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If you’re not already familiar with the name Casey Crawford, then you need to be. We had him on the FDE podcast a while ago and even then, we knew he’d be back. 

Today is that day. Casey is here to talk to us about Movement Charter Schools and the work they’re doing in Opportunity Zones. As always, Casey’s enthusiasm is contagious, so we’ll let you tune in and hear for yourself.

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.

Henry Kaestner: Welcome to the feature of an investor podcast, if you’re a fund manager, investor or financial adviser driven by your faith or want to be driven by your faith, then you’re in the right place. The best way to stay connected in the faith driven investor community is to sign up for our newsletter, Faith Driven Investor ERG. This podcast doesn’t exist without you, our community. One of the things we’ve heard the community asks for is help in finding great deals to invest in. And so we’ve launched Marketplace. It’s a new platform of funds and direct deals, everything from private equity and real estate funds to ETFs, from philanthropic to market rate deals made in the US in emerging markets. Check it out. At the age of an investor ERG for Marketplace. While you’re there, please send us any thoughts you have about how this podcast might better serve you or any questions you have about being a faith driven investor.

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Casey Crawford: It was five miles to the nearest pediatrician, so most parents don’t have transportation on public transportation. It was five miles from New York’s pediatrician and the health care system came and told us that and said, hey, if you provide a space that will staff and we could really use that. The yeah, we’ll that for ten years. And I guess we saw the opportunity for partnership in these big infrastructures, education, health care, affordable housing. When you can work collaboratively with your state and federal governments, with power institutions that be, you can actually create some really synergistic impact.

And what we’ve seen, again, with a really nice, stable investment returns where it’s sustainable and scalable.

Henry Kaestner: Welcome back, everyone, to the Faith Driven Entrepreneur podcast. If you’re not already familiar with the name Casey Crawford, then you need to be. We had him on the Faith Driven Entrepreneur podcast a while ago and even then we knew he’d be back. Today’s that day. Casey is here to talk to us about the movement, charter schools and the work they’re doing in opportunity zones. As always, Casey’s enthusiasm is contagious. So we’re just going to catch it and let him take it from here.

Henry Kaestner: Welcome to the future of an Investor podcast. We’re not supposed to have favorites and guests on any of our programs. It’s just not fair. I mean, we’ve got maybe one hundred and seventy five different episodes now across the two properties, and that’s not even counting feature of an athlete. And actually, William, I think Casey is probably the only one would be crossover between all three. Right.

William Norvell: I’ve thought about it. Yeah.

Henry Kaestner: Right now. Yeah. We’ve never spent any time talking to Casey about his athletic career at all. I mean, Super Bowl and all that stuff. And we’re not going to know either, but maybe maybe for some other episode. But what I do want to mention is that the reason why if I were to have a favorite and clearly I can’t because we have so many children as you, well, it’s not fair to pick one up, but if I were to have one, one would clearly be Casey, because last time when we got on the phone with him, we just started riffing on one of my favorite podcasts that we’ve ever done, fill fishers with sharks about identity and talks about anxiety and effectively talks about the fact that, gosh, if you’ve got high levels of anxiety, maybe that’s a chance to really look at where your identity is. And Phil did such a good job of unpacking that. There’s a five minute segment there on Identi, maybe my favorite five minutes of any podcasts. And when we start off last time, Casey, I think appropriately said, dude, I liked it. I think I really liked it. But still, there’s some part of it just doesn’t resonate with me. And Casey, would you say?

Casey Crawford: I think it was haunting me because I so couldn’t identify it when I feel anxious often like I feel like the Lord continues to lead me into places where I’m very anxious and very hopeful that he’s going to come down and save me from whatever you just called me to us again, want to look to scripture. I see that same story playing out time after time with these guys that, you know, lift it up as heroes in the Bible, namely Jesus, who like I mean, the night before his greatest act of work is is in the guard against. And he just stressed out and seems like pretty anxious and seems pretty troubled and seems pretty stressed and stressed as he contemplates, you know, going and laying out his life.

Obviously, you know, half and and so I just I was processing that man that the Lord, I think, oftentimes has led me to these places where in my flesh I do have a lot of stress and maybe some anxiety. And it caused me it focuses me to, you know, look back up to him.

Guy Lord, in the physical, this makes very little sense. And I’m very nervous about it. I’m very anxious about it. It’s caused me a lot of stress. Like, you know, I’m thankful that you are above all of the physical world that you put me in.

And it’s you you have you’ve called me to it. You walk and see me through whatever that may look like. And so you’re that tension man of always being stressed and stressed and called into the battle. I think that God so often does not always want to be. It’s not in the cabana, you know, relaxing under the sun. It’s in the fight. It’s in the. Is it stretching, straining kind of place and that’s, I think, where the Lords will use those places to grow and grow. My hope and faith in him, I agree completely, and I think that that was great.

Henry Kaestner: So a lot of times will suggest that people listen to both of those podcasts now. And if you’re listening to this, you’re probably a part of the faith driven investor community. This is a faith driven investor podcast. And what we’re referring to is a Faith driven entrepreneurs series, maybe one hundred and thirty 140 of them. If you take those two together, the Phil Vishwa one and the Casey Crawford one, you’ll have a great foundation. And I’m not suggesting you stop listening right now and go listeners, but you might want to later. So today, Casey is on the fate of an investor podcast. And there are two things that I want to unpack with Casey. We talked a little bit, not nearly as much as I would have liked to last time about your emphasis on mentoring, because I think that mentoring has such a play as we make investments when we come alongside an angel investment opportunity point in the life of an entrepreneur. What is mentoring look like there? I want to talk about that and then I want to talk about something I think is super cool. We’ve unpacked this a bunch of times, just you and I personally, about how you have taken investment capital and relational capital and a love and commitment for inner city Charlotte to come up with something as super innovative. And one of the hopes that I have is that listeners to this podcast will come away and say, yes, I’ve heard about some really neat funds. I can make some investments there. And maybe, yes, I’ve heard about a marketplace where I can find different angel investments.

But this kind of concept of just how do I take all that I am and what might be unique and individual that God might place on my heart. Well, that’s been your answer. You haven’t just invested in index funds. You haven’t just invested in Eventide and Praxis and Timothee funds. As cool as they are, you’ve done something really unique and innovative. And so I want to get there on this podcast interview, too. But to do things in succession, let’s bridge off of that concept I’ve introduced, which is mentoring. You have this opportunity to mentor the entrepreneurs that you’ve invested in and comes from what you do, what movement, what is it you do?

Casey Crawford: So we try to think about think words are also very important. We try to think about phrases in language that’s relevant to culture and not just to Christendom, but really to the greater culture and mortgage. We have about four thousand employees we’re able to do about one out of every fifty home finance is now in America. So we’re kind of a broad reach and really engaged, lots of different khamees, a lot of different cultures around the US and a really intentional to think about the yes that while some of us are very much living out our faith day to day, that we want to do so in a way that’s when that’s engaging the culture in the culture. I understand. So we try not to use a lot of Christian and Christian words that frankly don’t resonate with even like many millennials who are themselves Christians. So one word that I grew up with hearing was discipleship. And then you should be a disciple maker and you need to be disciple and you need to be a discipleship. And over the last decade of being a business, you have lots of young folks in our company is a loving and engaging.

And about once a day I get an email or a LinkedIn or Facebook from somebody that says, Hey, Casey, will you? None of them said discipling everyone. I’m says, will you? And typically it’s mentor me. Will you mentor me? Will you mention mean?

I think millennials very much have it right and they understand the value of mentorship and maybe even worse than we used to call it, the value of discipleship, having someone that was older, more spiritually mature, kind of helped grow us in faith and understanding of God and who he is and how he loves us. Now we interact with that. And so we came up with Citizen Movement Mentor. We absolutely want to love and value our people. And if they want to grow spiritually, we want to provide them that opportunity to do so.

And so we created a mentoring group and it really came so many things that are borne out of God convicting me of sin, of sin in my life. And we put a lot of emphasis on physical wellness and kind of like loving the whole person in our community and company. I had a really great friend who I put into it who would be in the gym together like four or five days a week for a couple of years. You transformed by. But I was watching makes some kind of crazy decisions, like crazy decisions in his life.

I did not think lined up with the faith. The man that he had told me he wanted to be, the person he was in Christ and man, the Lord convicted me. I mean, I was considered judging him Amen he’s not doing this. He’s not in this these others. And Lord said if you put into him spiritually the way you put into him physically, we wouldn’t be having any of these problems. And I was walking by our gym when that happened, and he and I worked out four or five days a week together and I said, man, if we had that kind of time investment spiritually, where we were really spiritually being minted ourselves by the word and by those, you know, gross material, our faith, I think we’d be in such a different place and he’d be in such a place.

And so right then I called my say, hey, man, we’re still great friends. And, hey, look, I love you and I want you to know that you’re like the legacy you’re leaving. Here is one of mentorship. We’re gonna have a mentorship program that is dedicated, inspired by you and my lack of faithfulness to grow our folks spirits.

And so I hired a buddy of mine who had been in ministry for like 20 years. I played football with. And so I I need some help on some adult supervision in this because I’ve never put together a mentorship program. And Steve Macfarlan came in and he became our CTO or chief pastoral officer and he wrote a 40 week curriculum that our organization is completely voluntary, all volunteer based. And we have about five hundred folks now in our organization that are actively engaged in mentor groups. And as mentor groups go on for 40 weeks, you know, it’s a really in-depth commitment of four or five members of our community to just be open and vulnerable with each other and go on a spiritual journey to grow in their faith. And some folks come into it really far from God, maybe never setting foot in a church, not really knowing what this is, who he looks like, how I can relate to him. And some folks come into these groups having walked with Jesus for a number of years and a lot and being really close in that. And it has been true. I’ve been in small groups kind of my whole life. I can tell you doing them in the workplace has been one of the most transformative, powerful things I’ve ever done in my life, because the bottom line is we can’t hide from each other at work. And we have just seen, oh, my gosh, we’ve seen incredible life transformation happen in and through our mentor groups. And honestly, we wanted to keep it small because we didn’t know we were doing it. First of all, we just like 40 or 50 people and see how this goes and kind of iterate expand. We’ve had such a hunger for people that want authentic, intimate relationships with each other. And now during covid even more so and so, the groups have really exploded, expanded with about 20 other companies now that have picked up this mentoring program and done themselves. It’s not no rocket science to it, but I think there is a beautiful nuance of doing it in the workplace that makes it easier than anything I’ve ever done in the church. In church, I see maybe once a week, maybe four, five or ten minutes before the service that we all get up and sing and listen and don’t talk and go home at work. And we have 40, 50 hours a week where we are locking arms with each other. We’re providing for our families. We’re like living out, missioning, calling, or at least just our vocational occupation together. And we have some really deep beliefs. And you can see people laugh and see him crying and when they’re hurting. And so it’s so easy then to get into those really intimate mentoring groups where you can be open, vulnerable. And if you have some great material to go through, mean we just see people grow like crazy spiritually. So one of those powerful things we’ve ever done, that’s awesome.

Henry Kaestner: OK, so I want to get back to that here in a second. And I want to unpack a little bit more about what a chief pastor officer does when he finished writing it. Figure it out. Yeah, he’s still there. Is he still working? Oh, yeah.

Casey Crawford: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. He’s yes, he is going in a thousand directions. I mean, again, he was doing church planting time in the Redeemer Network on the West Coast. And what he would tell you is that he’s disengaging more people now than he ever did as a pastor, reaching kind of more folks are really far from God because, you know, folks in greater degrees will not darken the door of church.

They will not go into a church, but they will come into work. And he kind of jokes nice. You know, I used to beg him to come to church for an hour week and then I’d ask him to give me money because now I get him for forty hours and we’re buying them a paycheck at the end of the week. So this is a great deal.

So yeah, it’s been really, really neat journey with Stephen, what he’s been able to bring to our culture.

William Norvell: I just want to comment on that real quick, because we talk a lot about investing and we spend a lot of time talking about money. Right. Of course, on this podcast, I got such an incredible story, though, of, you know, you get the resources you had, the organization you had and decided to invest in that direction. Right. Not taking your money and putting it in. But I don’t think that’s such an interesting thing. You know, as you peel back the parable of the talents, I think a lot of people can narrowly end up talking about rate of returns and money, but God gives us so much more stewards, relationships, employees, suppliers, all of these relationships. And I just love that you took that and said, well, this is a place to invest my time and my energy and the resources.

Casey Crawford: Well, also leverage to write what you think about money and how we’re going to invest. And I know lots of folks who I will share Stephen’s salary, but it’s not like the biggest salary in the company. Something I mean, he’s kind of paid like our middle level managers. And yet we have one chief master lost and almost four thousand employees. That’s awesome. Leverage the material he puts out. You got seen. It’s up on the Web. Any one organization can access it. And now, again, over 20 other organizations, we have churches that are using this stuff. And so as I think about Kingdome stewardship of resources, I’m always thinking about leverage and what is a great use of leverage. And, you know, we’ve had corporate chaplains of Americans. Those were neat and were good. They definitely serve a cool role. But, man, we found incredible leverage in a role like this because all of our mentor groups, they’re. Volunteer, nobody’s paid to lead a mentor like no one goes to church because, oh man, William, I’ll pay you X dollars to lead your small group. That’s not how it works. So, yeah, it’s been a great investment to your point and a great use of leverage and scale.

William Norvell: It’s amazing to think about that. And I know you’re telling us, right. Probably jumped on about the first day of school. First day of school. Yeah. Yeah. I got to hear about this. So you’ve also leveraged this into movement charter schools. Tell us. I came about where that is.

Casey Crawford: So, you know, we were founded really as a mortgage company in a bank. And when we got to do that and really my vision, you know, seven or eight banks had been at the epicenter of the greatest really acts of financial violence perpetrated against the world in decades. And I mean, they were known for a lot of darkness, a lot of greed, a lot of destruction in our nation and even reverberating around the world. What really convicted me on was like, hey, what would it look like if a bank actually became known for how it loved and serve the marginalized? Know how a bank. Yes, maybe the wealthiest of those are able to afford homes, were able to even have bank accounts, but they took the profits and reinvested it to transform the experience of the marginalized. Maybe those who weren’t customers maybe would never be customers. And I got really expensive. Man, that would be a cool, cool story. Lord, I would actually love to be a part of that. That sounds like something like you would do it. It sounded insane. Crazy. There’s a whole law deal with that. But part of that call did we kind of stepped into this was like kind of like to go into land. I will show you something that sounds exciting. But how how how am I going to take resources and reinvest them in ways to see your kingdom come and love the marginalized? And that’s a tough question to wrestle with an answer. And I talked about that with Aton. I’m sure lots of listeners grapple with that, how to steward these resources. And I mean, I think all of us that are followers of Jesus are going to say, hey, first and foremost, look, if the Lord calls you to something that’s like kind of a do not pass go, don’t you know where to go do that? Thankfully, I think with my background in football, I didn’t have the brains and some of you all do to really deftly kind of evaluate all these different investment options and how we’re going to do these cool ways to just kind of gave me some stuff. And the first thing you gave me was this concept of a charter school. And a woman had written her doctoral thesis on why Christian schools, the only inner city serving the report. Four pages later, I’m going to save you the reading. They run out of money. We run out of money. At some point, they run out of money. Christian schools work really well. The wealthy suburbs where parents have the means to afford them. When they’re serving the poor, they run out of money. But there is a new structure. This is like fifteen years ago. It’s called a public charter and it’s a faith based, not for profit, buys a building, buys real estate, leases it back to a public charter. The faith based not for profit can own the building control. What goes on in that building? Twenty four hours a day. Seven days a week. The return on the investment can be created by the lease with that public charter school, the public charter, to faithfully secular curriculum. If kids want to come in at eight and leave it to no problem, they will do so. However, you can offer faith based wraparound services in that same building that the school occupies before school, after school and on weekends. And I read that thesis and it was like a lightning bolt that went through me. I understood it. I got leverage, I got scale. I understood real estate. I knew that, hey, we’re in the business of financing homes. The first question people ask, what are the schools like with the schools? Like when you bring world class education to a neighborhood, you actually lift the entire neighborhood, you bring all the property values up. And we were Amen, you know, churches these days are kind of starting to understand that like a 20 million dollar building to be used three hours a week, not the greatest use of investment leverage and scale. And so, I mean, why not occupy another space that had a really redemptive purpose to it for the other six days of the week? Right. And so we kind of imagined that we could bring churches in to come and to leverage space for multiple uses, create a return on the real estate investment. So lift the neighborhood, have this wraparound redemptive purpose and provide this incredibly needed service to children in America of education. And so that was the vision. And it was, man, it was big and scary because this is when we were teeny. We had five, ten employees and was one man. But it seems like those are 10 or 20 million. How are we ever for this? Do it so many questions. And so yet, I guess it’s ten years later now we’re opening up our fourth school and today is our first day of school. So we just welcome four hundred new, bright, smiling faces onto our brand new elementary school. It’s kindergarten and first grade on the east side town in the middle of covid. And we are so incredibly blessed because every kid is suffering a little bit with their lives, have changed a little bit, but by far the most impacted or the most marginalized if you’re living at or below the poverty line, covid has devastated a lot of things in your world. About two thirds of our kids in school get their meals at the school, so we serve breakfast and lunch at the school. And for many mothers, the meals they count on every day. And so we’re literally we’re balancing two. We have our kids come in in person and be able to eat or do we risk exposure to this infectious disease. And so we have an incredibly courageous group of teachers and administrators who have an amazing church partner who built a big, beautiful church in there. And yet we welcomed in our kids for the first day of school, a brand new school. We have two others that are up and running already. The new one was today. So we’re thrilled to be in this business and thrilled with God has done it and through it.

