guest has to play a part, the guest has to be prepared. * John Marsh (12:08): Ty, I think you experienced this in Italy and you brought it into our world of vocabulary. There’s a difference in hospitality and entertainment. And there’s another one about an invitation. I love the way you frame that. It really is like we want to invite you into something that’s been loved dearly and we want to love on you. We want to treat you with the utmost respect and try to meet every need we could conceive of. * Ash Marsh (13:51): And so one of the things that I’m trying to do now in our home and what I want to do here on our campus is how do I invite you into not just the story we’re trying to create, but how do I invite you into the lifeline that we’ve already created to where when you come into our home, you should feel free to say, Hey, where are the cups? And when I tell you, you can help yourself as much as you want, not because I’m not being attentive to you, not because I will not take care of you, but because I want you to feel like this is your home. * John Marsh (17:04): And you know what we realized? What we love about overnight stay is when overnight stay can be hooked with great food. And if we’re going to be outside, which we want to be around a pool or water that you can have great service * Ty Maloney (18:10): There’s an expectation scale that is generally set by wherever you’re staying. If you think about even a full service hotel in whether it’s a mid-market or a larger market, those hotels are built for a certain client, even a Four Seasons. * John Marsh (19:11): I spoke with the national town builders this past week, and one thing they kept saying is how much access to the capital drives development, whether it’s the number of parking spaces, number of this or that. If you’re going to get their capital, you’ve got to align it with their proposed strategy that they think will make it easier to sell in the market, which changes the product completely * Ty Maloney (21:06): And so we want people to feel planted, not necessarily transient. So the rooms themselves have a different purpose. * Ty Maloney (21:36): We get the answer of generally it’s in somebody, the home of somebody who loves you. It’s actually shocking how many times that comes up and how many people actually go there quickly without any prodding. The second one is generally not too far from that. It’s actually going somewhere with somebody who loves a place and they want you to experience that place with them * Ash Marsh (25:01): I think that bedrooms are to sleep in and they should be comfortable and spacious enough to move around and not feel like you’re in a closet. They should definitely be beautiful, but at the end of the day, they are to have a good night’s rest. And when you think of that, it’s like what do you really need in your bedroom to have a good night’s rest? It should be the right temperature, it should have the right lighting, it should have the right bedding. It really gets pretty simple at the most complex moments of itself I guess you could say. But I think that the gathering spaces are where we want to be. We want to be able to meet new people. We want to be able to be with our people. * Ash Marsh (35:20): Well, I think a lot about being an introvert, for example. I love having a place I can go and get away from everyone. So being in a hotel, a high rise hotel with long corridors where I can go hide in a little room somewhere is amazing to me. But yet even being an introvert, I hate being stuck in my room for every single thing that I want to do, but there’s nowhere for me to go and do, I can go down in the lobby and work on my computer and it’s just not inviting or there’s nothing fun or encouraging about that. There’s not enough things offered. But sometimes the offerings that are in the room available to me are inappropriate. And so I think that when I think of staying at a place, it’s like finding that balance of what is appropriate to have in a room. And again, it goes back to my house. What do my guests really need in their room for them to be comfortable and for them to feel like they don’t have to ask for one thing more? And one of the things that I want them to come out of their room and experience. And so I think that that’s what we’re trying to touch on is getting to the place where what we really love to be a part of is an experience that has a room that you can stay in, whether it is something that, a place that you’re going to experience or a restaurant that you’re going to eat at or whatever that might be. And then you get to stay the night because you are just having so much fun that you just want to stay. * Ash Marsh (38:07): If you look at the amenities that are in most hotel rooms, the big box hotel rooms and the mini bar, whatever, you could be an idiot and have a few drinks out of that and you’ll have a larger tab than if you went to the nicest restaurant in town and the drinks won’t be as good. Seriously. And so I’m like, why wouldn’t we have a grander place for people to want to come out of their room and experience that and not have such jacked up prices in the room for them to have to experience it? * Ty Maloney (43:16): I think there’s a longing for more than just, and I think it comes down to that dichotomy between entertainment and hospitality where people are not just looking to be entertained anymore. They truly want to be transformed. They want transformational experiences that actually make them become something or move them, or you see this, I mean, people want to be interesting. * John Marsh (45:32): And now even thinking our place is somewhat, again, a land-based cruise ship, but cruise ships are restaurants with rooms, restaurants and pools and venues with rooms. And the key is to be able to put all this together. Information & Links Connect and learn more about what we do at https://www.marshcollective.com/ * Connect with Marsh Collective on LinkedIn * Connect with Marsh Collective on Facebook * Marsh Collective Journal
Crafting Celebrations: Emotional Storytelling and Celebratory Events with host John Marsh and special guests Ash Marsh and Shanika ReidWelcome to “The Redemptification Podcast”, where we explore the stories that bring life to moments of celebration and purpose. I’m your host, John Marsh, and today we’re diving deep into the world of creating unforgettable celebratory events with two special guests, Ash Marsh and Shanika Reid.
In this episode, Ash Marsh shares her philosophy on creating events that are not just aesthetically beautiful but that authentically celebrate the heart of individuals. She believes the magic lies in understanding the client’s vision and emotions, then weaving these into a celebration that truly honors who they are. “We work diligently and faithfully to understand how they feel and make sure that shows up in the space,” she says.
For Shanika Reid, it’s about sharing the love story of a couple and bringing it to life through the details. She explains that the conversations leading up to the big day help to reveal the narrative that deserves to unfold within just one day. “Celebrating people is what I love to do,” she says. “It goes back to making people feel like they belong and are appreciated.”
We also discuss how, as “emotional historians,” Ash and Shanika strive to transform venues into beautiful spaces that allow couples to realize their lifelong dreams. Ash highlights the importance of trusting professionals to handle key aspects of the event and the need to address challenges creatively. “Whenever we’re able to solve problems that are unsolvable, that’s magic,” she emphasizes.
Join us as we uncover the artistry behind creating memorable events, hear insights into navigating the unknowns of wedding planning, and learn the top three things that most brides should be aware of.
Insights & Inspirations Ash Marsh (01:14): I believe the greatest part that we get to have with celebratory events is that we get to see the individual and what their heart really desires to say what matters to them most. A lot of times they come in with a vision of what it looks like, and as we work and spend time with them, it’s really how they feel. And we work really diligently and faithfully on how they feel and how that shows up in the space. * Shanika Reid (01:52): I mean, it’s literally sharing somebody’s love story. So there’s so many details and so many conversations you have prior to that one big day that you just get to unfold and you only have one day to do it. * John Marsh (02:34): I heard this today, artists, and I think you both are emotional historians, so y’all are taking the history of a husband and a wife and their story and their family and weaving it together in this celebratory day * Ash Marsh (06:51): what really is a celebratory event is when someone’s truly celebrated. And I believe that we’ve all been to events where it’s pretty and it’s busy and it’s fussy and it’s all the things and it’s okay, but you leave and you’re like, wow, I don’t have any memory from that. * Ash Marsh (10:45): It is beautiful. It is a beautiful old warehouse that we have been meticulously kind to and we love it and it shows up. And so honestly, we are having to sell the trust in us that we can literally help them have the event that they want to have that they dreamed of having their whole life. I don’t know how much I really dreamed about my wedding day, but once you get there, even if you don’t think about it every day, once a woman or a lady gets to that opportunity, you’re so aware of everything you’ve dreamed of. * Ash Marsh (15:30): But whenever we’re able to solve problems that are unsolvable, that’s magic. It is like when you go to someone’s home and you actually get to really be who you are and say that you need something or you forgot something and they have it, it makes you feel so different because it’s not fussing over it. And people then again, feel celebrated. * Shanika Reid (18:59): It’s the little things that I want you to feel good about because that just builds up who you are. And that just magnifies even more of the goal of the dream of where we want to be in life. And so I think celebrating people in general is just what I love to do. And it kind of goes back to making people feel good, making people feel like they belong and feel love and appreciative and just all those things * John Marsh (23:34): Once you trust someone, a lot of stuff falls away. * John Marsh (32:57): Tell me the top three things that most brides don’t know if you can, that you wish they’d know. * Shanika Reid (33:33): The first, all my thought of was budget. They don’t understand how much things cost. * Ash Marsh (35:52): Okay, so one of the things I would say that would be a top three is don’t bring family and friends as your professional lead at your event. It is a great, wonderful heart intended. Want to include everybody. And just because grandma does things at the church, you can put on a 300 person event. No Information & Links Southerly Venues – website * SLEEK Design by Shanika – website * Connect and learn more about what we do at https://www.marshcollective.com/ * Connect with Marsh Collective on LinkedIn * Connect with Marsh Collective on Facebook * Marsh Collective Journal
Anticipation, Emotion, and Conversation: Crafting Hospitality Experiences with co-host Ty Maloney and special guests Ash Marsh and Nelson MarshWelcome to “The Redemptification Podcast,” where we explore the intersection of hospitality, design, and storytelling. Join your hosts Ash Marsh, Nelson Marsh, and Ty Maloney as we delve into the art of creating spaces that not only serve but also speak to the soul.
In our journey, we’ve discovered that hospitality is more than just a transaction; it’s an emotional experience. As Ty beautifully put it, it’s about being in a place where you’re not just received but anticipated, where your needs and desires are not only met but understood before you even arrive. This anticipation creates a space where you can truly relax and connect on a deeper level.
Nelson brings a unique perspective, emphasizing the importance of storytelling in Southern culture, particularly within food. For him, every dish has a narrative, and every dinner is an opportunity to create memories and forge connections.
Ash expands on this idea, highlighting the significance of the table as a symbol of communication, storytelling, and community. Through thoughtful design and attention to detail, they aim to honor the past while envisioning a future where every space is imbued with a sense of belonging and purpose.
Join us as we explore the power of hospitality, design, and storytelling to redeem spaces and create meaningful experiences that transcend the ordinary.
Insights & Inspirations Ash (02:10): Whenever you think of hospitality, I think why people have a hard time really describing it is because they’re trying to remember what they received in the form of hospitality. But really what it is at the core is it makes you feel a certain way. And so it’s emotional. That’s why you can relate to it whenever you say, Hey, it’s whenever you’re in the home of someone who loves you and who anticipated you and who knows the things that you need and desire and therefore your emotional needs are met. * Ash (02:52): So my definition of I thought of you before you got here actually came through just some meditation time of really thinking of why does it matter and why does it feel a certain way whenever we know that we’ve just been receiving the best hospitality that we’ve had. And what I was shown in that meditation was that it’s because you were anticipated. And the power of anticipation is incredible. I mean a bride, the reason why the groom is so excited for the bride to come down is because there’s anticipation. The reason why it’s so exciting to announce a child coming into the world is because of the anticipation. And so when you come to someone’s home or their business or their city and they are prepared for you to meet your needs, you’ve been anticipated and you can relax. And when we relax, we receive so much better. * Ty (03:48): And I’ve been telling people that the second best hospitality experience that I have had is when I meet somebody who loves their place and they share it from that. * Nelson (05:03): but broadly the south, we still have stories and stories make us who we are and especially within food in the South. And so for me, I mean it was always kind of natural to approach things from story. * Nelson (06:21): my favorite thing in the world probably ever is dinner big, fabulous, ridiculous dinners. And normally I create the story of the dinner before I get to cooking. Now I love cooking and all that, but I’m never ever going to serve something that doesn’t have a story because that’s just impersonal. And I think our world is rife with people who don’t have stories surrounding their hospitality. * Ash (09:42): Now you’re not just eating something. And you’re right, Americans, a lot of times we just go to eat. Whereas I believe when you go to Italy, what we found was that they paused to dine. They paused to have conversations and to actually celebrate the moment of the work and the love that was put into putting that bean on the table. It’s not just a bean to them, it’s literally life to them. * Ty (10:55): but human scale is not nearly as important as human connection and then being present. And I do think that’s what, when food and beverage done well, that’s what it can do. * Nelson (13:07): I think there’s also a huge difference between eating some food and having dinner. * Nelson (17:31): And I always tell people, I mean if you want to, the first thing to do is be radically honest with people in hospitality because so many of us don’t understand that a hospitality relationship like any other relationship is based on mutual trust. * Ash (19:30): but really the table’s about communication, storytelling, crying together, building together, dreaming together, the table’s very important. The food is an avenue that gets you to the table. That’s not the primary reason at the table. * Nelson (22:34): And what I do is I tell a little story. So it’s about a two page document. And what I’ll do is I’ll give some context, right? I’ll say, so this is where we are. We understand these things, and I set the stage and then I just tell a little story. And what it creates is imagine if you could just have one set out of one scene of a movie and you said, this is the most indicative piece of this whole film. I’d say they’ve really moved earlier and earlier because once you can define the story of a space, once you can create an understanding around it, it’s very easy to hold it up like a candle and say this, not that. * Ash (25:53): I believe I do more of an emotional architectural type design. How does the space really not just speak to me, but what are the stories that actually existed there? And then you touch on that when you go into the love letters that you’re writing because you’re actually saying, Hey, not only are we talking about the story that existed, but what could the story be? And I believe that’s the beauty of it, is that it gives us a runway Ty to say, Hey, we recognize and honor the past, but if we wanted to really honor this space and this proprietor or this investor that has asked us to walk along with them, how do we actually take this space and say, what would it have been had it kept going? * Ash (27:04): And it goes back to the place of hospitality. People want to feel like they belong. They want to feel like this is for me and this was done for me. * Ty (30:50): We call it a bridging process where we start with the schematic level of a floor plan. This is after we understand the menus, understand the story, we get a floor plan that includes generally we believe that the operational flow is right, everything from the guest flow to the kitchen flow to all those things, working really closely with the operator, the chef, to do those things. So then we have this kind of anchoring floor plan that shows the elements. But then what Ash you do so well is I think you create through revealing a lot, * Ash (33:53): And mainly it’s because we have found that there’s a difference between people that work on new buildings and the craftsmen that actually work in these old spaces. One of the things we have to really practice is not, again, not being perfect. These buildings are beautiful and imperfect in every way that we can find, and they bring incredible challenges to actually problem solve every single day in what we are tinkering because we’re trying to figure out what’s allowed because it only lets us do so much in order to honor its integrity. * Nelson (36:41): You have to give people license and liberty to do things. And I tell you, any of y’all that are in development first, if you are any of your vendors, if you’re not their favorite person, you are not doing cool stuff. * Nelson (37:48): And I just came in here and asked them for a kaleidoscope of hot pink, bright orange, osha safety yellow, and it made their week. But it’s giving people the license to live to the best version of what they do. * Nelson (38:26): And the way that makes them feel to get to do the best, to get to bring their best is huge. So I’d say a great metric for me always is, are you giving people license to act in their brilliance? Because I promise your subs are better than you think they are. If they do something for a living day in, day out, they have within them the ability to do something truly beautiful and they want to, but we have to give them the license * Ty (43:17): And I think in these food and beverage concepts, there’s a lot of opportunity for that, but sometimes it doesn’t seem like the juice is worth the squeeze. But I mean it really is. If you want a really unique and interesting project that’s designed forward, you’re going to have to be willing to be curious with your trades and bring people in that can do fabrication and work with a lot of different materials to get good outcomes, especially in these historic buildings. Information & Links Connect and learn more about what we do at https://www.marshcollective.com/ * Connect with Marsh Collective on LinkedIn * Connect with Marsh Collective on Facebook * Marsh Collective Journal
Reshaping Destinations: The Power of Diffused Hospitality with co-host Ty Maloney and special guest Nelson MarshWelcome to “The Redemptification Podcast,” where transformative ideas meet tangible action. In this episode, host John Marsh, alongside co-host Ty Maloney and special guest Nelson Marsh, explore the innovative concept of diffused hospitality and its potential to reshape small-town economies.
