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Randy Alcorn is the founder and director of Eternal Perspective Ministries (EPM), a nonprofit organization dedicated to teaching biblical truth and drawing attention to the needy and how to help them. Randy is also a New York Times bestselling author. He has written over 55 books including Courageous… Heaven… and The Treasure Principle. His books have been translated into over 70 languages and have sold over 11 million copies. Prior to launching EPM, Randy co-pastored for fourteen years Good Shepherd Community Church in Oregon. He is a well recognized voice in the faith driven investing community and today is sharing more about the treasure principle and what it means to invest in eternity.

Episode Transcript

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Randy Alcorn: In fact, I’m commending you to store up treasures for yourself, that even sounds selfish, but obviously Jesus isn’t quite us to be selfish, but it is in our own self-interest. But the bottom line of what he’s saying is you can’t take it with you. And that’s why it’s foolish to store up your treasures on Earth because either they’re going to leave you or you’re going to leave them. It’s not a permanent relationship, right? You can’t take it with you, but you can send it on ahead. And that’s what he’s saying by giving it away now, investing it in God’s kingdom. We can invest in eternity and make a permanent and lasting difference in people’s lives. That’s what’s so transformative about the message.

William Norvell: Welcome back. This is a special episode. This is a crossover episode, Faith Driven Entrepreneur and Faith Driven Investor, because honestly, we just feel that our guest today, Randy Alcorn, has a message that our whole audience should hear. It’s a message of generosity as a message of how to discern that with God, and we just think that our entire tribe needs to learn about this needs to try to discern what that means for themselves and how that could potentially impact their investing and or their business and or their lives and or their conversation with their neighbor tonight, whatever that may be. We are excited to bring this to you and sing out this special episode we are going to bring. Justin Forman, the president of faith driven movements out from behind the scenes because as we were talking before, he just had an amazing story of how Randy’s message has impacted him and his family. And I want to turn it over to him to introduce Randy through his story of how picking up this book at an airport and a plane flight changed the way he thought about generosity and how it’s transcended into his whole family. So just over to you now.

Justin Forman: Thanks, William. You know, it’s fun, especially we’ve been talking a lot about books and just the power of story. A lot of that recently, as we’ve been talking about the Faith Driven Entrepreneur book and just releasing that. But I’m just reminded, you know, on a special day like today, just the power that a book can have, how catalytic those moments can be. And you know, I can’t remember where I was flying from, but I can remember that by the time that I had gotten off a flight and landed in Dallas, then a book and really kind of changed the way that I view things. And there’s many things I’ve come to love about this book. But one of those was the brevity of it. It was a package, and it was, I think, almost like designed with that in mind that you can hit people with a concept so short, so sweet, so simple, so profound that you can live out. And it was a friend that had given me treasure principal years ago, and I picked that up and it just forever viewed as a young 20 30 something they just like how life is a gift and how we have to steward it. And what does it look like to kind of start out with the end in mind? And it just, you know, it’s one of those things that books have the power to unlock some of the things that once you see it, you can’t unsee it and it changes your perspective of things. And, you know, fast forward years later. You know, Randy and I have had the chance to be able to work together through a couple of different things. We did a video project kind of redoing the video project and retelling kind of a newer version of the story of treasure principal. And it was fun. Unbeknownst to me, last Christmas, my brother in law had been so deeply impacted by the book and made an impact on him that he surprised our 12 year old son, Tristan with that for Christmas. And so here we were in front of family, and we just kind of a fun moment to see a book that is so transformed me and transformed our family to be given that to my son. And that was a note, an challenge that really said, Man, if you can spend the time marinate on this book, go through it, finish it. You know, I’d love to take you out to dinner and talk more about it and to see that challenge that was issue there for my son to think about something that really transcends, you know, generations. There are books that do that, and this is certainly one of those. And that’s why. And to your point, William, that we just wanted this to be a message that reaches everybody. Entrepreneur and investor, like we have been entrusted with things to steward. And gosh, we just want to make sure that we do that faithfully. So with that man, it’s a treat and it’s a gift to have Randy with us. So Randy, welcome to the podcast.

Randy Alcorn: Thanks. It’s just so great to be with you guys. And thanks for that story, Justin. That was just great to hear about the treasure principal, its impact on your life and your family. That that’s why you write stuff. That’s why I write stuff in the prayer that it’s going to change people’s lives and impact them for eternity and impacting them in such a way that they’re impacting others. So that really only when we’re with the Lord are we going to hear all these great stories for people touched by the Holy Spirit through the things that we have done, not just the big things, but the small things.

Justin Forman: And that’s great. Hey, well, it really did it for us. You know, one of the things we love to do with our guests before we get maybe into the book and some of the topics and applications they’re given the fly flyover. Tell us a little bit about your story. Who are you, where you come from and how God’s led you to where you are today?

Randy Alcorn: Yeah. I live in Gresham, Oregon, a suburb of Portland. Portland, Oregon, is the world capital of weirdness. Yeah, but we love it. It’s a mission field, and we’re here to make a difference, and we know that it’s got purpose for it. I grew up right in this area and an unbelieving home. My dad was a tavern owner and had an amusement machine business that included the old pinball machines and taverns, and also he had cigaret machines and he had pool tables and shuffle boards and all of those kinds of things. So my house was actually very popular for kids because my dad would rotate his. Scenes from the different taverns and then all the access ones were in our house and our basement, so that was fun growing up having access to all those things, but it wasn’t fun and growing up in an unbelieving home, there just were, you know, obviously a lack of perspective. God was not talked about, thought about mentioned. But when I was in high school, I went to a youth group at a church and got involved, heard the gospel for the first time when I was 15 years old, a sophomore in high school, I came to faith in Christ and God radically changed my life and had the joy of living my mom to Christ a couple of years later and baptizing her. My desire at first know when I found out about missionaries and what they did, and I read Torture for Christ by Richard Worm brand and God smuggler by brother Andrew and Corey Tin booms the hiding place. All those things then that tells you the era it was back in in the seventies. I’m sixty seven years old now, so I guess that means I’ve known the Lord for fifty two years, but he grabbed hold of me in ways I cannot even begin to describe. I really came to the Lord. Reading Scripture, you know, when I jumped in and started reading Genesis, you know, people talk about how they get to Leviticus and get confused. Well, I didn’t have to get to Leviticus. None of it really made sense to me at first. But then when I skip forward to the gospels and are reading about Jesus, it had the ring of truth. God miraculously transformed my life and never been the same since we went to Bible College Seminary thought I was going to become a missionary at one point, but we decided to help plan a church and then became pastor of that church for 14 years and moved on from that to start a ministry called Internal Perspective Ministries. And that’s what I’ve been doing ever since.

Darryl Heald: Thanks, Randi, for sharing. It’s great to be here with you. Usually, you and I only cross paths during conferences.

Randy Alcorn: Right, exactly. It’s been a long time.

Darryl Heald: I also was deeply impacted when my father in law gave me a book at Christmas called Money, Possessions and Eternity, and I had no intention of reading it because I thought, what? What a lousy. Yes, how about how about a new driver or shotgun or something else like that?

Randy Alcorn: And could we could we use that endorsement on the back cover?

Darryl Heald: What a

Randy Alcorn: lousy gift.

Darryl Heald: I mean, I was not very grateful. So I mean, I needed this book really bad. And you know, it was just in God’s providence. So I was you young commercial real estate guy there in Atlanta. And I can’t tell you why I found the book and picked up the book. And that one’s a lot longer than the treasure principal, right? But it was, you know, we talked about a journey of generosity, and that’s what set me. I mean, you were my teacher and mentor in that, you know, it just it changed my life. And I don’t know if you remember when David Wills and I were trying to get the rights to take that as an excerpt. And then, you know, you finally came out with the treasure principle and so many stories on that. But can you give us a little context? Is that book in a lot of ways? I think there was a lot of ways kind of, you know, a huge kind of breakout book and a brainy book for you where I mean, you know, all over the world now, as you know, just the generosity messenger and the insight you give in there. Can you give us a little perspective of like how broad that message is gone? Number of books and things like that?

Randy Alcorn: Yeah, it is really been phenomenal and totally surprising. I think when the publisher asked me to write it, it was going to be the second book in a series of really small books, and they were kind of going to market them together. Well, the first book in the series was called The Prayer of Jabez. And so they really weren’t connected with each other, and there were good things about that book and perhaps things I didn’t feel is good about. But they decided to kind of separate what was called the life change series out into another one so that my book would be the lead book of that, largely because the project was a world onto its own. And, you know, eventually it had all the offshoots like the prayer of Jabez for left handed waffle makers and, you know, whatever. I mean, it was everything. And so here I was with this book called The Treasure Principal. But it turned out great because even though nobody would have predicted it, it’s like, Oh, wow, what book can we come out with that will sell a million copies? It’s actually sold over two million copies now. But how can we really capture people? Oh, let’s get them a book that tells them they should be giving away their money so people have to. And money on a book that tells you to give away your money, that’s just not going to go anywhere. So at the time, giving books and there were very, very few of them simply were not selling. They weren’t getting into people’s hearts and lives. I mean, individually, they were sure, you know, biography of ERG Latino and other great things like that. And then people would talk about giving along the way. But this was a book that focused on giving, and it was remarkable. And to this day, every week, I think I just read one. Yesterday we get these emails, these posts, these people using extracts from treasure principal people talking about how treasure principle changed their lives. People saying, by God’s grace, after reading this book, we liquidated our unnecessary assets and we had a lot that were unnecessary. I mean, we didn’t. This isn’t a vow poverty thing. I mean, most people still own possessions and live in houses, and probably most people are middle class people, but they’re just divesting themselves of treasures on Earth in order to invest treasures in heaven. And that’s what Jesus said. Don’t store treasures on Earth stored for of treasures in heaven. And how do you do that? Well, you do that through giving, and it’s been a joy giving message. That’s what I just love. I mean, not duty driven nearly as much as just joy and happiness driven. Jesus said, You know, it is more happy making it to give than to receive. That word is translated blessed. But what it means is it is more happy giving to give than to receive.

William Norvell: Oh, that’s so good. And I mean, I want to give you a chance. I think you might have just done it, but you know, in a sentence or two, right? You know, what is the treasure principle? Give us a couple of seconds on just kind of what is the key thesis?

Randy Alcorn: I think what Jesus was saying when he said, Don’t starve your child’s treasures on Earth. We’re moth and dust. Corrupt thieves can steal. But store officials, churches in heaven where he treasures their heart will be. Also, what he was saying is when it comes to treasures. They’re not bad. In fact, they’re good and it’s OK to store up treasures for yourself. In fact, I’m commending you to store up treasures for yourself. That even sounds selfish. But obviously, Jesus isn’t calling us to be selfish, but it is in our own self-interest. But the bottom line of what he’s saying is you can’t take it with you. And that’s why it’s foolish to stir up your treasures on Earth. Because either they’re going to leave you or you’re going to leave them. It’s not a permanent relationship, right? With our treasures on Earth. You can’t take it with you, but you can send it on ahead. And that’s what he’s saying by giving it away now, investing it in God’s kingdom. And it’s not just our material treasures and our money, but it’s true of our time. It’s true of our gifting, you know, our talents that God has given us. We can invest those in eternity and make a permanent and lasting difference in people’s lives. That’s what’s so transformative about the message.

William Norvell: Well, that is that is and I’m reading the book too, and it changed a lot. We did a group study on it and just changed a lot. And as you, as you say, some of the quotes as I’ve almost forgotten that that’s where I got that quote, right? It’s like, Oh yeah, that’s where I got that understanding. I totally forgot that it was so good. I was wondering, would you mind walk it through? How have you seen this play out in your own life? So you’ve mentioned a couple of different categories right time, talent, treasure. Get a little practical with us. You know, when when this message was given to you by God, how did this transform the way you’ve built eternal perspective ministries, how you spend your time, maybe how you pray? I don’t even know because you’re the expert. I’m not. I’m just curious from a practical view, how does your own life look different after you receive this message from God?

Randy Alcorn: Well, it’s interesting because I wrote several books and then I felt really Lord of the Lord, too, when I was still Pastor Young Pastor to do a sermon series related to money and possessions, not just the subject of giving, but including that. And so I thought, I don’t know how many weeks this is going to be. It’s going to be a four week series, a six week series, an eight week series. Well, so I started doing my research and then it was just so compelling. And I’m looking at all these passages and I’ve seen all these things that God says in his word about money and possessions and the connection to the spiritual life. Even where Jesus says, Where your treasure is there, your heart will be also. And I began to see in my own life and God had certainly led me into giving. I was sending a lot of money overseas, giving to my church, doing ministry related things. So giving was a big part of my life. But it was not so much. Based on scripture telling me to give, it was just the overflow of the Christian life. But when I’m looking at all these pastors related to money and possessions, stewardship, God’s ownership, I was stunned and I realized that I could preach two years worth of messages and just scratch the surface. And so the idea of the sermon series was God’s word overflows. I mean, God is so interested in this subject and expects us to be interested in it. And there have been different estimates. But if you take all of the stewardship parables, easily 15 percent of everything Jesus had to say related directly to money and possessions more than he said about heaven and hell. Not that the subjects more important than heaven and hell, of course, were more consequential, but it is really important. Or he wouldn’t invest all that time in it. So that’s what really caused me to turn that into a book, which was money possessions of eternity and that launched me into this area of giving. But to your question, what really was transformative in terms of our actual life was that it wasn’t long after the book came out. The original book, it’s been revised and updated sense, but came out in 1989 and I was still a pastor. But what happened later that year was I felt less of the law to get involved in peaceful, nonviolent civil disobedience at abortion clinics to save the lives of children just simply standing there blocking arms, but speaking up for those who could not speak for themselves. Well, as I said, I mean, I live here in Oregon and there were parts of the country, including Dallas and Wichita and Atlanta and places in the Bible Belt or Midwest. That’s its own kind of Bible belt where you could do that, and it could be fairly respectable in Portland, Oregon. It was not. The level of hostility was off the charts. So what happened was as a result of that, I had to resign as a pastor because they were coming to garnish my wages because of civil suits against me and others. And so one of those ended up being for eight point two million dollars, the largest civil suit in history, successful for a peaceful, nonviolent protest. And the result of that was I had to leave the church and I could only make minimum wage because the abortion clinics would garnish my wages, anything above minimum wage. So our lifestyle changed now. Fortunately, God had taught us already. We’re giving a large percentage of my book royalties away. I was making a good wage is a pastor, but all of a sudden I was making minimum wage. And so we looked at things and we irrevocably gave away the royalties from all my books. So now I’m actually looking at the pages of money, possessions and eternity, which I finish writing about one year before I could just make minimum wage and talking about God owns it all. And depending on God for everything. And that’s exactly what we were doing. That’s when my life really changed, which was ironically, after writing that book.

Darryl Heald: Well, that’s Randy. Thanks. That’s such a such a powerful story. And you know, one of the things that I think had such an impact on me is we think about the money and possessions part, and that’s really tangible. But this whole and eternity, right? The context of that. And of course, you know, you’ve had these famous books on heaven as well. But could you talk a little bit more just in terms of like where, you know, I think a lot of people listening to this right where we’re real practical, tactical, strategic, we understand the financial realm, right? We’re scaling businesses, we’re investing and all. But let’s talk about the eternity piece here, particularly in light of like from a relational standpoint, a family standpoint, things like that. What does that begin to look like in your own life?

Randy Alcorn: Yeah, know. I think of my family and the impact on my family, and I’ve told a story before about how when my daughters came out and we thought they should witness one time during the civil disobedience days and their dad, you know, getting arrested for speaking up for those who could not speak for themselves and the financial implications it had for a family. And I remember somebody saying to me, So do you realize the impact what you’re doing is having on your kids, how they’re going to be deprived, you having to make minimum wage and then having to see their dad go to jail? And I said, well, thank you for thinking of my kids, because, no, I really wasn’t thinking of them at all. No, but I said, you know, I hope that it will change them forever. That the material things now cannot be a huge part of our lives. God will continue to provide A. good and beautiful and wonderful ways, and our kids were not deprived. But the attitudes and actions I saw in my kids when they couldn’t have everything else that a lot of their friends could have. They couldn’t usually go the places and do the things others were doing. Though God provided us some wonderful trips and vacations and different mission trips around the world, different things that we did together, it was wonderful. But when my daughter Angela was in high school, she and I were out on a bike ride. She’s a junior in high school and we went down this new development and we saw a house that was the most beautiful house we’d ever seen in the area where we lived. And at the time, we looked at it and it was huge. It had this beautiful view of Mt. Hood. It was just landscaped beautifully, but it was still for sale. I’m in my yard and the for sale sign was $500000. Now I get it. Some people live in Southern California in different parts of the country where, you know, that’s not an impressive figure. Where I live, especially back in the 90s when this happened, there were no houses around that were selling for half a million dollars. I mean, you couldn’t find one. At least I’d never seen one. And so this is like the most beautiful house we’ve ever seen. And Angie was just great. Dad is just so gorgeous. And then all of a sudden it dawned on me, you know, and I said to her, And do you, do you know that if instead of giving away the royalties just from the last year, the royalties from my books, if we had kept them, we could have paid cash for this house? No kidding. And she’s got this big smile on her face. Well, she knew what we did with the money. She knew all the things. We talked to our kids about, which I, by the way, would really recommend. Sometimes parents are doing giving and they’re not talking to their kids and they’re not involving their kids. And I’d say, get your kids involved, help them even make decisions about, you know, where it goes. And all of that gives them ownership so that they have vested interests in eternity. But anyway, continuing with Angela, so I said that to her, and she’s just now kidding. And then I said, What age do you wish we would have kept the royalties? And we still could. I mean, we could get them back. We’d given them away, yes. But by that time, we could have taken them back. But but you wish we would and would buy this house or a house like that. And she looks at me and she laughs, genuinely. She just laughs and she said, Dad, he’s just a house. And I’m telling you. Tears came to my eyes because I thought people were worried about my daughters being deprived. Well, what they got instead of. They’re never going to get a huge inheritance, but they are. I hope they have received a heritage. And so that’s where it gets really personal for me.

William Norvell: Well, that’s good. That’s good. All right. I just keep wrestling. I’ve read the book and my wrestle, is this sometimes Randy when I go, OK, I get it. You know, there’s other things in the Bible where you go, OK, okay. Like, I’m not going to debate the theological points with you, right? Like this is clear, right? This is not debatable from that perspective, but how do our listeners get our head around treasure and have it? Right. And of course, that’s better. Like, obviously, that’s better, right? But two part question, right? So how do I one get my head around it, maybe theologically? And then two, you know, are there practical ways to maybe get around my own stubbornness? And you know, I’ve heard you talk about a financial finish line, right? Are there practical ways say, Hey, you know what? You are greedy and stubborn. And so here’s some practical tips to get around that.