Henry Kaestner: That’s amazing. That’s just a beautiful story. By the way. I love the fact that William and I are ascribed to being deft evaluators. I think I’m trusting you, man. I’m. Oh, yeah. Amen. Yes. No, thank you. That’s right. Maybe I should just own it. No, that’s definitely William is one of those one of the things that is really just trying to put myself in the shoes of some listeners right now who are saying, that sounds awesome.

Henry Kaestner: You’re suggesting that I can go ahead and I can take some investment capital and I can do a partnership with a public charter school. I can get a return on my investment by leasing the facility out. I can control some level of the of integration. And with that, I can do some amount of partnership with the local church. Sounds like you do that with local health clinics, et cetera. I don’t know if I have the same and maybe I shouldn’t say that. Same background, same resource.

Maybe they do just want to make it back. And I can assure you of that. That provides some great resources to go do this, no doubt about that. But you couldn’t have a less qualified background. I had there’s no teacher in my history that would have put money on me opening the school.

William Norvell: Well, what I love to I mean, I think this is such a big thing. I don’t think you’ve talked about this in the podcast. Right. I mean, I also hear in your story, I mean, you’ve got this vision, if you will, a long time ago. And one of my favorite quotes, I think it’s a tribute to Bill Gates is always most people overestimate what they can do in a year and underestimate what they can do in ten. And mean when you’re talking about that is investment, that is leverage. That is like watching something grow compounded interest every single day, working on it, making it a little bit better. Of course, I have to talk a bit about football. But, you know, Nick Saban, they don’t strategy is tee shirt for like years when he got there, was outworked yesterday. You know, it was just like to do a little bit better, just do a little bit better. And by that twelfth game, we’re going to not be tired in the fourth quarter. And I hear that it’s like, yeah, I didn’t do this all tomorrow. I didn’t have ten million dollars. When I set out on this journey, I took a step and and ten years later, I couldn’t even imagine what it would be. And it’s bigger than I even thought. And the Holy Spirit.

Henry Kaestner: Yeah. William, I think you hit on that really well with a great quote about overestimating the one year underestimating the ten year walk back through some of the details about how you got started. So I’m listening to this right now. I’m an investor. I’m in Milwaukee. I’m like, oh, my goodness. Of course, that’s a no brainer. It’s education, it’s health care, it’s the church. It’s all those different things. And I think maybe I know some different people to do it. But what was it? You did so some of the particulars, for instance, you know, it’s old big box and old came out, right?

Yes, yes. The real estate first, right?

Casey Crawford: That’s right. I mean, to billions when we start small, we had this big vision, was committed to it, but then started looking sort of survey research like you would in any investment register to understand who are the good operators in the space and how do we want to emulate these folks and could they make the numbers work and what that look like?

And I was blessed to find a model right in my backyard in Charlotte, North Carolina, that was making the numbers work. They were getting no outside investment. They had ninety five percent of kids were minority. Ninety five percent of kids were at or below poverty line. And they were having three hundred percent better academic performance than their demographic peers. And they were doing it at a surplus every year. So that surplus and they were paying down five percent. Note on that facility, too, because they got no investors and they said taken out a loan. And so I kind of looked at them well, and they’re actually if I kind of strip this out without thinking about any appreciation, they’re creating like a six and a half, seven percent cash on cash return right now, serving twelve hundred kids in an incredibly redemptive way. And that’s kind of like that whole picture to me was a great return. When I think about the six and eight percent, I think about the stability, I think about the fact that it’s really underpinned by federal and state dollars ought to do is attract the kids and educate them well is doing something for sure, but that’s a pretty predictable source of income. I like the underline credit. Right. I kind of think and then think about wow.

And now I get to Steward a thousand lives for 12 years and pour into these kids because we educate our kids year round because they need that to catch up. And I get the point of all year for 12 years when we can actually start to change the trajectory of lives. And here’s what gets really exciting to me when I looked at it. This is a big pull to plan. And if we can actually raise the bar with our schools, we can raise the bar for every school because the market chases excellence.

And so there are a hundred and some odd schools in Charlotte. I don’t have to own and build one hundred some odd schools is the kind of tipping point concept. If I build 10 that are having three hundred percent better academic performance than the rest, I believe we now have a platform from which to speak. By the way we build our schools. About a third of the cost of the traditional public schools are built. So we’re already having architects come and go. We you built that house. What, your cost per square foot. What? Because we share a parking lot with a 70 million dollar elementary school. We just opened up our lives. When we’re 70, it’s going to house the same number of kids. And so already we’re starting to affect and impact the way school is done just by setting a new standard of excellence.

So when I look at the capital return, the spiritual return and then the reverberating impact, the leverage that excellence creates in a massive space like education, public education, for me it was just easy, no brainer stuff of where to allocate resources.

Henry Kaestner: So what are you going to do with that from here? What’s it look like? You’ve got a playbook. Are you sharing it with others? Are you going to run?

Oh, gosh, we have zero secrets and we’re learning as we go. So our plan is through ten schools in Charlotte.

We think if and when we do ten, we’re having two or three hundred percent better academic performance than our demographic peers.

We’re doing it, by the way, for only 70 percent of the dollar. So the traditional public schools will get almost twelve thousand bucks per kid. We only get eight. So we’re doing we’re actually saving the state money on every single child we educate and doing it two or three hundred percent higher rate of academic performance, and then we’re making it a sustainable investment. And, you know, we didn’t talk about this much, but we’ve also partnered with our health care providers to carve out pieces of our school to bring health care to serve the urban poor. It is a major problem right now is being a big shift in Medicaid. And so we go, gosh, we already have this space. It doesn’t cost us that much to carve out twelve hundred square feet, 30, 600 square feet and bring world class doctors and physicians into the neighborhood to kids that otherwise have a tough time getting to our first school, it was five miles to the nearest pediatrician. So most of our parents don’t have transportation on public transportation. It was five miles from new the pediatrician and the health care system came and told us that and said, hey, if you provide a space that will staff and we could really use that. The idea was that for 10 years and I guess we saw the opportunity for partnership in these big infrastructures education, health care, affordable housing. When you can work collaboratively with your state and federal governments, with power institutions that be, you can actually create some really synergistic impact. And what we’ve seen, again, with a really nice, stable investment return where it’s sustainable and scalable.

And that was our real hope, Henries, that we could build these redemptive projects in such a way that they could attract major investment capital because we know the is going to allow us to do it. We’ve been able to invest about one hundred million dollars and we’re thrilled with that. And we might be another 50 million this year. We’re thrilled with that.

But this is a massive problem that way outstrips our balance sheet, whatever that might ever look like. And we’re going to need to attract capital to some of these problems. So we kind of our thesis was made if we build these in a way, they can create a four, six, seven percent return in a really collaborative, synergistic way. We can attract some major institutional capital that might just like the return. I mean, you go by CBS for a lower cap rate than that. So we go, hey, if we can do this and have major, major impact, it’s a scaled amplify lever that we can pull in the marketplace.

William Norvell: So it’s super compelling. What do you think are the barriers to seeing this scale? At one point, I guess you get to 10 schools and then maybe does the governor said there are charter networks out there that have gone pretty fast.

Casey Crawford: Like one hundred know there’s some great ones out in Texas that go like one hundred two hundred maybe. And that’s great. So we’re that’s what we’re on track to do.

William Norvell: I’ve done that with the faith integration, though. Have they done that with their partnership with health care?

Casey Crawford: No. But you know what? They’ve blazed the trail, right?

Like there was no one that had done one hundred networks when they started. So that was kind of their battle. How do we scale this to one hundred? Two hundred? And they’ve given us a roadmap for how to go do that with kind of scaling of the leadership. So now we’re just adding a few elements, right? We’re adding it. I mean, I would say they’re really critical because the faith can be a critical and integral one. But we John Machel’s right in our leadership curriculum for our kids right now. So we’re going to have like kind of Maxwells sort of five leadership academies where kids are going to get all his stuff growing up for 12 years in our life. And we’re teaching the kind of values we have an after school program that we kind of developed with the faith centered after school program that’s against totally voluntary. No one has to be leveraging the faith based programs they don’t want to. And then the integration with the different health providers is stuff that we’re learning as we go. We stole that idea from Ben Novarro down in South Carolina who worked with a South Carolina hospital system to bring health care in his school. So, yeah, we’re trying to add kind of our own contributions to the movement as we move along.

William Norvell: He’s one of the things I’m struck by when I hear your story. As you mentioned, Charlotte, that’s where your company is. Obviously, your your company has employees other places as well. But that’s kind of your hub. And you explain in your story, right, of God working three, working out with a buddy and convicting you of something else that sort of sponsors and moves into something else. And I’ve heard you tell stories before and you’re so good at it. That’s why we love having you on God’s giving you that gift. I’m really interested in how you encourage people in investing specifically to think through their story. Right. What God has put in front of them, because I think it can be overwhelming sometimes you can listen to a podcast.

Yes, I need to integrate my faith of my investing. Like, what does that mean, sell all my stocks? Like, put it into something good, take it out. I realize I mean, you’ve mentioned two or three huge concepts. Right. But like, they’re unique to you. And that’s exciting to me that I don’t think that story gets told a ton is it doesn’t happen. And it’s great to piggyback on other things sometimes. Yeah. But other times for you, like.

Casey Crawford: Yeah, right. Right. I am. We do. And I do love to piggyback and love to amplify. The great work that I feel like I’ve got is others too. We’re getting to do a little bit more of that now, which is amazing. I’ll tell you, a part of our story is fascinating. And again, I didn’t grow up doing that a whole lot, afraid of what or whatever, didn’t spend a lot of time fast and growing up. But man, the Lord Rusty in season right now, a company like everyone, a mentor said, hey, man, I’d love for you all to join the other Muslims fast and pray together because they were in such a season right now of it’s kind of overwhelming. Let’s make more business than we could imagine because the federal government is using the mortgage industry to subsidize credit across the United States. So every mortgage companies just have a. They can imagine a stimulus that appropriate for like is this really bad history of God’s people when they received their blessing giving it. And so we fast and pray. And I would say you even the to start the company was a time of fasting and praying and then in working and thinking about how am I supposed to reinvest redemptive Lee and, you know, kind of understand what this look like, redemptive banquets that mean to look like and may God has been faithful every time to kind of bring the right and next project to us. And I know that’s not everybody’s story. And I hope it’s not a frustrating answer for some folks. I can hear folks going, I’ve certainly been a great man. God didn’t drop in front of me. This answer the first I say, I mean, just being honest with yourself, did you really spend some time fasting prayer over it and really seeking in that that he would like? Because I’ve certainly sometimes gotten frustrated while Lord, you direct me and then good friends that love me would convict me that process again. So I’d really move fast and pray over your investments the way you would over any other decision that you’re really wrestling with in life, because I think it’s precious. That resource that he’s entrusted us with is so precious and there’s so much potential wrapped in those resources. I don’t think his believers were called to invest like the rest of the world.

And we really, I think, better be thinking about that maximum Kingdome impact that that treasure is going to have is maybe sometimes that an alpha return or whatever, but great. But it’s so that I can take that return and do something internal with it. Right. It’s always got to have some kind of internal purpose to the investment. So, yeah, that’s always been our hard that’s been our story and it’s kind of God’s to test me in this game. It’s not the type concept, but like I would just say testing and test and testing this really cecum bass, Craig and Resler beg him to show you what to do next. And then if he let you down, email case you your movement dotcom and I’ll I’ll go talk to him.

Henry Kaestner: Yeah. Yeah. So this has been awesome. A whole bunch of different things and a whole bunch of different things I want to talk about next time. I think we’ve already established fact there’s an opportunity to talk about your story as an athlete and how this all works in as well with this new property we’ve got. But we need that next time. And just grateful for your partnership. One thing that we always like to do in cash, I’m still on something from Williams script, so I’m going to hand it actually right back to William. William, what’s the one thing we want to ask of all of our guests?

William Norvell: I’m going to say that’s all I get guaranteed to me. I can’t believe you’re going to steal my heart. Do that. You can’t do that. Like, say, hey, we’re going to send the kicker out. But sorry, but this time we’re going to let the quarterback take that one, too. He just he’s been warming up. He looked good in warmups. We’re going to let him take this. It’s just an extra point. It’s just an extra point. You know, what’s the point we love and you just fasting and pray.

Gosh, really love you pointing us back to that. And I love your urge to gently. Have you really done it? You know, but with that, what we do love to close with, we love to watch exactly what you’re talking about in weird ways, how our guest and our listeners get linked together through the word of God. It’s amazing when we hear the stories of, wow, I just really needed that word from the Lord. And while your other words were fantastic and we want to hear what God may be doing through your life, through his word right now, that could be the season. It could be today, it could be months, maybe something you’ve been meditating on or something God divinely gives you right now in the scripture to tell our listeners, well, I’ll go.

Casey Crawford: Just two hours ago, we had our mentoring phone call and there’s a number of us that are kind of taking Mondays to fast and bread. And Steven failed that test. Will also I mentioned to is leading us through. OK, so we were Daniel for like, it’s never gonna happen his dream. And he’s asking Daniel, what does this dream mean?

And Daniel’s basically down payment. You’re full of pride. You take in all God’s glory. And he is about to humble you, buddy, in a big way and never assume here will not doesn’t have ears to hear.

He’s being told like humble yourself doesn’t have to hear. He’s going to keep taking guts. Glory. That was today of Suku processing that with community. And we talk about the mentoring group and the importance of the community in the workplace, a crisis in our community and how God uses that. And so I’ll share with the guys today that my first ever play in the NFL first ever play.

Maybe we’ll touch this the next with him first ever play kick off the ball game on kickoff return on the way, if you remember the way only do to allow you to do this anymore, just like human cannon fodder. I just run back and throw yourself into the other day.

Sorry, I’m on the wedge and I’m running up to protect our ball carrier and I just smash into this like human fire hydrant.

And when I hit them like everything’s black for a minute and I kind of woke up and shook my hands and like, instinctively grabbed his shoulder pads and ran, ran, ran and whistle goes, that’s all kind of off me.

And I mean, I was, you know, when you were playing, I was on I looked down on my shirt and a white jersey and he’s just covered just a big red bloody mess all over my jersey.

And now, mind you, he had just about knocked. Me out, turns out here broken my nose, not both snaps off of my chin strap first. I was so arrogant football player I shoved him looking at you bleeding all over me.

William Norvell: He says those exact words, the arrogance piece of that sorry.

Casey Crawford: I guess that is one area where I leave and now I run to the sidelines, of course.

And the train, which he’s made your nose broken. You’re an asshole to me, man. Sometimes in life don’t we just need a community to look at us and tell us how you got a problem?

Hey, you never, never needed it. You couldn’t hear it from there. My dad was like, Anchorman, you got a problem. It’s all over. We all see it bleed all over you.

You’re full of pride, you feel, and God would stop it. And then the beauty of a crisis to me in the workplace, I think, is that we have those other brothers and sisters that can come around us like let and know we got a mess. I right. We’ll take care of and clean up. And that’s been the greatest gift I’m sitting in. I was almost in tears looking like 40. My teammates were just coming alongside the fast and the crying to see the Lord encourage each other and challenge each other and make sure that we are being humble and given God all the way.

That is his and his alone only he deserves that. None of us rob from that. And I need that in my life. And I think what God really revealed to me is just the power of that in the workplace.

Man, when we can have brothers and sisters in Christ, the workplace is weird and 40, 50, 60 hours a week with and they’re point things like that. That is an incredible, incredible gift.

Henry Kaestner: Indeed. Indeed, it’s a great word always says Casey Yurok, thank you for being our friend and our partner in the overall mission and really going to be fascinating to follow what you do over the next year. I think that you are an exception maybe to what Bill Gates has said. I think that you’ll be able to get those things done. And if there’s anything we do to help you to get that and then have you back on the show, if you have, God might use you to not only transform the mortgage industry as he’s done through you, as you’re intentional about giving him the glory, if he might use you.

And some of those that I know that are friends and partners with you on the real estate side to do the same thing with real estate investing in education investing, that’d be an amazing, amazing thing. So continue to want to watch your story. Grateful for you. Thank you, brother.

Casey Crawford: I love you guys. Honored to be on here. Man, it is so much fun. Just walk this out with you guys. So glad we got connected.