Nelson Marsh, an expert in Italian wine, sets the stage by highlighting Italy’s unique landscape challenges for traditional hospitality. He illustrates the evolution of diffused hospitality, citing examples like San Felice, where historic towns have been repurposed to preserve culture and foster authentic experiences.
Ty Maloney adds depth to the discussion, emphasizing the transcendent potential of diffused hospitality for small towns worldwide. He underscores the importance of authenticity and cultural immersion in creating meaningful experiences.
Throughout the episode, John Marsh outlines the economic rationale behind diffused hospitality, drawing parallels between hospitality and real estate. He discusses the long-term value proposition of adaptive reuse and strategic investment in small-town assets.
From the economics of diffused hospitality to its ripple effects on local businesses and community development, “The Redemptification Podcast” offers a thought-provoking exploration of a transformative concept poised to redefine the hospitality industry. Join us on this journey of discovery and redemption, where every town holds the promise of becoming a destination, one unforgettable experience at a time.
Insights & Inspirations Nelson Marsh (04:00): So this is a big deal in Italy. There’s a couple things that have conspired to make hospitality work different there. First, anyone who knows anything about Italy knows that it is the most mountainous country on earth. And so because of this, they don’t have a lot of flat land, and this has meant that you have these little pockets with incredibly diverse ecology and you grow all these different things. But it’s also meant that building large buildings is very difficult. In Italy, you won’t see a lot of skyscrapers. It’s very seismically active there. And so all of this kind of conspired together to create a situation where the Italian government in the seventies and eighties was really trying to push tourism kind of on the tail of this Dolce Vita and Sophia Loren and that whole thing. * Nelson Marsh (05:22): Well, this worked so well that in the seventies there was a little town in Tuscany called San Felice, and they’re famous for growing this grape there. For those of y’all who don’t know, my expertise is in Italian wine. They have a very rare grape there called Pello that means little fist. * Nelson Marsh (05:55): And there was an English insurance company that actually bought the whole thing as one big asset from ’em. So what they got was a little tiny town in Tuscany with a winery that was producing a whole bunch and with little restaurants and a whole bunch of people living there. Well, as it depopulated, what they started doing was using it for corporate retreats. And then eventually they would stick a room in one building, a room in another building, and eventually the whole town turned over and they kept the winery running and they kept the industry there, but they actually turned this whole town into a diffused little model. * Nelson Marsh (06:49): And what it does is it allows you to preserve the culture and fabric of these areas. The other thing it does is it allows you to really have an incredibly high level of experience with existing structures. These days, it’s really gotten prohibitively expensive to build anything, but especially hospitality has really gone through the roof. And so what a lot of little cities in Italy have done is they’ve been able to build up an inventory of rooms that have a backstop where they can go and rent these things out as apartments. They’re just houses, but they’re able to have this overnight stay component. * John Marsh (07:42): So one thing we realized through this play, we started out realizing through our own experience here in Opelika, that restaurants move people. Food and beverage is powerful. You get someone to go to the worst neighborhood in town for good barbecue, we can move small places in a major way with good food. And as this has evolved, and that was right, and we are still doing that, and I think that’s still like the minimum viable plan for a town is to get one good place to eat. But when you bolt on overnight stay, and when you bolt on celebratory events, the sum of those three parts is greater than I could initially imagine it. It’s not in multiples, it’s exponential. * John Marsh (08:59): If you go downtown and stay in this diffused manner, scattered hotel, horizontal hotel, or as we’re calling it, diffused hotel in existing structures, you actually get to be a temporary citizen instead of just a visitor. * Ty Maloney (09:49): And we know that in the hotel industry, there’s a lot happening right now just overall in the hospitality industry. There’s this real pool for more experiential destination driven hospitality. But in the typical kind of classes of hotels from economy to budget, midscale to upscale, the hotel industry has done a great job of classifying. And if we were going to look on a Co-star (SDR was bought by Co-star) and look at a report and you look at how the industry kind of classifies, I’m not sure our conversation really fits because like Nelson said, the thing that, what’s really attracted to me around this idea is that, and just thinking aspirationally, is that there’s a model here that really could be transcendent for small towns because we could really create this experience, I think, and have these economic viable models that really allow a transient person to come into a place, into an authentic experience and not feel transient. * Nelson Marsh (11:18): in Italy especially, unless you’re in a major city, there are no historic hotels. There are some left and large. I mean, if you’re in Milan, there are some historic hotels. There are no historic hotels in San Felice, or I was recently in Gaana. There’s no historic hotels there. So I want to be careful to not make this sound like this is a replacement for these historic things because authenticity is important. * Nelson Marsh (12:03): This is about first creating a model that doesn’t require that and require new construction. But second, I think we need to address the thing around the hotel business, and this is in all big businesses that do something long enough, it becomes rote. For any of y’all Thomas Koons fans, this is a paradigm. A paradigm is a set of arbitrary tasks that we decide to do, and that becomes a way we do it, and now it’s sacrosanct, and we always have to do it this way just because we’ve been doing it. And then someone comes along and they break the paradigm when they say, well, why do we do that? And could we do it different way? * Ty Maloney (17:29): There’s also a transformation economy, and I think more people are becoming more and more aware of one, their health too, where their food comes from. And I think that’s what now we need to speak to is beyond the diffused hospitality story in Italy. But you can’t go to Italy and not fully appreciate what it took to put something on the plate. And I think that’s the kind of appreciation that we can bring in a small town setting because we can bring authenticity and expression and culture in a way, in a small town in this format. * Nelson Marsh (18:49): The freedom of expression in small towns can often be a greenhouse for creating beautiful things. * Nelson Marsh (19:24): And there are people everywhere wanting to do great things. The problem is we don’t often have a way for them to take that inspiration and that love and put it into action. And in Italy, the difference is they have fought tooth and nail to save and preserve the opportunity for these small experiences and small expressions. * John Marsh (20:07): And one tagline we are kind of working on here is every town is one unforgettable meal and overnight stay from being a destination. Once it happens, everything changes and people begin to go, I had this amazing weekend in this small town and we did this and we did this. * Ty Maloney (21:03): what I intuitively believe that it’s not going to show up necessarily on a market report. So I think when it comes to, if you’re sitting there thinking like, wow, this is an interesting conversation. How does this apply to my town? I believe that a gas tank away market from, if you think about a couple, an average couple, I believe that an average couple would, there’s a good size market that would spend $1,500 to $1,800 for a weekend. And if you can create a very meaningful experience for that amount, and I think there’s interesting about there’s not elasticity in an ADR average daily rate for a property like Blackberry Farms or a property that’s food and beverage driven or wellness driven * Ty Maloney (26:22): So that’s the thing is that we create spaces around moments. You have to be intentional to create moments, and a lot of those moments have to be revealed. That’s the beauty of these small towns is these authentic spaces and places, and there’s character and all the things. * Ty Maloney (27:27): You start looking at it and you say, well, hey, how can you start looking at that square footage and applying a programmatic model to a critical mass of overnight stay, food and beverage, and venue space to really start thinking about a holistic model that could be used for these assets? * Ty Maloney (29:35): So I think one thing that we have to really consider, so many of this at the scale we’re talking about from a hospitality standpoint and what’s typical in a small town from a mom and pop standpoint is that any one of these businesses would have a single operator and have to stand on its own. So for example, the restaurant would have to stand on its own. And I think that is actually one of the weaknesses. I mean, it’s really hard for an operator, even if they’re good in a small market for a restaurant to stand on its own, you have to be really, really good. * Ty Maloney (30:30): And so that’s one example. And then if you think about it, well, there’s a lot of people that do Airbnb overnight in small towns and do a great job at that. And then there’s a lot of venue spaces. But rolling all those together in a single operating format gives you more ability to have an overarching hospitality expression * Ty Maloney (31:15): I know one of the quotes that I hear often in real estate is that really, especially commercial real estate, is that an asset is really nothing more than a collection of leases. And that’s really in the context of a town and a place that we hope aspirationally is more than just a portfolio of leases, really, it’s a portfolio of operators. * Ty Maloney (32:32): Well, so in the accounting from a resort perspective, a lot of your revenue centers are rolled up into one pro forma, if you will, or one income statement. And if we were to do a restaurant here in our town standalone, we could probably expect the profitability of that restaurant to be between eight and 10% on an industry average standpoint. But when you see that in a hotel or a more collected income statement with other revenue cycles, you would see, you start thinking about it differently. It’s really a revenue center that generates gross operating profit that then has a shared GNA or general administrative cost and property operating expenses and marketing, et cetera. So it allows you to leverage that differently or thinking about it differently, and it gives you more support for that food and beverage operation. * John Marsh (34:14): I mean if you look at a side of the road hotel , Holiday Inn Express, if it’s $175,000 a key to build one today, a hundred room hotel is 17.5 million dollars. And we are talking about going into towns where we could build rooms, a restaurant, and event space for less than that. I mean, think about if let’s say your rooms are $295 a night ADR, and it only had 50 rooms, that’s a potential $14,750 if it was fully rented. And if you multiply that times 365, that would give you a potential $5.3 million income. If you do it at a say 60% occupancy, that still puts it down at $3.2 million and 50% of your money went out in expenses. That’s $1,800,000 guys. There’s models where it could be between, for the restaurant food and beverage, the 50 room hotel and the events, it could do $2.5, $3 million in profit a year. * Nelson Marsh (36:04): Another thing that’s worth thinking about, and I’ve learned this from the wine industry, this five seven year investment nonsense is not a horizon that makes sense for the longevity and flourishing of our cities. It’s just, it’s shortsighted and it’s foolish and it’s often predatory if you look out over a long-term. * Nelson Marsh (36:48): Well, if I take and do this model and let’s say I put 40 million in a downtown or 10 million in a downtown, those buildings are going to be worth more. They’re more special, they’re more unique every single year. And then because they were adaptive reuse to get there, they can be adaptive reuse again. * Ty Maloney (41:41): All of a sudden, when you start to identify with somebody who’s doing hospitality with excellence, and you see that, that’s why I believe it’s almost like it could be a catalyst just like our smoke stacks. * John Marsh (41:55): Right? Well, it certainly can because if you’re successful running something like this, if you think shops, retail, yoga studio, everything’s not going to pop up around it. You’re crazy. I mean, of course it will. Information & Links Connect and learn more about what we do at https://www.marshcollective.com/ * Connect with Marsh Collective on LinkedIn * Connect with Marsh Collective on Facebook * Marsh Collective Journal
Unveiling Purpose, Embracing Failure, and Impacting Lives with special guest Chris MeroffWelcome to “The Redemptification Podcast.” I’m your host, John Marsh, and today’s episode features the remarkable Chris Meroff—a man driven by faith, purpose, and an unwavering commitment to making a difference.
Chris’s daily excitement centers around unlocking God’s plan, viewing opportunities as doors to be opened, kicked down, or jumped through. Failure, he believes, is a crucial part of the journey, leading not to regret but to lifelong friendships and invaluable lessons.
As the founder of a venture capital fund focused on commerce for the kingdom, Chris shares his mission of creating economic development in impoverished areas. The narrative unfolds with discussions about the purpose behind abundance, daily conscious decisions to earn it, and the pruning of ventures misaligned with the greater mission.
Chris challenges conventional beliefs about education and employment, advocating for the trades as a path to success. His efforts include inspiring high school students to join a journey offering more than just a career—a reflection of character and values.
The conversation explores leadership principles, emphasizing alignment within organizations and the transformative power of empathy and vulnerability. Chris’s philosophy of intentionally trading greatness for the benefit of others goes beyond traditional notions of success.
Join us as we navigate topics of work-life integration, power dynamics in leadership, and the profound impact of influence. Chris’s journey is not just personal but a testament to redemptification when one’s purpose aligns with a higher calling.