Randy Alcorn: Well, I think one way to think about it is a lot of people think wrongly about giving where they think, OK, all right. I know it’s a good thing because they know people are needy here. I know a lot of things need to be accomplished for God’s kingdom in the world, so I’ll make the sacrifice and do the giving. And I realize God has given me a lot and so I can. Yeah, I can give some of the weight, but it’s like a begrudging. Even people who talk about tithing as if tithing were the ultimate like tithing is the training wheels of giving. It’s like the wading pool or, you know, is the end of the swimming pool where you get in. But then when you learn how to really swim, you go into the deeper water. Well, that’s how it is with tithing. So to me, the people are held back and they think that tithing is the most radical kind of giving that a person could do. Well, of course, that’s just that’s just 10 percent. And what God has provided for us is just way, way beyond that. But I think the mistake that people sometimes make is thinking of their giving as divesting. Just I’m giving it away and I’ll never see anything from it. But really, it’s investing and especially when you make wise giving choices and it’s truly making a difference in people’s lives for eternity. And so when Jesus said, you’re storing up treasures for yourself in heaven and Luke, 12, there’s a parallel passage where he says that you sell your possessions, give to the poor, and then God will give you moneybags in heaven. Or sometimes it’s translated money belts in heaven. So in other words, it’s the transfer of wealth to another location. You could say it’s a different kind of wealth, but it’s using actual material wealth as the basis for creating wealth and have it now. We don’t know exactly what that wealth will look like. We know that often it has to do with eternal rewards of ruling in God’s Kingdom of leadership in God’s Kingdom, a lot of people are thinking, Well, I don’t want to rule, I just want to go around and have fun or whatever. Well, it’s not ruling like in this era of under the fall of corrupt government or whatever. It’s going to be magnificent hearts filled with will serve at hearts of people serving the Lord in his kingdom. You’ve been faithful a little. I will put you over much. I’ll put you over five cities, I’ll put you over 10 cities. I’ve written a big book called Heaven and several other books on that subject. And I think part of what’s wrong is when we think of Jesus saying, Sorry, I’ve churches in heaven. When we think of heaven, we don’t have a biblical view of heaven. The biblical view of heaven is life forever on a resurrected earth, living and resurrected bodies with resurrected fellow believers with the resurrected Jesus in a new earth of resurrected culture and resurrected nature and resurrected animals. And it’s it’s, you know, don’t have time to develop all that and give the scriptural basis. But I’ve written whole books about it, and I’m telling you once you see heaven in that light, then when you think about investing and eternal rewards and investing in eternity and experiencing forever, the result of your giving way of your life and your time and your resources in this life, you think of that being something you will enjoy and others will enjoy forever, no matter what form that takes. That is an amazing, paradigm shifting thing. And ironically, it isn’t just that we OK. Yeah, we have to make all these sacrifices in this life. And you know, that’s that’s the pitch, you know, but at least it’ll pay off in eternity. No, it pays off in this life also, because then we have the joy of seeing where that money goes. I’ve had people say to me, or your books have sold over 11 million copies, it’s almost 12 million now. Do you realize what you could do if you had kept the royalties from those books? You realize the kind of house you live in, the kind of cars you could drive, the kinds of trips you could go on. And God has allowed us to go on some magnificent trips anyway, from speaking and missions, related trips and just all. All these kinds of things. But, you know, my response is always, well, yeah, there’s a lot we could have done with that money, but nothing that would have brought us as much joy as what we did with it in terms of giving them and what we are still doing with it in terms of giving it away. That is what is transformative to experience by the grace of God, not only change in other people’s lives as a result of our giving, but in our lives. And let me just add this my my wife has stage four cancer in the lymph nodes. It’s been a battle for four years. We had some test results recently that weren’t good. We pray for her healing each and every day, complete healing. God so far has not chosen to answer that. No, he may still and will praise him if he did, but will also praise him if he doesn’t choose to do that because the ball’s in his court. But I’m telling you to see my wife in the world daily and talking about heaven and looking forward to being with Jesus and trusting him fully. I believe that our lives and our hearts and our attitudes would have been very different if we had not, by God’s grace, learned the secret of joyful giving decades ago.

Darryl Heald: Well, thanks, Randy, that’s that’s super powerful, and we’re sorry that you know, that circumstances as it is and just it’s really amazing just to hear, though, the grace surrounding you with you and Nancy and your family despite the difficult circumstances. But you’re right, the hope of glory, right, is the driver. But so one of the things I think is really interesting. You just brought up this tension between how much do we keep, how much do we spend ahead, you know, treasure in heaven. Right. But then so a lot of people in our audience, right, are entrepreneurs, starting businesses, building businesses, investors who have capital goods given the ability to create wealth. So how do I how do I not have the begrudging attitude you’re talking about? And then at once, it’s the freedom to say this is how God created me and how do I begin to manage that tension or find a balance with, you know, using the worldly wealth right now to be a creator, to be a, you know, investor and things like that. So can I have the freedom to do that?

Randy Alcorn: You know, I think the answer is yes in a qualified way because I’ve had these conversations and heard that question, of course, many times from people, because it’s a very good question. I think the one thing we need to be careful not to do, and I’ve seen many people who have done this, and I think you have to where they say to themselves, OK, I’m going to make a ton of money and one day I’m going to give a lot of it away. Jesus did not say Where you want your treasure to eventually be there, your heart will be also. He said, where your treasure is, where you put it now is where your heart is going to be. So a lot of the people who have good intentions with that just keep accumulating and keep accumulating, and there’s no end to accumulation. There is no end. And so I think what has to be done is you have to discipline yourself to say, I am going to give generously now. I am not going to wait to give generously. Now, it doesn’t necessarily mean I will give away 90 percent of my income when I’m early on starting a business. For a lot of people, that just probably wouldn’t work with the starting the business thing, but I still will be very generous and depend on how much God is entrusted to me. Maybe I’ll give 20 percent, maybe 40 percent, 50 percent of whatever figure it is, and it all depends on the resources God has entrusted you and how it works. And there’s no biblical formula and there’s no magical percentage. I would never, ever under any circumstances go less than 10 percent because I just can’t imagine a New Testament believer changed by the grace of Jesus, who is unwilling to do the minimum that was required of the poorest Israelite. That makes no sense to me whatsoever. But the point is, yeah, there’s freedom. But then I would say not air on the side of because it’s not airing at all generous giving, but it’s just like, stretch yourself with the giving and ask God to bless. And you may find that of course, you’ll never know in this life because you can’t do it both ways. But I think in many cases, people just for their lives into the building of this business. They lose the business. The business, you know, just falls apart or the economy changes. They take the money that they made and that they invested in things out there and the investments went sour or they became very, very wealthy. And then they lost their families because their priorities weren’t right because their hearts weren’t right. So if you want your heart to be in the right place where your treasure is there, your heart will be. Also, put your treasure now into God’s kingdom, so your heart will be in God’s kingdom. Give your treasure to Jesus. Now see your heart will be with Jesus. That doesn’t mean give it all away. There are times where Jesus did say, Give it all away. OK, but isn’t. Do that for all of us. But whatever it is, do enough of it. Now that your heart is going there, then maybe not only might God bless you and your business, but your heart might be in such a place that when more money comes in, then you’re giving more and more. But if you’re always waiting for that day to come, when you’re going to become a giver that day in all likelihood will never come. And you will regret one day having really wasted your life with and your resources that were really God’s all along. Because he owns it all. When you could have invested in turn to be

William Norvell: so good and so here you tell that story. I guess I’ve heard a lot of people tell the story. You know, I’ve never heard someone say yes to the answer of Do I wish I have kept it? I’ve heard a lot of generous people. I don’t think I’ve ever heard one person say, You know what? Actually, yes, I wish we had not given that money away. And right, that’s staggering. It just hit me as you were talking. I’ve never heard someone say the other answer to that. And for someone who’s wrestling with that, for my wife and I just went through what a Darrell’s program’s journey of generosity and we were wrestling with what that should look like in our life. Fred is just such a moment to remember. I’ve I’ve never met someone who said we gave away too much. We made a mistake.

Randy Alcorn: Yeah. And I don’t think at the Jesuit seat of Christ, it’s just hard for me to imagine. Well, you know, I’m going to reward you for this and that, and I commend you for this and that, and he is going to do that. But this I have against you, as you said to the Rev.. Churches and Rev.. I have this against you, but this I have against you. You gave away too much to feed hungry children and get clean water to people and get the Bible translated into their heart language and to help persecuted Christians all over the world and to reach people with the gospel in the far corners of the world. You really shouldn’t have done that. I mean, I’m trying to imagine at the generosity of Christ him ever saying that, yes, somebody could say, Well, there’s probably a case where a guy made his family go hungry so that he could give all that money away. Well, God knows if there is such a person. And there probably is somewhere. But I would say that’s a rare situation, and I’ve had people say to me, we got to take care of our kids and living in a culture where even middle class is exorbitantly wealthy by global standards and historic standards, and people are saying, Well, we got to take care of our kids. Will you provide for your kids giving them food to eat and clothes to wear and a place to live versus just overindulging your kids constantly so they have the best of everything, which will not ultimately be character building for them?

William Norvell: It’s so good. I realize you’re one of the generous giving videos with Tim Keller to thinking about our heart boss. You’re right. He joked. You know, if you don’t know Tim as a pastor in New York and says, Yeah, I’ve been a pastor for 35 or 40 years, right? Said, You know, I’ve I’ve never had one congregant come to me and say, You know what? I struggle with the sin of greed. I think I’m too greedy. There’s just something about our heart posture that doesn’t let us go there. We just don’t assume we are right.

Randy Alcorn: Exactly. And I think that’s the nature of me. We talk about blind spots like, What are your blind spots? Well, I don’t know, because they’re blind spots, right? And that I think with greed, materialism, greed is idolatry. We’re told it’s putting something before God. It’s worshiping the material, it’s worshiping money and we do it and we do it a lot. And first, Timothy, six and other passages as well just really speak against, you know, the love of money and its impact on our lives and telling us to be rich in good deeds to give it away, laying up for ourselves treasures as a firm foundation for the coming age. The coming age is life forever on the new Earth. We got to change that perspective and when we do and we can’t just do it, you know you can’t. How do you make yourself less greedy? How do you make yourself generous? Well, this is only one way to give it away. There’s only one way to break the back of materialism that’s giving a lot away because when we give it away, we prove to ourselves that we don’t have to have it to live on. And we proved to ourselves, it’s not our God. And that’s what you do. So you don’t wait until you feel like giving in to give you give. But the more you give, the more joy you find in it. And pretty soon, giving is so wrapped up in your life you don’t even think of it as a sacrifice. Other people look on, they say, Wow, you’re kidding. You’re giving that all away. And often they don’t know. In my case, they don’t know what we give from our own personal income, from what the ministry pays us. But they know all the royalties are given away. But I don’t even think of it. I mean, I only think of it as privilege and joy and. And the same thing with my family that our kids are not going around hanging their heads because they’re not going inherit all this money or these great houses and lands or whatever. And this is where the transformation comes in. You only overcome greed through giving more and more. If you keep it, you’ll just stay greedy. In fact, when I think of the word miser, what English word is derivative of it is connected with it miserable. The miser is miserable. Think of Scrooge. Do you want to be like Scrooge? I mean, who wants to be very wealthy but utterly miserable until the transformation takes place? And Charles Dickens, when he writes that I go back and I reread that story once in a while, a Christmas Carol. And what happens to Ebony’s Your Scrooge in that strange story with the three ghosts of Christmas? And all of that is the equivalent of a conversion story. It is like coming to Jesus, and everything looks different now, and life is full of joy as you give away what you always used to keep and made you miserable.

William Norvell: So again, coming up on the Christmas season, I’m going to watch that with the new light now and the new vision. So as we come to a close, had one final question. I don’t know if we got exactly to it. Could you explain the concept of a financial finish line and how you’ve developed that and how our audience could think about that specific concept?

Randy Alcorn: Yeah, some people become highly specific with the financial finish line idea, and others take it more as not a clear line, but something that they generally strive for. There’s obviously advantages to clarity where you say, All right, this is all I need. All I could use. Everything beyond that goes to God when I reach a certain amount. And obviously I’m not going to say an amount is going to differ with what people believe about it or I reach a certain amount. It’s like in my investment portfolio. Do I need to keep pouring money into it so that there will just be way more than I could ever possibly use? Or do I need to give it away now and not leave it to my children after I die and hope they give it away because they may make more income than I do? I hope they do, but give it away now because God didn’t entrusted to my children, he entrusted it to me. So the finish line is don’t feel like you’re supposed to keep most of what comes in. If God is given you a lot of money, why has he entrusted it and given is the wrong word entrusted to your care? Well, it’s so you can make a difference for eternity. God will make us, it says in second Corinthians nine, he’ll make us rich in every way so that, OK, what’s he going to say now so that we can live in the nicest house and we can have multiple houses and the beach in the mountains and and everywhere? And so that we can go on the most exorbitant vacations and and have the most the greatest cars and multiple cars and all of that. OK. It doesn’t say that you will be made rich in every way so that you may be generous on every occasion. And Corinthians eight nine, I would just say, read and reread those two chapters and ask God to change your heart. And you see how grace it’s all about the grace of God manifested in people’s lives and showing through giving so that grace is the lightning. Grace is the lightning that comes from heaven, that comes from God. Giving is the thunder. That is our response to the lightning. You’re gonna have the lightning for the thunder to be there. And if you are not generously thunderously giving, it’s probably a sign that you’re not experiencing the lightning of God’s grace in your life the way you should and could. But the solution? Give more and ask God to give you a cheerful heart as you give. And he’ll answer that prayer. And when you see what’s being done with the giving that God has privileged you to do, you will get more pleasure and more excitement from that than you could get from any material possessions ever.

William Norvell: Unfortunately, we have to come. To an end, gosh, I feels like we could go on forever. We may have to beg you to come back and go on forever some time. But where we love to end is we love to invite our guests to share a little bit of where God’s word is working on them right now. And so that could be this morning. It could be a season in your life. It could be something that God’s brought new to you as you’ve been reflecting on a during a season. But just love to see how God’s word transcends our guest and our listeners and how it’s it’s always alive and working.

Randy Alcorn: Well, I’ll tell you right now that is both a hard and an easy question to answer. It’s easy to know what I should talk about because unless something changes and God intervenes and we still pray that he will. My wife is dying, and so we face that every day and still doing the treatments haven’t g iven up there. But we’ve said, you know, if it gets to a certain point and quality of life is diminishing, we’re going to take you off the chemo. And you know, all of that because we’re not hanging on desperately to life in this world. It’s better to die and be with Christ is greater by far to be with him. And my wife knows that and I know that. But obviously we want her to continue in this life. But I’ll tell you, when you look at that in terms of eternity, it moves your heart and it just the priorities becomes so, so clear. It’s kind of like what we’re saying before. It’s like people on their deathbed don’t say, you know, I wish I had spent more time at the office and less time with my kids. I wish I had spent less time with my wife. No, the regrets or the other way they wish they’d spend more time with their wife, more time with our kids, that maybe they hadn’t traveled around the world quite as much without their family. Or maybe they wouldn’t have spent so much time making money that you know, now they don’t have the relationships that they could have had if they had invested less in their business and more in their family or done their business in such a way that it didn’t have to sacrifice the family. OK, but for us, we are just thinking God, that by his grace, years ago he did. Some things in our life were far from perfect. And I don’t mean there’s no such thing as greed or materialism in our lives. You know, we live in a culture of it. It’s the air we breathe. But to the degree that we have been freed from that, that our hearts have been in heaven and for decades and cautions three says, set your eyes on things above where Jesus is seated at the right hand of God. By God’s grace, we have been able to do that and we have no regrets and Nancy’s talked about that not having regrets. So right now, I would say ironically, when we started our ministry now just over 30 years ago, I guess thirty one years ago, the verses that I chose that would be our theme for the ministry were in Second Corinthians four, where it says we look not at the things which are seen, but the things which are unseen to the things that are seen are temporary. But the things that are unseen are eternal. And that’s why we named it eternal perspective ministries. But it’s preceded by a verse that helps so much with understanding the meaning these light and momentary afflictions. Now think of Paul’s life, who’s talking and the afflictions that he went through are unbelievable. You’ll look at the list of those in Second Corinthians. It’s unbelievable. But these light and momentary afflictions are achieving in us and eternal weight of glory that far outweighs them all. Therefore, we look not at the things which are seen, but the things which are unseen to things which are unseen are eternal. OK, well, it’s not just we’ll have to put up with these afflictions, but then they’ll be gone forever because we’ll be in heaven will live forever on the new Earth. That’s true. But what it’s seen is these afflictions are achieving in us. God is doing a powerful work in our lives through our suffering. God has done the most powerful work I have ever seen in my wife’s life and my life through the suffering of these last four years. He is achieving eternal purposes. When I see her in the word. Every morning, I see her journaling, she reads to me from her journal. I turn some of the things that she’s written in her journal and ask her if we could use them as blogs on our EPM website. She wrote one recently called My Cancer is God’s Servant, based on a passage that says all things are God’s servants. He uses all things, and we know that all things will work together for good to them. That love God to them are called according to his purpose. And so not only in general, is that what we have been learning, but it has confirmed how grateful we are that God let us open our eyes years ago to the joy of giving. And we’ll sit and we’ll hear reports from different parts of the world and book that I hand out to somebody somewhere. And then somebody that had their car break down last week and took women or children to their house sent him some books and hearing the stories of lives being changed through the divine appointments God gives us and through the wealth he’s entrusted to us. I can say this we are not living with regrets. I mean, of course you always think should have done this better. Should’ve done that better. It’s not the mirage of perfection, but it’s thank you Lord, for helping us to discover these things and live these things out together as husband and wife for decades, even though it was costly and could no longer be a pastor, could no longer make a normal wage for, well, for 20 years. But God provided and God is gracious and kind and sovereign, and we trust him 100 percent.

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In 1976, 23-year-old David Weekley started his own home building company. Now more than 40 years later, the company has sold more than 100,000 homes, expanded to 19 cities across the nation, and won countless awards. In addition, David and his family launched a charitable Foundation to impact the world through both Christ-centered and secular organizations. David joins us to share the story of starting one of the most successful home building companies in the country and how their foundation is changing the lives of thousands around the world. 

Episode Transcript

Some listeners have found it helpful to have a transcription of the podcast. Transcription is done by an AI software. While technology is an incredible tool to automate this process, there will be misspellings and typos that might accompany it. Please keep that in mind as you work through it. The FDI movement is a volunteer-led movement, and if you’d like to contribute by editing future transcripts, please email us.

David Weekley: I would share to you, no one go where their passion and where they’re called, but number two, not to set aside their business acumen and learnings when they give so often times, especially if you come from a place of faith, you kind of it’s like you do business with your head and you give with your heart. And to me, you ought to combine those just like, you know, hopefully we’re living out our faith during the week and work. I think we’re supposed to give with the same business acumen that we use in earning money. Just amaze me that people spend 40 hours of 50 hours a week, whatever earning sums. And then they’ll give at the drop of a hat without any investigation, understanding, et cetera.

Henry Kaestner: Welcome back to the Faith Driven Entrepreneur podcast is a special edition to combine this with our sister property, Faith Driven Investor, because we’ve got a really special guests. And to be clear. Having done a couple of hundred of these, each one of the guests are very special. And each one of them has made a major impact, I think, on all of our lives. I think they’re great stories. I hope that you’ll agree with me today, though, is, shall we say, extra special. We’ve got David Weekley on the program and from time to time we’ll have an interview with somebody who’s made an impact on my life and has for quite some time. And David is one of those people. I met David first, I think, probably about 12 years ago, and I think back to the different entrepreneurial things that I’ve been involved with my life. And to some extent, they’ve been informed by some measure of naivete and hubris. And you know, David met me when I was in my thirties. I’m now in my early 50s and I found him to be nothing but incredibly encouraging. He must have been thinking, this guy’s crazy. He just did all these different things he wants to do. He’s never going to be able to do any of them. And I’m a busy, successful guy and I don’t have time for this. And yet he did, and he’s been one of those guys that has consistently been a source of encouragement to me, of guiding me and how to think about entrepreneurship, how to think about giving and giving. Well, Sir David, thank you very much for spending so much time with me over the years. Thank you very much for being on the program.

David Weekley: I’m excited about it.

Henry Kaestner: So we like to start every one of our episodes by hearing about the personal background of our speakers. And you’ve got a great one and you’ve got incredible testimony. And so we want to start there. And so maybe you can just start off. Of course, at the beginning, bring us through quickly about the type of home you grew up in, but then what made you decide to launch your own business?