Henry Kaestner: Thank you so much for joining us on today’s show. We’re very, very grateful for the opportunity to serve the larger faith driven investor community. Hey, the best way for you to stay connected is to sign up for our monthly newsletter at faith driven investor Doug. And while you’re there, we, of course, want to hear from you. We derive great joy from interacting with many of you. And it’s been very rewarding to see people join the discussion now from all around the world. But it’s also very important to us that you feel like this is your show and that you’ll help make it something that best equips you on your journey, one that you’re proud of and one that you’ll share with others.

This podcast, it wouldn’t be possible without the help from many of our friends. Executive producer Justin Forman, program director Johnny Will’s music by Carl. Well, you can see and hear more of his work at Summer Drugstore.com and Audio and editing by Richard Bahle of Cornerstone Church in San Francisco.

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Today, we’re talking about the future with two people who work with colleges to prepare the next generation of Faith Driven Investors. They’re both applying hands-on practice to their business school students in ways that uniquely prepare them for the world of finance and investing.

Dick Blanc is the Executive Director of Beyond: The Startup Accelerator at Cedarville University. He works alongside founders in the Accelerator by providing guidance and inspiration sourced from years of experience.

Steven Diedrich is the Executive Director of the Baylor Angel Network at Baylor University where they are helping engaged students receive a real-life education concerning the inner workings of angel investing.

If you’d like to reach out to Steven or Dick about getting involved with either of their programs, you an contact them via email:

Steven_Diedrich@baylor.edu

dblanc@cedarville.edu

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.

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Henry Kaestner: Welcome back to The Faith Driven Investor podcast. We’ve got a really special edition today. We talk a lot about how to get investors focused on how to honor God in the marketplace and be a part of his kingdom coming on earth as it is in heaven. And if I’m truthful, much of our focus has been on people who are already investors, who’ve been out there for a while and thinking about a new way to invest and maybe to reconfigure the way they think about their assets. Maybe they’ve been investing in fidelity for 20 years or some of the more traditional asset vehicles. But what’s a great way to think about getting investors to think about faith driven investing from the outset? The beginning of their career, their beginning of their investment life. Well, the two folks that are with us today have been thoughtful about that.

And we’ve got Stephen Diedrich from the Baylor Angel Network and then also Dick Blanc from Cedarville to talk to us about how they’re working with young entrepreneurs, young investors, how to help them to understand from an early day about how they can participate in faith driven investing. So Baylor Angel Network has been going on for a while. The idea of investing and putting money to work and training up student investors with real dollars is pretty unique. You guys have been doing it for 13 years and I want to camp out on that a little bit. Just tell us more about how you do what you do. What are the deals you see? How did the students get involved? How do you structure deals and maybe tell us even some success stories that have come out of your time in investing?

Steven Diedrich: Yeah, I’m happy to. So, you know, the basic way we operate is, as you know, I’d say almost any other angel network. We’ve got a pool of members that come in and we invest in promising companies. And although we’re university affiliated, we don’t have any hard restrictions on you’d have to be a Baylor grad to join. Right. Or you don’t have to give to the university to join. And the same with the companies. You know, we look at all sorts of companies, even if they’re founded by non Baylor alumni, the tie into the university is really through the student educational program. And it’s really flavored with even the way we got started. You know, the perspective has always been one of service and giving back. And one way I’ve heard it put it is, listen, I joined the Baylor Angel Network so I can invest. Right. And make some money in my investments as a steward of my you know, what I have. But then I can turn and give to the University of the profits, give up my time and mentoring these students and pouring it into that interaction is it’s really neat relationship where we’ve got students that are learning about investing and analyzing these opportunities. And we’re connecting them not only with investors who do it, but we’re having them do the work where they actually lead our screening, cycling and all the diligence materials that we hand to our investors when a company comes in to pitch was put together by these student analysts who’d been mentored and guided both by our faculty and by our members. And, you know, if we look at some success stories, we had an exit in January that I think is a great one to look at because it touches on all these points of why Baylor supports this. Right. Why do you support a bunch of investors, right. Who invest in these start companies? Well, we had members of the Baylor Angel Network who invested in and oftentimes they’ll take advisory seats, too. But they invested in this company that was actually started by a Baylor grad with this one, you know, in five or six years later, had thirty five times their money returned to them. So hugely profitable investment. That’s kind of what we’re going for in the angel world anyway, right? It’s not the most frequent outcome, but it is a great one. And out of that. Right. The members actually approached Baylor said, by the way, we know this was a great investment for us. We have clearly profited in our investments. We want to give to the university. And so out of that the university received, I think about 10 percent of profits were just given charitably from these members. And so you have this deal in particular touching a Baylor entrepreneur screened by Baylor students, invested in by Baylor alumni who’ve now turned around given money so Baylor can continue to do this program in training up and guiding these students.

Henry Kaestner: So tell us about the other part of that, which is the company that you invested in and are there different types of companies that you look at in terms of stage or industry or geography or whether the leaders are driven by their faith?

Steven Diedrich: Yeah, so our perspective is we want to be good stewards of our investors finances and we look at all sorts of opportunities. It almost has guided more by our investors perspectives on what they want to invest in. And that’s kind of what guides what we look at generally where early stage series. So after first revenue, but not too late. Across all industries. And so, you know, there’s a lot of diversity there. We don’t have any formal requirements that, you know, it be founded by a Christian. We don’t have any formal requirements on a mission there. But our perspective is we want to invest in companies that contribute to kind of the flourishing of mankind. Right. Things that are beneficial to society now. We can also paint a negative light. This is hey, there are things we just we don’t want our money in. But we don’t take a hard perspective on investing in Christians, because I think a lot of our members, they look at this and say, listen, I’m a Christian, you know, and not all of them are. But, you know, oftentimes our members have these projects that you know, I’m a Christian. I want to put my money to work in companies that are doing good. And then I can have an influence. It builds my relationship with this company, with guiding them, with their consumers and as well as with the students. And so I’d say more of our perspective is leaning on, you know, if you are a faith driven investor and you join the Baylor Angel Network, live that out. Right. You may be investing in an entrepreneur that is not a Christian, but what a great opportunity that is for Christians to be living and engaged in with people who don’t know the Lord Christ because it gives opportunity to point to him, to his glory. And why are we doing this? Why is the Baylor Angel Network different in our giving some of our profits in our pouring into students? And so it tends to more flavor who we are in leaning out rather than being a filter that we apply.

Henry Kaestner: Yeah, I think you bring up a super good point there and that it’s not just how unique Baylor Angel Network is, but I think that a lot of the folks that are listening to this podcast are angel investors and help manage a fund that invest in Faith driven entrepreneurs in Southeast Asia, United States. And somebody might infer from that that I think that really true faith driven investing is only investing in Christ followers. And yet you mentioned something dynamic that’s incredibly important. As an entrepreneur is out there regardless of their faith background or their faith intentionality. And they are living it up. They’re feeling the stress. They are going through the crucible, if you will, an angel that’s really involved in an entrepreneur’s life has this incredible opportunity to witness and be with them and be friends with them, whereas share the reason for the hope we have with gentleness and respect. And that comes through a relationship. And an angel has this great opportunity to be in relationship with the founder and then with time and through love, being able to share the reason for the hope they have. And I think that that’s such a key part, lest we otherwise be constrained with faith driven investing only into a holy huddle. Now, to be clear, I’m a member of that, and I think that investing in Faith driven entrepreneurs is a beautiful way to advance God’s kingdom. And yet that’s not the only way. And so you’re speaking to that. Can you maybe even give us an example or have you seen that happen where somebody from the Baylor world has gotten involved in a company and the discipleship or the faith foundation of the founder, the entrepreneur has been influenced in a way that’s been full of life for the founder?

Steven Diedrich: Yeah, no. And without getting too much into into maybe specific scenarios there. I mean, we we see a number of times where a BAN member will get involved as an advisor and help provide some coaching or help your entrepeneur. And, you know, I think one area, maybe one example that specifically shows how being a Christian in this can be a huge benefit is, you know, not all these investments go well and return 35x, like I mentioned earlier. And we have one that there was infighting, a shareholder and not a new thing, not a unique thing. But there was actually one of the BAN members who, you know, is investor in this company. And, you know, I look at and say, you know, because Christians were called to live in a way. Right. That puts us above reproach. I mean, that’s the calling of the Christian. One of our BAN members was asked to come and join into a special committee that was trying to help bring the peace. Right. And you think about what a Christian is called to do. And be peaceful. Right. Be a peacekeeper. And in these relationships. And so that BAN member was able to step into this role, help broker these tense relationships. And, you know, I can only imagine you look at this one on ones and say, what’s your thought on this member here? It’s like, well, you know, what a great option they were to step into a tough situation and show the patience, show the love, show the kind of uprightness of Christ in those relationships, even when things get bad.

Henry Kaestner: Thank you very much for that. I want to switch over to you, Dick. You’ve got a new program that’s starting at Cedarville under your leadership, has been launching a platform and a program for a little bit more than a year. Talk to us about how you are forming your curriculum and your investment strategy, how you’re looking at deals, maybe some of the same type of questions that I just asked Stephen.

Dick Blanc: Happy to. Well, we first looked at launching this program. We got 25 business leaders. Most of them alums from the university together. And we were focused on picking one thing where we could put our expertize and capital behind to advance the cause of Christ aligned with the university’s mission. And in doing that, they ultimately decided that the best and most equitable way and focus. Our collective marketplace energies, our capital, our expertize, our relationship base, our opportunity to mentor students and alumni and others close to both an accelerator on campus, we call the whole program Beyond, the Accelerator and also an angel network, not unlike what Stephen just described at Baylor. Then we also, of course, have an entrepreneurship academic track that cuts across all 16 of the schools at the university. But, you know, one of the things that really informed how we structured this and why we did it and why top down board of trustees, president, cabinet, across the university, everybody is very aligned with the strategic importance of the program. Our belief is that I know everybody on the call here the same belief that under God, the marketplace has tremendous influence on our culture. If there’s any doubt about that, you can see what happened when we shut it down for 20 days. These recent events that still continues has huge impact. The market points to us. It has gone on a culture. We also do it. The great advances for the cause of Christ seem to always begin with an athlete or a leader both Biblicallyin contemporary history. And if you look at how the marketplace looks like, particularly in the US, there’s like a continuous transformation or renewal of the marketplace that goes on every 20, 25 years. There’s cycles for the startup economy feom 20, 25 years ago also becomes a leaders of a marketplace of the future. Those leaders who were part of that whole venture economy 20, 25 years ago then become leaders in heavy influence in the marketplace. The worldview that those leaders ultimately have has enormous influence in the culture, communities, and the way we live. And so we’re playing a long game with a certain Time over Target. I personally think that by launching hundreds of state driven companies with a biblical worldview, for profit model, you know, ultimately rising and scaling to have positions and platforms of influence in the marketplace. We feel that that is a great, positive way to allow our communities to flourish, to advance the cause of Christ. That’s a biblical worldview, helped to shape the culture and really the ambitions and influence with those pillars and also those of us that helped shape and fund and coach and mentor and capitalize and to have that kind of impact. So we want to be a Midwest hub, in effect to what’s going on with faith driven entrepreneurs and faith driven investors. We also want to be part of a global ecosystem where our impact and deal flow and our capital can be multiplied. And you guys have a great impact and making all that happen. And it’s created just a phenomenal ecosystem for which we are now joining. And our angels, our alums and students going through the accelerator, the interactions we’re having with other accelerators for deal flow, the sharing of deal flow across other angel networks around the country. They just have this multiplying impact for God that has really added more impact for the university for God’s kingdom. So that’s what excites us and why we’re happy to have made this strategic move in the past year or so and it continues to scale.

Henry Kaestner: I want to talk to a little bit more about how each of you think about equipping the investors of the future with how they look at investment opportunity. But before I do that Dick, you have this entrepreneurial program that goes across all the different colleges that are part of your university. What are some common tenets what are some common principles that you want to impart on these young faith driven entrepreneurs, that are going to go out there and innovate and create a business?

Dick Blanc: Yeah. Great question. You know, we put some thought into that. Obviously, a biblical worldview is certainly a common principle. Everybody at Cedarville University, regardless of the school that their majors anchored in, whether it’s business or engineering or science, cybersecurity. You’re seeing all those degrees, everyone gets a Bible minor before graduation. So biblical principles are instilled throughout the curriculum in all of the practice areas of the 16 schools of the university. Interestingly, now the entrepreneurship program besides now the Bible minor is one other minor that’s across all 16 in all schools. So I tell you what, we see our partnership in all the tenets of the grit and tenacity in going all in that we know an entrepreneur does to attack then uncaptured opportunity or a problem that God cares about in a for profit model. We want to encourage more of our students, more of our alums, and of course, many of our investors who have an affinity with the university to help scale the addressing and solving of problems. So we see entrepreneurship in principle as a great way to influence the world, but also to solve the unsolved problems that I talked about two minutes ago in isaiah 58.

Henry Kaestner: So riff on that a little bit more, because you’ve got an opportunity, of course, to teach great entrepreneurial curriculum, you can do lean startup, you can do traction a whole bunch of different things. You can do Yoaz. And then, of course, you’ve been well versed in how to train kids on the Bible. Are there aspects of being an entrepreneur that you think a Christ follower really needs to lean into? Or are there different things that you think of Christ following entreprenuer that wants to have a career in entrepreneurship needs to be aware of or wary of?

Dick Blanc: Yeah, yeah, good question. I mean, one of the things that probably would be unique, I think, to an entrepreneur who’s a Christian, certainly one would be how they think about their role as a founder, as a CEO, as a leader of their enterprise. More from a stewardship standpoint than from an owner standpoint. That’s really one key principle that certainly drives home pretty hard.

I think another key principle is just the whole idea of, certainly the companies need to be wildly successful economically, financially, to scale, to attract investors, to attract customers, to operate, just like some of the great companies that are out there today, the Chick-fil-a’s the Home Depots and others. They need to be financially strong and sound at scale. Great profits, great revenue growth, but we also encourage our entrepreneurs to be principled in the impact that they make. So, you know, having more than one bottom line is something that we feel strongly about. And we see out there in the marketplace as something that’s honoring God. We have just some great mentors are role models that are participating in our program who do that with their businesses. And boy, it really resonates when a student sees that type of principled mindset in the leaders of today as they see leaders of tomorrow.

One thing I’m encouraged about, about the students today and I know, Steven, I’ve talked about this a little bit as well at Baylor, is the things that took me a while. And I’m an alum of the University, but the things it took me a while to learn in the marketplace. It seems students already have learned just the things that are important. They’re More principled. They’re more focused on having a purpose. They’ve got a mission. And I don’t know that when we were all grads was quite as prominent. You know, certainly we talked about it, but I see that passion that heart. Most of the students that I interact with have a strong heart for mission and purpose of God, but also a strong ambition to be excellent and successful in the marketplace. And they seem to have a great balance to that. And I hope that continues as they enter the marketplace.

Henry Kaestner: Steven, I want to switch back to your Baylor Angel Network. You’ve been thinking about investing for at least 13 years. And undoubtedly you’ve got a curriculum and a framework to teach investors, young investors about faith driven investments. What’s that curriculum look like if you’re going to encourage another university that wants to be serious about developing a curriculum on faith driven investing? What are those core pieces?

Steven Diedrich: So we kind of look at this from two perspectives. You know, first and foremost, as a university, you know, our focus is really making sure how are we doing a good job educating these students. And so not just training them. We’re not a trade school. Right. We’re not teaching them to just do this kind of classroom involved, but really encouraging the students to think through and be innovators and be leaders in this space and within the business. I think this is especially important then to take that extra step and put them and to get these hand experiences and let them lead right. With these companies, because with the CEOs engaging with the investors. And that’s one thing that’s kind of helped shape what our curriculum looks like. And the basic framework from the students perspective is, you know, they come in and they are not only being trained in, you know, understanding the basic tenets of how do you negotiate, how you evaluate an opportunity, what’s important, what terms or get you how do you model some of these financials? You know, that’s kind of the one part. Right. And that’s building on the broader curriculum that Baylor has in both finance and entrepreneurship and in a number of other backgrounds that our students come from. But beyond that, what I’d say sets the Baylor Angel Network apart is, you know, we have just an awesome opportunity to take, you know, these top students in this area and connect them with alumni and connect them directly with these entrepreneurs. Not only can they do it, but then they can see, you know, what’s a moderate who someone I can emulate. You know, one of the feedbacks we get at the end of the year, I often ask these students, like, what have you appreciated most about your time in the Baylor Angel Network? And I’ll tell you all, it’s good for these students. Like when you look at job placement, for example. Right. It’s good that they know how to do some pretty heavy financial modeling. They they’re creative in the way they think about opportunities and threats and. None of it mentioned just that piece, right? They don’t say, hey, it set me up for a great job. Oftentimes the feedback we get is, man, the members, the mentors I have. Right. The way I can now look at a Christian businessmen. Right. And learn to emulate that. The way that they walk in humble service. Right. Honoring God and what they do and now being a model for my life as I’m leaving college. Because, you know, oftentimes these students that I’ve had them ask me this several times already, as they say, you know, I’m Christian and I’m a finance major or I’m an entrepreneurship or I’m an engineering major. Right. And I do that. And, you know, should I take this job in investment banking or should I go into ministry? And I feel like there’s this kind of tension and just the opportunity, you know, beyond me. Right. But, you know, for each of our members. Right. To be able to give their input and really guide these students to understand that, you know, your faith. That should influence what you say. Yeah. You know, the answer is yes, Minister, through your life as an investment banker, minister through your life if you go into consulting or venture capital or, you know, a number of careers that our students go into. And so it’s that extra little piece that I see us having the opportunity and a platform to deliver through the Baylor Angel Network that I say sets this apart from other opportunities where they’re either just getting educated or just getting experience.