Insights & Inspirations Chris Meroff (01:28): And so it’s exciting each and every day to figure out what God has for me next. And so I would just say that the story really revolves around understanding what doors of opportunity look like, and then I think being brave enough to open, kick down or jump through those doors depending on what’s in front of you. * Chris Meroff (03:25): But there has to be losers in order for the winners to feel right. And so I’ve just really embraced this idea of failing fast and following my instincts as it relates to people and opportunity. And so even when the economics don’t work out, in some of those instances, I’ve created lifelong friends. I’ve learned along the way. They’ve never been something that I’ve looked back on and thought, man, I regret that I did that. * John Marsh (05:06): imagine if you ask different questions every time to different people. You can’t borrow the perspective on that one thing, but asking the same questions of lots of people, you borrow their glasses. * Chris Meroff (05:43): I walk around saying all the time is actually from Tom Peters. I’m not sure where he got it, but it’s this, I reward excellent failures and punish mediocre success. * John Marsh (08:15): Your not to-do list ought to grow great through the failures. And that’s really the valuable thing we have. * Chris Meroff (09:09): John Maxwell says it. Well, he’s like, this kid came up to him at a conference that said, Hey John, I want to do what you do. And John goes, well, you have to be willing to do what I did in order to get here. * Chris Meroff (11:39): And so we’ve created a venture capital fund that’s really focused on commerce for the kingdom. And so for us, we want to create economic development in areas that are more depressed, have a lot more poverty so that we cannot gain personal wealth, but instead we get to represent his kingdom to this community. And so that really kind of forms for us our more the other businesses that we have have to support that mission. And so if they detract from that mission, we have to prune them so that we can pour all that growth and energy into the fruit that we want to bear. * Chris Meroff (14:46): And so we ask ourselves all the time, well, why would He give us abundance? And so I think what He’s done is He’s really allowed for Sue and I, my wife and I, to think through, okay, well this abundance is here for a reason. And what He’s, I think continually communicating to us is what are you going to do now each and every day to earn that? So it’s not what I’ve done to earn it. It’s what will I continue to do. * Chris Meroff (18:09): it’s opened up opportunities to expand what that construction company does, really looking at getting into all the trades. And so that’s led us into this decision now to say, okay, well, we want to work with the local high schools there to encourage a lot more kids to get into the trades. And so we’re now recruiting directly out of high school, these kids smart to join us on this journey because we know that they’re going to have access to something they’ll never get at college, which is hopefully a reflection of who Jesus is and not just in the work itself, but in how we show up each and every day. * John Marsh (20:06): my dad told me this as an old man. He said, son, one day a trade, it’s going to be like a college education. And he said, a college education’s going to be like a trade. * Chris Meroff (21:06): 65% of the jobs that are open right now in the United States are in the trades, and yet we’re still graduating kids and telling them they only need to go to college. So 95% of the kids are going to college to fill 35% of the jobs that are open. The math just doesn’t work. * John Marsh (27:57): How do we help people feel more valued in what they’re doing? * Chris Meroff (28:02): I think two things that I spend most of my time on and talking about training other entrepreneurs and CEOs, one would be alignment. And so in any organization, it’s so important to fight for alignment. And so this concept that we can agree to disagree, but we can also get on the same page and head in the same direction together is so, so critical. Because what happens with most employees is that they have this uncertainty that exists. And we all know that when you’re uncertain, we tend to go to our own corner * Chris Meroff (30:02): if everybody knew what to do and when to do it, you wouldn’t need leaders. But what you need leaders for is to help cultivate this vision so that they know when to do it. They know how to do it. They know when they deliver it. You get to celebrate together. * Chris Meroff (30:26): And then the other one is for me, this idea of really letting empathy and vulnerability allow your people to feel like they’re known, heard, and valued. And when somebody feels known, heard, and valued, what you’re really having to do as a leader is every day when you walk into work, and I have to make this conscious decision still every single day, every meeting, every conversation I have to walk into a room and intentionally trade my greatness for theirs. * Chris Meroff (31:13): And so we talk about this greatness. It really is the idea that we are created in his image and his image is in his character. It’s in the soft skills of life. Things like kindness and compassion and loyalty and patience * Chris Meroff (32:04): There’s this notion that goes around, and we’ve heard it a lot, but this work-life balance. But I love how Simon Sinek says, unfortunately that can’t exist because that means that those two forces have to be opposing. You can’t balance things that don’t oppose. And so those things are not opposing work is a part of life. So it’s more about work-life integration. * Chris Meroff (34:33): They’re walking away doing stuff because I was spitballing in a meeting. And they’re like, I ran out and I did that thing for you, man. And I’m like, what are you doing? The pinging pong of emotions that I create because I just was unaware of the power that I was building. It really causes a lot of havoc. And so that’s one of the things that we talk to leaders about. You’ve got to understand the power dynamic in any scenario, honor it by trading it for their greatness. And it has to be intentional. That does not happen. I don’t accidentally walk through the halls of the office here and trade that away. I’ve got to think about every single human being I’m going to interact with. * John Marsh (37:50): maybe that’s the question we ask as we go in today. What’s one great thing I can see about everybody I’m going to see or something, it’s all around us, right? * Chris Meroff (40:37): But over the last eight years, God has really worked at me to say, okay, well you then are always the glass ceiling in any organization that you’re a part of, and people have a harder time finding me when you’re taking all the glory. And so it really kind of launched me into this mentality of trying to become unnecessary every single day. And the way that we become, I become unnecessary is again, the lifting up of the other people around me * Chris Meroff (42:11): I was like, I can’t make more time. And so it’s okay that I’m impatient. It’s okay that I’m running a thousand miles an hour and people just have to get over this professional whiplash that constantly is happening, pinging ponging around. But through this process of alignment and through this process of really becoming vulnerable and living out empathy, He allowed me, we figured out together how we make more time. And that’s really, again, becoming unnecessary, helping somebody else rise up. And so now there are a bunch of better versions of me running out there, running around, out there, getting stuff done. * Chris Meroff (45:15): And that really comes back down to this reality of influence and influence is, it’s not what you say to someone, it’s what they do with what you say. So a lot of people think it’s giving advice, but that’s not really influence. Influence is when you give advice, they actually go and do it. That means you have influence as opposed to giving advice or have an opinion. * John Marsh (53:53): Be vulnerable. But one thing Ash and I have found, we create safety by the level of our vulnerability. Ash and I create a safe space yet to meet anybody more screwed up than us. Most people just go, there’s so much hope for me of people you could make it. Information & Links Connect and learn more about what we do at https://www.marshcollective.com/ * Connect with Marsh Collective on LinkedIn * Connect with Marsh Collective on Facebook * Chris Meroff + LinkedIn + Website + Podcast + Book – Align: Four Simple Steps for Leaders to Create Employee Fulfillment Through Alignment Leadership + Book – The Empathy Revolution: Practical Wisdom to Combat Organizational and Social Loneliness * DCX Community – website Closing QuestionsWhat have you read that we should read?
- Chris Meroff (56:12): So I just recently read it. I actually, and so I’m going to go back to the same, well here I’m sitting with Jon in the green room and we’re talking, and then of course his books come up and I had read several of his books, but one of his latest ones, Soundtracks had come out and I hadn’t read it yet. And so I read it, it’s so good. It’s right in line with where I try to spend a lot of my time with the men in my community, which is this area of men’s mental health. And Soundtracks isn’t obviously about necessarily just mental health, but it’s about the things that we lie to ourselves about all the time. And so these soundtracks, these things that we tell ourselves that are just not true, again, going back to what I said before, we rarely see ourselves the way God sees us. And so we tend to fill our mind with things that are untrue. And so this idea that we need to pursue things that are true, I love Soundtracks because it really is a great reminder that we’ve got to fill our mind with things that are authentic, things that are true. And we need to do that with our relationship with God. But then also through authentic communities where people can speak truth into how they see us, how God sees us so that we can remember and have mental health that is really a healthy mental health so that we can be that for those in our community as well.
- Soundtracks: The Surprising Solution to Overthinking by Jon Acuff
- Free to Choose by Milton and Rose Friedman
Who do you know that we should know?
- Chris Meroff (50:59): I just met him in October and got to spend some time with him. In fact, we put on an annual conference here in Austin, and so he was one of our speakers that we invited. And so we were sitting back in the green room just talking, and I think I was supposed to be more out in the audience and listening and engaging. Anyway, just back there captivated. We’re just talking and really sharing all aspects of life with each other. So the guy is Jon Acuff and what a great guy, what a fantastic guy. And in a short amount of time has become a good friend and we enjoy this journey that we’re on together. And I would say outside of speaking and books and all the other cool stuff he does, man, one-on-one with Jon Acuff is pretty spectacular.
- Jon Acuff – website
- Jon Acuff – LinkedIn
- Jon Acuff – Amazon Page
What have you done that we should do?
- Chris Meroff (52:33): I think one of the things that I’ve and continue to strive to do is figure out what prison do I exist in, that I’ve made for myself. And so for me, a prison that I made for myself is this idea of converting all emotion to anger and learning how to live a vulnerable life. And I believe that God instructs us to give each other empathy, mourn with those who mourn. Rejoice with those two rejoice. But what it takes is it takes a human to be vulnerable in order for empathy to exist. And so I just spent way too much of my life closed off, hidden behind this illusion of fine. Good. Okay. So that’s something that I’m having to overcome each and every, but it’s been so fulfilling.
2023 Year in Review with John MarshWelcome to “The Redemptification Podcast,” today, John goes through a recap of some of the amazing things that have happened in the year 2023 around personally and Marsh Collective.
Insights & InspirationsJohn Marsh (00:02):
Well, welcome to the Redemptification Podcast, and today is going to be an interesting day as I share some of the highlights and some of the things that kind of happened and that we experienced during our 2023 year and do a slight year-end review for you guys to give you a little context of the things going on in our life and our work and our business, and hopefully bring some encouragement for you in where you are. So it’s kind of broken into two areas, personal and then our business areas. And I’ll start with the personal because it’s well personal. And if you’re not living the life you want to live today, the question is how long are you going to wait until you start? And this is something Ash and I ask ourselves all the time. So it’s really best. It seems to start out with things you’re grateful for.
(01:02):
And so there’s so much to be grateful for our health and our families and the opportunities that we have, the fact that God’s got his hand on us and that he loves crazy people, that he’s got to a supernatural plan to take everything you go through and make it a part of where you’re going to, that God understands that if you’re going in the wrong direction, he can turn the map and that he has a supernatural plan for mine in your life to use everything for his good and for his glory. And so one thing that happened this year started off in January, Nelson got married to MK, his new wife, and it was just incredible. It was in Barbaresco Italy and he had planned this for a year. And as quirky as Nelson is, there’s 20 something people going to an amazing farm that had never had a wedding on it before.
(02:05):
And Nelson’s friends there, two 80-year-old Vintners and their sisters, they just said, Hey, we want to open our home. And they treated us like family. It was beautiful. It was a small ceremony filled with fun and laughter and even Ash reading kind of the written words of a song that MK and Nelson, a Funkadelic song that they love so much that kind of describe their love for one another. What an incredible time. And I’m so grateful to have MK as a new daughter-in-Law, and for us to have this incredible journey of now getting to walk alongside Nelson working with us and our youngest son Joshua in the business. So started off with a bang, a couple of weeks in Italy with great friends experiencing amazing food. And during this time really what struck me was, and I called home and they always get a little concerned when I do that from a trip because what crazy things are they thinking of?
(03:11):
But I realized the amazing gift that Ash and Nelson had in food and beverage and hospitality. I don’t know how I haven’t seen it as clearly as that. Maybe it was that we were away for a while and that I just don’t know. But I saw it and I said, oh my goodness, they’re so much better than I ever imagined. And it really brought up the conversations that Ash and I had had in the past. And I kept thinking about and praying about this idea of going back. So I go back to read 2006. Basically I wrote a high level mindset of what we’re doing right now, this idea of diffused hospitality, of the combination of food and beverage, overnight stay and celebratory events. And then I rewrote that in 2014. Now in 2006 we had a plan in 2012 or so, we were working on that plan to get it ready to launch our first hotel and stopped when we met one of our mentors.
(04:24):
And that was the first time we had planned a hotel, had spent a lot of money on getting it ready and stopped. Then we waited 2019 comes along or 18, and we had a chance to do the first Southern Living Hotel in America with some developers that wanted to do it. We had a plan come together, it fell apart during Covid. And it was just interesting that during this time this year, I said, well, it’s been the same thing all along. And now I realize that Nelson and Ash had the gift to do it, that we had spent the last seven years working for clients and with them and had learned that a restaurant can transform a city, but boy, a restaurant with overnight stay and celebratory events that are done in a very iconic way with incredible attention to detail and sophistication could do tremendous things in a community.
(05:25):
So that’s what I learned there. And through the joy of being in Italy that kind of came about. We also have had some tough things this year. Ash’s mom’s been sick, she has cancer and she’s had to have her leg amputated. And all that happened in the last year or so. And so Ash has spent a couple of months on a hospital cot loving her mom and taking care of her. And that’s another thing to think about. I never thought that as we got older, we would need to take care of our parents and have bandwidth to do that. And boy, are we thankful for the margin that we have wise counsel and honoring God to build margin in our life, boy did we need as Ash is taking the time to walk with her mom and we ask that you be praying for her.
(06:21):
And also a lot of our, we’ve had multiple friends and people who work with us and people who work with us as siblings. We’ve had deaths and disease this year that just those things are so difficult and right alongside opportunity seems to run adversity. And so it was a season of joy from Nelson, getting married and enjoying grandkids and enjoying the work we’re doing here and great clients and amazing opportunities, but also tons of adversity in the sickness of people we love. And our prayer list is getting longer for those people, mentors, friends, colleagues, community members who are suffering. So that was important. We also, Ash and I spent some time personally and we do this every year and get help as we deep dive to get clarity on what our preferred future is. You have to set your preferred future. Like not having a plan is a plan, it’s just a bad one.
(07:28):
And a lot of people use that in their life. I’m just not going to have a plan. Well, not having one is one, it’s just a bad one. So you get what you get either by accident or by intention. We believe there’s a lot of need for in our lives. So we sit down and work on our preferred future. And when we do this, the best way we’ve had success is we had a friend of ours who sat in with us who’s wise, and that’s Steve Cochram, the founder of The Five Voices and one of the co-founders of Giant. And he helped us. But I think that’s the key. You don’t do your own heart surgery. We all need somebody to help us to sit down with us and ask us the questions who are not us. Because if you and your spouse sit down, they are you.
(08:16):
And so it’s like talking to yourself, and I’m sure you’ve had the privilege of trying to have big conversations with your spouse and it turned into heated fellowship. And if we’re not having those conversations, then the expectations are just building, but we don’t have intentionality around them. So what it allowed us to do is see our new roles in our companies, Ash and I as co-founders, but Ash as CEO, leading the company and she’s doing an amazing job. Honestly, it’s incredible what she’s done in a short period of time to unscramble a lot of eggs and to get us ready for this next season, which I am so excited about. I feel like we’ve been waiting our whole life for now, for the opportunity to take everything we learned and apply it in our own hometown, Opelika. We like to say Hope-u-lika, but Opelika to us is our testing ground.
(09:15):
It’s our laboratory and it’s also our responsibility. We steward 10 square blocks to the glory of God, and we do it for love’s sake. We work at the intersection of purpose and profit. So it’s odd people wonder where are you a hit and run developer or are you here to do it out of benevolence? And the answer’s no to either one of those. Our goal is to make our Sunday school teacher and our economics teacher happy with the projects we do and to build a generational impact that would last 50 years for the good of our city and its citizens and no one be able to undo it. So that’s been incredible. And as Ash and I realigned, we now know the project we’re going to do in Opelika, which is the biggest project and the most important project that we believe will have the greatest impact.
(10:07):
We think it’ll be bigger than everything we’ve done over the last twenty-five years combined. As you can see, I’m excited to talk about that. Also convening. We convene people and leaders here in Opelika, but we also share around the country. And this year we had the privilege to share the work we’re doing and the story we have of our marriage reconciliation with our friends at Generous Giving at the big celebration this year. We had a chance to share at FCCI in Tucson this year, the Teneo, which is a group of amazing conservative young people that are doing great work. We shared there, a friend of ours, Chris Powers, did a men’s retreat and I got to share there Brent Beshore and some other guys did Cloud Camp, which is 20 men, young leaders who want to be better fathers, leaders, business people, and fellow believers.