David Weekley: Born and raised in Houston, Texas, fortunate with a mom and dad who were together for seven years and two older brothers. We were all eagle scouts and, you know, kind of a suburban. Leave it to beaver kind of life growing up. So I was blessed in that way. My two older brothers were a lot older, 12 and eight years older, and so I know look up to them and always wanted to live up to their expectations of my parents expectations. Found out Boy Scouts, if you work hard, you could get badges. And it was kind of fun and I was never the smartest guy in school or the best looking or the best athlete. So I found out the working hard is what worked for me. I married my high school sweetheart, three kids and grandkids, and started out and went to work for a homebuilder right out of school because I was supposed to go get a a business degree up east, go get an MBA, and they wanted me to get a couple of years of experience. And so I went to work for a homebuilder and that was great. But then I got fired after about a year and a half, and so my brother said, Well, why don’t we start our own company so at age 20 to start my own company? Fortunately, it was the late 70s in Houston, Texas, and lots of homes were being sold and so grew that company up to the mid 80s. By the time I was 30 made a lot of money, thought I was God’s gift to the homebuilding business president, Local Builders Association, speaking to three hundred people every month and driving my BMW seven Series and building a 10000 square foot house at Memorial. I mean, I was I pretty much had it made. And then, sure enough, market downturn in the mid 80s oil and gas business in Houston and American went from 30000 starts to 6000 starts. And most builders went broke and we didn’t because we went to a couple different markets and were able to get profitable before we went broke. But the key point about that part of the story is that I remember the worst thing about that downturn was the reality that I had millions of dollars flow through my hands and nothing good had come out of it. And so kind of made got a promise to give me one more boom and I won’t screw the next one up. And he came through in the late 80s and early 90s, and guess what, about 92 that they have open heart surgery for a birth defect. I went on a Christian retreat and remembered my promise and said, OK, from this point forward, I’m going to give half my time and half my money to charitable causes. So I had to hire a CEO. I went through a couple with and found the right one, and I had taken the company up to about 300 million and he’s taking up to three billion. So I was fortunate to find someone wonderful, talented I was that was a professional manager where I was an entrepreneur, so to speak. So since then, I’ve been given half my time as well. And so that’s something that a lot of folks can’t do, but it helps you gain some knowledge, I guess, of the last 30 years and half my time, a thousand hours a year. So that’s 30000 hours into philanthropy. And you know, we’ve all heard it takes 10000 hours to get to be an expert, but I’m still making. Mistakes regularly, so still working on it.

Henry Kaestner: Well, the best part of that is that you’re showing mistakes with people like me is I and a lot of other people try to be better on that giving that helps rather than hurts. If you think about Brian Stricker and his work and so you’ve been a big part of that. I actually want to go backwards just a little second there because you talked about running the business as an entrepreneur and running the business as a manager and going from $300 to three billion. And what the type of skills are, they’re required to take it to that level. So many of our audience are entrepreneurs and they have a vision and they’ve got the energy and they’re catalyzing things. And yet it’s almost agree that you get the vision sometimes that you’re not great at actually program witnessing things. Can you talk a little bit about how that happened and just some of the maybe some of the lessons that you’ve learned in not only your own experience, but having been around enough around other entrepreneurs about mistakes made and or just council, you would give a visionary entrepreneur that is starting to see success come about and yet is really wondering what it takes to really scale something.

David Weekley: I was fortunate in that my older brother, who was my partner, was also a great mentor. And so I was able to bounce things off him and he had good business judgment. And entrepreneurship is sometimes a pretty lonely business. And so my first thought is to get some mentors people who you trust and have faith in to count for you early on. Second thought would be, is that, you know, oftentimes if you got a private company in your private stockholder, you know, the story is never sell anybody else stock or never give to anybody else. You know, you can pay them well, but just don’t give up stock. And for me, I found just the opposite to be true when I brought on my CEO as a partner sold some stock to him. Now I’ve got 40 managers that are my partners, that own real stock. And it’s great having them go through ups and downs. You know, this last downturn for us in 2007 and eight was really tough. Sixteen hundred team members and we took it down to eight hundred to survive and having a bunch of folks on the board with me pull through those waters that were my partners, whose financial net worth was on the line, just like mine was, was very helpful.

Henry Kaestner: Yeah, OK. So that’s helpful. You know, we talked a lot about partnerships on the program and I’d be completely lost. I’ve had three different entrepreneurial endeavors, and each one of them were successful because of Divine Providence, but more pragmatically, having an incredible partner because otherwise being an entrepreneur is a really, really lonely journey. And so I did not know that part of your story. Tell us about the story of the idea of trading your principles for an Oldsmobile,

David Weekley: and that goes back to when I was fired. And what happened? I was running a community for another builder and we kind of had this compensation deal that was set up where it was. I got a percentage of the profits about halfway through the in June, they said. We want to change the deal and instead of you getting a percentage of profits, we want to give you a company, Oldsmobile. And I kind of said, Well, I really don’t want a company, Oldsmobile. I kind of want the deal we set out. And so end up talk to my boss or my boss’s boss. And they finally said, Well, this is really where the companies go. And then the final. I went to the president that, you know, wrote a letter to him and he called me in and I thought it was going to be great. You know, we agree we’re not going to change it midyear on you. But he said, I didn’t really have the right attitude and I need to go find employment elsewhere. So that’s kind of what happened.

Henry Kaestner: If it had been a BMW, would you have said

David Weekley: maybe you could

Henry Kaestner: trade even weekly at home instead of one of the largest and most successful home builders and contractors in the country? It’s huge. If you went down from 600 to 800, it’s now come back where you are now. Can you share that?

David Weekley: Yeah, we got again six hundred team members, but we’re doing a lot more volume. That’s good news. Yeah, we’re back up to three billion, which is our peak.

Henry Kaestner: So if you’re in a really competitive homebuilding business, then you always have been. The fact that homebuilding is a lucrative venture is not new for other people. It’s not like you have invented a new rocket ship to the Moon or something like that. There’s some amount of execution that has to go on, and there’s some amount of really understanding your market and product market fit and understand your competition. Can you share a little bit about what that was like for you over the last couple of decades about how you’ve looked at the competitive landscape, how you’re able to come up with a product that was just better than other people’s? In a way that it was preferred.

David Weekley: When I first started out, I was up against a national homebuilder that had better buying power and more efficient. And so they were selling cheap. And we were and I figured out pretty quickly. I had to figure out how I was going to differentiate myself. And so I decided the design was going to be that first differentiated myself. So I went to California, got the latest designs, hired my own designer in house, Brad. Going outside so we could learn what our customers liked and didn’t like and continue on a path of being very, very customer focused on design. Then about the early 90s realized that we need to do more next. We were catching up on design. So then we gave our customers choice instead of design centers, and they could come in and pick out their own tile and various things. So we moved to choice. And then sure enough, most of the competition have copied our design centers, and I’m not a copy from somebody starting out, but we went pretty fast and big with it. And then so service became the key differentiator for us, and now we get about 40 percent of our sales from referrals. You know, we got 4.8 stars on a five star rating from our customers. And you know, you can’t get a steak meal where you get 4.5 stars. And this is a very, you know, complex purchase. Very emotional takes a long time. They get to see building it. And so getting people that really care for the customer and care for that customer experience has been a huge differentiator for us currently. And that’s not easy to do. You can’t just flip a switch and make that happen. That’s a culture in the company.

Henry Kaestner: OK, so I want to get to that because that’s the other differentiator. It goes beyond just design and selection. There’s a unique culture that you have, and I think I know part of the answer to this. I think that our audience knows part of the answer to this about your unique culture. Part of it is the fact that you have these 40 car owners with you that are strapped to the mass with you. But I think it’s also more than that to talk about your unique culture and how you built it.

David Weekley: Well, in my early forties, when I had that operation and kind of moved from being a cultural Christian to being more of a committed Christian, I really kind of made the decision to look at the other more than myself. Quite honestly, the first 20 years of the company history, it was all about me. After all, the company was named David Weekley home. That should be fairly self-evident. And so moving for me to the other is when we really started taking off and creating, we have

Henry Kaestner: it so that your name was on it, but your brother, at least one of your brothers, was involved.

David Weekley: Right? Well, he started out the little story on that would back the late 70s. When we started our first billboard, it was weekly homes. It wasn’t David Weekley homes and it was weekly homes from the 30s, not 130, not 230, but from the 30s. It was. It was a lot of home. Now remember a truck pulling up in front of one of our models full of furniture on the back and said where those homes to rent for $30 a week weekly homes from the 30s?

Henry Kaestner: Oh, that’s great. No, there’s an e there between the L in the world, right?

David Weekley: Right. But oh, so I talk to my brother. So we need a change, change the name of the cavities and what he want to do. I said, How about David weekly? Sounds good to me. So. Wow. So anyway,

Henry Kaestner: what was his name, Ebenezer or something that just didn’t work?

David Weekley: His name was dick weekly. It is. So anyway, one of the interesting challenge about that when I hit my thirties and I had young kids in school and you know your names on a billboard, I realized I was kind of put my kids in a situation where all the kids in school would assume their rich folks because our name was fairly well known around town, et cetera. So I looked at changing the name of the company that literally we did market studies, et cetera. And we already had enough of a reputation that it didn’t make sense. And then, you know, later as I got into my more philanthropy and being able to speak and talk to folks, et cetera, I realized that God kind of had a plan because he gave me a platform that I wouldn’t have had otherwise. You know, with a name that was known out there. And so, you know, I love the way I guess Rick Warren coined it, whichever stewardship of affluence our money. But we also have the stewardship of influence, you know, the folks we know, et cetera. So I recognize that having a company called Weekly Homes gave me a stewardship of influence that I need to work with

Henry Kaestner: and do steward that influence within the company. If I come on board and I’m a project manager and I’m one of the six. What am I going to experience a David weekly that are not likely to experience it of Pulte or somebody else like that?

David Weekley: Well, we bring everybody in here to the main office and we have a fabulous one on one. I get to meet them all and we talk and and they get inaugurated, so to speak. The main thing is we hire people that really care, right? So it starts off if you don’t get people with similar values. It doesn’t work. So we get people with summer values. We incorporate them well. We do multiple interviews before they come. We even interview their spouse.

Henry Kaestner: OK, I was going to ask you, is there something unique that you do in doing that early? And I’ll tell you that that’s one. So I’m glad you said that. That’s one of the secrets to our success at bandWith was interviewing spouses.

David Weekley: Right, right. And it’s it shows that we care about them and puts everything on a different playing field right now. And then, you know, you take care of people, you know, eight percent managing for one K, there’s profit sharing every quarter. We have weekly TV personal encounters where the manager and the team member, you know, we’re fortunate we’ve been on Fortune’s Unabridged Place to work like 14 times. And for a homebuilder, that’s not Google, you know, we’re out there building houses, it’s it’s hot and and, you know, in tough work and, you know, we don’t buy everybody lunch and we have a gym for them, you know? But it’s how we treat them and how they work well together.

Henry Kaestner: Tell me more about the personal encounters part.

David Weekley: Well, most people want to know how they’re doing and having their manager spend time with them each week for half an hour personal encounter and making it the team members time to feedback to the manager what their needs are and how they’re doing and what’s going on in their life and how they’re going with the kids. Or it’s a half an hour personal encounter every week with each team member. And it’s really their time with their manager. It also quite honestly cuts down on all the day to day interaction, having to go back and forth because they know they have this set half an hour.

Henry Kaestner: Yeah, yeah, that’s very interesting. OK. So personally, Karen, something I didn’t know about are just shocked at the frequency of it. But what you just saw obviously suggested there is that actually, it sounds like it’s inefficient, but actually is remarkably efficient because it changes the dynamic of the other thirty nine and a half for forty nine and a half hours.

David Weekley: Right, right. It saves time. It doesn’t take time.

Henry Kaestner: OK, I want to go back to Dave quickly. Homes, you’ve won lots and lots of awards and accolades over the years. Are there any that really stand out more than others? That’s a leading question, because you’ve been invited to build for a company that I think we can all really admire. You may have a different answer to it, but if you don’t answer it the way I want you to answer it, I’m going to bring you back there, OK?

David Weekley: Telling me that you want to hear about the invitation to build it was Disney. Yeah, and we went in there celebration project in Florida. And I’ll never forget sitting in my office and getting a call from somebody at Disney. And you know, this is Dave and I’m with Disney in this. I don’t want any tickets or anything. So no, no, no. Wait, wait, wait. You know, the setting, the sales call. And he said, We’ve been looking at you for two years. We’ve interviewed your customers in Dallas and in Austin, and we’ve seen your designs. We’ve had this week that we ran that because they research stuff to death and we’d like you to come with us in Orlando and said, Well, we don’t build in Florida said we know that. And but we want you to come bill for us in Orlando. So anyway, we got together with him. I went there a couple of years early before the project was opened, so we could learn how to build in Florida, went to Disney, you, you know, university. And anyway, it was a great experience for us. They obviously know customers focus very well, building that community where we were the only builder to start out and finished up. Everybody else blew out over time because the customer expectations at Disney are through the roof, as you can imagine. And they were paying quite a premium for their home, on their side, not on our side. But it was a great experience and really we were building. It’s called T and traditional neighborhood design, very higher density smaller houses, but front porches really creating a sense of community. And that has really worked for us strongly for the last 20 25 years, for probably the largest candy builder in the country and a lot of flippers come to us because of that experience.

Henry Kaestner: So there are clearly things you picked out from that engagement that you then brought back into the business for sure. OK. David, the way that we first got together was actually not around entrepreneurship, not around business. So much, although I heard a little bit about your story and I think it probably showed a little bit about mine, but it was around the concept of giving. And how does one give? Well, when I remember being on the Board of Hope International about 10 years ago and you had been a very significant underwriter that I came to understand that there’s this guy is really thoughtful about giving in. So you spent a good amount of time with me. I don’t know if you remember the first time was at a gathering and maybe an hour on kind of like a veranda. And I want you to be able to see if we in our time that we’ve got left. If you can share some of the lessons that you’ve learned in philanthropy and in giving, you talked about the fact that you’ve done some things well. There are some things you still are learning as you get to that 10000 hours of giving. Can you share some of those with people, our demographic, we tend to have our average entrepreneurs, probably in their 40s. Many of them are coming into a place now where they’re having some financial success and they want to be generous. And their heart is oftentimes really influenced by a lot of stories. And yet they’re businesspeople they want to give, Well, what would you share with them?

David Weekley: I would share to you, no one go where they’re passionate and where they’re called. But number two, not to set aside their business acumen and learnings when they give. So often times, especially if you come from a place of faith, you kind of it’s like you do business with your head and you give with your heart. And to me, you ought to combine those just like, you know, hopefully we’re living out our faith during the week and work. I think we’re supposed to give with the same business acumen that we use in earning money. Just amaze me that people spend 40 hours of 50 hours a week, whatever earning sums, and then they’ll give at the drop of a hat without any investigation, understanding, etc. And since from my standpoint, it all kind of belongs to God anyway. You know, I have no idea why he put me in this place and decided to give me a company that’s grown like it is, et cetera. It’s just been a true blessing, and it really belongs to him. Why shouldn’t I give his money away as carefully as any other investment I make? And so to me, it’s just it’s a little bit of a mess to not take it that seriously.

Henry Kaestner: Can you give us some examples of maybe some given that you did early on? Were you learned some of these lessons or was it just always just baked into the way that you thought? Were you just like, you know, from the get go? I’m just not going to give to something that doesn’t satisfy both my heart and my head.

David Weekley: No, usually, you know, said people give to people. Right. And so, you know, somebody in they’re doing good work and they come up and they talk to you about something. And I did a lot of that giving starting out. And then over time, the more time I spent, I saw some of those funds were not being effectively used were being wasted. You know, the outcomes weren’t there that were hoped for or promised. And I just realized that if I was really going to take my giving seriously that I had to again, I had to pay attention and I gave the time as well. Most people don’t have the time or don’t make the time for me as an entrepreneur. Once I got up to a certain size, I realized, you know, I was working 70 hours a week flying all over the country, and I realized that I was getting out of my skis. I was losing control. I wasn’t good at managing four cities and 300 million. I mean, it was getting beyond me. And so when I committed to give half my time, it meant I had to go find somebody to run the place. And that worked out, obviously, to my benefit in both ways. It freed up the time to be serious about philanthropy, and it also helped the company by getting somebody that had skills that I didn’t have.

Henry Kaestner: You also did something on your company structure, right? You landed on kind of a unique ownership structure that allows the company to operate in perpetuity. Can you just share a little bit about that?

David Weekley: Yeah. As you get older and you have this company, especially if it’s a large company, you got to figure out what you’re going to do with it. Am I going to sell out or go public or what’s the endgame here? And I did lots of research, talked to lots of families, looked at all kinds of different opportunities, and I didn’t want to lose what we created as a team here in terms of the culture doing a great job for customers, et cetera. So I wanted to continue specifically as a private company. So I said, OK, how are we going to do that? How are we going to get alignment, et cetera? And I decided to do a third of it since I’d had luck with ownership being in other people’s hands. I said a third of it’s going to be owned by the employees, by the team members. And so I’ve got 18 percent of it in individual managers hands owning stock individually and then we got a 15 percent ESOP that we put on top of that. And then I wanted the charitable aspect that I’ve been doing with my own funds as the primary stockholder to continue. So I put a third of the stock into a charitable trust. And then the final third is going to be owned by the founding families to keep it like a family business into the future, that doesn’t mean everybody’s going to work here, et cetera. And whether my kids or anybody’s kids have the skills to earn three billion dollar company, that’s a pretty significant skill set. But you can be great owners and you can be in different positions if that’s their choice. But I just like the concept of a third, a third, a third, all with the line values, a third for the team members, a third for charitable interest and a third for the founding families. All of them have aligned interest in trying to do the right things for the right reasons and move on down the road and hopefully be here 100 years from now.

Henry Kaestner: OK, so you hit on a topic. I want to get back in a second back to giving and lessons learned what you’re getting as you spend ten thousand plus hours and giving. But when you talk about your family and you talk about your kids, I know you’ve got three. I know Robin the best Robin. I’ve known Robin for these 10 years because I know she helped us put together a trip to Nicaragua back before there are any traffic lights in Managua. You also come from a family of three boys. And I have three boys, so I’m a father of three boys. I’d love to get any reflections that you have of family dynamics, being a good brother, being a good father and seeing faith be a part of the family dynamic. Most of the people assume that are going to be parents. You’ve been thoughtful about this. Can you share something with us about family dynamics?

David Weekley: Well, the family dynamics started seeing my father put an envelope in the plate every week, right? He’d reach into his coat. The plate would come by. He’d put it in. And so right, I think things were mostly caught, not taught. And so my father was a generous man and that helped set me up that this is what we do. This is how we operate. There’s a father growing up. It was a challenge because I said my name was on billboards all over town, so my kids were labeled rich kids right in work. And so how do you handle that? So my kids earn half the money for their car. You know, we sit down with Amigos de las Americas. They went down to Central America and live for eight weeks in a village on the floor when they were in high school and did mission work. So I mean, they’ve seen that our life is not the usual life. And I think that that builds a responsibility for you. I mean, for me personally, I’ve just always come from a place of deep gratitude for my parents, where I am in America, et cetera. And out of that gratitude, I get a deep sense responsibility of what am I to do? You know, too much is given, et cetera. And then when I act out on that responsibility through philanthropy and working with people in other ways or in the company, I just get a deep sense of joy, not just happiness, but deep, deep joy feeling like I’m in God’s flow, feeling like I’m doing what I’m meant to be doing.

Henry Kaestner: So I think that you touched on something there that it’s taken me a while to really kind of embrace, which is this kind of selfish ambition, which is this personal joy that you feel as you give is what we are trying to always get when we are selfishly had selfish ambition before, but kind of wrestle with it. So I always had a selfish ambition and a selfishness that’s been a kind of the core of my life and influence all that I’ve done. But you’re getting on something there that’s really important, which is that that you actually have an opportunity to lean into that. Yes, you probably can give examples where you sacrifice and you take up your cross. And yet at the same time, this guy’s invited to life that is truly life and that you can have this selfish ambition of looking for joy. And there’s a recipe for it. And you found that in giving you found this joy and as cool as a BMW seven Series is and it’s more fun to drive than a Prius, you get presumably more joy from some of the giving you’re doing, regardless of what car you have. Or am I just putting words in your mouth, right?