Henry Kaestner: So there’s a lot of conversation happening right now about the fall. And by the fall, I’m not talking about what happened in the garden. I’m talking about the season. Autumn, there’s uncertainty in what the fall schedule is going to look like for many schools. And as a result, I think that a lot of people are looking at the higher price tags of higher education. How important are programs like this, these real world experiences to the value of the college experience? And do you think that this crisis is going to slow, that our accelerate that, how are you processing all that?

Steven Diedrich: That’s a great question. I’ve actually had the same conversation with some of our analysts. Right. They’re looking at what if we go online in the fall? Should I take an internship, take a gap year gap semester? I mean, how does this impact just me personally? And, you know, one of the perspectives I have on this is higher education serves a great purpose. Right? A university model. It has a great purpose. And I maybe won’t get into the price of that because I think that’s a whole nother can of worms. But when you talk about the value that someone’s putting into coming off to university, it’s not just for the experience of being off at college or just for that diploma. Right. It’s kind of a signaling tool to get a job. Right. You jump down that labor economics degree. But really, you know, what the university should be striving to do is encouraging these students. Right. To be thoughtful leaders. Right. It’s contributing to that academic curiosity. And so a program like Ban, I think fits in perfectly and just enhances that experience because it’s not just I go to a classroom and I’m learning and they’re encouraging me to be creative and curious. But, you know, it kind of stops here. It’s this kind of flavor that we call the BAN practicum. So as the students come in, there’s the curriculum that they go through to. And in that it’s not just a class like you would normally have where you show up, you do your readings, you have some assignments. So it’s we’re digging deep. Right. And we’re encouraging the students to be curious and to ask questions. And then we’ve also got this awesome, you know, almost an internship through the Baylor Angel Network. And we hold these things side by side. And I can sit down and look at one of our analysts and say, you know, so tell me about this. You’ve got one company that you’ve been on a call with the CEO. You’ve talked about terms. Right. Why is it important? How are you applying what you’re learning today and tomorrow? And just that interplay between, you know, really pouring into and building up these students from an academic side, from an experienced side, from connecting them with alumni and engaging them that way side. I think just creates a student who’s so well equipped to not just go into the workforce, but to thrive and to succeed and be a leader in the workforce. And as we look at our years of graduates who’ve come through the Baylor Angel Network. As an analyst and looking at where they are now, it’s amazing and it’s humbling because they often leave with this perspective of how do I turn around and help the next person? How do I approach this with a humble stewardship? And that’s just such a blessing to see the way that just a short time we have I mean, it’s only 18 months of their college career, but through the Baylor Angel Network that we can help instill that and tie them in. And, you know, they can turn around and and help the class after them the next generation.

Henry Kaestner: Dick, want to throw in on that, too?

Dick Blanc: Yeah, yeah, happy too. You know, we had a record enrollment of 10 percent above the prior year in 2019, which was just phenomenal. And unheard of in the university settings. And even in the covid environment here our deposits are pretty well aligned with a similar performance. And so that’s been great. We’re going to open up on campus a couple weeks early. We want to send the students home for Thanksgiving break. And that’ll be the end of the semester. That’s how we’re going to manage that. But it will be on campus instruction. Even before the crisis came along, there was already a strong trend towards students wanting meaningful and real experiences that were real world and immersive. And programs like what Stephen is describing a Baylor, what we’re doing at Cedarville. Very much that way. They’re very real-world, very immersive. The interaction with top business leaders, Angels, venture capital, private equity, strong operators, and strong entrepreneurs. The students are getting immersed experience, paid on campus internships in venture finance, fund management, entrepreneurship. And it’s really created a draw for more of that kind of experience at the university. So we feel like programs like this could be a trend. So across Christian universities at least, that could make great impact, both outcomes as well as the on campus experience.

Henry Kaestner: I’ll ask you guys one last question before our final question that we always ask each of our guests, and that is if I’m listening to this as an investor or as a established entrepreneur. Are there opportunities for me to get involved as an investor or as a volunteer in either of your organizations? And if so, how do I go about it?

Steven Diedrich: Absolutely. You know, I shoot me an email now. So, you know, we’re always looking to bring in more members, more investors. And, you know, we always distill down to the four main reasons that people join the Baylor Angel Network. You know, one is to make investments or make profitable investments. The other is portion of the students piece, you know, kind of the service. And this comes in times in waves as members are able. But there’s great opportunity to contribute not just to the students as a mentor, but even more informally or with some of the other acts of service that we have. The other reasons we look at are just the opportunity to network with other investors. Right. Who share these values or, you know, kind of the final one is to learn about investing in these entrepreneurial ventures. And that’s the kind of the investing piece, right? Yeah. The deal flow that comes. You know one of the unique things as we talk about just the investing. I mean, these things get to be highly vetted by the time our members see them. You know, I will take 30 companies that apply in a cycle. Our analysts will do deep dives and 15 of them raise to get to the top four. And this is a five week process that results in, you know, 10 pages of research that our analysts do.

And so, I mean, there’s a high vetting of the deal flow, too. And so, you know, I’d say if someone of to join we’ve got ways to engage. If you’re close enough to drive into Waco, we’ve got ways to engage if you’re not right. We have out of state members that join us virtually. And so much of you know, when we hit this covid crisis, it didn’t really throw too big of a wrench in what we’re doing because most of our members live, you know, hour and half to three hours away. You know, most are about that far. And so a lot of our cycle is virtual, is enabled by Zoom or conference calls in other things. And so, you know, the presentation meetings online, too. Not ideal, but easily doable. And so, you know, I think you’ve got my contact information and, you know, let’s have a conversation.

Henry Kaestner: We’ll put it up in the show notes. Dick, how about your?

Dick Blanc: I would say the same thing. You can put my contact in the show notes. You also have the cedarville.edu/beyon. And if you go to those landing pages, there’s opportunities as entrepreneur in residence. There’s opportunities as an angel member to participate and mentor the students, as well as to invest in a curated set of deal flow and our next virtual investor event where we’re looking at deals is June 12th. So you can go to the Web site I just described and register. So that you can be a guest speaker, you can sponsor internships. So all that’ll be really clear if you go to cedarville.edu/beyond I’d love to have more listening in here, participate in the growth and become angel members. That’s the best way to plug in.

Henry Kaestner: Okay. Thank you. Thank you. With each of our properties Faith Driven Entrepreneur Faith Driven Investor and the new faith driven athlete, we ask our guests one final question. It’s always the same. What are you hearing from God’s word? Maybe this morning, maybe this week, maybe last week, that you really feel that he’s speaking to you about. Steven, we’ll start with you.

Steven Diedrich: That sounds great. So I’ve been reading through with my two boys first and second Samuel and we’re into Kings now. And, you know, as we’ve been doing that kind of just Bible study with, you know, a four and a five year old, one of the things that I’ve been just really taken from and resting in is God’s sovereignty. And I think even just in the face of COVID, that’s something that I’ve been able to communicate to as the spirit’s been teaching me. It’s this reminder that our security is not in our health, or our security is not in our finances or in our, you know, the income we have. You know, that’s not it. And so even if all that’s taken away. Right, God is sovereign. And that’s just an amazing thing to be able to read. Right. To talk to my little kids about. But also then to turn to our analysts and kind of point them to in this time of uncertainty. God is sovereign.

Henry Kaestner: Amen, Dick.

Dick Blanc: I’m thankful for Bobby Gruenewald, who I think you guys have interviewed on this podcast before, talking about the Bible app. And my discipline is to essentially go through that every year.

I love just how easy it is and the availability of it. And so I’m at this point in the year where I get to read about king after king in Israel in a quick summary of their life and their impact as leaders of God’s people, the Israelites. The contrast is so stark when you go through and read each of those chapters. It just basically starts out. And so and so was either a good king following in the steps of David or was not.

So where God challenges me every year in that particular area is just who will I be as a leader and who will I mentor others to be as a leader? And what, if there was a chapter in God’s word that summarized the impact of my life, what would it say? Would it say I was courageous and bold enough to address the things that God dislikes in the ways he wants? Would it say that I trusted him in his sovereignty and in his wisdom versus aligning and partnering with perhaps another acquaintance or company or partner who has some strength to help me in a difficult situation? Would I look to God and say God, like David, do I go to battle or do something else? And that certainly was a test for all the kings. Could it be said that in the scope of the things that I have the opportunity to lead and steward that I left him better than when I was given the role in terms of, you know, being aligned in God’s mission, in the impact that God wants to make in the marketplace. And that’s what resonates with me. And reminds me every day it wakes me up every day to think how we’re making an impact today.

Henry Kaestner: I love the fact that you brought up Second Chronicles there. I think I’m on a different reading plan, doing it actually as a three year plan with a bunch of buddies going through a chapter a day and in this time going through the Bible. The thing that really impacted me was Second Chronicles and maybe because of where it follows, maybe because you just went through eight or nine chapters that just had genealogy after genealogy, which are kind of tough to get through. But then I listen, you run into the bad kings of Judah and the good kings of Judah. And the thing that left such a lasting impression was that the good kings were good thereafter to their father’s heart. They’re after David’s heart. And yet every one of them made a critical mistake along the way and didn’t seek God before making a major decision. And it didn’t go well for him. For one, it was a trade deal. For one, it was going to battle. There six good kings, all six of them made a big mistake. And that’s such an admonition for me. And really interesting to hear that they made an impact on you as well. We’ve come to the end of our time. I’m grateful for both of you. Super excited about the way that you’ve been thoughtful and having teenagers through early 20s, being very thoughtful by Faith Driven Entrepreneurship and Faith Driven investment. It makes me incredibly hopeful for the world. And thank you for the fact that there are things that both of you guys could have been doing. One of the things that we share in common is that we’re both formed a little bit in St. Charles, Illinois, through our time with Arthur Andersen, Accenture Family Group but God has us each in different places. And you could have been in different places on Wall Street. And for you to be so serious about your faith and investing in this next generation, to have taken leadership in both these schools. It’s a big deal, makes me hopeful. Thank you for your faithful obedience in that direction. Thank you for us listeners. And until next time, God bless you.

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Every once in awhile, we get to have conversations with living legends. Today is one of those days. If you’ve been around the faith driven conversation, you’ve most likely heard the name, Chuck Bentley. 

Chuck is the CEO of Crown Ministries, as well as the Founder and Executive Director of the Christian Economic Forum. His fingerprints are all over the Faith Driven Investor and Entrepreneur websites, and today’s episode is a reminder of why. 

He’s been a faithful steward of this conversation, he freely shares his wisdom born out of experience, and our conversation with him today is one you’ll enjoy…

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.

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Henry Kaestner: Welcome back to the faith driven investor. We’ve got a special edition here with Chuck Bentley, something that is really special for me. Chuck’s a great friend. He’s been a great encouragement to me for a long, long time. He is the leader of Crown Financial. He’s the leader of the Christian Economic Forum. He has a podcast he hosts himself with a really, really cool studio. Wish you could see if we had video up, you’d see why. I have great studio envy. He’s got something really set up because they’ve got incredible product. The Christian Economic Forum podcast is really, really, really, really good. And it really want to highly recommend that as I do what he does through the Christian Economic Forum. And so many more of you will know about his work at Crown Financial. I’m going to talk about all that today. So, Chuck, first off, thank you for being with us.

Chuck Bentley: Well, thank you, Henry. I enjoy being on the other side of the microphone today because I had the privilege of interviewing you just recently, and it was one of our top podcasts. I’m hoping I can live up to the bar that you set so high for us.

Henry Kaestner: You’re very kind. And apparently you don’t have any other guests. I might have been one of just one or two. And I know another one is competing against was my partner, Luke Roush. So it was a very low bar, but thank you anyway. So tell us all. As we get started. Want to hear a little bit about your background. But before we get into Christian Economic Forum, which I will ask you some questions on. Tell us about your background and tell us about Crown Financial.

Chuck Bentley: Well, just a quick background on myself, I grew up in business, I have a business degree from Baylor and went into the oil and gas business with my family. My father started the company years ago, and that’s primarily my background. I did a couple of other things before I got called in to do what I do today. I’ve walked both sides of the street of the for profit and not for profit world. I’m particularly drawn to Crown because we’re about teaching God’s principles of stewardship and stewardship is what I like to call the invisible power that changes everything. When you see good stewardship present, you know it. You feel it. You’re actually you’re at peace. You’re relaxed. It’s everything’s functioning the way it should. And when good stewardship is absent, everything is broken and in dire need. The scripture says that people groan and I think that’s an absence of stewardship. So at Crown, we perpetuate that and we use a lot of different means to do that. It was started by the late Larry Burkett, who wrote 70 books on the topic. And we now operate around the world helping people know how to be better stewards.

Henry Kaestner: 70 books. That’s awesome. So tell us about the Christian Economic Forum. It was born out of much of the work that you’d seen happen with Crown and people that had been gathered around. But tell us how it started. Tell us about the work and how it’s grown and why I think it’s so cool.

Chuck Bentley: One of the things that happened to me as I was traveling the world opening crown offices, that was my job for many years. So I’ve been to every continent except the cold ones, except the ones where they’re covered in tundra. And we were starting offices and the people that would greet me at the airport were invariably the top Christian leaders in those countries. And I could just go around the world and just point out who’s who of people who were the best Christian investors, the best Christian entrepreneurs, the best Christian stewards in their country. And I began to ask myself, why is that happening? I mean, I wasn’t networking to find these people. I wasn’t trying to find them. It just was a reoccurring theme. And then suddenly I realized two things were a common denominator. First of all, these guys were great stewards themselves. They understood the principles of stewardship. Their businesses were built on great principles of stewardship, and they had a heart to help the people in their community or their nation to flourish. And they knew those principles were going to be necessary to share what they knew was the invisible power of God, the power of being a good steward. And from that, I began to think, right, these guys aren’t working on their budget. They’re really managing a balance sheet. They have huge responsibilities. What would happen if I got them together and in an agenda-neutral environment and asked them just to start sharing and talk about issues that really matter at a macro level? These are very capable problem solvers. These are people that that’s how they’ve found success, is learning to find the core issue and get to quickly. And so I did it. I was the least likely person to be qualified to do it. The idea came when I was standing in the airport with my wife in Zurich, Switzerland, leaving a meeting where I’d met some of these great Christian leaders. The world was coming in to go to Davos, but I thought, we need something on par with that. That’s got the same professionalism, but allows people with the Christian world view to really share their hearts where they’re not going to be asked for money. They’re not going to be given a job to do, but they’re going to be able to share their knowledge and wisdom with other people. So that’s how we got started.

Henry Kaestner: Gotcha. OK, so one of the things that our listeners love, of course, everybody does, are stories. There’ve been some great stories that I’ve been a part of and that I’ve seen at the Christian Economic Forum. Tell us about some of your favorites.

Chuck Bentley: Well, I’ve got lots of favorite stories, Henry. One of them is the fact that the top Christian economist inside of China is a part of our forum. He was an atheist, sent to the United States to study the reason for our prosperity. He did an academic study. All of his research went back to China at the risk of his own life. And as an atheist said, I’ve got good news and bad news. The good news is I’ve discovered the secret of why America is more prosperous in China. The bad news is you’re not going to like the answer. Christianity. And he documented the fact that the Judeo-Christian ethic, the values and the operating principles of God’s economy are what accelerated us ahead of the rest of the world. And he defended that in a white paper that was read by 100 hundred million people at the risk of his own life. And through that research, he came to faith in Christ. And when I read the paper, I read it in The Wall Street Journal. And I said, you know, this guy is a kindred spirit with me. I believe that is the solution to the world’s economic problems is to know God’s principles. And so through a series of really miraculous events in my life, I ended up sitting at a conference next to the author of that whitepaper. We had never been introduced. And there we were side by side. I didn’t speak Chinese and he didn’t speak English. But through a translator, we met each other. And that began a lifelong friendship of two people who believe that we need to perpetuate the advancement of God’s financial principles to the whole world. And so he became somewhat of a partner, a silent partner in this endeavor. And he continues to help us to grow the forum and to spread that truth to every nation that we possibly can. That’s just one of them, Henry. Tell me your favorite story and that will stimulate some more of mine.

Henry Kaestner: Well, I think, you know, Craig Dealll and I think back to the Christian Economic Forum in California. I think that you had also address this in Singapore, one that I didn’t go to. But just what’s going on in racial reconciliation in Zimbabwe and massive forgiveness was really poignant having a black African or a white African on the stage together, hugging each other and talking about their shared passion for their Christian faith and ultimately their shared passion for each other, just amazingly powerful.