(11:13):
And we did two sessions, 20 leaders in each session. What was so amazing about that Brother E., my oldest mentor and disciple in his eighties, and he got to go and boy, what an incredible time. And Ty, my co-host, went and helped Brother E and also enjoyed it. So what an amazing time seeing God work in the lives of young people. It was Pete Ochs, me, Steve Garber and Paul Estes all shared in the session that I’m talking about. And it was incredible. Those are amazing godly men that I’ve learned so much from. Also Ash and I got to speak at Capital Camp this year, which is an incredible event around capital and all the things around investing. And it’s put on by Brent Beshore in Columbia Missouri. You have to check it out. It’s a waiting list for the event, but it’s a chance to spend time with four or 500 of the most unique people in the country.
(12:13):
And then lastly, at a very last minute, a friend John Rulin who wrote Giftology, which is a great book I recommend if you haven’t read it. He invited me out to the Hobby Lobby headquarters and had a chance to spend a day with David Green and John Maxwell and other leaders, tons of incredible leaders talking about how to use their gifts to make an impact. And that was such a great experience. It is just been an amazing year getting the chance to share and we plan on convening more, but we’re going to try to convene here in Opelika as you hear more about what we’re doing, you’ll see why that’s a thing where we can be close to our family and also add value. So the work we’ve done with couples has been incredible. This year we’ve done eight high impact intensives in Ash, and I usually plan to do a certain number.
(13:07):
We’ve got six slots next year for high impact couples. I think four of those or five of those are already taken. But what was amazing is we spent three days per session, twenty-four days this year, eyeball to eyeball loving on high impact couples and saw God do miraculous things. We saw marriages reconciled, we saw healing from the past from brokenness. We saw people who believed and experienced having a great marriage find a lot more freedom and a lot more healing. Even saw that we had this couple we met with. And to see the husband was a tough man, a very tough man. And if I said the things that they did, he’s a Navy SEAL and so his job is specifically to do war things. But as he sat in, his wife asked, do you really love me? As their marriage was having trouble, I watched him just weep.
(14:17):
And the pain of being tortured as a soldier is quite different from the pain of being tortured as someone who wants to love and walk with their spouse and their spouse doesn’t want them. So I learned that lesson re-again. And then just the fact that we had the margin to invest 24 days into couples and watch God do miracles. Our prayer is a 50 yard line seat to miracles, front row seat to miracles. And I encourage you to pray that prayer and then for Ash and I to God be the glory that in just a few days we’re going to celebrate thirty-one years of marriage. And all I can say is I love her more today than I did yesterday, than I ever have. I’m more amazed that a beautiful godly woman like that wants to be with someone like me, and I’m so grateful for something that was lost and found.
(15:14):
And so know this, if where you are, you think, hey, there’s no hope for my situation, you don’t have God in it because God provides hope. Because if we have hope, there’s so many things that become possible. So in your marriage, I encourage you, if you haven’t checked it out, check out our resource page on our website from the couples section. You can do the five voices, I mean our 5-F survey, faith, family, fun, fitness, finance. You could go to the Five Voices website and take that which adds value. And then you could also on our website, we also have a resource page for couples. And if you really want to grow your marriage, go through all those resources, having a great marriage, great marriages are built, not found. And if you’re going to have ’em, they’re like abs, you got to do the work. You have to work to have a great marriage. Don’t believe the lie that it’s just going to happen. It’s not going to happen. Everything that the enemy does is against marriage. Marriage is a gift from God.
(16:25):
It’s one of the things that God let us bring out of the garden. It’s a little piece of paradise when it’s right and it’s a prison when it’s wrong. And if you’re not having the most incredible experiences of your life in your marriage, why not? If the person you’re married to is not the most interesting person in the world to you, why not? These are not feelings, these are facts. If we follow God’s truth, the feelings will follow. And then I guess, so we moved from convening to couples to companies, and our company this year has had an incredible year. We are privileged to finalize a deal to build a hundred ninety-eight apartments in Opelika, and we believe it’s going to be tremendous for our downtown. We need more places to rent. How long would it take us to build almost 200 houses in downtown Opelika, right?
(17:32):
A long time. If you had the land, if you could find it, this’ll be done in twenty-four months, and we’ll have the opportunity for a lot of people to be within walking distance of downtown. Now we get some pushback on these things and people are down on what they’re not up on and everybody thinks they’ve got a great opinion about what should be and what could be. But of course it’s a big difference between people who get out their wallets or sign the dotted line and put themselves at risk. But the ability to help this project come along and now to see the developers that are doing it Sierra Development, Jim Dawes and also his partner are doing this development and it’s going to be impactful to our city.
(18:25):
Also, we were able to finish our three event spaces. We’ve done 18,000 square foot of renovations in the last say, 12 or 14 months. We now have three event spaces, one dedicated to weddings, one to fraternity sorority, and to corporate, and one outdoor space that’s a pavilion that’s more for music events. And when the weather’s permitting weddings and things, this is the start of our community of being this diffused hospitality resort. We also have our first seven overnight stay rooms coming online in about a month, this will serve our weddings. The average wedding we’ve heard has 35 rooms it needs. So we’re counting on these seven being something people desire to bolt on to their wedding packages and ultimately, we hope to have more rooms as we finish out the project. But the seven rooms will be done in just a month and that’ll allow us next year to have our brides and grooms and their families be able to stay there.
(19:35):
But also for us to do programming around bringing in groups. And right now our house where Ash and I live is we use it like a boutique hotel. I mean we’ve got guests coming in tomorrow actually, there’ll be seven folks coming in and they’re coming in to see Opelika, see the work we’re doing and just experience what it is that God’s doing here. I tell people it’s important that you come here because first I don’t want you to not know what we do and what we start with. We start with some of the most difficult structures that we see. We usually laugh at how nice the buildings are other people get. And what we start with, a lot of people say is that a building may not have a roof on it or something or a floor in it. And so it’s interesting when people come and see, I think I tell ’em, if you don’t see God’s hand on what we do, if it’s not better than we are, I probably wouldn’t listen to us. But if you come here and some miraculous stuff is happening, then I’d be dang listening. And so that’s it. If it’s God, it’s worth having and if it’s not, I think I keep moving. If you’re looking for God answers, now if you’re looking for worldly answers, if you just want to be a hit and run developer that makes some money and doesn’t stay, we don’t have a good plan for you. Just keep running. That’s all you can do I guess. But we also,
John Marsh (21:05):
So this consulting. That we do in our community, so we’ve done a lot in our community, Opelika, which is where we work, and it’s why we have such empathy and also authority. We have empathy because we suffer, we have authority because we have suffered and found some ways to make these things work. So that’s been a blessing. We also are consulting in other cities and I wanted to highlight a few accomplishments in a few of the cities that we have. So the first one is our largest city, Winterhaven, Florida.And what an amazing year
(21:40):
We’ve had there. They’ve done so much work this year that has really kind of fulfilled a lot of the things they were hoping for and working on for a long time. The first being they had a development mindset that, hey, we want to create downtown living that is beautiful and meaningful. They hadn’t had any really new scale downtown living in a long time. So this year, full Masonry built units and built a 106 unit apartment complex called Rain Dance. And it’s a part of a larger scheme that they’re working on, which is to build 500 residential apartments in downtown Winterhaven, 500 in 5 years on scattered sites. And it’s just a powerful thing
(22:45):
What that many people living downtown can do. And so the first 106 was done this year. Rain Dance, the project the Breeze, which will be the next over a hundred units. It’s going to be coming out of the ground soon, so that’ll be 206 down of the provisional 500 that they want to do. That’s been incredible. Next move to right outside Fort Worth, Texas, a project we’ve done there called in Everman. And this project is called Timberview and it’s pretty unique because it’s a family that we really like out of Midland. They’re an oil family, but they’ve decided to develop this 175 acres into something pretty unique. So it’s a teaching farm, which is part of their foundation, but it’s also going to be take our model of iconic food and beverage overnight stay and celebratory events and weave that together on a campus that will ultimately provisionally hold a middle school and a high school, as well as Compass Financial, a headquarters there for an institute that’ll help biblical values around finances.
(24:00):
And so incredible project. We finished that plan this year. We also were brought into a conversation in Upland Indiana with Taylor University and had the privilege of working with those guys on a really short timeframe to create a very sophisticated RFP request for proposal that that was for the Lilly Foundation, a Lilly grant, and it was to connect and empower downtowns and higher education and what a great project and so many unique things we’re able to do to finish that. The team worked very hard on that this year. We also have had tons of guests in Opelika, John Rivers from the four Rivers, Smokehouse, Chip Hight, our buddy and friend from Midland that owns Opel’s Table, Austin Tunnel, which is building culture, who’s building some of the coolest places in the country. Check out his work in Carlton’s Landing. He’s building full masonry structures inside and out.
(25:04):
They’re fabulous. Doug Wilson and his friends are coming tomorrow. That’ll be the seven folks that are from the region around Carmel Indiana. We’ve got the team from Kennett Square, Kennett Square Collective, and Mike Bontrager came earlier this year. We had Eric Weatherholz, who’s a crazy developer from Atlanta, Weatherholz Healey Weatherholz Properties. It’s really, I call him the patio prince, and he’s passionate and persistent about creating patio experiences and creating the halo effect to impact all the development around him. Brent Beshore of Permanent Equity has been a incredible friend and blessing, allowing us to speak at Capital Camp and Cloud Camp and encouraging us and coming to Opelika a couple of times we had Steve Cockram who visited and I told you he helped us through our heated fellowship and provided some adult supervision for Ash and I working on our preferred future this year.
(26:08):
We had Rob Parker from Trillith who’s doing an incredible development for Dan Cathy and also is on the board of the National Town Builders Association with me. Incredible guy had Kyle Morris of Revive Church out in Arvada, one of our clients whose project has brought in millions of dollars and is transformative for the way we do church. And the plan we created for that is fabulous. Brad and Ty did tremendous work on this plan and what it really lays out is how do you impact vulnerable families as a church? How does a church steward its property well and work at the intersection of purpose and profits creating social, spiritual, and economic capital. How does a church handle leasing and picking the right tenants and how would they handle if they needed to evict someone? It was a hundred seventy-five page plan that is absolutely fabulous and so grateful to have Kyle and his wife visit us and hang out some and hear how their project’s going there.
(27:13):
And we’ve had tons of other friends and patrons visit over this year. It has been truly incredible. We’ve got such a great team now. Our team keeps growing. We’ve got new team members, Barend, who’s from South Africa, thank you to the friends that recommended him, Jess Correll in Stanford and his son Preston have recommended him and they said, Hey, this guy’s moving to your area. If you are looking for good people, you ought to hire him. And we did. And we are darn grateful. I pray God send me winners. I need people who can win at what we’re trying to do and I need your help. And Barend certainly did that. We also have added other team members. We’ve got Natalie helping us in the office and with creative things and Ash, we’ve got just our whole team. We’re launching restaurants all over the country and we’re doing these things.
(28:10):
And what’s happened is our consulting, at first, we didn’t know what to charge, so we just did it for Godly people and said, hey, pay us what it’s worth when we fix it. And they were generous with us and then we could figure out the fees. So we started doing projects and we still do for fixed pricing for fees, but then people said, we’d love for you to be our partners. And we said, okay, well how about we take part of our fees and you pay and the other part what it’ll take to cover our costs and then we’ll take the other part in equity. And so we started doing that and then we started doing fees, equity, and we bring capital. We started investing alongside our Patrons. And so it’s been an incredible journey so far. We’ve made some darn progress on the book.
(28:55):
We had another meeting today and I think within the next six months we’ll have a book that we can put in people’s hands that will be the operating system for transforming broken places and creating meaningful projects that have God’s momentum behind them. We’re going to try to put decades in a few days. Our goal is not to be just entertaining, it’s to be an operating system and a playbook for how do you save cities from what we know because we need lots of Patrons in America. We need people who will love a place and commit themselves to it because love is a dang difference maker. I love what Brother E said, and we had such a great call in the last, every week we do this Bible study. And this week he said, well, I want to share with you something I learned out of what we’re out of the specific scripture we’re going over this week. And the scripture was one Peter 4:7-14.
(30:04):
And it says, but in the end of all things is at hand. Therefore, be serious and watchful in your prayers and above all things have fervent love for one another. For love will cover a multitude of sins, be hospitable to one another without grumbling as each one has received a gift, minister it to one another as good stewards of the manifold grace of God. And that was powerful to me. I mean, I said, elsewhere, the kind of prayers. I want to have serious and watchful prayers. I want fervent love for other people and
John Marsh (30:44):
We want to be hospitable Without grumbling. But what we began to dig into that really struck me is the definition of hospitable. If you look it up, it’s “The love of strangers”. And boy doesn’t that align with Ash’s revelation of what our companies are all about. “We thought of you before you got here.” And so that’s kind of to wrap it all up, we are moving more into a season where all we’re going to focus on is biblical hospitality and how that applies to investing in redemptive real estate. How do you take irreplaceable real estate because of the way it was constructed and make it irreplaceable because of the way it’s operated and the income it generates and we believe we’re on to something. In fact, I’m so darn excited. I think we’re on the thing. What this was all about to this point is to get to the place we could take in historic downtowns like ours and do a project like we’re going to do, which will be 60 boutique hotel rooms, three event spaces and eight restaurants, all as a diffused hospitality urban resort. And this thing can create tremendous impact from social, spiritual, and economic capital. And that’s our future is codifying this and clarifying this to where it is our model for the future. When we talk about how you can impact the town, we’re going to be talking about these things. Here’s our models. And remember, it’s hard to get to the models. It took us forever, like 20 years and all to get to a model that we understood. And it’s 80% models and 20% miracles, and all you can do is get on your dang knees for that second part.
(32:35):
And so our hope is that next year it’ll be full of meaningful work. We’ll see. We’ve seen five marriages reconciled in the last year or so. We hope to see more Ash and I have helped reconcile over 200 throughout our time serving and following God and sharing our story. I tell you, there’s a lot of hope for America. There’s a lot of hope for broken families, and there’s a lot of hope for those who believe. And here at Marsh Collective, we are here to fan the flame of all the good things God’s doing and to give you hope. Because if there’s hope in your future, there’s power in your present. If this is added value, I hope you’ll share it and keep checking us out here as we continue to charge hell with a squirt bottle and work in such a way that we believe people should see God’s hand on what we do. Blessings.
Information & Links* Connect and learn more about what we do at https://www.marshcollective.com/ * Connect with Marsh Collective on LinkedIn * Connect with Marsh Collective on Facebook
A Librarian, Technology, and Real Estate with special guest Andrew SegalWelcome to “The Redemptification Podcast,” today, John interviews our special guest and the founder of Boxer Property Management Corporation, Andrew Segal.
In 1992, Andrew Segal founded Boxer Property Management Corporation, embarking on a journey that would redefine real estate. The company began by leasing a 108,000 square foot office building in Dallas. Initially, Boxer focused on acquiring, managing, leasing, and administering commercial office buildings. Over the years, they expanded their horizons, transforming retail centers, resort hotels, and various real estate ventures into stable and profitable properties.