David Weekley: No. And yeah, I’ve got a pickup truck now, so I’m sorry. It’s just I had the great good fortune to have had a lot early and had it taken away in the downturn and recognized that that’s not what life was all about. So my generosity came out of that understanding.

Henry Kaestner: OK. Share with us other things that you’re learning about giving and maybe way that maybe start off with this is just how do you all give? And for those that don’t know your daughter, Robin is running the foundation and you’re giving away more and more and more money. But what’s a way aside from the amount? But what’s a way in which you give differently than maybe did 10 years ago?

David Weekley: Well, like most entrepreneurs, I love deals in models. And so I used to give to whomever had the best model for something, whether it be, you know, five for finance or savings groups or community health workers or whoever had the coolest models that I thought, This is neat. Let me go, give to it. And what I’ve found out is that even more important than the model is giving you great leadership. It might seem self-evident, but I got caught up in the deal earlier. But, you know, if you got great leadership, they’ll adjust the model and get it to the best place. But if you don’t have good leadership, the best model will fail. So the key thing is that we really, really give to extraordinary leadership. So that’s that’s one thing.

Henry Kaestner: Before you go that, I’m going to come back and remind you that there’s a second thing, but that’s really, really important. That’s really hard to do. What are some different ways where you interact with a person and are able to determine whether they’re a great leader or not?

David Weekley: Well, have they established a vision that is big and broad and is a dean supported with a strategic plan that can get them there? And do they have people around them that can help get them there as well? So oftentimes will work with or meet the second layer of folks and not just to face the organization, but people really doing the work. And then you can really see what the organization is like and what they’re doing. And obviously always trying to focus on the outcomes of what’s happening. So, you know, it can be great people in lots of flash and a great deck and a great plan. But if the outcomes aren’t there, nothing else matters. And so again, I feel like I’m investing God’s resources and I want to have flourishing humans out there as a result of my investments.

Henry Kaestner: So you hit on something there that somebody that you and I both know. Kirk Kyle Hacker is the board chair. Praxis has impressed upon me and he said, You know, they’re really only three things for a leader to do is that you’re responsible for the vision you need to resource the enterprise and you need to get the right people on the bus. And it’s that emphasis on that third one that I think a lot of us miss. And that’s why I think that just in the same way that you interview spouses of employees, they’re coming on board the organization. Interviewing the next level of leadership helps you to really understand, Is this a great leader or are people really following the leader or not? And I think that’s really important. OK, so thank you. So the first one is leadership.

David Weekley: The second one, this really has three items. I look for an organization that uses leverage where my dollar will create $5 or $10 worth of impact. You know, I’m a real estate guy. I love leverage. So one authorization that has great leverage. I want to organization that can scale like geometrically, not arithmetically, but can really scale. So I want to fund organizations that can blow things up, right? That that can really impact the world. And then thirdly, I want to fund an organization, has some type of sustainability plan for the long term. Do they do anything where they can create their own income? Do they have a plan to get government funding, you know, or bilateral funding? Because if it’s an organization and the only way that they can grow is to go get more donors, and they will always be limited by how much that they can raise. So I want to get involved in things that can have high leverage, can scale and have some way to reach sustainability over time.

Henry Kaestner: Can you give us some examples of the leverage in the scale where you go ahead? And you know, if I write a check for a dollar, it’s going to lead to four or five in any samples of ministries. Charities doing that well, they come to mind.

David Weekley: Well, the one you mentioned, Hope International does it well because, you know they lend money, make interest on the money so they can fund part of their operations. Another one that I’m very involved with is Christian Camping. And so if we go and help and build a Christian camp, so if a Christian camp from go broke, add more cabins and you know, more dining halls, et cetera. Once that investments made, assuming you have a big assumption, great leadership and great board governance that can break even and provide returns and continue to impact kids for Christ forever. And so you plant the seed and it grows.

Henry Kaestner: Yeah. So there’s this sustainability in there that you build out some infrastructure now parents feel better about spending twelve hundred dollars on the right.

David Weekley: And so things like that to me have a lot of impact for the dollar invested a lot of leverage.

Henry Kaestner: David, is we come to a close. I’m going to ask you the question that we ask every one of our guests. And that is that is there is something that God is teaching you through your time in scripture, your time in the Bible. It doesn’t need to be necessarily. This morning could be last week, but what are you hearing?

David Weekley: You know, something that is kind of guided me through my Christian journey as I try to think about what should I do this or should I go left? Should I go right? Should I go to more full time ministry or something else is I’ve always appreciated the version. First Corinthians 07:24 brothers and sisters. Each person as responsible to God shall remain in the situation God has called him to. And so to me, we’re in these life situations. And rather than presuming that to be a Christian brother or show my love of God or whatever, I’ve got to go, change my situation, take the situation to God’s, place me and figure out how I can take that to the next level and in a more Christian way, in a more loving way, in a more outreach way. How can I take where I’ve been placed and really plus it in a significant way through my faith and outreach, et cetera?

Henry Kaestner: It’s a great word. That’s a great word. So as we’re entrepreneurs, you’ve probably if you found this podcast, you probably know enough to know that God absolutely uses you in your business. And that being entrepreneur is by no means a second class citizen where we’re just doing this just so we can make money to do something else. Or gosh, if we’re really following God, we’d be in full time ministry in Botswana or something like that. But to stay where we are and look to honor God there. And of course, as you’ve heard from David today, you can make an impact on a lot of people’s lives where they live, as in the case, David. But each of us has an opportunity to be able to impact culture, and one of the things that I’ll take away from this is just the greatest investment that you can make, and culture is bringing the right people and giving them some skin in the game. But when you bring the right people in, getting to know them more than another important might and what a great way to be able to live on somebody. And when you’re having this every week where you’re following up with so many of this personal reflection moment to actually know who their spouses. So when I’m talking about going on a vacation or they’re talking about something that they’re wrestling with with their spouse in terms of where they give it, their time or their money, or what they do, or how they can support their spouse, you actually know them. And so that’s a big takeaway of mine for many. David, thank you for your time. Thank you for your friendship and partnership. And again, one encouragement that you are to me and all of us.

David Weekley: Thank you.

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Today’s episode takes us all the way to South Africa, and we couldn’t be more excited about it. And the question we’re going to start by asking is this: How can a garbage-collection company in South Africa undo the legacy of Apartheid? 

Bertie Lourens, CEO of WastePlan is here to share how their company is working to divert the vast majority of customers’ waste-stream from landfills and converting it into valuable, recyclable resources. They do this by employing hundreds of local workers, caring for their families, and investing in local schools to educate the next generation of South African leaders. 

And, as Bertie shares today, stewarding God’s creation has now grown into giving God a majority ownership stake in the company. Listen in to find out how…

Episode Transcript

Some listeners have found it helpful to have a transcription of the podcast. Transcription is done by an AI software. While technology is an incredible tool to automate this process, there will be misspellings and typos that might accompany it. Please keep that in mind as you work through it. The FDI movement is a volunteer-led movement, and if you’d like to contribute by editing future transcripts, please email us.

Bertie Lourens: I think God went after the very thing that could become a mammon stronghold in my life, that very thing that I believe I’m building, something of massive equity value. He said he wants that. And it was very difficult, but at the same time, I knew this thing is actually really worth minus something to deal with. I said, OK, God, I’ll give you shares.

——

Darryl Heald: Hey, William. Doing well. Excited to be here today, especially to hear from our friend in South Africa.

William Norvell: I know. It’s amazing. It’s amazing to have you and Bertie and Darryl have known each other for a while. So it’s going to be fun to tease out the story. I know our audience is going to hear something that they probably haven’t heard before, and we hope the spirit can use BAM story and what got him and his faithfulness to encourage and inspire other faith driven entrepreneurs as we’re listening. So, Bertie, welcome to the show.

Bertie Lourens: Hello, William. Thank you for inviting me.

William Norvell: We’re happy to have you. And, you know, as we get started, one of the things we just always love to do is just to hear a little about you, who you are, where you came from, where you grew up, how you ended up becoming a Faith Driven Entrepreneur and you know, how you ended up sitting in that chair today with us telling the story.

Bertie Lourens: Thank you, William Norvell. First of all, I’m a son of God, God Almighty, the creator of the universe and everything in it. And I’m married to a beautiful, gentle Canadian lady. And she calls South Africa home for 15 years already and Foljambe grandkids. But I was really born and raised in a small mining town in the south east of Johannesburg in the 70s. I grew up in the 70s and 80s and that was during apartheid South Africa. It was a very difficult time for South Africa. And everything that we are facing today is the legacy of apartheid. And a lot of things that we do today is still trying to fix all the wrongs of the past. So I grew up as a young teenager seeing all these wrongs, and I just thought it might be wise just to give a little bit of context about apartheid and what the past is and was. But it was really a governing system that denied all nonwhite people any decent education, no voting rights and no rights for any managerial jobs. So you can understand what that means over a period of 40, 50 years of a father that needs to work in the best job we can get, as in a mine, as a general worker or in a factory or a construction company and a father teaching his son, this is the best that you can ever be. Just try and be the best general worker that you could ever be. And hopefully you could become the supervisor of general workers. And if you just keep perpetuating that over decades, a whole lot of anger happens, a whole lot of hurt and a narrative of blaming. So that’s that’s the South Africa that I grew up in. And I saw how apartheid came to an end. I saw how a new era was born for South Africa, and so how Nelson Mandela was released from prison and how he was elected as the first democratically elected president. And I started seeing how the entire country started rallying together to try and correct the wrongs of the past. And it’s been two decades and we still doing that. But it almost feels like we fail every decade. Our failures are bigger than the decade before. So that’s the context where I grew up. And personally, I was a very insecure teenager when I grew up because my father never told me that I had what it’s like. You never told me that he loved me. So I always grew up never knowing what that real lack was that I had inside of me. But I always knew that I just do not feel complete. Of course, I ran to alcohol and women and I was also a very good salesman when I was in school. And I very quickly learned that I could make money. And that’s when I realized how hold on, money will maybe fill that gap and it will make me popular among my teenage friends, which I did, of course. But luckily I got saved very early in my twenties. It’s just off to the one relational failure of the next. I realized that I just do not have what it takes to keep a life together and a surrender to Jesus at the age of twenty three in the late 90s. And it was wonderful. It almost felt like it was the beginning of a healing journey for me. Shortly after that I found a mentor that saw something in me and decided to help me to build the business because I knew I wanted to be a businessman because I could sell stuff and I thought if I can sell something, I can build a business. I started a business in 2004 and I am still running that same business.

William Norvell: Well, that’s amazing. Thank you for walking us through that. I’m going to ask if you would would you maybe spend. A few more minutes for our listeners. I mean, I hear that I’ve you know, I’ve read a little bit about apartheid maybe, but maybe it’s been a few more minutes on what it was like growing up. Like what did you sense in the air? What did you sense was was there and sort of from your perspective, because we have a listening audience as a white man. Right. What did it feel like at school? I don’t know. I don’t even know the right question to ask. But I’m just really curious for I just always learn, obviously, from people in different worldviews. And they grew up in different scenarios than me. And I just want to give you kind of an open mic for a couple more minutes to say just kind of what were some of those experiences like for you?

Bertie Lourens: William, you know, when you’ve become a teenager, when you hit your 10, 11, 12, 13 age, you start asking questions, you know, just things around you, you know, just that there are no black kids in your school. You notice the kids that you play sports against are all white. You’d notice that when you drive out of your town, you drive into a we call them townships, but it’s really chanty towns. And you just see black people there and you see that the people who work in the white people gardens are black people. And you don’t see black people driving cause they’re driving bicycles and their clothes don’t look decent. She’s noticed all these things and then you start asking you questions, you ask your parents these questions. But why you see beggars at the traffic lights are only like people and not white people. And you ask them, but why are beggars only black people? And then they answer you. But you can see it’s almost a governmental brainwashed answer that does not make sense for a 12 or 13 year old. And that’s when you start realizing. But hold on. Yes. Something wrong with the entire system. And you listen to adults, the way they talk around the barbecue, around the Sociales about them and us, and you ask yourself, but we are all one, we’re all one country wiser, them innocent. You know, you ask these questions and you get answers that just do not make sense. And to take it one step further. For most of these answers, there was a biblical scripture to, quote, to justify the system of apartheid and. You see black people doing the hard labor, almost like the Hebrew slaves, that both the infrastructure of Egypt, I saw how the black people, the majority of South Africa was like people were building the infrastructure for the minority. And something inside of me just said that is wrong. It just doesn’t make sense. It’s not sustainable. And then you start watching news, you start understanding what you hear on the news. You start hearing the conversations in the kitchen and around the dinner table with your parents, really as the tension started building up of the masses of South Africa, just saying enough is enough. We want voting rights. And you start hearing those conversations, the family conversations, the fear. And it’s a fear is a massive bloodbath, revolution coming. And we just do not have answers anymore. And I saw all of that and the fear also gripped me. But then I saw the miracle of a peaceful negotiation between Nelson Mandela and the ruling president, F.W. de Klerk, back then, and all of a sudden, very quickly, the tension released and there was an election. All the black people were granted voting rights and the ANC, which is the party that represented them, won, and there was joy and there was fear all at the same time, the wealthy whites that were able to flee, fled, packed up all the goods, and they fled everywhere else in the world because they believe that all the white people in South Africa were going to be murdered, that they believe in communities rejoiced and they sang Hallelujah. And you started hearing these messages of the fearful and the jubilant all more or less in the same space. And something inside of me said, that’s a miracle. What happened here. And it really was looking back now, it was a miracle, and very shortly after that, in the 90s, we just had a great leader and Nelson Mandela, who was very verbal in his communication. He understood the fear of the white communities. And he spoke to us on public television, where he made very, very bold statements of how you will protect us. And he made very bold statements to the angry majority black community in South Africa, saying we need our brothers, our brothers in our country to help us rebuild this country. And you just hear that propaganda coming from him and eventually you start believing this is going to turn out to be something beautiful. And that’s why we named it the Rainbow Nation, because we really believed something beautiful that was going to come out of it. And we still hold on to those hopes in those dreams because it’s still beautiful, but it just sometimes feels like it’s taking too long. But our timing is never the same as God’s timing.

William Norvell: Man, thank you so much for it. Such a beautiful job of taking us into some of those moments. And I just thank you for walking through that for our audience. And I’m interested in how did all of those experiences impact you as an entrepreneur, as someone who was studying what God wanted you to do? Right. And what was your part of that story that was being written in South Africa? Where did God find you and push you to an entrepreneurial journey?

Bertie Lourens: So I knew that I wanted to be a businessman for selfish reasons. I wanted to get rich. And that’s the end of that story. So I pursued that dream of becoming rich and I could see how this new South Africa attracted so much foreign investment. This was truly the hope for the continent. And we achieved amazing GDP growth. And I just realized I am in this ecosystem that is filled with growth and I have the skills to sell and I want to be a businessman. But as I went on doing this, I noticed that the people that we employ in business are poor and they are, many of them general workers that work for a very, very low salary. And that started bothering me. Now, the salary we pay is equal to what competitors in the market pay for those laborers. And when we pitch for contracts with clients, a big chunk of our service costs is labor costs. So if we overpay, then we are not competitive and we can grow. So we were forced to pay the same salary, but we realized we can do much more. So it’s just an awareness. It grew over time that while we employ poor people, we have the power of influence over them more than what political leaders have and more than what the church could ever have. Well, they work in our business. We found out that the one that receives a salary submits quite easily to the one who pays the salary. So the one who pays the salary has tremendous influence. And we I thought, let us use that and help people learn how to better themselves so that they can build a better future for themselves. And all of that comes down to education the way you think, because if you could educate yourself, you can acquire more skills or a higher skill, you can bring it to your workplace, you can get more responsibilities and then the higher salary. I’ve personally worked with some of the guys in the early years, and I’ve seen once they get that, it’s almost as if you’ve put them on a perpetual path out of poverty because he’s connected the dots. You said, I see how this thing works. It’s not a secret any longer. Bring more value, take more responsibilities and more money and then repeat. And that made me excited that we have this influence that we can help people out of poverty.

William Norvell: Amen, amen. Yeah, you’re sharing a gospel. You know, you share in the good news with people that you’re holding this good news that they don’t know about yet and educating them. What a beautiful reflection of the gospel where God placed you and where he put you. And and what are the unique things I’ve heard you talk about before that I’d love to have you share with our audiences? You know, you set out to build a business also where God would be a shareholder. And could you tell us a little about what that looks like to you, what that felt like to you as you dug into that and prayed about that? What does it look like to make God a shareholder of Voice Plan?

Bertie Lourens: Will needs to understand how that started. First of all, if you have a really good mentor and he is building a really successful business, all you need to do is just listen to him and do what he tells you. And that’s what I did because I didn’t know much. And what happens is if you enjoy enough success upon success and if you do not have people around you that are willing to hold up a mirror to you so you can see who you become and you will become proud. And I became very proud because I enjoyed tremendous success quite quickly and in the first years of the business. And I had to define later on to myself what is pride and pride to me is the conversation with self that says that I am better then and you can fill in the gap there with any name. I’m better then. And very quickly after that, pride leads to strife or strife and striving says that I would like to be better than so-and-so. So it’s a situation of measuring and seeing that you’re better than some, but then coveting the success of others. And that just put you on the spiral of destruction, which I didn’t see. I didn’t see it coming, but God did. And and luckily he rescued me there again shortly after the business, about seven years in, we started losing a tremendous amount of money, buckets full of money. And it came as a shock because I his Blue-Eyed Boy, I’m so successful. What happens? Why all of a sudden all these losses, whatever I worked so hard for over seven years, could be gone in a moment. And I found myself in my garage a year later on my knees, crying out to God to have mercy on me and rescue me from the situation and repenting of my pride and my arrogance and my striving and building it in my own strength. And he did. He came and he rescued me. William, it was very shortly after that the situation turned. It was miraculous and it turned. So you could imagine early the next year, I was still very raw and I was covered in the fear of God and just asking him, how do you want me to build this thing out now? I do not ever want to make the same mistakes again. And I felt God say to me, he wants me to give away, well, what did I have? I had detonated an insolvent company and I asked him if he wants that. But I heard God say the word equity to me. And that’s a very interesting word. Now, the founder of a business always believes that the equity value is hundreds of billions. The balance sheet could showed deep zeros that the founder always believes it’s worth more. And I think God went after the very thing that could become a Maymont stronghold in my life, that very thing that I believe I’m building, something of massive equity value. He said he wants that. And it was very difficult, but at the same time, I knew this thing is actually really worth minus something to deal with. I said, OK, God, I’ll give you shares that you’re going to show me how. And I asked him if he does if you about by 30 percent. And he remained quiet and then I gave him 30. And that’s where we are. So from three very shortly after that, we grew to fifty one because I immediately so I started understanding the benefits of inviting God Almighty, the creator of everything, to have him as a shareholder in your business. The value proposition is just so big at first you don’t know it. But once I did it, I started realizing what I did and I realized, but hold on, let’s let’s give him a controlling stake and then I can sit back and watch this thing grow. And that’s where we are today.

William Norvell: And hey, man, I love parts of that story that, of course, because we have a God that runs after us harder than we can imagine that he rescued you. But hearing a practical it just gets me every time when you hear of God coming to the rescue and the audience knows I cry a decent amount. So, you know, I may cry again now, but it’s just a beautiful story of you submitting. And, you know, and it’s not a prosperity gospel. It’s a reality of the scripture. Right. That like, when we do turn to the Lord and when we do repent and we do give it back to him like he’s here and he’s there for everyone listening and not everyone’s in that spot. People have already done it. But, man, if you are run to him, be with him. It’s an amazing story. And, you know, and I would imagine the the way God wants to run in their business or be a shareholder may look different, but to submit that to him is the point. Right.