Chuck Bentley: That is powerful. In fact, that’s been one of my top podcasts, is telling his story through CEF of how God has used them personally, knows how to lose everything and still have joy and peace and contentment. Let me tell you one more that happened through the Christian Economic Forum, and I’d like to qualify this by saying I don’t wanna take credit for any of it. The forum has enabled some of these collaboration’s to happen, but I don’t think it’s because of us. I think they may not have happened without us, but I don’t want to beat our chests and say we’ve made this happen. But John Erwin is a friend of mine. We’ve been friends a long time and I invite him to come to the forum. And John’s a filmmaker and he came as a young guy and told his story. He was called on why I want to make films. And he said, because my generation will not read books, but they’ll watch films. And to really reach my generation, we’ve got to make non cheesy faith based films. And a couple of the guys that just resonated with them and unbeknownst to me, they met him out in the hallway and said, tell us your dream. What film are you trying to make? And he cast a little vision there. He was ready. You know, he had a little trailer, his mobile phone. Next thing you know, twenty five million dollars flowed into his organization that enabled them to have a breakout movie on in Hollywood.

Henry Kaestner: Which movie was that?

Chuck Bentley: Well, that one the one that those guys funded was Woodlawn. And it was a great movie. And then that went on from there to become Moms Night out. And then they did. I can only imagine. Yeah, of course. I can only imagine. Rung the bell. That one was a very big financial success for them, but I take great joy in that. Henry, I didn’t raise twenty five million dollars for John. He knows that. But I was able to put him in front of the people that helped him take the next step. And that does impact culture. That is one of the ways that our message gets out. And so I’m just so proud of that. And the stories go on and on.

Henry Kaestner: So this year, as can be the 10th anniversary of the Christian Economic Forum. You were gonna have it in Jerusalem. Obviously, that’s all changed. What’s this year looking like? And how do you anticipate the shaping future gatherings?

Henry Kaestner: I’d like to say that this crisis has helped us because it forced us into a corner. Many people think the Christian Economic Forum is just one event, one time a year. And that’s been our history. We really weren’t providing year round value to our members, but because we had to cancel Jerusalem, we kicked into high gear to say what can we do to share the principles and the knowledge among each other? And so we collected white papers. Those are starting to come out. They’re published every year. Then we began podcasting and we started a WhatsApp channel and started sharing information among our membership around the world. From that, we’ve seen great value being added to our members lives. There’s a couple that you know, that are in a real challenging time. They’re classified. They’re not in this country, but they’re classified as a business at great risk because all their customers are wiped out. Right now, they supply retailers. But through a prayer call that we hosted, they found a new customer. And that was just God at work, you know, and that’s going to help them keep more people employed and to grow their business. And so. We’re finding that God used the crisis to help us get better at what we’re trying to accomplish.

William Norvell: Thanks for walking us through that Chuck, William, here. So great to have you. And I’ve been fortunate to come to a few of the forums as well. And just so thankful for you responding to God’s leading and walking towards the path that he was opening up through some of these opportunities. And one of the things I know, and you mentioned it a little bit, as you get the opportunity to spend a lot of time with leaders and with people that are leading organizations, whether it’s for profit or nonprofit in all kinds of different countries around the world, you might be able to get a chance to interact with more people leading in different distinct environments than few others that we’re gonna have on this podcast. I’d love for you to share with our listeners a little bit about what it looks like to lead during these uncertain times. To timestamp this, we are doing this during the middle of the COVID crisis, we’re about six weeks in. What are you hearing out there and how are people thinking about what God is doing around the world and what their role is to lean in as a steward of the leadership that they’ve given that God has given them?

Chuck Bentley: I’ll give you two quick answers to that, William, because I think that’s been pretty thoroughly discussed on some of your podcasts that I’ve had the privilege to listen to. But I think I can add a few points. I think right now what I’m hearing among leaders is there’s a premium on wisdom. There’s not a premium on information because we’re overwhelmed with information, everybody’s got information overload and we’re almost saturated trying to keep up with what data to process, what data to throw out. So what’s risen to the top is how to respond with wisdom. And I think wisdom is being able to effectively apply truth to our lives. And we’re seeing God’s leaders who are filtering the headlines through God’s word. And those are the people making very, very wise decisions. That’s what the world needs right now. And that’s what God’s leaders are doing. They’re taking the data. They’re processing it. They’re checking it against scripture, and then they’re making really good decisions of how to apply that. I think, secondly is that people are moving more rapid than they would be otherwise. You’re seeing that I had one leader tell me I’m under a lot of pressure to make great decisions fast, and I’m concerned about that because I feel like I’ve got to be moving faster than I’ve been in the past. But when you curtail that pressure of quickness with the timeless, priceless wisdom of God, then you can move fast and know that you’re on sure footing. And I’m seeing that across the board. I’m seeing the leaders that I know and interact with being able to navigate this better than those who really don’t have a North Star, who don’t know how to process the data and make a wise decision.

William Norvell: And that’s a great transition. We didn’t spend a ton of time talking about what you did at Crown, but I don’t know if you would venture yourself an economist per say. You can answer that in a minute. I know you know a lot about the economy and you’ve spent a lot of time thinking about what God thinks about the economy. And during uncertain times, I would love if you would take us a layer into the certainty of some of God’s economic principles. And I know you’ve written about this before, so I’d love our listeners be able to hear the framework with which you think about how the Bible and how God thinks about the underlying foundational economic principles that he has laid out for us to follow.

Chuck Bentley: Now, I want to run through a couple of those quickly. And thank you for that opportunity, William and Henry, because I am not an economist and I’m not an expert really at anything. I think the one thing that I would maybe if I could stake my claim as an expert at anything, I would like to believe that I know what the Bible says about money and economics as well as most anybody else. I really have dedicated myself to study in that for the past 20 years. And there are principles that are absolutely certain that we can rely on right now. I have a son that suffers with perpetual or chronic anxiety and he just has trouble turning it off. At times. It’s affected his sleep. It’s affected a lot of areas of his life. And one of the things when it’s really happening, that hamster wheel is spinning in his mind. I’ll sat down with him and this little technique has helped him so much. I’ll say, what do we know that’s certain? And let’s run to what is certain right now and we’ll just start ticking off what’s certain. OK. You’re well, you’re not in danger. You’ve got opportunities. You know, we just start listing everything we know to be true and it brings calm into his life. And I think when there’s economic uncertainty like this, this massive gap of the unknown, I mean, we don’t even know what data to rely on in some cases and who’s telling the truth and who’s promoting propaganda. We just need to pause and run to what certain and God’s principles are what we know are certain. You know, when I look at what God says, we’re not owners were stewards. Then that should bring us relief. That should bring us relief from the stress that we are temporarily managing on God’s behalf. And the requirement for a steward is not to be successful, but to be faithful. And the Bible says if you’re faithful with the little, you’ll be entrusted with much. So that’s a huge economic principles world ignores because money flows towards trust. Just like water runs downhill. Money will always flow towards trust. So what happens in an economic crisis? Money leaves environments that are high risk and untrustworthy and moved to those presumed to be trustworthy, Singapore, Switzerland or the United States in a crisis. Money doesn’t flow to corrupt nations. It flows out of those nations. And so for a business owner or an investor to position yourself as being a trustworthy steward, faithful in the crisis puts you in a position to attract more investment. We’re always attracted to trust. And that’s where money will always go. And that’s something we know we’ll be certain before the crisis, during the crisis and after the crisis. And then one that I really love. I think we miss sometimes it’s a principle of meekness. The Bible says that we’re all to be meek because in comparison to God, we are very weak creatures. But meekness doesn’t mean we can actually means power under control. I tell people I’m helping to manage their finances. Well, you should always have more in storage than you have that the public can view. And when you manage your finances with meekness, it affects your lifestyle choices. It affects your business policies, affects everything in your life. And you’re demonstrating that the ego of money is not in control, that there’s a deep sense of humility and dependency when you exercise meekness in all of your choices. And the Bible promises in Matthew five five that the meek shall inherit the earth. And if you think about that promise, that certain promise of God, it should make all of us as investors and God’s investors to want to pursue being meek, to be really careful about how we feel about our own acumen in business, how we feel about the decisions we make, and to guide even when we’ve been successful, to guide all of our decisions with a great deal of humility. And just a quick story, a guy and CFO that I met. He owns a factory that they built, the equipment that built the factory that creates the products that are sold to 200 nations. Thirty five hundred people working in the factory. Top top business success in his country. Just a super example. And when he invited me home to his house for dinner, I remember going into the home and thinking I can is this is far simpler than I ever imagined. I just didn’t think his lifestyle would be so humble. Because it doesn’t have to be. But it was a choice that he made. And in our conversation, I asked him what was his life verse? And he quoted Matthew 5:5 and I thought, you know, he’s living it out. This is a very meek person. So those are just a couple of them. Maybe I’d mention one more, William, if we’ve got time. I like the law of inverse prosperity. The prosperity gospel gets confused in the Christian world today. And I like to teach Jeremiah 29 because everybody knows verse eleven. Some people have it posted on their wall or they live by that. Now, I know the plans I have for you declares the Lord plans to prosper. You not harm me. Plan to give you hope in future. But verse seven, he tells you what the plan is. And God said in Jeremiah twenty nine and seven that you should seek the prosperity and the peace of the city where I’ve called you. And he says, if you will seek their prosperity, you too will prosper. And so he flips the prosperity gospel upside down. And he said the best business plan, even if you’re a refugee in Babylon, is to help other people prosper. And if you think about the best business models in the world, the ones that almost require no selling, you know, they’re the unicorn type growth. They’re the ones that help somebody else get better at what they’re doing. Their service or their product improves the life of other people. And there should be no secret to any of us. But it’s a secret in the sense that it’s God’s idea, not man’s idea. God told his people to live that way. And I met a guy that was doing it. And interestingly enough, he had been incarcerated, found Christ in the prison, and he knew how to do mechanics. He got a job as a mechanical mechanic repair in this very large fleet of vehicles that were service vehicles. And that’s what he did for a living. And going along just fine. And one day got an idea. He calculated and this guy used to be in prison. He started counting how long those trucks were in the shop and shut down for making money for the owner. And on average, three days. And so he went to the business owner and said, hey, I’ve got an idea. Why do we get a truck and we go to the field and service these big rigs instead of having them bring him in to shut him down for three days? And he said, how long you think you repair one in the field? He said, three hours. And so imagine that business proposition. You get your truck fixed in three days or in three hours. And so they partnered on this business the first year, did over a million dollars and billings on this mobile diesel mechanic repair business, cutting down the time from three days to three hours. So those are some of the principles that come to my mind way. And they’re not the ones that are sort of percolating to the top of most people’s radar. But I think those are great ones to remember during this crisis.

Henry Kaestner: Chuck, you’ve been around this movement for a long time by the movement, I’m talking you about the faith driven investor movement. You’ve been with people as a store of money, as you think about investments, as this movement grows, as people start to think more purposefully and more intentionally about how they stored not just their donation capital, but also their investment capital as well. What are some thoughts or encouragements or just hopes that you have for the development of this space as people become more and more intentional with how they invest their money?

Chuck Bentley: Well, I think a couple of things. I hope that there’s more collaboration. I’d really appreciate some of the terminology that you and Luke have introduced to the movement to try to thank you. Say to try to de-tower of Babel this thing is it.

Henry Kaestner: It is. And for our listeners, we’ve got the video going right now. And so Chuck can see this picture of the Tower of Babel is behind me on my wall. I continue to be fascinated by what does it look like when the body of Christ comes together to build something not for their glory, but for God’s glory? And how special might that be if, you know, Brueghel’s painting, you know, the intricacy and the detail and the scope of this tower that they are building that, of course, was doomed for failure because there are building for the wrong reasons. But Chuck is talking to of course is what does it look like for a bunch of us to come together.

Chuck Bentley: Well, I think if you look at the history of the impact Christian investors have had on the world, it’s enormous. We were the group that primarily built the schools. We built the hospitals, we built infrastructure. We built dams. We built all the systems that created wealth for the world. And that’s really one of God’s gift to individual believers. And it’s just been remarkable to track that throughout history we’ve influenced the prosperity and flourishing of the whole world. And we’ve done that in a diversified way. And diversification is a great thing. It provides safety and it’s a good thing. But when there’s a deep sense of trust and that’s what’s essential in a movement that’s going to collaborate together where there’s a deep sense of trust, it’s really obvious that we could do more together than individually. And I think when people have common operating system of stewardship as opposed owners, you can set aside some pride, you can set aside some of that hubris and some of the metrics where we tend to want credit for things that are achieved and really do more together. And I want to encourage people to begin to do those kind of things together in the movement and to take on the big task. To me, it’s a David and Goliath type scenario where the people who are really skilled and equipped, they surface during the battle and they may not look like they’re bigger than the giant that they’re face in culture or a problem that’s in economic systems. But I think we can be some of the people that bring those five stones to bear on the guise of economics and in our culture and really see them change. And I’d like to see that happen. That’s one of the things that I’m pulling for.

Chuck, as we have probably about five minutes before William asks he final question, which is going to be what is God teaching you through the Bible right now, through his word, knowing our audience and forget about the script. Anything else that you think that investors should know or should be concerned about or should find their identity in or trend that you’ve seen out there that you’ve been thinking about, that you think that people need to wrestle with more, anything? What do you think for five minutes? What do we riff on?

Chuck Bentley: You know, I’m very concerned about the shift in culture that is turning negative towards very basic things in investing like profit. Very basic things like building a large business, employing a lot of people. I had a social media exchange with a young person just recently. And I was a little bit stunned by how sour and almost bitter and antagonistic he was towards people who’ve been successful. And that’s a very dangerous thing. I think when you look at the Ten Commandments and you put that through the grid of faith driven investor, God actually set up the original laws to help investors succeed. And if you look at the Ten Commandments on a macro level, cultures that worship God Almighty in him alone, they do better economically than those who have a myriad of idols and outward manifestations of some false God. And he will bless those who honor him. Then you look at the very practical elements of the Ten Commandments, like don’t steal. Don’t murder. Don’t lie. Don’t commit adultery. Those destroy trust. And when trust is destroyed, economies are destroyed. And then lastly, he said, do not covet. And that’s the only one that’s internal to our heart. The others are external, invisible, and you make laws against them and enforce those laws. But only God, in his words, said to an investor, to a believer, do not cover something else, has hindered. What that allows us to do is to joyfully celebrate success. I don’t have to envy your success. I don’t have to be greedy to try to replicate it or compare myself to it. God said you swim in your own lane and then you can be joyful for how I bless other people or the jobs they create or the wealth that they’re called to manage. And I really think that we need to uphold those values as we get more and more collectively and individually successful. We need to say, let’s celebrate the goodness of God and give him the credit and let that overflow and generosity, but protect the movement of the core values. As a believer that it is OK to succeed. God himself created a meritocracy and his principles allow us to flourish. And those are good things for people create jobs. And those are great outcomes. And we need to be able to in a winsome way, defend that position as Christian investors.

William Norvell: Chuck, thank you so much for diving into some of the principles and walking us through this. As I think about a listener, my guess is they might be really identifying with these and say, you know, but what does it look like in practice? You know, how do I take the first step? How do I go forward with that initial step towards putting some of these into work? And if you could give us an example of a person or two that in your life has really taken that first step in and built something that’d be great. So please do that for us, if you would mind.

Chuck Bentley: One of the things that I’ve seen investors trip up over is what really motivates the investor. Obviously, we have to have good returns and we have to have very sound investment principles. But when you strip all that back, what’s really motivating them? And I find that oftentimes they think cannot be motivated by something other than, you know, the desire to win or even greed, because a lot of times there’s nothing else that’s been proposed to fill that void. And what I’ve seen people do that have been successful in the investing side and not greedy and not driven by coveting or comparison, are just trying to build something bigger than the next guy. These people are driven by love. Love is a tremendous motivator. You know, when you say, I love my family and I’m gonna go out and bring something home for them to eat tonight. That’s OK. That’s, in fact, a good thing. It’s showing tangible expressions of love for your family when you really love the people you work with and you want to be sure they have job security, that’s OK to be motivated by that. When you want to see problems of the world saw where you can bring the blessings of God and human flourishing in this common grace to the rest of the world. And you really do love God and love people. That’s a great thing to do, Henry, and to make it tangible. A friend of mine named David Snyder, and he’d probably super embarrassed if I called him out on this. But David thought he might go to the mission field, you know, because he loved God. And that’s what you see a lot of Christians wrestle with. And he said, no, this is not my gift. He’s much more analytical, much more tactical. And so he said he was in college. He said, I think I’ll just figure out a way to help this guy who’s going in the mission field and needs support. So he bought a duplex and he lived in one side of it. Any place, 100 percent of the revenue from the other side, that duplex, while he was a college student to his friend who went to the mission field, and he was his primary launch into the world of serving on the mission field. And David got so excited about that. He thought, what if I buy another apartment and out of love for God and love for missions and love for people on the field? He bought another one, you know. And that core motivation of love for God, love for people led him to be a phenomenal investor. At one point in his career, his owned like 15,000 individual apartment units. And he loves the people in those units. He loves having chaplains onboard. He likes getting crown materials to teach them how to be better stewards. He takes care of them where they’ve got the covid virus. He had about 15 of his employees and tenants injured in the great tragedy of the mass shooting in Las Vegas, because he has a lot of units there and he just responded with such love and grace and kindness. He’s a picture of what a faith driven investor looks like to me, Henry.