What sets Boxer Property apart is their dedication to enhancing the value of the properties they manage. They employ innovative strategies, revamping assets and offering cost-effective solutions to create a superior experience for tenants and customers.
Today, Boxer Property Management Corporation manages over 15 million square feet of commercial buildings in major cities. Their approach blends progressive management and logical strategies to redeem under-performing assets.
During this episode, Andrew Segal shares insights into the evolution of Boxer Property, highlighting the transformative power of technology in reshaping the real estate industry. He emphasizes the importance of clear measurement, organization, and streamlined business operations. We also explore Boxer’s unique approach to workforce expansion, which focuses on assembling a bench of talented professionals ready to join the game. Andrew shares his vision for the future of real estate, advocating for an industry that is more accessible, customer-centric, and cost-effective.
Insights & Inspirations Andrew Segal (04:15): Well, I think ironically, technology caused us to devolve in the way that we were organized. It’s almost like the iPhone is so entertaining. It kind of ruined our ability to talk to each other. We’re just, we’re on it all the time. So when I entered business back in 92, and it seems recent, but it was a long time ago, we had file rooms and those file rooms were guarded over by file clerks and the intelligence and the records of companies were kept in a way that was accessible. * Andrew Segal (05:04): It was like a library with a librarian, and then we started filing things electronically. Electronic filing is this dark room and you just are putting things in there. They’re very hard to find, and we lost access to our record keeping. * Andrew Segal (05:22): It used to be that you could go back and you could refer to a construction job you did and you could see the file on it and all the invoices and all the bids and the correspondence and the returns of the correspondence, and now that’s gone. So my brother and I were very concerned about that. * Andrew Segal (06:04): So the first thing we did is we hired a librarian for our electronic filing, and it was really weird to advertise for a librarian. In the private sector, but we didn’t really know what else to call that person. And then we ended up building a software product that kind of embodied organization. It had data management, it had single places of truth, and we felt that there would be this huge payback because we would be able to get away from just remembering, asking, responding, which was a big part of our day, and actually go to the part of work that was valuable. * John Marsh (08:22): we say you can’t manage what you don’t measure and it’s hard to multiply what you don’t manage. So you through having the content there of what’s happening in your organization, starting to see what the activities, and I guess it probably gave you a look into the roles and behaviors that were really happening * Andrew Segal (08:43): You need to even start at a much more profound way is you need a list of things you don’t measure. * Andrew Segal (11:58): So when you think about there’s a storm, the roads are ice, there’s a mass shooter, there’s a hurricane coming, there’s covid, there’s a hack. What are the playbooks for these things when you don’t have time to have 20 organizational meetings? And that’s one of the thousands of things we were able to organize once we got organized. * Andrew Segal (12:28): it’s almost like having an iPhone and adding an app as we started off with very light approvals or here’s a checklist like an inspection. * Andrew Segal (19:27): Our world doesn’t stop at five o’clock on Friday. So the question is how do we extend the work cycle for two reasons, number one, to match up with when our customers are interacting with us. But number two, to just do things faster. * John Marsh (19:58): So really in three, a 24 hour cycle, there’s this potential for possibly a three multiple of accomplishment within that 24 hour cycle because it’s being handed off, * Andrew Segal (20:12): It’s a third of the price and three times the speed. There’s not a lot of things in our life that changed the needle that much. And at Boxer it was about an $18 million direct savings, not counting the other dividends we got by running. I tell people the sun never sets on our accounting department. * John Marsh (20:37): What I love is that this is everything that when I looked at the relay and looked at the possibilities there, first thing I noticed was the job descriptions, the level of clarity that it has because a person that has the problems I have made the, I mean you can tell you were in the companies and the verticals that you needed that type of work. As you look at it, it’s not fluffed up. They’re really clear. And so I mean it’s so easy. I guess it’s hard to even imagine that I could say, Hey, I need some accounting help and I could get someone this afternoon and they’re on my team this afternoon. And what’s quite different, you’re not buying a five or any kind of person, you’re getting a full-time person to have their eyes on your prize. * Andrew Segal (21:32): They’re like a cloud server. So when you get a cloud server, you don’t have to worry about the roof leaks or the power supply, whether the licenses are there. So we have an office, we have a computer, we have an internet connection. They only work at their desk in our office, but everything they do is at someone else’s direction. And these people really wear the colors of their company that they’re working for. Is it for them? It’s a career, it’s not a gig. * Andrew Segal (25:16): So what we realized is we wanted something like a bench for a coach. When a coach wants to put someone into the football game, you don’t turn around and go recruit someone from high school. That would be insane if they have someone who is suited up on the bench ready to go in and when they point at them in less than one minute, they’re in and they’re part of the team. So what we did is we replicated that. * Andrew Segal (26:30): it was a revelation that the value that people perceive, you would think that they were just people trying to save money, but what they perceived to be very valuable was condensing the entire recruiting process is read their resume, watch a video interview of them, talk to them if you want to, and then bring them on board. They become an immediate long-term employee, but you’re only committed for one month. So a company can give people back basically guilt free because they never miss a day * Andrew Segal (31:38): I think that as people in the real estate industry, we need to continue thinking about making it fast and easy for our customers…. And sometimes people just want space. So that means in the office market is having space available that’s turnkey, different sizes. Think of it like an inventory in a store, really spending a lot of attention, getting that space to be easy for a consumer to see, understand and acquire. So compress the cycle of moving into real estate. And then the other thing, and I think that this is going to become a very big issue certainly in the housing market, is that we need to focus on lowering the maintenance costs of the real estate that we have. * Andrew Segal (34:10): One of the most interesting things, and I forget who said it, but it wasn’t me, but we were talking about real estate and he said something profound. He said, we think of class A and class B and class C, but it doesn’t describe the structures that you and I both love is historic building and they’re the best. Do they have walls of glass? Do they have hidden ventilation? No, of course not. But it’s class X. This is what is beginning to see the highest rents and the highest levels of depreciation. * Andrew Segal (37:49): we have to go back and remember what we liked about them, what did we like about downtowns? What did we like about malls? Because those things are still there. I think we just need to see them in a different way. * John Marsh (38:47): If you’ve got clarity of vision, you can accelerate toward the goal. I tell people, I say if the price is fuzzy, no price is really cheap enough, but when the price gets clear, the price gets easy. Information & Links Connect and learn more about what we do at https://www.marshcollective.com/ * Connect with Marsh Collective on LinkedIn * Connect with Marsh Collective on Facebook * Andrew Segal + LinkedIn + Boxer Properties – About – website * Relay Human Cloud – website + Be sure to use the referral code: “MARCOL” * Boxer Properties – website Closing QuestionsWhat have you read that we should read?
- Andrew Segal (46:30): So I reread a book that came out when I was, I think nine years old. It was Free to Choose by Milton and Rose Friedman. Milton Friedman was an economist who won the Nobel Prize in economics. He was the person who was credited with explaining to us how inflation worked, and it was really the first version of Freakonomics. And there’s so much in that book that was relevant in the seventies, that’s even more relevant dust and see why he won the Nobel Prize for.
- Free to Choose by Milton and Rose Friedman
Who do you know that we should know?
- Andrew Segal (39:51): So two groups that you should pay attention to. One is the Caruso organization based in Los Angeles. They did a project called The Grove, which may be the most fabulous urban renewal mall, whatever you want to call it. It’s kind of a little bit of everything that’s there. I took my team to go see it and we were standing at the valet service watching what was like a valet and a guy, the head valet comes, he puts his arm around me. He goes, so you own a mall? I said, how did you know? He goes, nobody else would be staring at the valet operation as long as you dido’s execution is just amazing. And the other one is our mutual friend, Chris Powers at For Capital for capital made a decision to become a connector, to become a leader, to become someone who was socializing thoughts and innovation. And you say to yourself, how does this drive more warehouse purchases? But when you spend enough time with his team, you realize how great they’ve become by leading. It’s really, really interesting. Those two are two of my inspirations.
- Caruso – website
- Caruso – The Grove – website
- The Grove LA – website
- Fort Capital – website
- The Fort Podcast – website
- Chris Powers – LinkedIn
- Redemptification – episode with Chris Powers
Where have you been that we should go?
- Andrew Segal (44:18): A couple of things. One thing that blew my mind very recently was Manila, the Philippines. I’ve traveled around the world, I’ve been to India things, and I was horrified at how great a city this was that I really knew very little about. I was standing in some shopping centers. There was one, I think it’s the most beautiful shopping center I’ve ever been in India, and I’m talking about Miami and New York and Paris. They really taught me some humility about thinking that all the answers were here. And part of it is just exploring and exploring without a necessary agenda. I went to Mongolia twice last summer, a long story, and I learned so much about politics from that country. So longer explanation, but get out there and go see things. The explorers win in the end. And of course come see our mall in Fort Worth. It’s really fun.
- La Gran Plaza – website
- Manilla – website
- India – website
That’s Not Normal, a Patron Journey with special guest Allan BranchTy has a great conversation this episode with an incredible, third-generation entrepreneur, Allan Branch. Allan is from Panama City, Florida and discusses his journey from software development to investing in real estate and community development. Branch grew up in a family of entrepreneurs who owned restaurants and car washes, which gave him a unique perspective on business. After selling his first software company, he began investing in real estate, starting with a small quadplex and gradually moving into larger projects in Panama City’s historic downtown. Branch emphasizes the importance of storytelling and community engagement in his work, and he is running for mayor in the next election to further his efforts in revitalizing his hometown.
Insights & Inspirations Allan Branch (05:16): And I grew up hearing my dad talked to his friends about debt service and curb cuts and grandfathering of sign codes and variances and dealing with employees and firing employees and hiring and marketing. And we didn’t really grow up watching sports or politics. We grew up talking about car washes and restaurants and dealing with people and my dad dealing with employees of the carwash, which were unorganized and a lot of ’em had money troubles and family issues. And we would talk about those things. And I saw my aunt and uncles and dads fire people and hire people. And so that was my normal. So what your kid’s normal is a lot of times dictates how easy things are later in life. So starting a business, having a job was unusual. I just thought everyone started a business and everyone went around as a kid being filled with kind words from their town. And that’s not normal. It took me a long time to realize that. * Allan Branch (06:10): It took me a long time to realize that. But I got into software and really just took that. I had one job out of college in Birmingham, Alabama, and immediately started freelancing in my off time building websites for people. And that was 2003 ish and really got into software. I had a great business partner for many years in the software business that really mentored me. * Allan Branch (07:20): ….and just kind of carried that forward into software and sold those and subsequently started in real estate. So just kind of carrying the lessons through into these new businesses. * Allan Branch (09:18): in 2015, we sold the first company and it was a very, very small seven figure exit. It was just enough money where most people would buy a lake house, an RV, a new truck, and a big ass boat and be like, whoa, look at me everybody. * Allan Branch (09:51): And so we started looking at all these ways, what do we do with this cash? Do we spend it on toys? Do we put it into something? Do we put it in the stock market? And for me, I didn’t know. And so I run across stories like you guys and Incremental Development Alliance and people like that, and you start seeing how towns get revitalized. And so I started looking at like, well, how do people make mistakes in this real estate stuff? And it’s usually when they bite off bigger things than they can chew. * Allan Branch (10:46): And so I want to create businesses along the way that make lots of mistakes, but lots of small mistakes. And so we started, how do you get into real estate? Well, I didn’t know anything about construction, so I was like, all right, I’m going to build a shed in my backyard. …I learned about soffits and what is putting things on sixteens and headers on doors and what’s house wrap and what is R-value and all those kinds of things that you might learn your first two or three years being in that industry. I learned it through building a little shed. * Allan Branch (11:39): And so we started looking at what’s the next step? And so we found a little quadplex and I would say in a blighted part of town, not in downtown Quadplex was like 2,400 square feet and it was like 40 bucks a square foot. And so I think it was $80,000. * Allan Branch (12:05): Alright, what’s that 10 grand? Okay, I can survive that mistake. Alright, it needs new electrical service. Alright, what’s that five grand, 10 grand, whatever. I can survive that. So really I can survive the mistakes of an $80,000 project and learn a little bit. And that project went well. The mistakes we learned were probably more like two and $3,000. * Allan Branch (13:14): And then we started looking at downtown, which is a whole different story. Our downtown in 2017, nobody wanted to be here. And the prices, the sell prices reflected, it was literally $10 a square foot to buy a building. Now those buildings may need new roofs and new plumbings, but you look at this product downtown and you go, why is it $10 a square foot here? But an old metal building next to the paper mill is a hundred dollars a square foot or $80 a square foot * Allan Branch (14:17): The problem is there’s no renters. The numbers of the renters were paying so little, you’ve seen it. You can’t afford to fix the buildings and buy them at a bank level, they’re like, nobody’s renting there. * Allan Branch (14:30): And so it takes a couple to change a market, you have to have a couple, at least one crazy person who’s changing the market, changing the market with how the buildings look, changing the market with getting renters to pay more. * Allan Branch (15:34): So we started buying up downtown and promoting the stories of downtown. And I sort of just fell in love with the stories, realizing that my family was a part of those stories. My dad grew up half a mile from here. And you start realizing how important stories are and realizing what legacy is. Legacy is when you’re a part of a story. * Ty Maloney (17:47): you move from, you understand the business of property to a whole other element that I think is expected when you go into a downtown, because so much of a downtown, the fabric of that place is embedded. Like you said, these stories are embedded. Our historic downtowns are the destination markers for place * Ty Maloney (18:48): But there’s also this embedded story in you and you have this really unique story in the sense that you’re a third generation entrepreneur from Panama City. Like you said, you’ve carried this Branch name, it allows you, it’s almost like you’re implicated in a way that no one else could be implicated. So this identity of being a patron is something you’re walking through and it’s at some point what started as, Hey, this is kind of an investment strategy to preserve wealth has transitioned into, wow, this is a bigger story and I want to talk about * Allan Branch (19:45): And so the joke is Allan starts businesses that he wants in his backyard. That’s not evil actually. That’s really what you want. It’s especially when you live in the neighborhood, that’s sort of the opposite of gentrification. * Allan Branch (20:05): John Anderson has a great quote, “your area that you’re developing your farm and the family farm.” If you’re thinking of it generationally, you don’t want to abuse the family farm. I wouldn’t build some business downtown that was detrimental to downtown. This is where, not just where my investments are, this is where my kids hang out, this is where I hang out. * Allan Branch (22:26): So if you’re looking to change the rules of an area, your outside developer a lot of times comes in and goes, I’m going to do this. And everyone’s like, you don’t know what we want. You’re not from here. We don’t like those things. But I’m from here. I’m as Bay County, Panama City as it gets, and I ain’t hiding them. And people like that. * Allan Branch (23:39): change comes from people, not person, people, multiple people. And especially with the limited amount of money I have and time, it can’t be, Allan’s the only one that knows how to get through these processes and get things done. It’s got to be other people figuring it out as well. It can’t be just me. * Allan Branch (26:08): When you invest in downtown too, it’s one of the few places, I mean your neighbors will always, no matter where you invest, give you your input whether you’re building a quadplex in urban sprawl or building downtown. But downtown people really tell you their opinions on what it should be because that area represents them as opposed to urban sprawl. The target doesn’t really represent them, but downtown represents the heart. That’s what people say is the heart of the city. They mean when people come to a city, they say, show me your town. They usually take ’em to downtown. * Allan Branch (33:02): And so if you don’t want to be an owner operator, you’re really trying to guess the smallest scale of the restaurant that will allow you to have managers that insulate you from day-to-day problems, right? Food truck, one food truck or a hot dog cart. You can’t hire a manager and personnel and then expect money to come to the owner. That’s an owner operator size. * Allan Branch (34:53): I’m trying to cultivate managers and people who have not been given a chance to lead * Allan Branch (38:18): What’s easier than just telling stories of your town? Why is the bridge name this and why is the school name this? And who was the first black police officer? And how did the town form and how did we overcome adversity that just gives him a home run pitch to do And History Class [bar in Panama City], the goal is to celebrate our community and our community stories. And so the marketing tells the story. It doesn’t really talk about the products that much. So we hope that really raises civic pride, I think, to love a place. And a few of the stories, those stories are people who are normal, people who overcome adversity or pour themselves in the community in an unusual way, and they’re being celebrated and they’re usually forgotten within two years is the problem. * Ty Maloney (40:13): the thing that I would take away from that is that I think the role, you take both, you use business as a vehicle, but you also this idea of storytelling and then at every juncture you find opportunities to plug people in because that’s the most authentic version of storytelling is when others are actively living out their story and then they’re sharing it and getting them to share it, like you said, whether it’s their skills or their talents. * Allan Branch (42:35): Storytelling is typically not telling your story. It’s telling other people’s stories. Information & Links Connect and learn more about what we do at https://www.marshcollective.com/ * Connect with Marsh Collective on LinkedIn * Connect with Marsh Collective on Facebook * Allan Branch + LinkedIn + Less Everything – website + News article + Article about Warehome * History Class – website * El Weirdo – website Closing QuestionsWhat have you read that we should read?