Bertie Lourens: William, I think, is going after the one thing that he knows will drive the biggest wedge between you and him sometime in the future. And he’s going to go after that thing. And all he’s really asking is just to surrender, to surrender, whatever it is, just surrender. I’ve got this. I know your future better than you will ever know. Just let me do this with you and it will be so worth it. It’s always asking,

William Norvell: hey, man, I’m going to turn you over to Daryl after one more question here. I realized, of course, we got so excited about the wisdom you have here. I forgot to ask you. Could you tell our audience a little bit of what a waste plan is, how many employees you have, what you guys do in South Africa? I think the name tells a little bit. I think people are already on the edge of their seat knowing a little bit. But could you tell us a little bit more just about the business and who you try to serve and how you try to care for God’s world through the business?

Bertie Lourens: Yes, absolutely. So most companies have ways as part of the production or service offering, and we found that that’s normally an afterthought and it’s a liability. It’s an ever increasing cost that somebody somewhere has to manage. But there’s no specialist or an expert or dedicated person to do that. So we offer a service companies, food companies, factories, hospitals, hotels, shopping centers. We will bring our personnel onto your site. We will segregate your waste. We will divert as much away from landfill as possible, and as we divert the waste away from the landfill, we turn it from a liability into an asset and we have enough data to show it’s an appreciating asset. So we take waste with segregated at the source in separate streams. We sell those streams. The value of those streams we sell increase in value year on year. We return the biggest part of that value back to the client. But what happens in the process is that person that did that sorting and the handling of the waste, he realizes. But I was part of turning a wasteful item that’s a liability into an asset. And in that process, we generated new revenue. I earned a salary. And with that comes dignity because I was part of turning value out of something with no value. And that’s the beautiful part of what’s happening here. We have about a thousand employees scattered over 10 cities and we have about six hundred and thirty clients that we service and waste gets segregated from all the sites moves into big processing centers, which we call recycling centers. Where we do final sorting, we compress them and we sell them to the highest bidder. So we always try to put

Darryl Heald: a lot of that waste trader in a variety of ways. Just love hearing the story. And, you know, my love for South Africa, I mean, it just we’ve had lots of great adventure. This a lot of fun to be have a chance to tell more people just how God’s moving in your life and your business in the country, things like that. So I want to take us back when we first met. I think our audience has already heard there is a deep thinker and I just remember where we have a mutual friend. He invited you and Leslie to this journey, generosity. Why don’t we just start there? What did you think about that? And just the process that happened yesterday?

Bertie Lourens: It was mind boggling to process all the information that was presented over that week. And now I saw how very, very poor people gave everything in those videos. I mean, those discussions. And I saw how excessively wealthy people did the same. But what struck me was that the richest and the poorest were equally happy. Joy, Joy, that is deeper than what a dictionary can define for you. And I think that’s what hooked me, that I was chasing really after satisfaction all my life. And you think that wealth will give it and then you’ll meet people and they’ll tell you, no, it doesn’t. But that we can realize. Hold on. I think I got the secret. Yes. This is the thing that I’ve been chasing after all my life. This deep satisfaction and joy comes only from a place of true generosity. And I was just trying to piece that together. What would that look like for me when I leave this weekend? And I wanted to just take in as much as I possibly can while I’m there so that I have as much to work with when I go back home on the Monday.

Darryl Heald: Thanks for sharing that. I know there’s a hope and desire that all of us as entrepreneurs and investors, that we understand that value proposition that is more blessed to give and receive and that we can truly live in that point of joy. So a couple of things, though, that I just when I think about Botein, I just I love how you are walking out this jury. One of them is when we were driving home from the office to your house for a dinner one night and up ahead of us, there are some guys at the light who were begging for money and things like that. So take the story from there. I thought that was just I forget the date of its day, but tell our audience just what you do. I mean, this is just like everyday generosity. I just love this piece.

Bertie Lourens: Is there so the South Africa that I just told you about, I just want to give you a little bit more context. The unemployment level now sits at thirty eight percent unemployment. The amount of school dropouts is ridiculous. Something like forty eight percent of people at starting grade one get to grade 12. So you could imagine the amount of people on the streets that do not have jobs. His name is Bennett, is a baker, is bent over. He was hit by a car. A drug is back and he’s never been able to get surgery. So he’s bent over almost 90 degrees. And he’s just let the traffic light on my way home. And he’s got the brightest of smiles. So it’s easy to be generous to him. But surprisingly, most people are not. After the Jörg weekend, one of the first discussions that I think you see every time is, well, is it right to give to a beggar? It’s just going to buy alcohol. And I remember that weekend someone say that I don’t know who it was. So that person said, but it’s his job to give account for the money he received. It’s not your job to give account on his behalf. You just gave your job is to give account for the money God gave you. And the way you live with that, so I just decided my wife and I, we decided we are going to give to every beggar we went ERG we started changing money to have as much money as possible. We quickly ran out of money. So that plan didn’t work well. We then became a lot of Budweiser and we broke it up into smaller denominations of money and so that you can give less but give to more people. And then it is just one of the beneficiaries of that decision. And they love seeing my car. And if he hasn’t seen my car for a while, especially now during covid, if I drive past it on my way to the office and he sees me, he will stop all the traffic just to get to me because he knows he’s going to get something.

Darryl Heald: Well, I just love the relationship you have. I mean, it was obviously that was I mean, that’s happened dozens and dozens of times. You’ve talked about education and the importance of education. Let’s talk about what you and lesslie is from a kingdom investing side. We think about this giving. What are your particular passion about? What are you excited about giving to right now?

Bertie Lourens: There are it’s really the education the education states and South Africa are alarming. It is a bomb that will explode if nothing happens. There’s another state. About four percent of kids that start in grade one will pass. Math increased above four percent. So you have ninety six percent of your population that cannot count. So the quality of jobs and the amount of jobs that they’ll get is few. And so the amount of unemployed people, the volume of people that are unemployed is growing year on year. And it just doesn’t make sense that one should live in this country and think that that’s OK. So we put as much effort into educating people and just basic skills. So first of all, a capital is the foundation that reform really is the structure we formed where we could have got as a legal shareholder in our company. And the Nyko Capital uses all of its funds and it throws it into schooling. So there’s a few schools up here in Pretoria and Johannesburg, Christian schools. So we try and throw all our skills in there, all the networks, all our relationships, and as far as possible that we could use our resources and our assets. And money is just a very small part of that. The lady that works in our kitchen, who cleans our house, looks after the kids when we are not there to try and do as much as we can for her and her kids in terms of housing, schooling, the gospel, help them understand the gospel of the gospel and preach the gospel in the communities. The guy works in our garden and we just felt that that is practical in South Africa. If one just starts there, you’ll stay busy for the rest of your life just there. You do not have to go after big things, just those immediate lives around you influence them and help them educate themselves.

Darryl Heald: Yeah. Thank you for sharing. Some of that is a real joy for me to see some of those schools with you on that last trip. I mean, how many students do you have in these schools now?

Bertie Lourens: They’re all there’s about a thousand students, I think in all the schools where we’re involved. I’m particularly drawn to one school with its two hundred kids. It’s in the middle of Mamelodi township. It is a Christian private school. It’s private because there’s no other support coming from the government. So it’s really donations. And some of the parents are paying fees to keep the kids in there. But it’s beautiful what’s happening there. It’s kids that have all the odds stacked up against themselves. If they did not go to the school, they would go to one of our failing government schools that are producing the results I’ve just mentioned. So here we are creating an environment for them where they have great education, great principal with a great teaching group that we teach the gospel, we model the gospel, we show the gospel, we model grace. We model generosity. And we try and show them what good fatherhood looks like because that’s the one big lacking thing in the poor communities. There are no fathers there. So the way I see it is zero two hundred kids that will become two hundred families one day and 200 families. We’ll have a chance at success in South Africa because of the school and that on its own is so rewarding because you look in the eyes of these kids and you interview them and you hear what they say and you hear kids say, I need to live generous with my fellow students. That comes from a kid that has nothing. And that’s beautiful because that kid gets it and that kid is going to enjoy success and joy because they get that concept of generosity.

Darryl Heald: That’s great. Thanks for sharing that, Betty. You also have a real passion for leadership so that you’re studied this for your own self as a leader, your company and your community and your family things. Tell us a little bit more about these. What’s driving you to do these interviews with other leaders there in South Africa?

Bertie Lourens: Daryl, I just started with interviewing my mentor when he was getting old, and I needed to have some video footage of what he’s taught me over the years. So I asked him and questions some of the questions are ones I’ve never had time to ask him. And some of the questions that I asked that deeply impacted me. So I asked him that. I took a video of it. We broke it into 10 little snippets, videos, and the purpose was really just to release it into our organization. But the value was so much that we thought, let’s literally just start a YouTube channel called Stories that Inspire. We posted on there and then for anyone to enjoy. And I thought, that is wonderful. And I asked God if he wants me to continue with that and felt free to go find another leader like him. And my deal with God was if he had to keep sending me people that are willing to be interviewed by me, I will continue to do so. And we are on series six, I think, right now. And I am just enjoying hearing from these people because everyone who has achieved the level of success are always keen to share it. They’re not stingy. Everyone who has had success wants to share it. So that’s what I do. Like I ask them and I try and package it in snippets that other people can enjoy and use and benefit from Amen Burty.

William Norvell: As we come nearer to close, I want to give you an opportunity just to maybe speak, just to have an open mic a little bit again to talk to the entrepreneurs out there that may be listening. And any other advice that you might have about, you know, just how God taught you to lead a business from a faith first perspective.

Bertie Lourens: Thank you, William. Yes, this all comes from the journey of starting to surrender, and I have developed a conviction that our father wants us to steward his stuff on his behalf. Now, we’ve heard this. This is all tacky, but if we can just pause for a moment and think of your earthly dad had assets with hundred billion dollars and he asks you, my son, would you take over the running of this company while I’m alive, then what would you do? How would you do that? Well, the first thing is you’ll be very fearful and respectful. And as you step into those very big shoes, but you will honor him and every one of your decisions, you will seek him in every one of your decisions. And you must check in with him daily. And our father, the creator of the universe, has created resources that generates about 90 trillion dollars of GDP every year. We are his sons and daughters and he wants us to stay with these assets on his behalf. So why do we get caught up so much and what we create and what we hold onto this such big journey out there? And by calling for us and I almost feel like our father is sitting on the edge of his seat waiting for us to surrender and let go of our stuff and the power that our stuff has over us and said, God, I’m your son and I’m here to steward your assets on your behalf, for your glory. God showed me in Romans eight. I’m about 19 and this is my translation of the all of creation is waiting eagerly for the Sons of God to stand up and reveal themselves and say, here we are. And then to do what? To risk your creation out of the bondage of corruption and to then steward it in a way that gives glorious liberty. What is glorious liberty? It is it’s a freedom that gives glory back to him. And I think that’s our calling our sons and daughters. So when he gives us assets to steward companies and people, he wants us to steward in a way that brings liberty, freedom to the resources of the earth that we stewarding the animals, the plants, the rivers, everything, the resources in it and the people and all of creation should the glory to father because of the way that we is sons of stewarding his assets. And I just think it’s such a big calling that we cannot waste time to get caught up in stuff and status, you know, and accolades. And I just felt that the only way that I was able to do this is to reach a place of complete surrender. So when I gave God shares in the business and I gave him control, it almost felt like that was absolutely necessary for that to happen before I could really stupid things on his behalf. Before then, it was all for me, as for me, my family, their inheritance, my legacy and all that nonsense.

William Norvell: Oh, I love that the it wasn’t something you begrudgingly did or maybe you did, but it was necessary. It was like that was the only way for it to work, actually, in sort of God’s world is to take that step of obedience.

Bertie Lourens: Yeah. And I want to add one more thing. The second point to that is the idea of generosity, how to be generous lives. I realized that a father is a generous father and the father of lies is a stingy father. And selfishness and stinginess come from the fear of scarcity. And generosity comes from the understanding of abundance and abundant provision from our father. And it’s almost as if we could live our lives in either one of these two veins. You can’t be in both. And when you realize that my father is the father of a Bynum’s and I can share my resources abundantly with the ones around me and I can live abundantly gracious with the people that I lead, employ my family, my friends, my neighbors, then you see the lie of the enemy. But until you make that choice, you live in the lie of the enemy. You always think, especially in South Africa, in a declining economy. How can I put away as much as I can now so that my kids will be OK? The day when I die. And I think we all live with that fear. That is the father of lies that are whispering those lies until years. And he whispers little lies. He puts little packets of lies and fear around our lives, neatly wrapped as gifts, tiny little packets. And as soon as you take the one and you open it up, you give him legal right to enter and cause havoc. And you cannot live in faith and fear. So Faith says, my father is abundant, is my provider, and he will look after me and my family. And fear says it’s up to me to put away as much as I possibly can so that my kids and my family are going to be OK one day.

William Norvell: Amen, I almost hate to ask another question, a wonderful place to end, but we do have to get to our closing question because we always ask it. And so usually I would cut myself off. But thank you for sharing that. And our closing question, will we love to ask, is just where God has you in his word today, where he has you in his scripture. And that’s something that you could have been meditating on for a season. It could be something God revealed to you this morning. But just to let our audience in to where God’s walking with you in his holy word today,

Bertie Lourens: William, I want to share something that happened over the last week. I got busy. I had to travel to Capetown, came back, went on a mountain bike race, traveled again. And this morning when I sat down, I opened my word. I saw it for the last eight days. I did not have a quiet time. So the last eight days, I got so busy that I didn’t sit with my father and I speak with him. And I realized the day before I exploded in the meeting because I acted out of my flesh, out of anger. And when I said with God, I repented for not seeking him daily. I allowed business to come and take me away from him. And I felt the father showed me the picture that the enemy wants us just to move away from my father slowly. You’ll never come with a big bang for your give away. His plan will come slowly. You’ll distract us with things that he knows will move us away from our father. And if you can get us away for long enough, then introduce a stage to riches, lies and fear. Because if we’ve been away from our father long enough, he know that we will not hear this Holy Spirit in the moment and introduce introduces little lines once we take them. He comes in with a lot of lies and after a week I was operating fully in my flesh, making fleshly decisions and exploding at people. I’m making bad decisions and that’s just a fresh revelation that I did not set before my father every day. And I ask him advice and if I don’t sit in his word, so his presence and I listen to the Holy Spirit, I do not care how long I’ve been a Christian. I will fail. I will act in inflation, will make bad decisions, and I’ll disappoint them.

William Norvell: Amen Amen, so grateful for you joining us today, so grateful for your story, so grateful for sharing what God’s done and through your obedience and at times your disobedience. And thank you for sharing both of those and how he still comes to the rescue through all of those examples. So grateful for you and grateful for your story.

Bertie Lourens: And give William.

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If you’re involved in Private Equity, you simply have to listen to today’s guest. And if you’re not involved in Private Equity, well, you’re still going to want to listen to Brent Beshore because in addition to taking an alternative approach to private equity, he’s an all around interesting person. 

When it comes to PE, Brent doesn’t want to replace the founder. He doesn’t want to run up debt. And he doesn’t have a timeline for when he wants to sell. How does that work in practice? 

Hear the CEO and Founder of Permanent Equity tell you himself…

Episode Transcript

Some listeners have found it helpful to have a transcription of the podcast. Transcription is done by an AI software. While technology is an incredible tool to automate this process, there will be misspellings and typos that might accompany it. Please keep that in mind as you work through it. The FDI movement is a volunteer-led movement, and if you’d like to contribute by editing future transcripts, please email us.

Brent Beshore: It’s impossible to make good long term decisions if you’re short term in nature and use short term capital. And again, this kind of goes down to the structure, you know, when your time horizon is stretched to eternity. It does fundamentally change the way that you think about the day to day and the things that previously were anxiety filled. Frustrating not to say that I’m never frustrated or anxiety filled. That’s not true at all. But certainly a lot of that stuff has faded away. And I find myself a lot more comfortable that I worship a living God, that sovereign.

Henry Kaestner: Welcome back to the Faith Driven Investor podcast, Brant, be sure. In the House, Brant, welcome.

Brent Beshore: Thank you so much.

Henry Kaestner: One of the things that we do, many of our listening audience may not know this, but we do a couple of different things before we actually go live with you. One is that we do our infamous three to one clap to sync up our audio tracks, which sometimes works out really well and sometimes doesn’t. But the other one is more materially is that we pray. We pray for you, the listener. We pray for the technology, and we just pray generally for the guest in our time together. And in the prayer today, William had mentioned something that I thought was really interesting, alluded the fact that at one point in time he cold called our guest today. Brant and I had known that. And so, William, what was that all about?

William Norvell: Absolutely. You know, I have been following Brett’s career and sort of what he was doing, permanent equity when we were getting started with the lower middle market side of sovereigns and had run into a couple of roadblocks. Honestly, just that I thought he could understand from what I had read, from what I had heard. We’re going to find out later. I think Brant is a brilliant communicator, both with his writings and with what he talks. No pressure.

Brent Beshore: Brant, can we lower the bar of expectation?

William Norvell: Nope, nope, nope. We’re sick of a brilliant or signaler brilliant his writings and what he gives away and the thoughts and the way he catalyzes those are just really, really well done. And I said, you know what? I think this guy is going to be able to help with this problem. I have. And I forgot how I found your number or whatever, but I got your note and you were gracious to get on and spend to get half an hour with me walking through it. It was super helpful for what I was doing. And from then we found out we had a shared faith and we’ve been able to connect on other things. And gosh, I want to say it’s like three years from now. Now we find ourselves on this podcast and with tons of mutual friends. And as I was praying, it’s just like I am just always amazed at the plan God is writing that we don’t know, that we have no clue what God is up to. And we find ourselves here collaborating in a deeper friendship and in a friendship with more people. It’s just fun. It’s just fun. Indeed.

Henry Kaestner: Indeed. And I’ve been looking forward to this. You know, it’s infrequent that we have guests on the podcast out of the Faith Driven Entrepreneur podcast or the Faith Driven Investor podcast that, like me, our adult converts who came to faith later in life. And so Brant and I share that. And I think we can get into a little bit. In fact, maybe we’ll even to start there and just bring us up to speed with who you are, where you come from, your early days. Growing up, you’re wrestling with faith the time before you became an investor.

Brent Beshore: Yeah, well, again, thank you for having me on the show. I don’t think is particularly interesting for me to tell people about my background growing up in Joplin, Missouri. But, yeah, I grew up in Joplin, Missouri, southwest corner of the state. My dad worked for the same company for a long time. My mom was a college professor and we attended most of the time, attended a Presbyterian church in Joplin growing up as a PC USA church. And it just never clicked for me. I mean, I can remember when I was a real young kid, you know, I’ve always felt a pretty significant battle with pride. I didn’t realize at the time it was a battle with pride. But I can remember being six or seven years old, sitting in vacation, Bible school. And, you know, they kept talking about all this stuff. And I was like, this all seems very far fetched. And I don’t know why they keep talking about. But they had great sex, you know, and that’s what really mattered to me. And, you know, the fat kid, as long as you can just feed me snacks and I’ll pretty much go along with anything. So, you know, but I can just remember from a young timelike, just I just wasn’t a believer. Like I didn’t believe. I thought it was made up. And I didn’t see a lot of people who centered their life on it. It felt very much like religion. And now that I’m finding I mean, I think there’s a huge split. And I certainly have gone through this phase. And I think in my faith journey, is it not really being about God and being about me and it being about my religious performance. And so, you know, kind of continued on. I remember I asked my mom to drive me to the church when I was fourteen, probably. And anyway, I just had a lot of questions. I had a lot of questions about why God was who he claimed God was and why I couldn’t have faith. And I pretty much made up my mind at that point that I was an atheist. But, you know, this guy was an amazing human beings names Bill Christmas since passed an incredible teacher, kind, loving, gentle man who spent an hour with a punk, prideful fourteen year old kid who was pounding him with all kinds of questions, which I thought were incredibly novel. And come to find out, we’re like the little baby steps that you first start thinking about when you’re thinking about faith. I walked out of there and I was just convinced that there was no God and I was convinced that, you know, I’d kind of go along with whatever society wanted me to, but I wasn’t going to have any faith. I went to college, a school in the East Coast. All my professors were pretty much atheist. I mean, maybe some of them had some a little bit of faith here and there, but not much took religion classes from people who made fun of Abraham and, you know, said that it was all just a ruse to control people. And so, you know, became more and more hardened and got into new atheism. It was a very attractive, you know, the Dawkins of the world and the Hitchens of the world and got into sort of a really condescending view of faith. And that was really my life until kind of mid to late twenties. I mean, I woke up when I was. Twenty seven, twenty eight, I had gotten lucky a few times, and I really say lucky, I mean, obviously now I would say providential, but truly I couldn’t explain why I had been successful. I mean, I look back and point to a few things in hindsight, but I woke up with a beautiful wife who loved me. We didn’t have any kids yet, but I had more money than I needed. And a career which was seemingly on a really great trajectory. And I just felt empty and hollow inside. And I just thought there had to be something more than this. I was just kind of at the point where I was like, what is going on? And around that same time, I met some people who just acted very differently and who loved in a way that I didn’t know was possible and who didn’t have egos and who just were delight to be around and had fun and just lived free. And I was so attracted to me and I kept getting to know these people. And I said, what is it about you? What do you know? They say, oh, well, I mean, we’re followers of Jesus. And I was like, Oh, come on, please, seriously, that’s the thing, you know? And they took me under their wing and fed me lots of books and fed me meals. And it was a long, slow, painful journey to faith. Like God just wouldn’t let go is how I would describe it. And so yeah.