Henry Kaestner: That’s a great example. I know, David. You couldn’t have picked any better. And he’s done very, very, very well financially. His investment returns have been outstanding.

Chuck Bentley: And love is a good motivation, Henry. And it also applies to that other problem that I have angst with. Is the world’s pushing back against people making profit, growing big companies employing a lot of people. You know, that’s not a bad thing. And if we can be a group that shows the love of God to the rest of the world, what a beautiful picture to have good financial returns, good business practices, very strong high levels of professionalism and integrity in show loved all the people around us.

William Norvell: Chuck, as we come to a close, we always love to see how our listeners and our guest are connected through God’s word. And that’s just an amazing time for us. We love getting notes in from people of just seeing what God’s word does through this medium. And so if you would mind sharing with us. Where does God have you today in his word or during the season, something that you might be meditating on that he might be taking you through?

Chuck Bentley: William, I’ve read through the word of God many times, and it’s a practice that I enjoy. That’s what I do as I try to just read straight through the word of God. Year after year.

But this year I’m doing something different. I’m listening to the word of God. So I have a Bible app that I really like reading it and how it’s done. And I get up in the mornings and I listen through it and it causes me to listen differently. And it’s had a great impact on me. I’m enjoying it so much. I literally look forward every morning to getting up for my time to just plug in the earphones and listen to it. But I got to part the other day in Jeremiah, where Jeremiah was complaining to God.

And there’s not many places recorded in the scripture, and I’m glad my name isn’t recorded in the scripture, as one who complained to God. I mean, if I were in the Bible, I would be embarrassed at some of the things that would be revealed about me. But Jeremiah, it’s revealed that he’s asking God questions and he’s not happy. And one of the questions he asked in Jeremiah 12 is how long? You know, he’s upset. He’s just really anxious. And I think for where we are right now, we can all relate to that question is how long, how long is this gonna go on? Seems like it’s going on forever. And I’m tired of it. And so God answers him. And I was just fascinated by his answer. He, as he typically does, ask you a question in return, just the way it did with Job. And so he says to Jeremiah. Jeremiah, if you’ve been running with men and you’re already weary, how are you going to keep up with horses? And he just reset the whole perspective for Jeremiah. And he pointed out to him that this has a purpose. You know, this waiting, this learning and growing in character in patience is to prepare you for another challenge and a challenge maybe you haven’t even imagined. And I feel like somehow right now we’re running with men and we’re complaining and getting weary.

But there’s going to be a day that God wants us to run even more difficult gantlet, a difficult challenge, and to use this time to be prepared for what lies ahead. I’m encouraged by that, William and Henry and I think that God’s people need to be those who can meet these challenges head on. Be patient. Wait on the Lord. Trust in him and then be ready for running with horses whenever that challenge hits us.

William Norvell: Amen. Thank you so much, sir. Thanks for joining us and spending time with us.

Chuck Bentley: Thank you, William. Thank you, Henry. I just admire all the work that you do. I look up and you guys have just been everywhere having a huge impact on this space, whether it’s the entrepreneurs, the athletes, the investors. I’m just so proud of the work you’re doing. And I’m just blessed to call you friend.

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Today’s podcast has us traveling all the way across the pond to Belfast, Ireland. Malcolm Johnston is the Executive Director at Angello Capital, where he and his team are working to provide sustainable social transformation by investing in enterprise-led development. 

He talked to us about the work that he did during a time when unemployment in Ireland had hit 65% and how God called him to use his understanding of business to help the community around him. 

Our conversation with Malcolm is a reminder that Faith Driven Investing has hands moving in every corner of the globe and as faithful men and women steward what God has given them, lives change…

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.

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Henry Kaestner: So welcome back to the Faith Driven Investor podcast. We’ve got a special guest with us today. We have Malcolm with us online, Malcolm Johnston from Northern Ireland. I was going to ask you why you talk with that funny accent. But now we all know and Malcolm, I’ve gotten to know you over the course of the last year or so and just been so impressed by the way that you process what God has put in front of you. You’ve got a great story and some really interesting places. So I’m really grateful for you to be able to be on our podcast with us to share some of those. Welcome.

Malcolm Johnston: Thank think it’s great to be here. And I hope that you can get my accent. I didn’t realize I had an accent until somebody told me. I hope you can get what I say.

Henry Kaestner: Yes. No, I think it’s phenomenal. It’s an awesome accent. I think it may be one of the best ones, maybe probably the best one we’ve ever had on the FDI podcast. And yet there’s a great story behind it, too. It’s more than an accent. It represents a culture and a great country and a society that had really been in the news when you and I were growing up. You were living it.

I was in the United States growing up in the 70s and always hearing about Northern Ireland and the troubles. And you’re in the midst of that. You now, as part of what you do, you go to places where there are troubles and you bring in light and you bring in investment and you bring in training for entrepreneurs. But you grew up at a time in a place where there were some troubles. Tell us about that. What was it like growing up in Northern Ireland in the 70s and 80s?

Malcolm Johnston: I think probably it was more influential than probably we thought at the time. It’s your normal that you kind of learn to live with it. But yeah, I was born in 1962 and the Troubles kicked off in 69. So it was very much part of my life. And the restrictions that we had and school and going into the city, a constant news flow that was pretty depressing, but effectively just tribal conflict and then a very small country. And yeah, it definitely shaped. And I find ways, I guess. Bit by bit to find out how to be salt and light in the middle of that trouble. And so apart from, you know, going into business fairly early on in life, the business I went down to was a family business. I joined my father and it was a wealth management and financial planning business. So we were advising wealthy people about their money, building their investment portfolios, helping turn a wealthy and successful people to try to think through some kind of purpose and objectives for themselves. But the thing was, probably more shipping was getting involved in inner city Belfast and very socially deprived communities politically of young people, and in many ways were the castoff ghettos that grew in the city because of the troubles.

Henry Kaestner: And let’s take just a quick step back, because I realize that you and I were born in the 60s. And I understand you say, by the way, that the troubles began in 1969 and I happen to be born in 1969. I like to think that you’re talking about two different things. But many people, listeners may not understand what were the troubles. I want you to tell us what was it all about, the IRA, etc..

Malcolm Johnston: Well, it’s complicated. I guess, that you’d find this when you go around the world that the conflicts in most places are not straightforward and very often they’re the consequence of depending whether you look back 10 years or 50 years or 200 years, and Ireland’s very much like that.

It’s been a place of amazing richness, but also a place where a lot of conflict and ultimately the conflict, I would say, was racial and tribal. It just happened to be called Protestant and Catholic, but it was basically two tribes of people whose background was a bit different, whose allegiance was a bit different to sense of national identity, was a bit different. And it happened to be called Protestant, Catholic, but it really wasn’t a religious difference. It was more about allegiance and flags. And it very much created a black and white divide in Northern Ireland, which erupted. It went way back that the conflict between Palestinian Catholic communities went way back. And then it erupted at the end of the 60s due to a series of events that just brought to a head and exploded and the IRA became weaponized to fight a war or a battle. And then the communities just polarized. It was pretty much a civil war that was called Protestant and Catholic, and it shaped everything. Everybody knew where they stood in that conflict and that defined community set defined borders and boundaries and parts of the city. And it was very much a coming to the head of years and years of history that went way back. And where you stood, everybody stood somewhere or not, depending on how far you look back in history.

Henry Kaestner: OK, good. So I want to come back to that in a little bit, but less than talking about the history, but talking about that as a platform that makes you uniquely equipped to do the amazing work that you’re doing right now. But I interrupted you during your biographical sketch. You’re talking about work in the family business, working with your dad, working and wealth management. So bring us through to the point in time where you really felt that God had really called you out of that. But what’s that process?.

Malcolm Johnston: Yes, I got involved in business, got married. Married now for Thirty three years this year. Two girls. Who are I? I can’t believe I’m saying this, but they’re twenty seven and twenty five. So I think God wired me to go to difficult places that started in Belfast going and to inner city ghettos with very high unemployment and starting to work with kids and young people. And the business gave me a great platform to grow the business, to be as successful as it could, to be as profitable as we could grow it completely and absolutely with the purpose of seeking the kingdom in the business. So we were never scared of trying to make it as successful as possible. And we saw our business very much as a platform to be salt and light to the people we were dealing with on our staff and all of that to very much Kingdom in the business building profitability so that we could do really cool stuff with the overflow of the profits, but then also using the business as a platform to build freedom of time to go and be involved in other things. Being on the business that allowed me to work in inner city Belfast for many years doing community development work in an inner city ghetto. And it also allowed me some time after that to go pioneering mission, pioneering and Eastern Europe, just after the fall of communism so early 90s, starting to go into Eastern Europe building mission.

Henry Kaestner: So what is that like? So Wall comes down. Lots of us remember just what it looked like on TV and in pictures. And you’re one of the first guys in with some others going in. Walk us through that experience that this time in history.

Malcolm Johnston: It was. Actually, over time, a number of business guys. People who were connected, strategic thinkers, entrepreneurial, not scared to jump into a challenge, but jumping into these places where they had been completely controlled through communism. The church had been underground. There was new enterprise system at all. Everything was centrally controlled. And then almost in a flash, it disintegrated and there was absolute mayhem. It was just chaotic. And me and some other business guys went down as practically mission and entrepreneurs, as volunteers with Youth for Christ and Youth for Christ basically said we’ve never been able to do anything in Eastern Europe. Now it’s open. Do you want to go and have a go at it, see what you can do and see if you need to build a team, build a team, if you need to raise money or, you know, find it. But it was kind of like a blank sheet. Go and see what you can do. It was harrowing in many ways. What we find as the churches started to come up from being underground, the poverty was absolutely terrible. We just had to respond to what we saw, especially starting to support pastors and learning to be beside people. And I kind of lived in this strange double life where at home I ran a business that worked with the wealthy and help them build their portfolios and think through what their purpose wasn’t and all that stuff. And then this other part of my life, I was working in abject poverty, trying to be beside people that were trying to get on their feet. And I made an agreement with my wife that I would travel short and often rather than go for long periods of time. The kids were young. I couldn’t be away for weeks at a time. So we kind of came to an agreement. I would go for maybe five or six days, just flat out doing stuff and then come back into this other world. And I had so many experiences of coming back absolutely broken hearted from what I’d seen on just trying to decompress and just sitting in the office I cried my eyes out with the suffering that we had been thrown into the middle of and trying to figure out how do we be beside these Christian communities and help them to get on their feet. And how do we reach young people and kids in that situation? So it was harrowing and it absolutely broke my heart and I never recovered from it. I start to tell you that talking about things that happened, it will still make me cry. So it was God threw us into a big challenge, first in Ukraine and then in the years that followed that we established a Youth for Christ program. There was great local leaders finding the right people. God brought us to the right people who had a passion for their own country. And we just learned to mentor them. And so we went from Ukraine to Moldova. Right, Russia, Belarus, Armenia, Georgia, setting up stuff.

Henry Kaestner: So tell us about the business and the economic environment at the time. And just to put some framing around our time together, you’re just really uniquely equipped to talk to us about faith driven investments, investing in Europe. You do investments in other places you and I met in Africa. But you are uniquely equipped to talk about. What does it look like to come into different economies and invest, whether it’s an economy like Northern Ireland, which at one point in time, I think had something like 65, did you say 65 percent unemployment?

Malcolm Johnston: Yeah. And that and the inner city ghetto where you work with young people. That was their reality. 65 percent unemployment.

Henry Kaestner: And then fast forward to, you know, behind the Iron Curtain as people are emerging in the state controls so many of the jobs. What does it look like when you’re ministering to people that don’t have hope? They don’t see commerce as a way out. They don’t see investments as a real thing. They see a class divide between rich and those they exploit. Just walk us through. What does that look like in your business? Because you’ve come from wealth management and you understand investments and how it drives economic gain. What’s it look like? So maybe we’ll go back to Northern Ireland later. But let’s focus right now in Eastern Europe. Walls come down you’re in with Youth for Christ. You’re going around to these different economies, you know, business. You know, Jesus. What did it looked like when you start putting your business and investment skills to work?

Malcolm Johnston: That’s a great question. And initially, we were very much we were a charity. You know, we were raising money in the rich world to bring it out into the poor world. We worked a lot with the churches. Even when they were small, they were beginning to get on their feet. And we reckoned that the best thing we can do is work with the churches to help them to do what they want to do in their communities. And we started to do a lot of work with street kids, helping churches to set up projects for the children that were living on the streets in their communities. I absolutely loved that. And I could live lots of lives. I would just keep doing that, getting to know those kids, letting them know that they were loved. And so we set up kind of typical rescue programs for kids that were charity based. The kids were generally coming from absolute squalor. Remember, they lived on the streets literally, or they just find somewhere to sleep in a friends house.

But they just lived in squalor around this kind of typical charity project of, you know, day centers feeding, somewhere warm to stay, hearing about Jesus. You know, it was a safe place for three hours a day and we helped the kids then go to school. And as I watched this program, I realized that when we closed the doors at night and I remember one particular situation, I went to visit one of these day centers in a little village. I had a destitute rural Moldova. And I watched the kids coming in, smiling, laughing. But you could see the pain in their eyes at the end of the program, five o’clock at night. It was getting cold. It was dark. And this little girl that I’d watched in the program, beautiful little eight year old and. When we were leaving, driving away back to the city, this little girl was sitting on the footpath outside the program where we had met in the little church building, and I asked one of the folks explains why she not going home. She said she’s no home to go to. And that absolutely broke me. And it was part of God’s call, which was these kids do just need projects. They need parents with a job. You know, this is huge sticking plaster. It’s typical charity stuff, but it’s sticking plasters. Little girls like that need parents with a job.

Malcolm Johnston: It’s in the United States equivalent. There is going on a mission trip and painting the church. So you’re using sticking plaster is the term that you use in Europe.

Malcolm Johnston: Yeah, yeah. And that was God’s challenge to me because, you know, to build the charity programs, the street kids was very, very difficult, you know, to find the right leaders and build the funding. That was all tough. But to start to think through, what did it mean for parents to have jobs? Well, it was about business and what needed to happen to establish business and see businesses growing and these kind of very difficult circumstances. And that was God’s challenge to me. I remember clearly it was God’s challenge to me was Malcolm, if not you, who? You know, you understand business, you understand investment, and you love these kids dearly. If not you, who?

Henry Kaestner: So, where do you get started? That’s quite a challenge.

Malcolm Johnston: It was it actually turned out to be mission impossible before too long. I changed the dial tone in my phone to the Mission Impossible theme tune.

Henry Kaestner: Oh, that’s so cool,.

Malcolm Johnston: Because it literally was mission impossible. I mean, it was just excruciatingly difficult to find how to make that work. And this was like twelve, thirteen years ago when the whole idea of impact, investing, social enterprise, enterprise and development, faith driven investors. None of that existed. You know, twelve, thirteen years ago, it was literally a blank sheet of paper. How would we possibly go about this? It was God’s call, Henry and Bob and the feel. There are things that showed me that God was absolutely calling us to start to think about this. What the job creation, three billion business to the glory of God look like, and really tough places where the church was tiny business hardly existed, but it needed to happen and it was God’s call. But I think it showed me actually in hindsight that God has an amazing sense of humor. You know, it was brutally difficult. I look back and I couldn’t look back and paint an amazing picture of success. I think that we were pioneering and I think rather than building success, I think we find every possible way of getting things wrong and things not working.

Henry Kaestner: Tell us about some of those early stories. I love the Mission Impossible phone ring. By the way, I may or may not adopt that or may or may not give you credit once I do. But tell us about some of the early stories. Tell us about some of the mistakes and maybe even some of the victories. Definitely some many victories.

Malcolm Johnston: We formed Angello to gather together people who were thinking the same way, new faith driven people who were thinking the same way, who were looking beyond charity and business people who could see that these places needed business to grow. So we formed Angello without actually really any clue about what was going to be the right approach. And we decided and then at the beginning that we would try to build a small investment fund to invest in small businesses in Moldova. And at that time, we had to build everything from front to back. We had to try to find entrepreneurs, bearing in mind that the country wasn’t long gone of communism. So the entrepreneurial culture was very, very early stages and certainly faith driven entrepreneurs hardly existed, you know, in a country where the Christian population is less than one percent. So to find entrepreneurs who are decent business ideas was challenging. And then to find investors who would be willing to invest in small businesses in a place that they’d never heard of. Generally, you know, just a bit everything about it and building a structure. You know, the legal and tax structure that could accept people’s money and then deploy up and the small businesses in a place that had never, ever had any inward investment of any kind.