- Allan Branch (51:06): John Anderson’s probably one of my favorite people, has a great way of looking at properties and how to incrementally get them in partnerships and that kind of stuff. I’m not a big business book guy. If you Google Zingerman’s, they’re a restaurant sort of group in Ann Arbor, Michigan that talks a lot about customer service and building these sorts of multiple small food and beverage concepts, that kind of an ecosystem. Seth Godin, if you’re not reading his blog, you should be. He’s an amazing writer. Takes two minutes to read his blog every day.
- Zingermans – website
- Seth Godin – blog
- John Anderson – website
Who do you know that we should know?
- Allan Branch (47:47): Yeah, I think Revitalize or Die. I think you guys are doing tremendous work. John Anderson, Incremental Development Alliance. Anytime you run across a downtown that looks great or a building it looks great, talk to who owns this place. I mean, I’ve called Ocala City, they’re planning and just been like, who’s building buildings down there and doing cool stuff and getting connected into Main Street stuff.
- Revitalize or Die – website
- Redemptification – episode with Jeff Siegler from Revitalize or Die
- Incremental Development Alliance – website
- John Anderson – website
Where have you been that we should go?
- Allan Branch (49:01): Ocean Springs, is awesome. Certainly we’ve been to Opelika. Opelika is a great spot too. There’s a lot of big city downtowns. And so to me, big city downtowns are not really our model to copy or to study. And so I love the little town that has too many pond shops and used car lots. That’s Panama City. So how do these other small potentially coastal cities and the lessons they learn apply to our city? So I’m not really looking on like, well, how did the Lower East side of Manhattan? No, no, no, no. I’m looking at Ocean Springs, Mississippi, which is off of Biloxi, typically a tourist town, things like that. And I’m looking for people or stories that either break my assumption on a thing I’m about to do or confirm my crazy idea makes sense, which is what your podcast did multiple times of downtown historic buildings being a higher asset class.
Here; How where we are impacts who we are with special guest Ryan Fredrick It’s a deep cut today in the studio. John sits down with author and advocate of human flourishing, Ryan Frederick, to talk about how the places we choose to inhabit affect who we become. Together, they wrestle with the [...]
The Lawyer and the Yoga Studio, Living With your Development with special guest Kerry Wilson John hops on with Kerry Wilson this week, of Winter Haven Florida, to discuss coming home, and working within your community. Join us to hear a broad reaching conversation about the most unique fund in the world. [...]
The Long Hold; How a Redemptive Lens Can Change Capital with special guest Luke Roush John has a riveting conversation this week with a “modern day Captain America”, Luke Roush. Luke is the tip of the spear for Sovereign’s Capital, a Fund that aims to see God’s love expressed through the world of [...]
Charging Suburbia with a Squirt Bottle with special guest Jeff Siegler This week, John sits down with a bona fide fire brand. Jeff Siegler is the man behind the ever insightful, and often incendiary, Revitalize or Die, join us as John and Jeff discuss the tension of battling mediocrity in our cities, and [...]
Salvation through Sawdust with special guest Lawrence Sheffield Ty sits down with a beacon of goodness and redemption; Lawrence Sheffield. Together, they talk about bringing the power of grace and hard work together to redeem our broken societal image of vocation. Lawrence takes us on the journey that looked like a detour, but [...]
Spiritual Gardening: How to make safe spaces for amazing conversations with special guest Josh Kwan John sits down with a firecracker of faith this week; Josh Kwan. Together they discuss the deeply personal challenges of stewardship, generosity, and living into our faith. Josh discusses the difficulty of following an iconic founder, and the [...]
Being a Christian in Business vs. Being a Christian Business with special guests Mike Gibson and Randy WilsonTy sits down with Randy Wilson, and Mike Gibson of Creature Construction. Together they discuss the challenges of faith and purpose in business, and wrestle the question of whether we should have christian businesses, or express our christianity through business. Never ones to shy from a challenge, our intrepid trio inspects the ways we can express a redemptive view of business in one of the most challenging business spheres of our time: construction. Tune in for a conversation that finds the intersection of purpose and profits in the most unlikely of places.
Insights & Inspirations Creature creates value through vertical integration of ‘modular components’, particularly in healthcare construction.
* Mike Gibson (06:25): you have to understand that from a traditional general contracting standpoint where you’re just coordinating all the work on a job site and making a small fee on the coordination of all the work, we are actually doing the work. And so we’re actually much larger than it would seem like we should be
* Ty Maloney (08:13): a lot of times when we think of general contractor construction management architect, there’s kind of this separation, there’s this management, and then there’s true builders. And what I want everybody on the call to understand is that you guys are actually leading trades and responsible for trades
* Randy Wilson (09:43): me and my wife, we, a little bit backstory, we met in Uganda, lived in Uganda for three years, moved back to the states we were living in. Austin decided to move to Birmingham and in that process she got really sick. So because I was working internationally, I couldn’t find a co-working space. I was open at 1:00 AM And so I was sharing that with Mike one day and he was like, Hey, our office, you could come in anytime of the day, anytime of the night, you name it, here’s a key fob, you can have unlimited coffee, unlimited snacks.
And so for the first probably four years of our relationship, I was a little bit of an undercover nonprofit executive director who I often tell people I worked at Creature for four years, I’ve worked for Creature for the last two years.
* Randy Wilson (11:49): we recognize this sub and the sub GC relationship wasn’t always the best one. And so we wanted to address that and try to figure out how we could navigate that and create a better situation. So my role today is working with the leadership team to think through how we do that well internally, so what’s the internal impact? But then also externally. So as we do our work, we’re going to be given a platform to have an impact. How are we choosing to use that platform? And that looks like working with nonprofits, community leaders, sitting in with different churches and just different connections that come from the day-to-day business operations.
* Ty Maloney (13:18):it’s more cultural than it really is anything else. Because we create division of trades, we, there’s almost like there’s a lack of cultural service. One common thing is who owns the condensate drain in a project? Is it the plumber or the mechanical guy?
* Randy Wilson (14:44): my role and my title is not it not an excuse for the leadership team to be jerks. It is a resource for our team to be loved and cared for.
* Randy Wilson (17:05): a chaplain is this one thing, a chief spiritual officer is very different and has a lot more ownership in the company.
* Ty Maloney (17:24): I think it’s an important distinction to say, Hey is Creature itself is not a Christian company. I mean a company, well your words were, it doesn’t have a soul, but you as a leader, Mike, happen to have a strong faith and a strong faith to a leader.
* Mike Gibson (19:10): as I think about Creature, I think that what I’m called to do here at Creature is to be who I am. And I’ve been called to be a Christian.
And so I think that companies like Creature that are not on the nose about being a Christian company are important because I think that it’s important to be in the world, not of the world
* Mike Gibson (21:52): the hope is throughout the day that my reactions and strategies are being filtered through my faith. And so some days that’s more successful than others. And I think one of the keys to being a Christian leader is to not own your mistakes. In those moments, you’re going to screw up and you should not spend a whole lot of time defending that
* Mike Gibson (22:38): as believers sometimes we can give off this air if we have it all together, everything’s perfect, everything’s good. And I think certainly as a leader where you’re working closely with people, they can see the truth. And as Christians, the truth is that we are broken and we are sinners, and salvation is through our great savior. And if we are not vulnerable about our brokenness, everything else we say about our faith isn’t really true and won’t have the impact that it could have.
* Ty Maloney (23:29): Mike, one of the things I honor about you shown to me very early is that you lead with a, and it’s rare in this industry because it always feels like a fight
* Ty Maloney (24:17): the elephant in the room is this secular marketplace, almost this, I don’t know, separation of church and state, separation of church and market or how do these things, compliance, all those things, all those questions come up.
* Randy Wilson (25:21): think HR is seen in the traditional sense to care for people. And so they do a lot of stuff to try and care for people. And I would say what I bring into the table is a desire to first know the people we’re trying to care for and then to be bold with what, so I’m going to zoom out a little bit. The same rules that people are that exist that cause a lot of people fear are the same rules that we as believers can follow to give us a lot of freedom. So if we treat everyone the same, we can do whatever our faith convicts us for the most part, as long as it’s within certain rationales. But you can pray with people, you can pray with your team, you can lead prayer times, you can.
* Randy Wilson (26:56): my role is really thinking through how do we care for our people that are the people that God’s given us?
* Randy Wilson (27:58): ultimately it is creating a safe space for people to have hard conversations. If from a non-spiritual lens that is what I do.
* Ty Maloney (29:30): it’s easy to see faith as a lens we see through, but not as something that we truly want to integrate in.
* Ty Maloney (31:20): want to have full integration. But in the midst of all the things of business and conflict, it’s really, it’s difficult. So my questions, is faith a lens? We’re just seeing it through, or is integration really possible?
* Randy Wilson (32:42): to call business. Anything other than hard is probably incorrect.
* Randy Wilson (32:52): I worked for three different types of industries that are for profit. The construction industry is hands down the most difficult industry to be in
* Randy Wilson (34:24): one of the questions that we’ll ask companies is what is your unique spiritual impact focus?
* Randy Wilson (40:53): I am a doer that I go and do things so that I might have things and then be considered well done
* Randy Wilson (41:23): the reality is, when God looks at us through the blood of Christ, we are a being verb. We are children of God, we can be his child full stop right there.
* Randy Wilson (45:25): very similar to how our company would do a business plan is how we would do a spiritual impact plan. And so we asked that question of how do you feel like God has uniquely designed you, uniquely called you to expand his kingdom through your company?
* Randy Wilson (47:26): we ask the question of, okay, well what does success look like and how do you define it? That’s where the KPIs start to come in is we’re trying to figure out what do we want, what do we want those relationships to look like? How do we want to interact with them?
* Randy Wilson (49:47): when things get hard, is the leadership team going to be open to having those conversations or are they going to be noses down in the weeds and not willing to step out? Who’s going to be a part of that?
* Randy Wilson (50:38): As a faith driven individual, I’m looking for opportunities to share with those people in a way that’s relevant to their life. So I’m not coming in with doing bad evangelism, just blasting it out all the time. But really God called us to love people, love God, love people. And so my hope is just to love people well, and then to gather people together and opportunities to dive in deeper
* Randy Wilson (51:05): for about three or four months last year we did, every week we had breakfast where we could just ask hard questions about the business, about life, whatever it was
* Randy Wilson (52:27): people really like the squishy thing cause it gives them a reason not to do it. And we would just say, if it’s squishy, then make it less squishy press into what we look all throughout scripture. He makes it very, God makes it very clear that he gives assignments to folks
* Ty Maloney (55:18): it’s easy to have a lazy theology. Like you said, we could call it squishy or we can say things like, well, God works in mysterious ways or whatever
* Ty Maloney (55:57): As entrepreneurs that are faith driven, we think that the environments we’re in and these things that we’re not, that stuff would happen if there was a moment, there was something supposed to happen that would happen without us. God works in mysterious ways, and that’s not true.
Information & Links Connect and learn more about what we do at https://www.marshcollective.com/
* Connect with Marsh Collective on LinkedIn
* Connect with Marsh Collective on Facebook
* Mike Gibson – LinkedIn
* Creature – website
* Randy Wilson – LinkedIn
Closing QuestionsWhat have you read that we should read?
- Randy Wilson
- Living Life Backwards by David Gibson
- Mike Gibson
- Becoming a King by Morgan Snyder
Who do you know that we should know?
- Randy Wilson
- Work for Life organization
- Mike Gibson
- Patrick Lencioni – about
- Working Genius assessment
Where have you been that we should go?
- Randy Wilson
- Rwenzori Glaciers in Uganda – about
- and your child’s next baseball practice
The Big Yes with special guest John RiversJohn has a riveting conversation this week with John Rivers, founder of 4 Rivers Smokehouse and 4 Rivers Farm. Together, they explore the ‘big yes’, and stepping into purpose with our work. John has gone from a healthcare executive with a passion for barbecue, to a serial entrepreneur taking on some of the most salient and complex issues in our society today. But he’s not done yet, John is stepping out on faith again, and is knee deep in a $65mm vision to redeem farming, connect cities back to the land, and fight hunger. You do not want to miss this one.