Henry Kaestner: So yeah, OK. So I completely identify with that. Twenty it was my age and and there’s some wrestling involved too. One of the things that’s impacted me recently is spending some time in jail packers knowing God. And yesterday I’ve been struggling a little bit with some of the Genesis stories. I mean there’s a lot to just be curious about, you know, in the tent and some of these between Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, they’re not always exemplars. Right. And I was particularly struggling with the Jacob story and and Jay Packers’, knowing God, he did a great job of talking about the wrestling with God story, which I had not fully understood, and putting the hip out of place. And one of the things that helped me about that lesson was just understand that Jacob just went and grabbed God, wanted to get out of there. You know, as the story goes, God said, let me go. And Jacob wouldn’t let him go until he got the blessing. And I thought, wow, that’s really interesting. As sinful as far as I am, there’s some precedent here that is messed up, as Jacob was. I mean, he was a deceiver. I mean, that’s his name. It just really kind of messed up in his dealings. But he wanted God. He wanted a guy. He wrestled with God. But in wrestling with God, he knew enough to know that he really wanted to hold on to him, and he did until God got his blessing. And do you see parts of that wrestling with God in your own life?

Brent Beshore: Yeah, I mean, this was a huge I think when I was a hardcore atheist, I looked at myself as being smart and capable and competent. I could I could do things. I didn’t need anybody. I didn’t I certainly didn’t need God. And then, you know, I was reading the Bible. Everyone’s an idiot in the Bible pretty much, right. Everyone but Jesus pretty much an idiot. And thankfully, because I’m an idiot, too, it gives me a lot of hope that God to work through me. I mean, literally, if you look at all the biggest figures in the Bible, I mean, they were all messed up in their own ways and God redeems them. Right. And I think that’s where the story for me of wrestling with God is really wrestling with who am I and wrestling with the deep seated sense that I have in my life. And the more that God brings them to the surface, the more that I wrestle with God with them. It’s amazing. It’s a I mean, it’s what a gift. I see things that have had a grip on my life for my whole life. And I still, by the way, so much, very much an idiot. So but it’s amazing to see those things lose grip. And for me to change my heart, to actually change towards people and to truly love and care for people in a way that I didn’t even know was possible.

Henry Kaestner: Very interesting. OK, so it looks going to take us to a conversation about permanent equity. You have a day job. Your faith informs a day job and will impact that a little bit, too. But you are the first person that we’ve had on the Faith Driven Investor podcast that is auditing seminary classes. So you’re serious about building out your knowledge? How do you have time and what brings you to it? Because you’ve been doing this for a little while, too, right?

Brent Beshore: Yeah. Yeah, I started let’s see, this is my third or fourth semester now of adding seminary classes. I mean, just a great opportunity. There’s a cohort at my local church that was going through Covenant seminaries classes, and I was lucky enough to be brought along. And it’s a great group of people and just trying to learn and explore. And I mean, how do I find time? I don’t know. God sort of I think makes time for it. And I love it. I mean, I’m a huge nerd and I love to read and learn. And I think if anything, if I’m being honest, it’s a lot easier for me to learn about God than to be in a relationship with God. And I think that’s actually something that I’ve been struggling with in seminaries. I’m very drawn to the intellectual side, the knowledge and the sort of apologetics and the defense of the faith and being thoughtful and logical about why I believe what I believe, which I think is a bad thing at all. I think that you can have a right doctrine and have a horrible, sinful heart that has turned away from God. And I think that’s something that I’ve actually been struggling with. As you know, I would say anybody listening who I don’t want them to find it intimidating like the Amen, amen. An area like I don’t want to be like this is somehow impressive, like for me, honestly, the more that I focus on my relationship with God and the less that I care about knowing more than everyone else. And I think that’s the comparative side of me. The prideful side of me, I think is it comes through in that the more I just want to focus on God, the better it is. And so I would say is being a seminary or reading, you know, you’re obviously a huge reader, Henry, as well. And, you know, I think that’s great. I think, though, that I’m learning the more I mature in my faith, the more I’m just really trying to focus on who got it and being relationship.

Henry Kaestner: You know, I think that’s really interesting. And I think that a lot of investors probably aren’t in the same spot. I know that I am as an investor, you do want to know a lot. You want to know about your industry. You want to know about your model. You want to know about deal structures. And so I think that we have a propensity in our relationship with God, with three thousand plus pages in a Bible to know as much of the text as we can to know systematic theology, to know the writings of what field or Spurgeon are and just gone. But the deep personal relationship where God is our father, ABBA is really hard for us. So that’s a great encouragement. You hit on something personal for me and likely for others as well.

Luke Roush: How do you think know. So just as somebody who’s an adult convert to faith, a lot of times that actually kind of changes everything about how you think about family, how you think about fatherhood, being a husband in an investor, maybe to speak a little bit to when you had this awakening, you’d had some success already as an investor, how did your coming of faith impact how you thought about shepherding capital? And maybe that dovetails into, you know, what I perceived to be a fairly novel structure in your fund with an evergreen structure. So you had any comments on that?

Brent Beshore: Yeah. I mean, the short version is it changed everything. I mean, I think that the things that hasn’t changed or the things that I’m still holding on to, that I haven’t surrendered to God and that somehow I want to go and wallow in my blood in that area in my life, that I’m learning more and more to have a distaste for. I mean, I still have those areas of my life that I haven’t. And I think that know in the business world looking at is everyone’s job around me to serve me. I mean, which is really as the boss, as the CEO. I mean, I had a mentality that was look like I don’t know how to say it. It was all about me. Right. And it was about we are going to work for me. I’m going to make money for me. Everything was around me. And that’s the exact opposite of the gospel, right? I mean, we worship a savior who willingly gave his life and who gave up everything for us. And, you know, what is the purpose of life? I mean, I think prior to becoming a believer, it was to amass as much. I mean, it was it was gain and it was to try to make as much as I possibly could and get as much as I possibly could and experience as much as I possibly could. And, you know, a lot of those tastes have changed in the more that I’m able to love people. I mean, that’s really comes down to. Right. And what does it mean to love somebody? It means not to love them in the way that you want to be loved. It’s to love them in the way that they want to be loved and that they should be loved. And so what does it look like in a business deal? You know, I saw am wrestling with a lot of this. I mean, to be completely frank, the challenge I have is it’s easy for a deal to look Zero-Sum. And I don’t think it ever is right. And I think there’s always an opportunity to collaborate with people and to make more. And that’s what God wants us to do, right? God wants us to love one another through the structured business, to grow the garden, to grow the cities, to encourage human flourishing. And I think that, you know, capitalism is an amazing, amazing vehicle, a gift from God to be able to do that. And so I don’t see conflict with that except for I see conflict with my own sinful nature, how I frankly, I want to be smarter than other people. I want to get a good deal. And I think that oftentimes when I feel that pull of wanting to do better in a comparative way, I think that’s where I’m in danger of harming the deal. I’m in danger of, you know, setting things up poorly and suffering the consequences down the road. And so when it comes down to it, the biggest thing, which is we’re in the investment business, we’re in the negotiation business, we’re buying companies or at least buying majority stakes in companies. We want to do it in a way that honors the people that we’re working with. And we want to work with them after the closing. And we want to have them feel good about it. We want to have them excited about the future. And oftentimes my son screws that up. You know, if I’m just being honest, like we’re all messy. I explained some of the other day, like, how can you be a believer? I say, well, look, the Bible explains a world that I see around me, the history that I experienced and predicts the future better than any other system I’ve ever been aware of by a mile. And one of the core doctrines is the doctrine of sin, right. Paired with the doctrine, the Imago day. And when you pair those two things together, it says that, look, we all have this incredible darkness in us that wants to come out, that’s comparative, that’s sinful, and we want to use it everywhere. And by the way, were made in the image of God. And if we fully appreciated each other, we’d be tempted to worship each other. Right. I mean, that’s how beautiful it is. I think in the ideal world that comes through. Right. I mean, you get this incredible excitement around a deal about the possibility of it. And it feels like the Imago day, right? It feels like we’re going to come together to build something more. And then you got everyone sending everyone’s messing this kind of junk all over, right, and you’ve got the lawyers are junk and we’re junk and we’ve got all this junk together. And it’s just it causes a mess. And so I think most of my job these days is trying to weed through the mess and look at my own self and my messiness and say, OK, how can I minimize the mess that I’m going to be putting into this transaction and really just try to figure out how I can give grace to people and how I can love people despite them, maybe not always having the best intentions like, oh my, perhaps I don’t either. You know, I should never be surprised by it.

Luke Roush: Yeah. Yeah. Maybe any kind of quick thoughts on things that got easier when you became aware of your faith and how you executed as an investor and then things that got harder as you became aware of that.

Brent Beshore: Yeah. So I mean, I would say the thing that became easier so it’s impossible to make good long term decisions if you’re short term in nature and you’ve short term capital. And again, this kind of goes back to the structure. You know, when your time horizon is stretched to eternity, it does fundamentally change the way that you think about the day to day and the things that previously were anxiety filled. Frustrating not to say that I’m never frustrated or anxiety filled. That’s not true at all. But certainly a lot of this stuff has faded away. And I find myself a lot more comfortable that I worship a living God, that sovereign. And that has I mean, there you go, Sovereign’s Capital. It’s almost like it’s intentional, you know, well played, well played. Except I’m just trying to plug in there for you. You’re welcome. 20 bucks. Anyway, when you stretch your time horizon to eternity, it changes the way that you can look at individual short term issues and allows you to think, frankly, much more clearly about what’s really important, what’s not. And for me, that has enabled a lot better relationships and frankly, it’s enabled a lot better transactions. What has gotten harder? Man, I used to love to get a good deal, like a good deal, like I used to love to be able to be like, look, I’m smarter. This is how I arrange things. So I did. And oftentimes I was doing it in a zero sum sort of fashion. And even though I still have the tendency to want to go there, I think trying to create win win win scenarios, you know, sort of if you think about all the stakeholder groups, because oftentimes we just think about the seller and the buyer. There’s a lot of other stakeholder groups than those two parties. Right? Certainly the seller, the buyer. You have the investors behind us. Right, that are our clients as well. You have the employee base. You have a leadership team. You have the vendors who most people don’t think about. You have the communities in which they sit. And of course, then you have the clients. How do you create a scenario where you’re encouraging flourishing among all those groups? And yes, you are sitting at the Nexus Point, right. That’s the beauty of capitalism. And you’re able to share in the flourishing. But that’s when things are really exciting, is when you get to do that. That’s where you should make money. You should make money because you’ve enabled a unique form of flourishing and you get to share in the benefits of that. You should not make money and you should not try to screw somebody over right out, do somebody in negotiation. And so I think that’s where that’s become a lot more difficult. And like I said, I’m still struggling with the day to day.

Luke Roush: So maybe just for some of our listeners who may not understand permanent equity, permanent capital or evergreen models, maybe to share a little bit about how that works and how it differs from what most people would be familiar with in a closed end time.

Brent Beshore: Yes, a traditional private equity. So we are a private equity in the sense that we are buying private securities, private equities, the equity side of the debt or equity. We’re on the equity side and we’re buying them from private companies, small private companies. And so how traditional private equity works, though, sort of beyond just the name itself, is you’re typically going to buy something you’re in levered up to a lot of debt on it. You’re going to try to optimize it within a short window of time, typically two to five years, and then you’re going to sell it to somebody else because their investors expect their money back. And in the process of that, you’re going to kind of do whatever it takes, right? I mean, like I said, it’s impossible, make good long term decisions with short term capital. If your time horizons two to five years, you’re going to make decisions that are going to benefit the company and going to show up in that time horizon. So what we do is in many ways the exact opposite of that. So we buy with no intention of selling the business. We are typically not using debt in our transactions. We are partnering with the leadership team that’s already there, certainly helping augment skill sets. We want to be helpful in how we do that. We are not coming in and clearcutting the leadership team, and then we’re really trying to encourage them to reinvest back in the business and treat people well and like I said, encourage flourishing. And so it just looks very, very different in practice. Right. I mean, how we’re able to structure our deals, how we’re able to operate the companies post close, it feels very different. And then, of course, we are not putting the company through another traumatic sort of sale scenario within a fairly short period of time. We’re able to do that because the capital raise. So the model that we created, which I think is unique, at least we haven’t or anybody else who’s done it this way, is we basically run funds that are very long dated so that our investors give us their capital for the better part of. Three decades and then there’s some options to renew if we want to continue forward, but it’s functionally indefinite capital writing three decades is a long time and so we’re able to come in and certainly generate a good return. That’s a focus of ours. In fact, we want to be world leading in the returns that we’re generating, but we’re generating in a very different way. So instead of levering up the company and hoping to get a big pop on the exit, we are trying to run these companies extremely well and create a flourishing within the companies that then we can share in on the way up, as opposed to trying to set out, negotiate and then sell it to somebody else who can work it out, negotiate them as well.

Henry Kaestner: So the better part of three decades feels like a long time. And maybe I say that just because I know that some of our investors have told us, you know, with our 12 year fund, that feels like a very long time. And and I think that it does. Do you offer liquidity along the way in the event that somebody is like, gosh, I love what you’re doing, but, you know, it’s been 10 years and you get some things they got to do.

Brent Beshore: Yeah. So there’s no guarantee liquidity along the way. What we’re used to doing is a lot of the businesses that we’re getting involved in have excess cash that’s coming out of them beyond what’s required or even what can be reasonably responsibly reinvested back into the companies. And so that cash flow stream that is aggregated and then goes out to the investors about once every six months to a year, depending on the situation. So there is a sort of a distribution stream that’s coming out of these companies. And of course, there’s always secondary liquidity. Somebody could sell their stake and we have a process for that internally. Thankfully, we really never had to. I mean, I think one time somebody, because they were funding a startup, had to balance some small position for them. Other than that, there’s a lot of trust. And I think that’s one of the things that’s beautiful is that, you know, our investors have given us a tremendous amount of leeway and trust and we don’t take that lightly. I mean, we know we have the best investors in the world with the best capital structure we think in the world, and that allows us to do things other people can’t do. It allows us to put trust into people that other people can’t put trust in and allows us to invest in industries that other people can invest in and situations that would be impossible. And so we consider that to be our core advantages, that we have better capital than everyone else. And then, of course, post close. We want to treat people kindly and generously, but also with a high expectation for excellence. So oftentimes those two things seem in conflict and we don’t think there’s any conflict between those two. God calls us to excellence. Do unto the Lord. Right. Whatever your hands find, do unto the Lord. Like we want people to pursue excellence and excellence both in their job and their career, but also excellence beyond what is the product look like? What is the service customer service look like now? Are we falling way, way short all the time? One hundred percent. We live in a fallen, broken thistles and thorns world. Totally get that. But we certainly want to aspire to be excellent. And so that’s where we drive our returns from.

Luke Roush: How does that approach just around time frame? How does that influence kind of where you hunt for the right kind of partnership opportunities, recognizing that not every company is conducive to generating Alpha over a thirty year run? How do you think about focus and concentration?

Brent Beshore: Yeah, that’s a great question. So one of the first filters we put it through is do we think this company is going to be around and the demand for this product is going to be around in twenty, thirty years? Spot on. Right. And if we don’t think it’s something that’s going to be around for a really long time, we won’t get involved in that. Like for us is nice because it weeds out a tremendous amount of fabs, a tremendous amount of we call them Hustle’s right. These are maybe the companies doing great media companies grown a lot, but we just don’t have a high degree of confidence that it’s going to continue on, at least in a shape or form that we can predict. And so it gets us into a lot of things that are what we call Main Street businesses. Right. So if you look at our current portfolio, right, we’re in construction. We think that the world will continue to build things. I think construction’s been going on for a while and probably will continue for a while. Right. And, you know, subsegments of that, like we’re partners in the nation’s largest swimming pool builder as an example. Right. One of our jokes that we say in our offices that people have been dipping their bodies in water for pleasure for, you know, millennia. And we think that will continue. And so we’re not concerned about the new app that’s going to make you feel like you’re swimming in a swimming pool. I think there’s just a tactile experience and a a shared familial experience. There’s a community experience, too. Swimming is a

Henry Kaestner: global warming play.

Brent Beshore: You know, we build in Arizona and it’s an oven already and getting hotter. And so we think that that’s probably pretty good for pool sales as well. But yeah, anyway, we try to be involved in things that we think are enduring and that are going to last for quite a while.

Henry Kaestner: Brant does not shy away from talking publicly on podcasts about different verticals that are interesting and beyond construction swimming pools. I remember hearing the story where you’re talking about how pet crematoriums were a very interesting high margin play. I think maybe since said that maybe that played out a little bit. But tell us more about some of the verticals that you’ve seen and are interested in.

Brent Beshore: I mean, I think one of my favorite parts of my job is to get to see all these unusual little missions that you never would have expected otherwise. Right? I mean, there’s behind every wine bottles exampled. There’s the things that you never think about, which is where does the sand come that forms the glass, right? How do you develop new molds for the punting at the end of the bottle? How do you develop the foil? Right. How do you do the ink that goes on the foil? What are all the different chemicals that are used and what are all the different methodologies and equipment that’s used to harvest? And how do you think about the storage of those things? I mean, we’ve literally looked at them using the wine business as an example of sort of interesting angles, like I would never buy a winery. Right. I shouldn’t say that. As soon as I say never got an interesting way of humbling me and I end up doing the things I say I never will, which I guess if I’m being honest, if I somehow stumble on a great wine investment, that’s probably a good thing. So I guess I’m happy to eat my work. But if you look at the wine business, I mean, owning a vineyard, there’s a lot of non-economic reasons why people own wineries. And so any time you have non-economic reasons for participation in an industry, you’re going to see a dramatic decrease in the return set. And so whenever we look at an industry, one of the first things we look at is we call it the sexiness factor of how sexy is the industry, how much interest is there other than economics to participate in the industry. And so this is where you get into really weird economics around things like wine and movies and restaurants even, and anything that’s sort of a consumer ish thing that people would pick up and look at. But beneath the surface of those industries, there’s all these little niches and interesting things that you can see. And so I just love seeing all the different business models. I mean, I would say, yeah, there’s certain areas like crematoriums. I joke that all you need is a storefront oven, which is kind of crude, but it’s true. And there’s a lot of emotional reasons why you don’t want to just put Fluffy in the backyard, that you want to have a proper burial and all of those things that come along with that, I would say that any more. What’s interesting to me is not trying to formulate my own interesting things that I want to go pursue. And I’m just fascinated by all the things that come to us that I just never even knew existed as using example in the wine business. I mean, we’ve looked at everything from machinery to new genetic techniques for grafting grapes to different vine and all these different things that you would never imagine that you look at. And that kind of goes for every single industry. And so I just love the variety and all the different ways that you can serve a customer. And I think that the best job in the world,

William Norvell: you’ve been thoughtful. You spent a lot of time coming up with this vehicle and everybody’s really interested in brands vehicle. He’s always super open handed. You’ve written extensively on your twenty seven year vehicle. You’ve written extensively on how it kind of works. The question I want to ask is we’ve got an audience of Faith Driven Investor do you fundamentally and I don’t know if I know the answer to this, do you fundamentally believe the 10 year, 12 year fund is broken? Do you think tonnes of Faith Driven Investor should be using the permanent equity model? Do you think it’s another tool in the tool chest and there’s a great number of tools, or do you see the market going? What encouragement would you have for other Faith Driven Investor to maybe starting a fund? How would you encourage them to think about what might be the right fit for them and what God might be calling them to?