Other than a few, you know, big infrastructure projects through European Bank for Reconstruction Development or something. But this has never been done before. So every piece of it was difficult. And actually people agreed to invest because they knew that I wasn’t crazy. You know, they knew that I probably was well intentioned and it was like I probably was well intentioned. We have no clue what you’re talking about, but it sounds like this is the kind of thing that should happen. So we’ll make a small investment in your fund to getting people convinced to be investors rather than just philanthropists. They understood philanthropy, but the idea of building Kingdom through building business was not something that people really understood much about at the time.

Henry Kaestner: I’d imagine some of that dynamics is because and we see this in United States, so presumably you see some amount of it in Northern Ireland. The concept of building the kingdom through business is a novel concept even here, let alone Moldova. Right. Yeah. And so you’ve got some vision casting to be done that actually God cares about the marketplace. He actually cares better. Investment dollars. I want to do it in Moldova, but that was had some ripple effect back in as you’re building this consensus and building this fund. It must had some ripple effect back in Northern Ireland to right?

Malcolm Johnston: Honestly, Henry, most of the outcome from that was there were very, very few people who understood it. Very few people who, you know, would say we should go to crazy places like that. But I think that generally people did not really get what we were talking about. A few people were willing to invest. They were willing to come with us. But I think that we were probably way ahead of our time. Now, there are more people that have heard of impact investing and, you know, there’s few more stories about it. But actually, back then, we were probably ahead of our time. It was desperately lonely, actually, to persevere in what we knew. God had called us, too. And so it was tough.

You know, I didn’t bring a huge groundswell of change in people’s attitudes to invest in philanthropy. And it didn’t. It was lonely. And we had to go to London and into Europe to find people who got it, actually. And most people didn’t. They were still in a different paradigm.

Henry Kaestner: Yeah. I can empathize with that when we’re starting Sovereign’s capital. We went and talked to maybe 700, 750 different people and a very, very distinct minority, said, oh, that makes sense. You know, you can actually put investment capital and work with entrepreneurs driven by their faith for some sort of financial return and social impact. And I found myself at times feeling frustrated by that. You must really felt that.

Malcolm Johnston: Yeah. Very much so. It was absolutely mission impossible. And it was really tough, really tough.

Henry Kaestner: Because at least with us, we had some investment ideas lined up. You’ve got to build a market and demand on the investment side. And you also had to build a market in demand on the entrepreneur side. Right. So how do you do that? How do you take people who’ve been living under communism for so long? Bring the gospel to bear and help them understand there’s a God who love them, but then also that they were created in this image of a God who worked and who was entrepreneurial, who is creative. Tell us generally how you do it. But then give us an example of a company or two in Eastern Europe where you came alongside an entrepreneur and helped them to live that out.

Malcolm Johnston: Lots of things we tried. Didn’t work. One of the guys that was involved with us on the team back in the early days, even before Angello got going, he was a tech entrepreneur and he had gone to Moldova with a student ministry to volunteer the student ministry for a short time. And he could see that part of the legacy of communism was a pretty rigorous education system. So students were coming through university.

They were a lot of kids were coming through and learning IT, but there was no work for anybody. They came out of university with qualifications and ended up in the streets. And, you know, there was no work for anybody. And this guy decided that he’d set up a tech company with his own investment and start to hire these I.T. graduates and teach them modern day programing. So they basically built software in Moldova and sell it into first world markets. And so he started this company in the early we had been about 98, 99 at the same time as I went first to Moldova. When they started to recruit graduates from the universities and build a software development company, which was the first of its kind in the city, and began to employ people, pay them decent wages and pay tax. They became the biggest taxpayer in the country and the company grew like wildfire. Actually, they began to recruit more people. They were winning contracts outside the country. Fast forward a few years, a lot of difficulty, a lot of efforts to close the company through corruption and so forth. And actually, I give these guys credit for it. They have just floated that company in the New York Stock Exchange. hat is completely out in the left field compared to anything else that they have seen. But they went the right sector. They spawned an I.T. sector in the country. That’s nine, 10 to 15 percent GDP. And it was a raging success. But the challenge with any of those countries is to find entrepreneurs who have got the skill and the experience to grow and scale their companies.

And we made the mistake about 10 years ago of going investment first, make sure we just a small fund and then we needed to find companies to invest into. And on hindsight, we took the wrong approach. We shouldn’t have been trying to invest. We should have been doing what we talk a lot more now about had me is building the enterprise ecosystem. And hoping that after a period of time quality companies would come through that process, that were ready for investment. And in hindsight, that’s what we should have done.

Henry Kaestner: Yeah. And so the work that you and I are now doing in Africa, you know, brought to the Fairview Hotel, we got together in February with an eye towards doing faith driven investments. Where are the great entrepreneurs? Let’s invest in them. And I really came away from that trip. Really just encouraged by the opportunity. But then also understand that if we wanted this to really be a thriving marketplace in five or 10 years, we had spent a lot of time thinking about building capacity.

Malcolm Johnston: That’s exactly right. That’s exactly right. And I think that’s a big lot of our experience is where to start building that capacity and knowing that it’s just going to take time. Hard yards building relationships is one of the things that I learned and I’m deeply convinced and convicted about is that in these developing markets, guys with ideas and vision and all of that, how we behave when we turn up is incredibly important. We can really get that badly wrong with our enthusiasm to be agents of change. And I realize that so much of what we’ve got to do is to empower locally and not Short-Circuit, that by bringing in smart people from outside who can get from A to B faster.

Henry Kaestner: That’s pretty tempting, though, isn’t it? When you see how it will work in Northern Ireland or the West and then saying, we’ll do this, do that, and you can get pretty prescriptive pretty quickly, at least I feel like I can.

Malcolm Johnston: Yeah. We made all those mistakes, and I’m honestly we a lot of it for good reasons. You know, we cared about the poor. We wanted to see community change. And there’s times where we just drove too fast. And a lot of what we built that wasn’t based on local empowerment fell apart and we had to go back and start again.

Henry Kaestner: So tell us about, again, what brought us together is this group that got together in Kenya focusing on faith driven investments in East Africa. And then as a result of that, taking a step back and saying, gosh, what does it look like to you? Yes. Do some of that, but tread slowly, but also build out the Faith Driven Entrepreneur ecosystem. What are some of the things that they are starting to happen and have happened in Eastern Europe, as you’ve looked at some of the mistakes that you made and said, gosh, we need to focus on capacity building where some of the initiatives that you have been involved in.

Malcolm Johnston: Yeah. One of the best examples of that is a group of people we’re working with right now in Uzbekistan. And that’s a little part of the world, Central Asia. That was always fascinating to me, even when we were very much involved in Eastern Europe. We helped to start mission stuff in Kyrgyzstan because they were blessed a lot by having common language and Russian. So it’s a fascinating little cluster of countries East Pakistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, very, very close. Islam is rampant, growing, and we find a cluster of Faith driven entrepreneurs who desperately wanted to have partners from outside. And we very readily agreed to this journey, this together, because I could see that they had good local leadership. They were smart. They had a vision for this themselves, not the vision that we had to try to sell to them. And so we came alongside this little group of faith driven entrepreneurs in Uzbekistan. And right now, we’re taking these steps with them to build that ecosystem. And they want to have programs in there, like the ones, for example, we saw in East Africa. They want the programing. But right now, what we’re doing is standing beside those guys to provide some very small level of loans and to faith driven entrepreneurs almost as a sign of partnership. We’re with you. We’re gonna do what we can to help you..

And I think that the conditions really exist there in Uzbekistan to build out this ecosystem. And they want to be an example out. ofUzbekistan for the Central Asian region. And that excites me. So that’s an example. And a little place like Uzbekistan that just desperately wants faith driven people whose faith puts me to shame. You know, it’s just such a privilege to be with, not to try to teach or push, just to be beside. It’s such a privilege and honor to be with these guys with friendship, actually, and just a commitment to journey. These are the kind of guys that can really make a difference in their country. And they’re so excited that there’s a movement happening. So as I tell them about the movement that’s happening with, for example, faith driven investors and Faith driven entrepreneurs and that kind of stuff that’s growing in East Africa. They are thrilled to bits that there’s a movement that they could be part of. That’s a great example of it.

Henry Kaestner: Tell me about this dynamic of going in and starting off with some low interest loans with these entrepreneurs. Just really, really impressive by their faithfulness in a really challenging spot. How do you balance coming alongside them and the discovery and the diligence that you would do as an investor if you’re looking in opportunity in Belfast or New York? Presumably they don’t have data rooms. They don’t have audited financials sometimes. How do you come alongside them in a way that’s not judgmental or prescriptive, but at the same time leads them towards a world in which they will be ready for more of a buttoned up presentation, maybe more accountability? How do you navigate through that whole dynamic with patience and wisdom?

Malcolm Johnston: Actually, it takes a lot of wisdom to let them come at their speed with appropriate support and. I think one of the things that I’ve seen most, Henry, is that if we build from where our investors willing to go with what they have with their current perceived wisdom. All right. What is impact investing look like if we go from that point of view of. Existing impact investment capital and an existing impact investment structures investment will never go to Uzbekistan. It’s just the demands of the money. The kind of due diligence that’s required currently. These frontier markets, the difficult places for the church is small, but for business, that’s definitely necessary to see that kingdom built then existing money and how it thinks would never go to these places. Now there’s a massive missing segment that is going to continue to be missed.

Malcolm Johnston: I guess I find that a bit depressing as I’ve watched the sector evolve, as I stay close to people in these difficult places determined that they should find the support that they need. It’s a bit depressing to watch the capital with its intentions. Being far away from where these guys are going to be for a long time. And so what I desperately want for these kind of guys who we need to support them with, with rigorous programing incubators and accelerators and mentoring and all that stuff, the good stuff, that there are no great programs available. We’ve got to push them to really develop their standards and so forth. But there needs to emerge, in my opinion, type of capital that see, that’s role as kingdom building, not as a new cool place to find an impact investment, because if the money wants a new cool place to invest, it’s never going to go to Uzbekistan or Moldova. Those countries will stay, still, on the frontier because they don’t have thriving enterprise ecosystems of faith driven people, because the church is tiny and it’s persecuted and they need commitment from people like us to go the journey with them over a number of years, and willing to see capital brought to it that’s appropriate to where they are and they can get to us their next step, not holding out capital that says we’re with you if you can make it to the fifth base.

But capital that is willing to come to the second base to serve what’s happening, what God’s doing in that country. So that’s one of the things that I see emerging. I think it’s exciting what we see emerging with the journey towards building ecosystems. The stuff that we’ve been talking about is super exciting and it can be done. I’ve been around it long enough to know that what we’re talking about can work on the kind of faith driven people that are building these ecosystems is exciting. The missing piece is the kind of capital that’s willing to come. So the faith driven investors, in my view, are going to need to apply their capital to serve in some of these difficult places. Just the way, you know, people like the guys that have followed with me and the difficult places where we’ve kind of gone with our time and our lives to serve, to see future in these places, capital is going to need to do the same to come to these difficult places and still with rigor and still with proper thought, not just throwing money at stuff that doesn’t make sense, but that’s what I desire for these kind of guys that will find ways of plugging the gaps with capital that will come to serve them because they are truly kingdom builders.

Henry Kaestner: I want to bring it back to Northern Ireland before we close out. Fast forward to present day in the ghettos. The slums now. Are things better? Over the last 20 years.

Malcolm Johnston: Yeah, they’re definitely better, and that gives me hope, you know, as I go into other frontier markets and see difficulty. I see a change comes, mindsets change. Innovation starts to happen. People start to have confidence to build something that isn’t going to be wiped out by the next terrorist attack or economic slump. So, yeah, there’s been massive change. People have hope now. And people stay to a greater degree when there’s a sense of hope. This is a place I can build a future than people choose to stay. And, you know, when I was growing up in Ireland. Ireland was a place that students come out of University and then left to go and build a future somewhere else. Now to a greater degree. People will stay and start businesses and that’s exciting to me as I see. Eastern Europe, Central Asia, one of their biggest problems is immigration. Bright people leave and the experience of Northern Ireland is that. when the steps are taken and she and starts to happen, then people even start coming back and bring their skills back with them that they learned elsewhere. I’m going to build a future here. And so, yeah, we see a huge change here in Northern Ireland. There’s a much greater understanding between people who are in the past diametrically opposed, that there’s a much greater sense of space has got potential.

Henry Kaestner: So, as you said, it’s a message of hope for some of the other places that you’re investing and that maybe 20, 25 years behind. And I’m very, very grateful for this conversation. I think that a big lesson that I’m taking away from it is making sure that we have a mind of service, that we’re not prescriptive or judgmental that would come alongside the entrepreneurs. We work with the right pace to bring them to a place that may take decades to where they are equipped to have the pro forma financials and cap tables and ability to talk about proff stacks and convert’s and those types of things. But we need to come along at a pace that is driven by a heart of service and driven by the Holy Spirit. And so I’m grateful for your perspective and your long obedience in same direction and in difficult places in emerging markets. Malcolm, one of the things that we’d like to ask people that are on any of our podcasts is something that they’re hearing from God through his word recently that they see really working in their life. And it could be through your Bible time this morning. Maybe it’s last week, maybe last month. But what’s one thing that you feel that God is speaking to you about now?

Malcolm Johnston: Yeah, I think it’s a great question. What God called us into and through in some difficult places. It took me a long time. I’m probably like you. I want to change the world where there’s brokenness. And Isaiah 61 is the call of God in my life when there’s brokenness and lack of hope and opportunity. I want to change the world. God brought me through a lot of tough stuff of realizing that, Malcolm, all I’m calling you to do is be faithful to what I called you to. You don’t need to have a big success story to shout about. Your success is that you were faithful to what I called you. And what God has taught me a lot about in the last while is from man Psalm 27 where David who was a go getter and he was a fighter. He was a king and all that stuff. And he got to the point of saying, in Psalm 27. He said one thing I ask of the Lord this is that I seek and I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days in my life to gaze upon the beauty of the Lord and to seek him in this temple. And that was a go getter who got to that point of saying, this is the one thing I do. And I’m glad to say that God had to break me down from wanting to constantly be getting things done, to be able to say this is the one thing I value above everything else, to learn to gaze upon the beauty of the Lord and to learn what that means. To actually just gaze on the beauty of the Lord to spend time in his presence in silence, learning to appreciate his beauty, that these nations that I care about, wanting to see them being restored and transformed. God says these are my nations. I’m working. Even before you turned up, I’m working because I’m the God of all the earth. You learn to gaze on all my beauty and realize how big a God that I am. And you just be faithful to what I’ve called you to today. And don’t worry, if you don’t see it happen in your lifetime, you just be faithful and learn to gaze on all my beauty and enjoy walking with me. And so Psalm 27, I would say, is the big thing that has meant so much when seeking to learn to walk faithfully, whether there seem to be results or not.

Always is beautiful. I needed to hear that. I have a feeling that a lot of our audience needed to hear that. I’m grateful for your time. I’m grateful for your friendship and your encouragement. And I’m so much looking forward to doing work with you under God’s power, not ours, for his glory. And then my sense is that together we’ll have an opportunity to gaze upon the beauty of the Lord through the work he’s doing in Central Asia and Eastern Europe, in Africa and other places. I’m grateful for the message you had about the mindset that we have in investing in emerging markets. The history, the context. And again, grateful for your friendship. Malcolm, thank you very much.

Malcolm Johnston: My pleasure. Thank you. God bless.

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Did you know that 37% of all Americans live in apartments and other multi-family units? And they’re over 96% occupied? 

What used to be a form of transitional housing has become the centers of communities where marriages start and kids are raised. Multi-Family Real Estate investing is continuing to be a dynamic place for Faith Driven Investors, and we want to make sure you’re aware of this trend. 

To do so, we’re talking today with David Snyder of Continental Realty Group and Steve Vecchitto of Advenir. Few people know more about the social and spiritual changes happening within the multi-family real estate space than them. Let’s listen in…

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.

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Henry Kaestner: Welcome back to the Faith Driven Investor podcast. Special time today focusing on multifamily real estate. We’ve got two great leaders in the space, David Snyder and Steve Vecchitto. And when we think about expanding faith driven investing beyond private equity and some of you have been listening show for a while might know that my own personal background is in venture capital, private equity. But with time, we came to realize it is cause we think the private equity of venture capital might be to be able to express our faith in what we do and how we invest. There surely are other ways to do it as well across different asset classes. And maybe the best example that I go to first when I talk to somebody is multifamily real estate. So many of us are accustomed to real estate investing. We understand it. We understand how cash flows. We’ve come to understand what cap rates are. And it’s just such a great place to be able to minister to people who are in need because there’s a part of the investment we’re making. We’re investing in homes and in communities. And of course, where there’s communities, there’s great relationships. And it’s a great opportunity to love on people in a way that points to a God who loves them. And we’ve talked a little bit about multifamily real say in the past. We’ve had guests like P. Kelly on before, but today we’re going to get much deeper into multifamily real estate. I’m going to talk about that when we talk about the two leaders who really understand the space, who’ve invested in it successfully. And David and Steve, thank you very much, both of you, for joining us.