Insights & Inspirations John Marsh (00:58): in 2009, he created his first concept Four Rivers Smokehouse and quickly became one of the fastest growing restaurants in the southeast. He’s got a nonviolent revolution going on through changing the world through purpose and barbecue. * John Marsh (01:17): I can get someone to go to the worst neighborhood in town for good barbecue * John Rivers (01:59): Healthcare was a great blessing and it was 20 years career that I had in it. But before I even started going into healthcare, I love cooking and I always tell people that God gives us a special gift and a special talent when we are kids…And then he uses something to wake you up and to kind of remind you. * John Rivers (04:36): When you start doing your passion, okay, you’re calling what God made you to do and you align that to your work, your occupation, to your efforts, and you’re doing it to help other people, man, you line those three things up and life takes on a whole different meaning * John Marsh (05:02): I love the seed analogy because God puts all the power in the seed to accomplish what he wanted it to do. And so you see seeds that came into barbecue and you see seeds that are working through other pieces of your life. * John Rivers (06:01): when God speaks to you, he moves your heart. And our job is to say yes. Okay? And the scary part about that is not knowing really what you’re saying yes to, * John Marsh (07:39): the restaurant business, we say it’s, it’s entertainment, it’s wholesale, it’s retail, it’s manufacturing, and it’s daycare all under one roof * John Rivers (08:28): God has put you where you’re supposed to be in order to touch the people that are around you that he puts in your path, whether they’re sitting in the cubicle next to you or whether they’re in an auditorium over in Greece or in Russia or something, talking to them. And quite honestly, I would contend it’s scarier for people to talk to the person in the cubicle next to them about God than it is a complete stranger in a different country. * John Rivers (10:02): You’re going to grow by making mistakes. Make a mistake on a smaller foundation and learn that same lesson for a lot less money heartache than you do paying for. Don’t overpay for lessons, * John Rivers (12:24): The person I was Monday through Friday became very different from the person I was on the weekends. But Monday through Friday was, it became a job and I had to do it. And the weekends my spirit would come alive. And that disparity between those two people was too much for me to say, I can’t live. I need to go where my heart is. So the point being, it wasn’t overnight, I’m leaving my job, I’m going to do this right. It was a slow progression that God moved me along and started to show me and hone me in to what the plan that he had for me. * John Marsh (13:41): what got us going. Don’t keep us growing * John Marsh (13:58): want what I’m doing to have the flavor and passion of God’s thing * John Rivers (19:09): When you come to the terms of understanding and acceptance that everything happens for the reason and the reason for God, you walk into challenging situations with a completely different perspective. And that change in perspective to me is as little as a say. Instead of saying to God, why is this happening to me asking the question, what are you trying to show me? Change your perspective. It’s amazing how things will change in that environment and then change in your life. * John Marsh (20:29): when I spend time with somebody pretty soon, I don’t know what’s them and me. It’s just all Brunswick stew of sharing good words together * John Marsh (24:36): faith is like a muscle. As I’ve learned more about exercise, time under tension is the only language it knows. * John Rivers (29:15): success breeds growth, more success, but it also can and breeds a lot of temptation of making terrible mistakes. And I learned that some of the most important things to that we have to stay disciplined around is not necessarily our to-do list, but it’s our to don’t list * John Rivers (31:05): a lot of the last three years in particular of my leadership efforts have been investing in the team to give them a voice, to get them to stand up and express their opinions. And especially, and I put it from a perspective, you’re doing it out of love. You’re not doing it out of disrespect * John Marsh (33:52): Do you compel or beg your team to give you wisdom when they do feel like it’s kind of speaking against the person that’s been instrumental in dreaming stuff and all that, how do you invite ’em in? How do you compel? * John Rivers (34:08): Well, first of all, one-on-one. You give ’em permission. Okay, not in front of everybody else. Two is you not just give ’em permission, but you implore them of how you need it. Depend on them. Now that doesn’t mean they’re going to be a superman the next day and be able to do that. Then you give ’em small. It’s just like working that muscle, building up for that race. Throw something out at a meeting that’s low hanging fruit. What do you guys think? If we did this?` * John Rivers (35:22): when you put a problem or a challenge or question out there, resist the urge to answer it. When you see the path, you know want to bring them along. What’s that saying? If you make a decision for me but you don’t include me, then you make it happen to me. * John Rivers (39:56): if we’re going to keep our mission and the center of our business and the business keeps growing, shouldn’t the mission keep growing with it? * John Rivers (41:01): If God had shown me back then, Hey John, I want you to build a 65 million farm campus and feed millions of people a year and teach people about regenerative farming, I would’ve asked two question, what is regenerative farming? What am I going to get? 65 million? * John Rivers (42:13): as a country, we are handing out more food than we ever have before, but the number of missed meals and the number of people that are hungry is at an all time high. And that’s not the solution. So you keep digging, okay, well do people understand about where food’s coming from? And truth matter is little Jamal and Jimmy and Tina who lives downtown, they don’t know tomatoes come from the ground. And how are we supposed to expect them to understand and appreciate and care about the food that’s going in their body and the gift that God gave us in this beautiful soil, in this beautiful planet and our responsibility handed down to us by God to take care of the land, they’re never going to appreciate that because they don’t know that there’s any value in the soil, in the land itself. And then we’ve got all of our farmers who are producing all this beautiful food, but in the state of Florida, we got almost 1 billion pounds of produce that goes to waste on the fields. * John Marsh (45:55): being a former addict, drug addict and helping drug addicts, I feel like you invest in 500 or 1,001, make it. That’s how it feels sometimes. And what I prayed about it and I just said, but you know what, if you’re the one, it’s a hundred percent success. Information & Links Connect and learn more about what we do at https://www.marshcollective.com/ * Connect with Marsh Collective on LinkedIn * Connect with Marsh Collective on Facebook * John Rivers – LinkedIn * John Rivers – 4R Restaurant Group * 4Rivers Smokehouse – website * 4Roots Farm – website Closing QuestionsWhat have you read that we should read?
- John Rivers (51:11): I’m a consummate reader, so I’m, I’m reading some Wendell Berry right now. Unless you’re into regenerative farming, it could be incredibly dry, not so exciting. But one of my favorite books and relevant to today’s conversation is a writer named Mark Batterson, who I love what he writes and one of the most pivotal influential ones on me. And this journey of faith and courage and a little craziness all combined. One of his first books is called In the Pit with a Lion on a Snowy Day. And it is a super easy read and just it’ll hit on so many engines and fire them up on you. And it’s taken from one line, I think out of Kings and just how Benaiah who was David’s head of his army, jumped in a pit with a lion on a snowy day. And he talks about the lion as being that big challenge. He didn’t walk away from it when the lion fell in the pit. He actually went after it. He takes that one passage, it’s that one line, and he draws it into your life of how God puts these ostentatious big fairy audacious goals in front of you. But he is also giving you the courage and the ability to go after him and get ’em. Such a fantastic book and just a great, great writer.
- Wendell Berry – author
- In the Pit with a Lion on a Snowy Day by Mark Batterson
Who do you know that we should know?
- John Rivers (48:47): …there’s so many people that are doing things and I know this one is probably a low hanging fruit and cliche, but just last week, one of my favorite people and mentors is actually Dan Cathy over at Chick-fil-A. And they do a lot of things behind the scenes that just we don’t hear. But I got to listen to him speak to a group of young employees that he had. He was so kind to invite me just to come and be a fly on the wall and listen. And I think I took more notes than they did, but if you ever have a chance to hear him speak about leadership and education and stuff, it’s something to take a look into. And the course your company does a ton of stuff. But man, I was just so moved that one of the most successful chairmans and CEOs that are out there has taken the time to pour to their employees and their team members. And just the message that he had was really, really inspirational.
- Dan Cathy
Where have you been that we should go?
- John Rivers (50:05): Well, one, we love to travel around. That’s one of Monica and I’s touchpoints and one of the most meaningful trips. And it was funny, we went over for work before we bought this hydroponic system in Israel. I said, I want to go see it and put my hands on it. But that trip to Jerusalem, went to Israel, just have dinner on the river, the Jordan River, and be able to just go to places that are so biblically special and to experience that was probably one of the most meaningful trips we’ve ever had. That’s something I highly recommend to people.
- Israel – travel site
Redemptive Work Requires Community with special guest Dave BlanchardDave Blanchard and John share a conversion about redemptive entrepreneurship & faith-driven work.
Dave is the co-founder and CEO of Praxis. Praxis is a venture-building ecosystem with a redemptive imagination, supporting founders, funders, and innovators motivated by their faith to address the major issues of our time. Dave’s experience & specialty lies in Redemptive Entrepreneurship, Design, and Startups.
Previously, Dave was a Principal Designer at IDEO and founded two companies in music and technology. He is a co-author of From Concept to Scale and a contributor to Praxis’ various publications on redemptive entrepreneurship. He has a BA from Babson College, an MBA & MEM from Northwestern, and lives in New York City, where Praxis is headquartered.
Insights & Inspirations Dave Blanchard (03:49): So when we hear on earth as it is in heaven, to us that’s redemptive. Okay, so let’s get to work together. And we think it requires community to do it. It’s not, it’s very hard to do this sort of thing on your own as the solo hero. * John Marsh (04:41): When you say things clearly, you have worked on them diligently. * John Marsh (06:13): I tell people, I said, if you don’t like what you’re reaping, you need to talk to the person handling the planting. * John Marsh (08:42): I was thinking about tapestry and community is this way, is it tangled or woven? If it’s tangled, it looks unintentional, but woven is with intention. * John Marsh (14:40): they kind of use mentorship, coaching, and even sometimes therapy and Christian counseling interchangeably. And what I’ve personally experienced, is mentorship is when there’s a relationship where someone shares wisdom from the journey that they live, they’re giving what they’ve been living. * John Marsh (15:01): And so it has this framework, here’s what I experienced in this situation. Here’s when I had to close a business or here’s when I went through having to lay people off. They share stories and there’s wisdom of God embedded in their story to help you make decisions. Coaching seems to hold the environment and believe that if they ask courageous questions, you have the answers inside of you and they’ll bubble up. And then therapy seems to be dealing with specific issues of trauma and helping you work through those things. * Dave Blanchard (19:27): to your last point too, on the therapy front, I would just encourage investors who are partnering with entrepreneurs to think about some of the traumas that they’re experiencing too. We don’t do that work, but we certainly look for chances to refer people or recommend say, Hey, whether it’s going to get a spiritual director or going to some serious therapy times. The entrepreneur is a, I think it’s as one I can say, I think we’re a troubled bunch, and that’s right. And we get ourselves into situations that only create more of it, and it’s our resilience. * Dave Blanchard (24:17): I think outside perception and sometimes inside perception in the industry of why startups fail is they couldn’t find product market fit. So they just didn’t have the creative connective energy with the market or they couldn’t find the capital. They were trying to raise the money and they ran out or so on and so forth. The data actually shows that the majority of startups actually failed because of co-founder tension and people not being on the same page. * Dave Blanchard (26:13): you mentioned decision making where some of that stuff really comes alive when there’s a perception of, hey, two co-founders, 50 50 partners, how do decisions get made? This is an area again, where I think we have a lot to learn in the entrepreneurial world from marriage and where if we are as least as Christian entrepreneurs putting Christ at the center of our work we should be doing at the center of our marriage, I think that brings humility to that process. If we are, at least as Christian entrepreneurs, putting christ at the center of our work, it brings humility to that process. It asks for us to not go on our own human wisdom, but submit to the Lord in prayer these major decisions we are undertaking. * John Marsh (29:56): it seems like a lot of people are doing real estate and put redemptive on it, but I can’t see that there’s any meat underneath that. * Dave Blanchard (34:02): I think to the point of redemptive real estate, it’s love is in the people, it’s in the place, it’s in the product, and there’s plenty of opportunities to deliver it as a thing that just requires heart, I think at the end of the day. * Dave Blanchard (40:44): And so one of the ways we’re doing that here in the near future is kind of relaunching this thing called the Redemptive Innovation Studio, where we’re going to bring together folks for these conversations. We’re going to have entrepreneurs and residents who are thinking about what’s next for them. Oftentimes serial entrepreneurs who want their next project to be in that more in that kind of redemptive moonshot category, if you will. And really just try to continue to cultivate an environment out in the world where when a Christian entrepreneur comes of age, whenever that age is, whether it’s 12 or 40, they’re like, oh, here’s a method. Information & Links Connect and learn more about what we do at https://www.marshcollective.com/ * Connect with Marsh Collective on LinkedIn * Connect with Marsh Collective on Facebook * Dave Blanchard – LinkIn * Dave Blanchard – Praxis * Praxis * Praxis Redemptive Framework * Praxis – Ben Bohannon * UpSmith – Wyatt Smith * Immerse Arkansas – Eric Gilmore Closing QuestionsWhat have you read that we should read?
- I’ll go with a lesser known favorite of mine, a huge fan of a book called Alternative to Futility, which was written in 1949 by Elton Trueblood, who is, I think he was a Quaker Pass pastor that end up advising presidents and all sorts of things.
- Alternative to Futility by Elton Trueblood
Who do you know that we should know?
- Multi-time Praxis fellow by the name of Jonathan Robinson down in Birmingham, Alabama. Jonathan has started in a company called Hire, and their purpose and focus is I think very important in our time. So he basically said, okay, what is Amazon doing to local communities and local business and what are we going to do about that?
- Praxis Labs – Higher
- Jonathan Robinson – LinkedIn
Where have you been that we should go?
- So a particular passion of mine is snorkeling. I’ve always felt like the strongest apologetic for faith in the world is beauty. And I think if we go underwater and we see that underwater, God has done this marvelous, just amazing thing with everything, and we can’t even see it most of the time. You just kind of get the idea for the extravagance of God’s capacity as a creator, his care for the earth, his joy that he must have in us going around the corner and seeing that beautiful fish or that turtle floating through the ones.
Being a Patron, Placemaking, and Priming the Pump with special guest Luke HenryLuke Henry, John, and Ty have a conversation around their shared experience of being a Patron and the diverse skill set it takes to build momentum when placemaking.
Luke Henry has one of the most diverse backgrounds that you might ever see. Getting his start in the landscaping business, earning a Doctor of Pharmacy degree, and finally, starting the placemaking initiatives, Main Street Reimagined and Henry Development Group.
After working two full time jobs, both running his own landscaping business and working as a pharmacist, something had to give. So, Luke stepped down from his pharmacy career to pursue entrepreneurship completely. While Luke is extremely passionate about landscaping, creating and maintaining outdoor spaces, he has always loved learning business and leadership. Luke’s previous business experience, his love of real estate, and a desire to make his community a better place, lead him to co-found Main Street Reimagined in 2018. Main Street Reimagined started by quietly acquiring 8 buildings on a one block area of downtown Marion, OH that was 70% vacant at the time, with the vision of making it the catalyst of redevelopment and the center of dining, shopping, and entertainment options.