Brent Beshore: That’s a great question. And look, I want to be clear. There’s been a lot of people who served a lot of companies and a lot of investors by using a traditional two and twenty ten year, 12 year, whatever the shorter term vehicle it would be. And I’m not going to sit here and say I know more than them. What I would say is that logically, when you think about first principles, the more optionality that you can have, the value of an option is in being able to make a decision down the road. And if you talk to any private equity investor has been doing it for very long and you ask him what’s the most painful company experience in their career, most of the time it’s not the one that went to zero. That’s actually not the thing that they’re most upset about. The one that they’re most upset about is the one that they just had a tiger by the tail. They knew that the thing was going to grow for decades. And they just I mean, the thing was a bonanza and they had to go and sell it. And they knew that the guy who they were going to sell it to or the woman they were going to sell to was going to experience an unbelievable ride up. And then they were going have to sell it to somebody else. Right. And so you get these really weird situations where it doesn’t make economic sense, it doesn’t make cultural sense to have to sell something, but you have to sell it. And I think the longer you can stretch that time horizon, it doesn’t mean you have to hold everything. I mean, this is something that’s very different than I think people would assume. Sometimes sellers will say it us. OK, so you’re pledging to never sell our business and we say absolutely not. That’s not at all what I’m saying. I think there are good reasons to sell and bad reasons to sell. Do you think there’s anything wrong with selling? And they’ll say, well, yeah, I mean, if you’re going to sell my business, then why wouldn’t I just sell it to traditional private equity? I said, you’re selling the business so there can’t be anything inherently wrong with selling. Right. It’s what are you selling for the right reasons or the wrong reasons? And I think a really, really bad reason to sell is the time clock stopped. Right. And you’re being forced to there are good reasons to sell, which is somebody would be a better owner of that asset than you are. Somebody would be able to encourage flourishing in that asset more than you can. They would be able to bring a skill set. They would bring as I’m going to slip into consultancy gear and going to use that word synergy. Right. They can bring synergy the table more than we can. So I would just say is from a fund structure standpoint, I encourage people to think about this as look optimally, it would be an indefinite sort of holdco structure. I think there are even problems with that. And Henry touched on it earlier with liquidity. And, you know, how do you make sure you get the right mix of investors? And, look, everything’s going to be complicated, but I think the longer you can stretch your time horizon, the better. Would it actually show up and returns? Would it actually show up in the value of the company? I think it depends on the company. It depends on the people. It depends on their mentality. But it never hurts to gain optionality. And I think that in this case, for where private equity is today, I think there’s a lot of people waking up, both CPAs and LPs. Right. I mean, there’s on both sides of the ledger saying I think it’s better to go longer as long as we have some checks in place and that we can be responsible for it. The other thing is just I mean, frankly, I’m thirty eight when we raise the first fund, I was thirty five. Thirty four. I mean, I’ve done it on my own with my own capital since my mid 20s. We first raised our capital as my early to mid 30s. If you’re going to have a long time horizon, you also got to have a long time horizon. That makes sense. So I mean, most people who get into private equity didn’t follow my path. Like, I joke that I’m the Forrest Gump of private equity for a reason. I kind of fell backwards into it. And so most people are spinning out in their forties and you’re just probably not going to have a 30 year time horizon in your 40s as a GP. And so I think there’s some very good reasons potentially in that situation to not have a longer time horizon.

William Norvell: Superville, that’s great. Says I think about moving towards our clothes. And Luke and Henry, jump in here. Just kind of you know, if you had one or two pieces of advice or investors on the other side of this podcast, they’re out there. They may be looking for venture capital companies. They may be looking for long term hold companies. They may be looking at the public markets. What do you think Jesus has taught you about how you look at investing? What would be one or two pieces of advice or thoughts that you would say, you know, this is something I’ve just been really thinking over as an investor that I think Jesus has shown me.

Brent Beshore: Yeah, I mean, I think one of the lessons that I repeatedly learned that I think is just cause God wants us on our knees, God wants our whole heart, God wants our whole self. And I don’t think that you should take investing and put it off to the side. And O’Henry is really passionate about this, too. And I applaud a lot of the things that he said and talked about. This is going to bring your whole self in your whole life and put it in God’s hands. And so when it comes to investing, you know, I would say having the humility to say, God, I don’t know, lead me and guide me, you give me wisdom. Don’t sort of move investing off to the side and have it be something where your analytical over here and your hard nosed and met people who it’s almost like they’re Christians on Sundays and maybe Christians on Mondays and Tuesdays. But when they talk to GPS on Wednesdays and Thursdays, they’re definitely not believers. Right. And I think that that compartmentalization is really detrimental to both their life and their returns probably over time as well, as well as it’s really detrimental to the people who are trying to invest. And so practically, what does that look like? It means that try to be kind and gentle and understanding and trying to figure out what is the thing that that investor, if you’re going to put your capital with an investor, what are they really trying to achieve and why are they trying to achieve it? And what makes you confident that the thing that that has created success in the past is going to be sustained? I think there’s a lot of people rushing into different areas. And I mean, certainly right now there’s a huge rush of people into what I call lower middle market private equity and pursuing all kinds different structures, which is wonderful. Right. And there’s a tremendous amount of need. And I’m not discouraging that in any way. But I would say is I’ve seen people who with no track record and with very little expertize in the space, raise money from people just because they say, hey, there’s this idea that I have. And the reality of it is, William, as you know, I mean, I’m preaching to the choir here. It’s brutally difficult. One of the things I want to make sure people get from my comments is, you know, I’m not being flippant when I say that I’ve gotten on my knees every single time after we close the transaction and prayed to God would rescue me. That’s literally true every single time we’ve ever made an investment. I’ve had a moment after close where I thought I shouldn’t have done this. This was a mistake. And look, God has rescued us. And I think that the area, the market people can look at and see, OK, you’re paying half of the multiples that you’re paying in the public markets. That’s really attractive. Look at the yields you can get. The reason why it’s cheap is because it’s really, really, really hard and it’s really fraught with risk. And these companies can go to zero very quickly. And so I would just say is, if you’re an investor thinking about entering into small business, private investing, take it slow work with somebody who’s done it for a while, learn the ropes. A lot more things sound good than are actually true. And I say that comes back down to humility. And God wants us humble and dependent and follow that from the Bible.

Henry Kaestner: It is it is all in the Bible

William Norvell: brand, I think said it so well. Like, one of the best ways that God lives with us is to pour his word into us and let us pour over his word with him. And so we do, as you know, love to ask, just like is there a verse is there a story that is helping bring some of those things you just articulated to life during this season? Right. I mean, God’s word just moves with us through the seasons of life and just wondering if there is something God’s been using in your life to help bring some of these thoughts to mind.

Brent Beshore: Yeah, first of all, it’s a great question. I’ll tell you, there’s no one verse or no one story. And I think you can see this repeated in the Bible. And this has taken me a long time and only recently has been a somewhat of a revelation to me is that I, for most of my life, have focused on the content of what I say and not how I say it. I focused on being correct in my logic and being thoughtful in how I would write something out. Right. Like that’s how I think is how I would write. And oftentimes what it does is it causes me relational issues because I don’t say things with a loving heart and with a goal of helping somebody understand. And this is just my own pride in my junk’s sort of coming through. But when I think about Jesus at the well, with woman at the well. Right. I mean, it’s the most beautiful story of love and acceptance while also not shying away from truth. There’s a lot of ways you can say truth without hurting the other person in the process. And I think that recently, you know, when I think about the story of the prodigal son. Right. And like just how the father was so loving and accepting of him coming back and loving and kind towards the older brother who I identify with a lot as well. Right. And I identify, unfortunately, both brothers in different ways. And I think that the whole point is the content of our conversations, the content of our interactions with others. It might only be 20 percent of really what people hear. And I think so often it’s the other big chunk is how you say it with the right tone, with the right kindness and love wrapped around it. So not to. Shy away from truth, I think you can get squishy and, you know, if you don’t have any truth in it, just all grace. And I think that that’s not loving actually either as well. But I just need to focus way more on that. And that’s something that recently I’ve tried to focus on more and stumbling my way through it. But I think just really trying to be thoughtful of who is the other person, what do they need and what is a way in which I can communicate with them in a way that shows them I care and that I’m for them. And even when I’m saying things that maybe are opposed to what they would hope, I would say

William Norvell: I mean, I’m in

Henry Kaestner: front. I’m grateful for you. I’m grateful for you taking the time for you, sharing what you’re doing. I think a bunch of different approaches, I think are really, really important. And I think that it’s particularly helpful for me. My big one takeaway, I mean, there are lots of different things about the model I think are important. Lots of different approaches to working with entrepreneurs and investments. And how we think about that that are unique and interesting would even get into the fact that you’ve got this really unique advantage of being in the center of the country and being able to take a look at some of these businesses that might otherwise be overlooked. And you had a really, really, really interesting. But the one thing that I’m going to take away from this is what we talked about before, which is that as an investor endeavors to know God and enjoy him forever, we have to be conscious of our propensity towards having both knowledge and academic knowledge at the expense of a close, intimate relationship with the founder and the owner of the universe. And that remains probably my greatest challenge. And you helped put some words to that, that I think that resonate with me and I hopefully a lot of our listeners. So thank you for that. Thank you for your time.

Brent Beshore: Yeah. I really appreciate you having me on. Thank you so much. And it’s a pleasure. Keep up the great work.

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In 1998, Mart Green took a transformational trip to Guatemala that changed the way he thought about return on investment. Since then, he has been involved in Bible translation and distribution efforts from the launch of the YouVersion Bible app to the establishment of a collaborative partnership among 10 of the world’s largest Bible translation organizations, called illumiNations. 

In today’s conversation, Mart shares where his passion for Bible translation started, the encouraging steps he’s seen in the effort to eliminate Bible poverty, and the power of what happens when competitors become collaborators.

Episode Transcript

Some listeners have found it helpful to have a transcription of the podcast. Transcription is done by an AI software. While technology is an incredible tool to automate this process, there will be misspellings and typos that might accompany it. Please keep that in mind as you work through it. The FDI movement is a volunteer-led movement, and if you’d like to contribute by editing future transcripts, please email us.

Mart Green: So in that one moment in time, I went from why to how why do we translate the Bibles for small people groups to how are we going to make sure that everybody on planet Earth has God’s word in their heart language?

Henry Kaestner: Welcome back to the Faith Driven Investor podcast. I’m here with William William. Good afternoon.

William Norvell: It is good to be here, as always. Good to see you.

Henry Kaestner: It’s great to have you discontinuing this segment, this series, I should say, of course, on other ways to think about doing Faith Driven Investor. And I’ve been thinking about Mark Green, who’s our guest. Welcome to the program, by the way.

Mart Green: Thank you, Henry. Look forward to having this time with you.

Henry Kaestner: When I think about alternate ways to think about Faith Driven Investor and different ways to think about guys economy and how to measure the success of our investments, I keep on coming back to one story that I’ve heard, Martelle, time and time again. That’s really made an impact on me and it’s made an impact on me because I really think that my thought about what a return on investment look like was probably pretty much in sync with Marte’s way up until this time he had this trip to Guatemala, which we’re going to hear about. And so I’m eager for Mark to tell a story and we’re going to get into that and we’re going to be unpacking together. What does it look like to think about investment return in light of what God tells us through his scripture and tells us through his spirit in a way that I hope will stretch us all? And I hope that in the course of doing that will bring us closer to knowing God and then just helps us to understand how to steward the resources he’s entrusted us with under his power for his glory. So hopefully that’s what success looks like. At the end of this podcast. You’ll have that much more of a closer sense as to what that what that means for you and the assets you’ve been entrusted with. So, Mark, thank you for being on the show. Let’s start off, as we do with all of our guests. Tell us a bit about your personal background. Many people will probably know of your family, but pretend like we don’t.

Mart Green: Yeah, I was born in Oklahoma. My family gravitated to Oklahoma City because of a retail company called TGen Y where my dad worked. And so when I was nine, my dad decided that he want to get work life balance. And so he borrowed six hundred dollars and started what became Hobby Lobby in our home. So we glued frames. I was nine, my brother was a seven, and then I have a sister, she was three. So she got out of the child labor and just saw the business grow in her home. And my mom ran the business for the first five years without pay. My dad finally quit his job, selling half to see if he could make a go of it. Then I went to school. I was at college. I decided I heard my dad talk about Christian bookstores, will actually quit in nineteen eighty one, came home and started a company called Mortdale. We have thirty seven Christian bookstores and then ninth grade. I found a young lady that I liked and I chased her for six years and finally she agreed to marry me and we’ve had four children and our twenty second grandchild is due today. So if I run off this podcast you’ll know that I got the call and I’m sorry, but the family comes first. But anyway, somehow the two have become twenty two. And so God’s blessings, that incredible family.

Henry Kaestner: Wow, that is awesome. You’re a very rich man and the most meaningful sense

William Norvell: in a beautiful way to end the podcast. I don’t think we’ve ever had that happen. That would just be hey, what is beautiful.

Henry Kaestner: Yeah, I would be super cool. OK, so get back to it because you gloss over that a little bit and you’re an entrepreneur. We have this sister series that we do called the Faith Driven Entrepreneur where we’ve done, I don’t know, maybe one hundred and eighty hundred and ninety segments. We’re not going to tell so much of the Mardell story today, but I want to look at it just a little bit. You grew up in an entrepreneurial home. You were glowing picture frames when you’re nine years old, and then you went and started your internal venture. What did it look like growing up in that house that made you want to be an entrepreneur? And were there ever a time, though, when you saw what was going on in the business? You said, no, I don’t want to do that. How did it all just growing up in an entrepreneurial home impact in shape, how you ended up seizing and lean into your own entrepreneurial career?

Mart Green: Yeah, what I saw probably were a couple of things. One was hard work because it was a lot of hard work. We started a business in your home, your mom not getting paid, all those kind of things. And then I also knew that it was a way to provide for family was also a way to give. You know, my family has always wanted to give and be generous. And so by being entrepreneurial, the more you can do, the more you can give. And so we kind of see it now as a prosperity gospel or the poverty gospel, but the plentiful gospel. So I use a symbol of a funnel. I have a coin in my pocket, has our family a love that intimately has a heart that was easy, live, extravagant generosity. I wanted to put a curtain being torn because I think that’s the most generous thing that ever happened visually. When Jesus died on the cross, the tartan was torn. This is hard to do that. So I chose a funnel. So on my coin in my pocket, I carry is a funnel in the back. And so that’s what I saw just kind of lived, you know, the more you get, just give. So when I was at college, I was nineteen years old. My dad, he want to do a barbecue stand. He want to do all these different things. And I wasn’t interested. But he said, Christian bookstore. I thought, oh no, that’s kind of cool because the entrepreneurial what you’re doing, you know, there’s not a lot of people go to Hobby Lobby, buy so flower and their life is transformed for eternity. Now they have incredible experience. It makes their home better and all that stuff. But a Christian bookstore, I’m thinking, oh, because usually you give to ministries and you make money, you’re entrepreneurial. Well, that’s kind of the deal. The Christian bookstore you kind of get to take. Both of those, and so, again, 19 not smart enough to ask all the big questions, you know, that I should have I probably would have never done it. So I quit school and my dad would pay for school kind of work. His measure goes, well, if I come over and I bust, I’ll make enough money to go back to school again. So that was my plan.

Henry Kaestner: So tell us also a little bit about family business, because Mardell is co-located with Hobby Lobby. You’re all together. What’s it like working in a multigenerational family business altogether?

Mart Green: Yeah, for me, it’s a huge benefit, as you can imagine, because my dad already had banking things, relationships. They had lawyers worked up. And all this is good news. I’d have to worry about a lot of heavy things. Now, obviously, Christian bookstore and at that time is off supply. Now, we’ve kind of evolved into education supplies. That was all different. So that’s what I had to do. Lots of learning. But the advantage of having a family business here together is my dad had already cut down lots of trees and lots of weeds that were in my way. And so I had huge advantage in that way. What I had to go do is say, hey, can I be a merchant in different categories? Then obviously Hobby Lobby has lots of different categories and they’re world class, what they do. And so it was just fun to go and do it there at the same time, have those advantages. But, you know, my dad kind of let me do it. You know, he didn’t come in. He only had seven hobby lobbies, I think, in nineteen eighty one when I opened. So he’s still trying to get his. And so the nice thing was my dad could have saved me from a lot of mistakes. He probably watched me walk right in that wall and get a bloody nose. When he stopped me I probably have done it again. Right. But since he didn’t stop me, I didn’t do it again. Right. And so I had a father that would empower me and not help me lots. You see what I’m saying? But in the decisions I had to make, he never Trumpton never got into the business of why did you do that? Why did you do that? So anyway, it was an incredible, incredible I guess I just assumed everybody had the same upbringing. I guess we all do. Right. I guess I assume everybody’s trying to figure something out on their house or working at home and working. Mother, nine years old. I didn’t find out later that I was I wasn’t under the child labor laws.

Henry Kaestner: So did your kids. The next generation, the tilers and and that generation start off the same way,

Mart Green: not at nine. We let them go to school and get a little bit older and stuff like that. But some of that same philosophy that, you know, your first car you have to pay for part of that college. We matched their funds, you know, so we got a little bit better than my parents. They were zero, you know, and stuff, because, again, they didn’t have the funds to help me at that time. So that’s what we try to figure that out. You know, that’s not a science. That’s an art stuff. How do you help your kids? You don’t want them to feel entitled. That’s always been a concern that we’ve had as a family. How do you do that? How do you be generous if your family seems to love got intimately and little extravagant generosity? What’s extravagant generosity to look like within a family member that’s also healthy? Right. I give my kids lots of money. That wouldn’t be extravagant generosity, really. I’d actually be killing their work, desire and all that. So it’s a it’s something you have to work through.

Henry Kaestner: OK, so that’s give me another Panksepp. So we’re going to come back to it because I’ve gotten to know Tyler and Derrick well over the course the last couple of years. And I know that you’re actually very, very intentional with the way you do that. I think that there’s a lot there to unpack. We won’t go there on this episode. But I actually want to go backwards. Just a second. You pulled a coin out of your pocket and you just said what it was. Just briefly, because I want to talk about that coin and then I want to talk about another thing that you always do as a matter of habit that’s really made an impression on me. But tell us again about the coin and then I’ll tell people about what the other habit that you have that’s made an impression on me.

Mart Green: Yeah. About twelve years ago, our family decided, you know what, we have a vision statement, a mission statement, a core values for the business. But we don’t have it for our family. And our family is more important than our business. So why don’t we do that? So at that point, Gen three object to my parents be Gen one, we’re younger. So Gen one, my parents, my brother and sister and their spouses, those eight of us sit down in a hotel room with a facilitator just to kind of put down who are we, what’s the Greens all about? So we have our core values, but we got an interest in a real simple one. So the real simple, little memorable and so is love got intimately the extravagant generosity. So I like symbols. I like things that I can look at and say, oh, that’s what that means. So as I showed earlier, that love got intimately extravagant, generous. So every morning when I get up here, I gave one to all the family members. Now I’m not ten. They kept theirs. They may have lost it. I have extras. They can have one because I’m a simple guy. But once a year we have a big family. Celebration is so at that meeting of a new family member. Then they’ll get a copy of this as well as that. We have a custom Bible for our family that when a new family member marries, then they get that Bible and we all bring us back to the meeting and they sign our Bible. We send their Bible just as a commitment to each other. Now, I can’t force my kids to love. Got into me a little extra generosity. All I’m saying is that’s where the river’s going. So if you want to go up river, you can jump out of the river. You can. But we’re kind of going this way, what we feel God’s given us. And so it’s been fun and our kids have embraced that. And just some of those little things you do as a family,

Henry Kaestner: it’s not one of those little things is a very big thing that you do as a family. Okay, here’s the other thing that you’ve done that’s really made an impression on me. You have the same way of signing off on your email every time. What is that? What quote do you put down and what does that mean to you? Because that’s a bridge. To an area, the conversation that Williams can take us through

Mart Green: now, back in the day, we were trying to do a full page ad for the newspaper about God’s word, very important to us. So I hired a firm that came back with a little tagline. I didn’t like it. So I sent him back to the drawing board and they came back with four words. I said, that’s it. That’s it. That’s it. So the last twenty three years I’ve had all my emails with these four words. This book is alive. And then I have a script that I put under that and hope most people understand because it’s the only book that’s alive. I mean, I’m watching it. There’s 6000 languages on planet Earth and every time it gets translated a new language, it speaks to the people. There is no book that does that. And so this book is alive is kind of what I love, being sure that I put on other people as much as I can.

William Norvell: So many beautiful things, so many beautiful things. I love symbols. I wrote down Quoin with family motto. I’m going in, I’m going have to get your tips. That just speaks to me.

Mart Green: I love

William Norvell: that. But one of the things we do want to dove into is Henry said, is your personal journey with God’s word and why you think it’s alive and why you think it’s so alive that you want to tell everybody about it. Every time you send an email, which I imagine is quite often, from what I understand, Guatamala is a big place for this started for you back in the late 90s. Could you tell us a little bit about that story?

Mart Green: Yeah, it’s a moment in time story, William, so thanks for asking. Nineteen ninety eight, because we had Christian bookstores and we sold Bibles, we thought and I didn’t know there were 6000 languages that people don’t have God’s word in our language. And so when I learned that, I said, oh, maybe we could be apart. So maybe Mardell could sell Bibles that helped pay for Bible translators. Well, the Bible translation process is kind of long, so that didn’t work so fine. I said, well, how do you pay for the printing, the Bibles? Because typically a new people groups, they will sell the Bibles to subsidized price. So maybe they charge them a quarter or fifty cents, but they may not be able to four or five dollars. So we started paying for first edition Bibles. So they said, well, ma, you paying these first edition Bibles, you got to come to a dedication. We dedicate the Bibles and you know how it is. You’re busy, you get your business, you’re trying to get it. You got four kids. And finally, the date worked February of nineteen ninety eight. So February 5th, I get on an airplane and I’m headed down there. And so now I’m getting some information about the translation. I don’t know much about this thing. You know, always the Asian heart attack people and there’s only thirty thousand of that. Speak this language like I’m new to this. I’m saying if you got a language, you got lots of people. My football stadium here, Norman holds one hundred thousand people. You know, all these people are going to fill up and get a little bit like an empty stadium, you know. Oh, and then only eight thousand of those people can read. A thousand of them are believers. Only four hundred believers can read. And I’m like, this is not a good hour. Oh, I you know, that’s the language I speak. I’ve got to go back to a family who all business minded. They’ll go on no good stories and I’ll come back. Oh, I went all the way down to Guatemala and four hundred people can read this Bible that this couple spent forty years translating because of warfare down there and all that stuff. They were nineteen fifty eight before I’m born to nineteen ninety eight forty years translating the Bible for people. Well for me it’s real simple. I’m not doing this again now. The forty years that the people I have no idea how to console them because they spent forty years of life. There were seventy years old when I got down. There will be one hundred ten when they get the next one done you know. So anyway so we got the ceremony and it’s ten hours out so I’m two days on the oral question. This is not working. Why do we do this then. I just ah forget it. It’s over. I’m not doing anymore. And then got the ceremony and they actually have, there was an American couple down there and for each and all the tech they give me a Bible for free. The translators get a free Bible and gas for one of the local isn’t huddle walk up to get his Bible. It’s something I’ve never seen before. In a Mortdale, we carry over a thousand different Bibles. We you take every language, every color, all that. There’s a thousand different choices. And I’ve helped people find the one, but I’ve never had them do a guest for doing Gaspar got God’s word. It’s hard language. Hinduja the first time he wept. Then he wiped his tears away and he wept. And I was stunned by that moment, watching a guy weep over a Bible. And so at that moment, the gods never spoke to me audibly. But the Holy Spirit has prompted me at different times in my life. That moment is a prompting was a simple question. Maat, why don’t you go tell Gaspar he’s not a good ahli? And that was like a spear going right to my heart sink, right, because I have been arguing that exact point for two days and I’m really not comfortable going up and telling the guy who’s weeping over his Bible he’s not a good return on investment. So in that one moment in time, I went from why to hell why do we translate the Bibles for small people groups to how are we going to make sure that everybody on planet Earth has God’s word in their heart language?

William Norvell: Let’s get it. And I’ve heard you talk before about, you know, you went from Oraibi to EROI. Could you tell us about what that metric means to you and how you put that into practice today?

Mart Green: Yeah, so I had a process. That’s what I’ve been arguing ahli the whole way down here. You know, that’s my heart language, right? That’s my language are a lie. And so I thought, well, what happened here? Then I realized, you know, I’m in charge of potent seed. I want to plant a seed that’s potent. So what? I plant potency. God’s in charge of the fruit. Now, right, I can take a scene put in right place and all that stuff, but now I understand God’s word is very potent. I have no idea what God is going to do among that group of four hundred or the thirty thousand. I mean, obviously, more people learn to read all that kind of stuff. So what I’m more concerned about now is in my planning potency and I just happen to believe that God’s word there’s only two things that last forever souls of men and women in God’s word. And so this is something I’m going to get to talk about for a long, long time. In heaven, we have all these 6000 names on our guys are going to figure all that out. He’ll figure all that out. But it’ll be fun to talk about your Bible and my Bible and all that stuff. And maybe we will instantly be able to speak six thousand languages. I don’t know. I mean, heaven is going to blow our brains out. Right. And so I can’t wait to get there because every tribe, every nation, every language is in heaven. That’s what it tells us. I love a picture that a guy does. He’s got the Last Supper, Elstein, the last supper. He took up an indigenous people around the table and I like call him at the next supper. The next time we go, they’re all going to be different indigenous people and all that stuff. So it’s beautiful. Heaven is an exciting thing and I think God’s word lasts forever. So that’s my EROI is to invest in things that last past, my lifetime.

William Norvell: That’s great. And so obviously a big point in time. Guatamala gasp Are these moments when you came back, you’re on the plane home. What do you think it did you immediately jump into how to solve this problem? What eventually led you into going really deep into the Bible translation world?

Mart Green: Before I took it home, I had one more experience and that was two o’clock in the morning. So, yeah, but it leads to that. So at two o’clock in the morning, I’m going to One Dollar Hotel and I lost the Arawa again. I didn’t get a return on investment on that Rodwin Dollar Hotel. And so I didn’t mind the hotel.

Henry Kaestner: The service at the hotel supplied you was not as good as one dollar that you paid.

Mart Green: No, it was a barn and the bed wasn’t made. And there’s no running water, just the bucket downstairs tin roof. So at two o’clock in the morning that actually there were cats, Latin reporters, jaguars, the four drunks singing out here. So that was a no sleep night. So at two o’clock in the morning, I’m not sleeping. And the most of the day I just watched as many people revival got pierced my heart. So I get out of book. Arthur being in God’s word and knowing it for yourself as a key being as well known as the key. Well, now the Lord gave me another prompting and it’s what kind of ahli is Mark Green? Fifth generation Christian, my mom’s side through my dad’s side, I own Christian bookstores, I paid for the printing that Bible, that man was over. I have 50 Bibles to my name and I read the Bible every great once in a while, maybe on Sundays when pastor opens it up and says to go somewhere. So all of a sudden I realized the oral question in Guatemala was not Gaspar, it was Mark Green. So I made a vow. February 8th, 1998, two o’clock in the morning, I get up first thing and read God’s word for the rest of my life. And so I get to gasp are weeping for me to appreciate what I took for granted. I’ve had in my English language for hundreds of years and hundreds of translations, but it took him for me to understand what I had taken for granted. So that started my journey of doing translation. But it really it took a few more years before I understood how to do that collaboratively. I went back and said, Hey guys, we got to sell more Bibles. Somebody else we can pay for more printing of Bibles. And so that was my first deal, is let’s just continue to pay for more printing of Bibles that get them done.

Henry Kaestner: So let’s talk about collaboration. Illuminations is a big project. You’re bringing together a whole bunch of different folks that might not ordinarily play well in the sandbox together. We’ve looked at this a little bit before in prior podcast with Peter Grear Rooting for Rivals. It’s just we live in a sinful fallen world and everybody’s got their own way. We know how many denominations there are. We know that we’re living in this post Tower of Babel reality. I’ve got that painting right behind me that’s kind of given birth to what you’re doing. Illuminations, right. But you’re bringing people together and you’re working on collaboration across a whole bunch of different sectors, different organizations that have different histories, and yet they’re all coming together. How are you making it happen?

Mart Green: Well, I’m not making it happen, but I’m trying to facilitate it happen. Of course, I think the Lord did it. So, yeah, back in ninety eight, right after my Gaspare experience, I was in Chicago and I just felt like someday there’ll be a project, so be the nominee to protect themselves. They would come together. No doubt I could do it. They would come together and both would come together. So that’s set my heart for 12 years. And then I went back to Guatemala because I talk about Guatemala all the time. So Todd Peterson, a good friend of yours, and see me say, hey, Mark, we’re going down to Guatemala City, I’m sure, Guatemala story in Guatemala. So I went down there when I was down there. So I’m not going back to Guatemala for about another ten or twelve years. And every time I go down there, my world gets rocked. You know, I said, oh, almost. If I get all these people to come together. And another unique thing was happening, and that’s called you Verson. So your version is a ministry based here out of Oklahoma City that has the Bible app that many people will be familiar with. Incredible entrepreneurial story. You won’t be surprised if you’ve already had him or we won’t have him on. We have, of course. Yeah. And so but he was doing these text digitized at the same time print on demand was saying, hey, green family, will you digitize these texts. Well that’s fifteen hundred dollars times two thousand languages for two different people. So I’m like no, no, no, I’m not digitizing these texts for everybody down river. I’m going back up river to who owns the intellectual property rights because bibles are intellectual property, you have to get the rights to do that. So we started by building a digital Bible library, so it kind of gave us a mutual reinforcing activity is what’s called the Collective Impact World, something we can all do together? Let’s centralize, digitize and standardize all these Bible text of the world. But my real goal was to finalize. We built this beautiful library that’s got two thousand books in it and there’s four thousand missing. So that was kind of a way to bring everybody together. And because it was called by the resource, we had four other resource partners like myself, a resource partner. You have ten Bible translation agencies that do most the translation in the world. You have five resource partners all meeting once a month, just strategizing. And so because it’s kind of cool by the resource partner now, we can be obnoxious as a resource partner and you can be a step too far. So it’s a it’s a dance. It’s a relationship of trust. You have to trust me very deeply that I’m working with you and I have to trust that you’re going to share. So I’ll build your tool as long as you’ll share with these other nine ministries, which actually represent there’s one hundred and fifty Bible societies that all have their own boards. So technically we’re coordinating probably one hundred fifty two hundred organizations all together. Now there’s a United Bible society, but they’re not over the Bible society. So they can say, hey, guys, please do this. But one hundred fifty boards could vote different way. So that took a trust, takes a long time. You get trust by the drop and you lose it by the buckets. And so we’re just trying to continue to build trust. So that’s what a collective impact really, really at the bottom line is about trust. But you know what? We all want to eradicate battle poverty. And nobody can say that by themselves. No donor can say I’m going to eradicate Bible poverty. No ministry party can say I can read. So that’s what keeps us whenever we get kind of shuffled down here and fighting with each other, all that stuff, we can keep looking up, guys. We’re going to eradicate poverty. There are people dying without scripture. We have the oxygen there underwater. We got to get them the oxygen. They’re going to die under there.

Henry Kaestner: So I’m fascinated by a collective impact. I’m actually not going to take us there because I’m a guy who saw t shirts at the University of Delaware. But William did go to Stanford Business School, which is where I think collective impact came out of. When you’re there, did you study collective impact and if so? Walk us through with Martje as he understands just the general principles of collective impact, because I think that they apply to limitations. And I think if this is an intro and an invitation for others to participate in illuminations, I hope they will. As people are motivated by the eradication of biblical poverty, I hope that they’ll find more about illuminations. But another thing that might happen from this is just the value of collective impact. Is that something, William, you’re familiar with? Did you ever study that there?

William Norvell: They didn’t let the Alabama guy into that class. Now, they were like, too heady, too much. You know, we’ve got sails for you, but so didn’t study it. I believe you that it started there. But I guess and Mark can illuminate us a little bit.

Mart Green: Yeah, it’s kind of wild because we started 2010 and in 2011, this Stanford comes out with this new concept called collective impact. And it was just so great because it gave language to what I was doing. Then as you’re doing something, you can explain it to people, but they did it. So there’s really what they call five steps ones, a common agenda. We just talked about that to eradicate child poverty. We all agree that’s a common agenda. Then you have a shared measurement system. How are we going to measure what we’re doing? Well, fortunately, in Bible translation, you can get it down to chapters in the Bible. So we have a goal that ninety five percent this world will have the full Bible, ninety nine point nine six will have at least the New Testament. And that last point zero four, which will be about three million people out of eight billion that we may have in twenty thirty three, we’ll all have scripture by twenty, thirty three. So that’s a shared measurement system. And then you’ve got mutually reinforcing activities. We talked about that, the digital Bible and let’s do some stuff together. Let’s go do something. So that’s one thing. We do lots of other things together now. Continuous communication. You’ve got to be talking. We meet every month. Typically, Dallas has the largest admiral’s club in the country, C twenty one in the Dallas airport. We all fly in for four hours. We fly back out. And so that’s the way we see each other. Now, obviously, the last year we’ve been doing that by Zoome because we can’t meet in person, but we’re about ready to get that going again. So we’ve met one hundred and three times, I think over the last ten years and then about three times. Wow. Yeah, trust takes

Henry Kaestner: time, you know, at C twenty one if you’ve been there a hundred and three times, you know the

Mart Green: gate. I know. I know so. And there’s a backbone about memorization and almost like the chief operating officer of it because all the CEOs come right, all the donors come, large donors all have businesses or things we got to go back to. So it’s not like we get full time to this. So we stir up all this trouble. I resisted it for the longest time. Then I realized no. So we have a staff of probably four or five that we helped fund that. Just follow up with all the details. Museum of the Bible, you said? Yeah, my brother on here, the Museum of the Bible want to make a room and put all 6000 languages in it. So they want to collect all two thousand Bibles. You know how hard it is to get one each of two thousand Bibles. It’s so hard that you would not do it unless you call one person called the backbone of Illuminations. And we did all that work with one hundred ninety organizations getting them to send to and from Germany, from Afghanistan, the whole world. These Bibles are not all sitting somewhere. And so now those are there. But they are now. Yeah, but we didn’t know that we started, but that’s the power of coming together. So those are the five points. The one that’s missing. Stanford missed one, the most important one, and that’s prayer. And so we have made this thing with a prayer from the very beginning. We actually have a translation prayer. It’s a six line prayer. And if we have time, maybe we’ll get to say at the end of it or something like that. But it’s just a six line prayer that I just hope maybe someday there’s so many people praying everywhere I go. I handed out my little card, a little magnet, two versions of it, because I’m a simple guy, right? So I want to leave somebody with something. I got to say to the Angels guys that prayer, I’m getting tired of hearing that we just go get that one solved, go answer that prayer. And so now, of course, people can pray what they want, but we’re also collectively having a prayer. And we just had an illuminations gathering. Three hundred people there. And every morning over one hundred people came early morning because we don’t let them out till 10:00 at night. They came up early morning to pray because we made a high priority is guys, we are operating the prayers of the people. And so that’s how you get people together, is to pray together

William Norvell: as a major. They I love symbols, too, and I’ve actually become fascinated over the last four or five years with collective prayer, praying the same thing. Right. I used to go against and of course, the Lord’s Prayer. I’ve never gone against that one, but I say, no, let’s not read prayers like God wants to hear our original thought, you know, but I love the power of it. Would you mind sharing that sixth line prayer with our audience? I would love if you would just pray that overall our audience over this moment.

Mart Green: Absolutely. God, your word is more precious than all that I possess. Your scripture gives light to my path and directs my steps. Through your will alone, lives are transformed, the mind’s made new, so I now pray for all people that do not yet know you, for you’ve promised that your voice by every tribe and nation will be heard. So equip us by your breath to provide every heart language with your word. Amen Amen.

Henry Kaestner: That’s awesome. And William, I love that you ask that question. William has authored the Sovereign’s Capital prayer and then also the faith driven movement prayer. And there is something really beautiful when everybody present together some. Thank you for sharing that with us.

Mart Green: Yeah. Thank you for allowing me to share.

William Norvell: And the last question I’d love to ask Martis, you’ve worked on this collective impact. You know, we’ve got a lot of entrepreneurs and investors that have, you know, shared high level goals. Right. They really do. But they also have their own business to run. How have you seen entrepreneurs work? Well, with that also, are there roadblocks that they should be looking out for? I mean, you do have to watch out for your own organization at some point. How does that tension play itself out and in this organization? And I would imagine others.

Mart Green: Yeah, the good news is, like we just came from this Illuminations event. We had one hundred and forty four giving units. So that’s lots of families. Now, some of those families, all they do is they come visit once a year and that’s it. We have thirty what we call co-host couples that give a little bit more their time and then there’s the five who give up their time. So some of those are in situations like Tai Peterson, former NFL football player. So he has a situation. They can give him more of his time. He still has to get some income and do some stuff like that. I also have in the way that I’ve been able to free up my time to do this. Now, not everybody can get the same amount of time. So I’m generous with my time and my talent and my treasure. Some might give us their talent and their treasure. Some might give us time and treasure. So you just try to get people, you find out what they’re getting are how can you help us? How can you do different things? And so but the five all have unique situations that they had enough time that they could give us that, because if they can’t, they won’t. There’s other people that love to be a part of our meetings every month, but they can’t because their time. So but when you get to a big enough audience, then you can have enough people that can come together to solve the issues that we have to come together with.

William Norvell: Well, as we do come to a close, this may be a little bit of pressure from someone who spent a good portion of their life translating different Bibles. So, you know, I know you hold the Bible dear and the Bible is alive as your as your sign off. But what we love to ask at the end of ours is we also hold God’s word very dear. And we love to see how God’s word can transcend your lives. Our guest lives with our listeners lives. And so we would love to invite our guest to do at the end to share something that God’s telling them through his word could be something this morning, could be something the season, could be something he’s told you his whole life that you think our audience should hear. But we’d love to invite you to do that here with our audience today.

Mart Green: Man, I wish we could take whole forty minutes on that question. I got lots of good answers there, but I’m all Jeremiah nine and twenty three in the message version. And it says, don’t let the wise regular wisdom. Don’t let the heroes brag of their exploits. Don’t let the rich brag of the riches. If you brag, brag of this and this only that you understand and know me. And so I’m really not a Bible guy on an intimacy with God guy. I just feel like the number one way to get into the God is through his word. And so that’s what I’m about. Intimacy with God.