In order to kickstart the development, they also started and operated 4 different hospitality and service businesses. After surviving COVID, these businesses created a regional draw to downtown Marion, and began the momentum that has been created with additional projects by us as well as many others who have joined the movement.
Today, between Main Street Reimagined and Henry Development Group, Marion has nearly 20 buildings in the walkable downtown, most of which have been redeveloped or are in process of redevelopment to a curated mixture of office, retail, restaurant, and loft apartments.
Insights & Inspirations 2:30 – And about five years ago, I had what my wife calls a midlife seizure and decided that I wanted to do something a little bit different and a little bit bold. And we’d been buying some rental properties. I bought my first rental property when I was 19, when I was in college. Fixed it up. It was way worse than what I thought it was as they usually are, but I learned a lot of lessons through that one and was, I guess, crazy enough to buy some more and kept buying them through our first several years of marriage. And anyway, five years ago I started looking at our downtown in our hometown of Marion, Ohio. And what I saw wasn’t really great. I had heard the stories from lots of folks in my parents and grandparents’ generation that this was where they went school shopping, this is where they went on Friday, Saturday nights, this is where they ate meals, had community, went shopping, were entertained, walked the streets, drove the streets. – Luke Henry * 3:40 – So I met a guy who was also interested in doing some of this type of work, and we had lunch one day, it was July 5th, 2018, and I proposed a partnership to him where we buy some buildings on this one block of South Main Street. At that time, that block was 70% vacant, so there wasn’t a whole lot going on, but we had an opportunity to buy some buildings. And so we bought eight buildings quietly. We called ourselves Main Street Reimagined, we unveiled our plan, and it was off to the races. – Luke Henry * 5:20 – So I figured it had to be easy. And so we were crazy enough to bite it off. And I’m sure we’ll get into some of the discussions about how it was not in fact easy the same as your journey has been. I know, but it looked easy from the outside anyway. – Luke Henry * 6:30 -I remember sitting there and I said to him, if we don’t do this, who’s going to do it? And that really was a lot of the motivation was just to say, man, we want to raise our families in this community and we know that downtowns can be something really special. – Luke Henry * 8:30 – you can’t estimate what you don’t specify, and it’s very difficult to specify what you’re going to do when you’re just looking from the outside of these properties. – John Marsh * 9:50 – Tell me what you would codify his skills as they have added so much value, and then what do you think yours are? …he is extremely artistic and creative in that way with aesthetics and finding ways to blend materials and really has a passion for the older elements of the buildings and how do we marry that with new elements and has very much helped on that design aesthetic, really coming at it from an artistic viewpoint. He also has a much different network than me coming from a different background. So we had kind of different social groups that we could tap into as we were spreading the word about different elements of these things through the years.I come at it much more from the entrepreneurial business side of things. I end up being the de facto CFO, I guess, and sort of CEO to run a lot of the business operations, work with banks and help set up our business processes and do the HR side of things as well to bring on some of our key people that have helped us create not only these properties and then what led to a construction management company and a property management company and several other businesses that have come to inhabit our buildings. – Luke Henry * 14:30 – Well, what we did have was a vision and we knew that what we wanted was to create an ecosystem. What we needed was something that each place would support some of the others and we could create experiences. – Luke Henry * 15:35 – And we started taking these people through the buildings and giving them the grand vision and the plan. And each of those tours ended the same way, which was with them saying, we love your spunk, we love your drive and your dream, your vision, but this is just a little too early in this process for us to actually make an investment here. – Luke Henry * 16:40 – So if that involved us opening up some of those operating businesses, we were prepared to do that. So in addition to the wedding venue, which was always our intent to operate that business, we also owned, opened an ice cream shop and well sandwich shop and a full service salon as well as some loft departments. – Luke Henry * 17:30 – we believed that renovation was revitalization and we missed the gap that the attracting of successful businesses is no joke – John Marsh * 20:20 – we believe if a downtown’s going to flourish, it needs iconic food and beverage celebratory events and amazing overnight stay. And if you have that, you can build a place. – John Marsh * 23:30 – I’ve been thinking about constraints and what a blessing constraints are. And so if you even think about margins in a book you read, imagine a book with where the words run to the edge of the page. Those margins do things. And so with us, to your point, these historic buildings, they constrain us in a way that makes funky cool things happen and beautiful things. And so it’s not just a little better, it can be incredibly better because it’s how it’s designed and your space is beautiful. – John Marsh * 25:00 – when I heard you say the things around doing things with love and the way that it looks on sticks and bricks, man, that really resonated with me. And so that’s what we’re doing and that’s what you’re doing and that’s what a lot of people are doing. And I think that it just feels so good to actually have the words to say what it is. – Luke Henry * 25:40 – if we don’t treat this with love, dignity and respect, people in places flourish when you put love, dignity, and respect over ’em every time. It’s the soil of life. – John Marsh * 29:30 – And so what I realized over some time is that, and probably sophisticated people know this already, but I had to find it out the hard way that different banks have different appetites for different projects at different times. – Luke Henry * 36:00 – Your buildings are irreplaceable built by people that don’t live anymore with materials we don’t have anymore in methods we don’t do anymore, and approvals and entitlements, we can’t get done anymore. That’s irreplaceable. And with great programming, they’re unstoppable. – John Marsh * 36:30 – we have to buy what’s on the block and we have to figure out a way to convince a building owner to sell us their building, at a somewhat reasonable price and figure out a way to then make it pencil to turn it into something that fits the ecosystem and fits the community. – Luke Henry * 42:10 – But what we do know is where we feel like we can make an impact and we have been somewhat disciplined and especially in the beginning of making sure that it was as dense as possible so that we could really make an impact. – Luke Henry * 44:30 – These are relationships that we had to start and try to kind of water and help them grow, give them some business advice, connect them to an attorney to set up their LLC and insurance and a lot of those pieces. – Luke Henry * 45:30 – It’s not just an ad on LoopNet and people are coming out of the woodwork to seek us out. It’s things that we’ve had to create and curate. * 47:30 – Can you give an idea in a sense how big your team is under this umbrella so that other listeners could kind of understand what it takes, what the team looks like? …so our team looks like one construction manager. We have three to four maintenance and construction people in-house in addition to all of our subcontractors for all of our licensed trades. A full-time property manager, a part-time property manager. We just hired a full-time bookkeeper accounting specialist. And we are currently searching for a business development person. – Luke Henry * 54:00 – It’s working at the intersection of purpose and profits. It’s not ignoring either, but honoring both. And that’s what I say, you want to know what’s the best real estate development idea of all sophisticated real estate development with love. – John Marsh Information & Links Luke Henry – LinkedIn * Luke Henry – About * Main Street Reimagined – Marion, OH Closing QuestionsWhat have you read that we should read?
- One of my favorite quotes in the world, it changed my life in 2010, is that in five years you’ll be the same person you are today except for the people you meet and the books you read. So I’ve become a voracious reader since then, so I could really probably rattle off a whole bunch.
- But probably the most impactful for me lately has been “Who, Not How” by Benjamin Hardy. And it’s been just my mantra as we’ve started. We’re starting four new businesses this year working on five significant downtown projects right now. And there is no possible way that I could lead those individually. It all comes down to the who’s that we’re attracting, recruiting and engaging in this mission to make the things happen.
- Who, Not How by Dan Sullivan and Dr. Benjamin Hardy
Who do you know that we should know?
- I mentioned him earlier, my buddy from college, his name’s Jason Duff, he’s got a company called Small Nation. They’re in Bell Fountain, Ohio, and they’ve done 40 or 50 buildings in their small downtown town of I think 18,000 or something like that. And he’s been a great mentor to me as well, and is doing great work in the world. He’s done a little bit like you kind of taking a show on the road in terms of helping some other folks. And the need is just enormous for this kind of work.
- Jason Duff – LinkedIn
- Small Nation
Where have you been that we should go?
- I will say we, our family, again, this is a fire ready aim. I decided in December we had a family trip with a conference we’re going to go to with our kids in late January in Lake Tahoe. And none of us had ever put on a ski before in our life. And I announced in December that we were going to learn to ski as a family. And as is typical, we went all in fully committed, bought skis for our kids for Christmas. And it’s, it’s been well worth it. There’s been some falls, but it’s been a great family learning experience. There’s been tons of teachable moments. Nobody’s gotten really, really hurt. So hey, if you haven’t done it, you need to do it.
Caring for Place with special guest Doug WilsonDoug and John have a conversation around their shared experience of caring for a place.
Doug is the Founder & Executive Chairman of Monon Capital where he co-creates with others around ideas and opportunities for innovation and imaginative/redemptive entrepreneurship through venture investments, a thought & conversation studio, and a venture lab.
He serves as a director, trustee, or advisor of several institutions and companies including Warner Pacific University, EDGE Mentoring, Telemachus, Fields Park Trust, Sagamore Institute, T&H Investments, Discovering Broadway, Windrider Institute, Sinapis, Chatham Ventures, and Lost Valley Ranch.
Insights & Inspirations 2:02 North End Project + “And it’s interesting to think about it in terms of development, but it spurred a thought that we had about what could we do that would really be a blessing to the community.” * 6:20 Needs before returns + “You started with a need and it wasn’t a return. I mean, what does it mean to start with needs and not returns?” * 10:05 Investment strategy + “Well, in the broadest sense, one of the things that I was particularly after, we were particularly after was enabling charitable based capital, particularly donor advised funds to be put to work. And I read a statistic not that long ago now, but the average donor advised fund returns 4.2%. And if you think about not what you give out of it, that’s one thing, but there’s a corpus often. And the question is, is that corpus being managed in an active way to be useful in your local community?” * 13:40 Gifting investors + “…we wanted to create an experience that allowed people to see the reality of what was happening and that this would continue, but that as an investor, you’re not just an investor. If I could be so bold, I would call the investors as kind of investor residents.” * 15:02 Tennant vs Business resident + “We don’t have tenants as you would normally think about it in the commercial space. We have what we’ve called business residents.” * 20:16 Community hope + “The difference in relational and transactional is such a big thing. And it’s important that, you and I talked about something that really struck me and it’s how some communities lose hope. I mean, and they get to the place that there’s hopelessness and it’s so unpleasant being there that their town has got so much deferred maintenance and so little care and love, and they’ve tried so many bake sales and so many historic commission, that they’ve tried all these things and it just doesn’t seem to work. That is a start. And I thought it was interesting we said it finally. They only see it as a liability instead of an asset.” * 26:50 Brainstorming, Planning, Promise + “…it’s been such a healing thing because in provisional, I can say anything. I can dream anything. And when we get to plan, we say we want to do this. We don’t have all the numbers. We are not sure how in the world we’re going to do. Honestly, we need fishes and loaves and miracles, but we want to do it.” * 28:10 Venture lab + “Part of my world within Monon Capital, we have one of the elements is a venture lab, and it really is the place where we dream and think about interesting problems. So, one of which is North End and the structure we used is Field Spark Trust, and it’s a supporting organization of NCF who’s been a terrific partner in helping us work through the complexities of all the things you have to do if you’re going to begin to blend charitable and private capital together and all that.” * 32:25 Diffused hospitality, scattered/horizontal hotels + “And what we believe is the future of restoring broken downtowns that are dead is a diffuse hospitality, overnight stay, iconic food and beverage and celebratory events. If you can build that, and the reason we think this is because it’s one way that the existing world of finance understands how to roll operational incomes up into real estate projects.” * 38:26 Divine beauty + “So, it speaks to something in them that say, there has to be something more to this than what I’m simply experiencing. So, we create beauty. We’re doing this, and you can see my background. One of the things that I have as a fundamental premise is that I intentionally put myself in the pathway of beauty everyday.” * 43:38 Love, creativity, faith + “I’ll give you a couple examples here that I really don’t care for the phrase, “human resources”. I think human is a fabulous noun and I think it’s a terrible adjective. Because what it does is it equates people with financial resources, natural resources, all kinds of inanimate objects. They have value and they should be cared for.” Information & Links North End – website * Doug Wilson – about
Unlocking Underutilized Church Land for the Common Good, with special guest Bo Wright and Thomas DoughertyTy has an insightful conversation with Bo Wright and Thomas Dougherty about the intersection of Urban Design and Church Land Use.
Bo received his bachelors in Theological Studies from New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary. As he stepped into his career he began to develop an interest in the relationship between urban design, human scale, and how churches engage with their neighborhoods. This interest led him down a path of studying public policy, and ultimately towards his work in the New Urbanism Movement at Strong Towns. Following his work at Strong Towns, he began working as the Executive Director of Kennett Collaborative. He has recently transitioned out of Kennett Collaborative to continue his work as an aspiring developer.
After growing up on a small farm along the Ohio River, Thomas received his Masters of Architecture in 2018, followed by a Masters of Architectural Design and Urbanism in 2019. Thomas now lives in West Chester, Pa where he continues to develop work towards “innerblock urbanism,” a model for elderly living derived from the “godshuis development” in Europe, and other human-scaled works in the urban design sphere.
Insights & Inspirations “The Great Opportunity Document is estimating that over 40 million young people who are raised in Christian homes could walk away from the church by 2050” Ty Maloney * “80% of America is single family homes.” – Bo Wright * “Currently almost the entire country is zoned single use for all the land that we have. So, churches are going to fall into a category in which they can build and utilize their church, they can park their church, they can probably put in some rectory, maybe they can have a school building, a couple other affiliated things. But they can’t buy rights to build housing units and they’re not going to be able to do that on their land.” – Thomas Dougherty * “when any institution, like churches have a vision for how to utilize their property, it opens resources. And that’s the first step is what is that vision?…the first step is to get people excited with the vision and then it’s, “Okay, how do we do this?” And I think there’s a lot of different ways that churches could go about that.” – Bo Wright * “developers today …have a bad rap for … a lot of what we’ve built in the past 50 years has not been thoughtful and has not contributed to the common good. But there are a lot of developers out there that want to do that, that want to be contributing to the common good and the good of their city.” – Bo Wright * “What can you do for your city that last 50 years and has an impact and no one can undo it?” That’s the way churches should be thinking about, especially if they own their land. That’s the way they should be thinking about their neighborhood and their city is, “What can we do with the assets, the land that we have that we’re stewards of it that benefits this community for the next 50 years and no one can undo it?” – Bo Wright * “we’re going to build and develop for love’s sake” – Ty maloney * “ if we’re shaping the world… then we need to ask for more than what bricks can naturally give us…. We have to design and build places that reflect partly that spiritual nature of who we are.” – Thomas Dougherty * “What do I do if I have 20,000 square feet of this facility that we are only utilizing one day a week.” – Ty Maloney Information & Links InnerBlock * Video Series on the Godshuis Development * Strong Towns – website * Bo Wright – LinkedIn * Thomas Doughtery – LinkedIn
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