Steve Vecchitto: Thanks for having us on.

Henry Kaestner: So love to start the show by giving each of you a chance to give a brief overview of your background. We’re going to start with David. Want to start by giving us quick fly over about Continental Realty Group and the work that you are doing. And then, Steve, we’ll get right into what the work that you’re doing at Avanir Word Fundamental Realty Group.

David Snyder: We started this company in 1982. We’ve been doing it for a while. And all we’ve done for 37 years now is multifamily real estate. We don’t do any other type of real estate. One of the things I like to tell people is that we get a chance to make money by meeting people’s needs. And we specialize in their housing needs, where students and observers of people’s demographics and their needs that they have for housing. During the last 10 years, we’ve done about one point eight billion transactions, 1000 units, certified properties during a time. Over the last two years, we’ve sold off a lot of our portfolio that we bought about 10 years ago, and we’re down to around 4000 units now and expanding back up from there. So we’re involved in about 10 markets across the country and somewhat similar to Steve’s company, unexcusable, bigger than we are. We have similar amount of markets and it gives us a chance to walk alongside of people. We’re just not landlords. We’re walking more on side of people in their daily life and there’s spiritual responsibilities that come with that.

Henry Kaestner: Thank you for that, David. Steve, take us through Advenir and just a flavor of what you’re doing there. Then, I want to get back into talking about both of you and your faith journey and how you see it manifest itself through your different company.

Steve Vecchitto: David is a little more experienced than I am. We’ve only been in the business for 25 years instead of 37. Wow. We own currently about 14000 units in six states. That’s about 42 properties with a market value of around two point three billion of that, 800 million of it’s in equity and under management. We, like David, only do multi-family properties. We don’t do any other product type. We do also have our own management company. We believe that it’s essential for us to be able to operate and execute business plans to own our own management company and really be hands on. I think David’s formula works really well because you’re hands on and he’s found third party management companies that can operate in his system. So, you know, I think he’s unique to using third party management and it’s worked for both of us. You know, we think there’s a long future in multi-family properties and investments.

Henry Kaestner: Tell us about your faith journey. That’s one of the things, of course, that brought you onto the program. And you’ve been thoughtful about how your personal faith impacts the work that you guys do down in South Florida and as other five states. Tell us about how you came to know God.

Steve Vecchitto: Sure. I’ve got a storied past. I grew up in Connecticut. Roman Catholic really was a lukewarm Christian. I came down to Miami in 1996, pretty much a sinner and a heathen. And I did start at Viniar. Point in time and had a good friend who was in a church. He was drumming for Jesus and he became a special friend of mine and a brother, and we talked about faith. Then when we started our company, I decided that I really wanted to create a culture that was meaningful to our employees, our residents and our vendors and created four pillars. And the four pillars were really true fairness, love and kindness. And at that time, I was not a believer. And I have come to know the Lord over last 12 years, really, from my wife’s pushing and some other friends and I got through the Bible, you know, I started in Bible study 12 years ago and that changed my life. And since that point in time, everything has blossomed in my life from my business to my marriage, to my relationship with my kids, to my focus on what’s important and what’s not important. I’ve really left what is valuable to the world and are looking at it with a different lens. And what is it that Lord, what is it Jesus wants me to be doing in my life? And it’s turned me from being a greedy person to being a steward of what God has given me and for investors money. So it’s really changed my lenses in view of the world.

Henry Kaestner: Can I talk more about this space that you both are in? David, talk to us about the multi-family sector. I don’t think that a lot of people that are listeners appreciate how big it is in our country at least. I didn’t as an investor how big it’s in our country. The world. And just also how much it’s changing. So give us a flyover. Tell us about this industry that you guys both are experts in.

David Snyder: Well, the multifamily sector, I feel, is a very oftentimes misunderstood sector for the average investor or many investors think that the minute you talk about multifamily, you’re talking about low income housing. There are people of all demographics in the United States who choose to live in multifamily. We have very, very high end rentals. We have workforce housing. We have low income housing, affordable housing. And also just to keep pace with the housing demand, the US has to add 300000 housing units per year in the multi-family sector. And when the downturn of 2008 hit, we went through almost four years in the US where there was virtually no new housing built at that time.

So we dug a hole where we were essentially a billion two in units below what was needed. Since that time, we’ve been building and trying to equalize out that that deficit. And we’ve only in recent years gotten back up to the three hundred thousand level. There still is a high degree of intensity for demand for multifamily housing. The occupancy rate on a nationwide basis is almost 96 percent. And that’s no nationwide figure. It’s not just Boston and Denver and Dallas. That’s nationwide. So Podunk, Arkansas, you have wherever Des Moines, Iowa, everywhere is. Therefore, there are full and there’s a tremendous backlog of demand. We still have 30 percent of millennials living with their parents. We have more boomers than ever living in multi-family housing. Our current boomer generation is the healthiest that we’ve had in decades. And the healthier the boomer, the more mobile they are. And one of these people don’t want to go live in single family homes and take care of the lawn and paint the house. They’re living in multifamily and being very mobile. So we have increased occupancy there. And then, of course, the millennials, which is right now the biggest generation, is a very mobile generation and they’re creating demand for millennials. The thing that I think that many people don’t realize is the impending tidal wave of people coming after the millennials, the gen Zs right now, or within two hundred and forty thousand the size of the millennials and their demographic won’t be cut off for another two years by the time we end up with the next two years. The Jameses will actually be bigger than the millennials, and they’re only the age of about twenty two right now. So they’re just starting to enter into the multifamily stage. And we have this tidal wave of demand that is coming from a demographic basis.

Henry Kaestner: Steve, tell us more about that. Tell us about some of the personalities that are going into multi-family. So it’s it’s not just the person is just getting started. Not just transitional. I’m 50 so I’m dating myself a little bit. But when I grew up, the American dream was I own a home, and that was everybody knew this was everybody’s goal wasn’t even up for discussion. That’s all changed now. Right. Who are you seeing in your properties?

Steve Vecchitto: Yeah. Look, I think that dream got crushed in the 08 09 recession. You know, you asked what is the size of this renter base? It’s 60 million households. So we are leasing to providing housing for 60 million households and a household. There’s two point three persons on average. So apartments are essential. Right. Everybody needs a home. And we see those that are getting out of college or from blue collar workers that are mechanics to plumbers to electricians all the way through tax base. And as David mentioned, the boomers are selling their houses and saying, I don’t want the responsibility, I don’t want the upkeep cost. And I’m moving, too. We see it here in Florida. They’re moving to the coast. And large apartment communities and they’re paying anywhere from Florida, literally twenty thousand dollars a month for rents and would rather have that than have the home. So I think you have whatever our nation looks like is what the rents are based looks like.

David Snyder: It’s making our job as landlords more complex because 30 years ago, all we had to do was worry about young people. There was a there’s just transitionary housing. I’m sure Steve will agree in today’s world. He’s got boomers sitting on the same property that he has millennials and they’ve got some gen X’s. And somehow you have to figure how to meet these people’s needs, even though you’ve got all these different demographics in place and not just meet their needs, but learn how to minister to them where they’re at, whether they’re very wealthy or older or whether they’re millennials or students at the same time.

Steve Vecchitto: Yeah, I agree. We have really two categories. It’s a renter by necessity, where they have no other alternative. They can’t go live with mom, they can’t afford a house. And you have renter by choice. And I think both categories are growing just as fast. So the renter by choice says, I don’t want to own the home. I’d rather live in rental property. It’s my lifestyle that I’m renting for. The rent, by necessity, has no other choice in that demographic. Certainly are different. The renter, by necessity, probably never will buy a home. The renter by choice may never go back to a single family home.

Henry Kaestner: So which space you find yourself saying so rener by necessity, I think I get. Renter by choice. I think 75 percent of millennials now would rather rent than own a home. So the whole idea whether they’re impacted by the financial crisis or not, just they have a preference to whether it’s mobility, flexibility, just value things differently. Seventy five percent would rather rent than own before gone. Where do you find each of yourselves? Is it evenly mixed based on the properties you have, or do you focus on renters by necessity, more in Class B and C spaces or more class? How does that break after each of you?

Steve Vecchitto: Well, for Advenir, we’re probably 75 percent rents are by necessity. So we call it workforce housing and families that are making between thirty five thousand and one hundred twenty five percent of our renter base. Probably makes more than one hundred thousand dollars a year is that rents or by choice.

Henry Kaestner: David, how about you? How’s that mix work out for you?

David Snyder: Well, the challenge and the opportunity that multi-family gives us as landlords is we have the ability to walk alongside of people in their lives, to walk alongside of the wealthy. Rohner, the lifestyle runner, to walk alongside of the runner by necessity. The ones that are going through budget problems and, you know, work problems and and that we’re in a very unique position as landlords. Landlords in the 80s used to be disguised, collected rent. If you didn’t pay me, you’re gone, you know, and that’s it. There’s landlords today. We have the opportunity to be candelas to encourage successful living in the residents of our community. And not just capitalists, but we’re stewards. I mean, we’ve been given these relationships of hundreds and hundreds of people living within our community. We’ve been given those relationships. We’re going to be held accountable for what those people receive from the relationships that they have with us. And so the landlord today is a very catalytic person that is after the the economic benefit of their tenants, the spiritual benefit, the social benefit of their tenants and. At the same time, we’re driving financial value from those people that live in our communities also.

Henry Kaestner: How about you, Steve? Talked about the ministry opportunity that you see as you’ve got these people that are living in your communities. And how do you see it being different? What does it look like to live on somebody in one of your properties where it’s workforce housing? And was it looked like in another one of your properties, the love on somebody that’s maybe a millennial? And when I say millennial makes it sound like they’re like some sort of kind of like alien or something like that, although sometimes I think we experience them that way. But we’re talking about this next generation that’s really starting to lead in the workplace that would rather just not own. But that’s a different demographic. It’s a different need. How do you love them both?

Steve Vecchitto: So, you know, I love the term millennial. I have two millennial daughters and they are pure millennial. It’s all I love them to death. You know, I think it comes from a different two different standpoints. One is the culture that we’ve created in our company and the management team side. We have seven core values that we continue to train our employees in, in some of the key words that are included in those seven core values, our teamwork, customer service, innovation, integrity, humility, balance.

And if we’re training our team members how to operate in their communities. It goes it goes downstream. So they’re able to pass that on to the residents. They’re able to pass that on to the demanders that we’re working with, you know, from a spiritual side. And I know you’ll probably talk about this later, but we use apartment, life and apartment. Life has just been a wonderful bolt on addition to what we do on the management level to connect with each one of our residents.

Henry Kaestner: Tell me about their model and how you how you all employ it.

Steve Vecchitto: So their model is pretty interesting. They do recruit team members, so there’s a family or couple that will come to our community and live in our community, become a part of that community. And the cost is relatively inexpensive to us as owners. And I think the benefits are just huge. The benefit to us is higher retention, building of community social activities that they create reputation management in our business, the reputation of our community and online leasing is so important and they’re able to raise that reputation.

Henry Kaestner: So presumably also makes your online ratings go up in some of those other things, too, and I know that there are different models. I know that David has had a different approach. He’s got mission that I don’t want to talk about that here and saying. But, Steve, before I let you go, comment on what you’ve seen in your properties over the course the last two or three months, just to timestamped this a bit, we’re talking about this in May of 2020. COVID 19, has shut things down and a lot of the country is going through really a loneliness problem. And pre-covid 19, we’re headed off the charts as a country in terms of depression, loneliness, etc., and that’s only got worse. Now, of course, what are you feeling from your communities and what role do you see? Apartment life. And then I want to ask David about the same, because the way that he dresses the same situation with loneliness.

Steve Vecchitto: So I think loneliness goes to fear and a large extent and the fear is how am I going to exist with no money or how am I going to exist? I just lost my job. I’m collecting unemployment. And in some states, it’s been hard to get those benefits because the unemployment system registration has not been functioning well. So we’ve actually been reaching out to every one of our residents, helping them through the process of payment, their rent and finding out. Are there issues? Are they having problems with health? Are they having problems with transportation? Do they have an elderly in the unit that needs special care? Our teams have gone out and raised money to bring food in so that the residents can come in into the leasing center and grab whatever they need for the night. And it’s interesting because we’re now seeing residents bring in food to the leasing center as part of the community as you drive through the properties which enjoy it. What’s interesting is the parking lots are packed. Everybody is at home, right? We’re all in lockdown. And apartment life has helped with virtual social events. They’ve done video nights where they’re streaming from Netflix or some other source. And as a community, everybody’s watching the same movie the same night in our apartment, life teams have really helped. So we don’t have them on every property. And you could tell the difference of the ones we do have apartment life teams on versus the ones we do. And I’ll say the reason we don’t have apartment life teams and some of our properties is we’re still searching for that right team that’s been provided through the church system.

Henry Kaestner: David talk to us about other models, other ways for people to love on the way that you love on people in your facilities.

David Snyder: You know, we also make use of apartment life in our communities and, you know, apartment life and groups like that, they give owners the ability to pay attention to the function of what they do, which is the business side of everything. And then they have people that they provide to us that help with our purpose of why we do it and taking care of people and taking care of their social and spiritual needs and that type of thing. And an apartment life is one of the groups that helps us do that. We’ve added on more employees during this time rather than fewer. We’ve hired more part metalized staff to do nothing but just be on the phone and talking to our people on a daily basis and doing needs assessments and then that type of thing. So they’ve been an instrumental part, but we also make use of other groups and we expand also apartment life’s mission on some of our properties in that we use some of our apartment life teams as a liaison or a coordinator to bring in the local church in the area to try to adopt some of our communities and to provide different services and activities to the residents of our communities through the local church. And it’s been a very rewarding option for us because it gives a lot of people in the local churches the ability to have an outlet for ministry and multi-family housing. I mean, we’ve got some properties that there’s mechanics from the church that go out twice a month and they’re maintaining the cars of all the single moms on our properties and stuff like that. And it actually is raising the spiritual self-esteem of some of these people in the church because it gives them an outlet.

We provide Mother’s Day out programs and other things through the church and then some of our apartment life people coordinate that. They’re also coordinators for social services where we have some local social services available. They’re not necessarily faith based and they act as coordinators for that. In addition, we also have other groups that we believe in very much. And one is Crown Financial, who is involved in teaching stewardship on some of our communities and that type of thing in dealing with people and providing studies on how to budget their time, budget, their finances, et cetera. Friends First dot org is a mentoring program that is designed to help teens and young people on the properties. And then finally, Mission Ninety Eight is a group that really is somewhat similar to apartment life that they specialize in just bringing in the local church and to a point where they can serve people in the multifamily community. And, you know, a lot of people run by apartment communities without giving them a second look. And 37 percent of Americans live in apartment communities saying multifamily housing. And it’s a big part of our population that the church has a responsibility to reach out to and to include in their community also.

Henry Kaestner: Talk to me a little bit about the difference between these two different models. One is an organization like an apartment life where somebody will go and live in a community. And then on the other hand, you might have a local church that might adopt an apartment complex. When I used to go to the Church of the Good Shepherd in Durham, North Carolina, for instance, we had a apartment complex that we as a community adopted and that seemed to be able to last through any type of a turnover of key personnel as it was the church that adopted them and offered up English as a second language type of classes and things like that. David, you’ve had experience with both. Talk about the pros and cons about each of those models.

David Snyder: I think the pros about apartment life is they’re often more proactive. They’re more national. So we can have them many other states, you know, as opposed to when we deal with the church adoption concept for lack of a better term. We’re having to reinvent the wheel in each location, you know. And so a partner in life has a model that can be mobilized and news nationwide. The downside or some of the negatives of apartment life that they know, too, and I’ve discussed with them, is that local time as a ministry teams that they put on the properties are there for a two year period. And so you get all these relationships made and everything, and then all the sudden the team is gone. And it may be four or five months or six months to a new team, maybe put in their place or whatever.

But that turnover affects the model bit. That’s one reason why we’ve married our apartment life teams with the activity by the local church, because we understand that sometimes teams, you know, graduate move on to other things. But the local church provides a consistency of the effort on the properties themselves. And so even though you may have a partner or wife team that comes in and out of churches there. The church hasn’t gone away. Some of the personnel may change, but the church is there and it provides a consistent ministry provision for the people on those properties.

Henry Kaestner: OK, so this is going to be a little bit of leading question. Obviously, you believe that this is something that works or you won’t be spending money on it, but maybe I shouldn’t be so presumptuous, somebody listening to this. They’re not the family real estate property, the money that you put into these programs. How much of it do you think that you get back? How much of it do you think accrues to the benefit of the limited partners and the investors you have? And or how much of it is something that goes above and beyond that that you actually think may not add to the investment returns but is instead something that you would otherwise allocate towards ministry spend and how you do discipleship or evangelism?

Steve Vecchitto: I think I’d answer in two ways. So there is the financial benefit to the property, which ignores to the benefit the investor, and that is higher retention. So I’ve got more people staying longer. Part of the reason is the social activity that’s been created and the neighborhood that’s been generated. And so I’ve now I’ve got friends there that I don’t want to leave. Right. So I get a higher retention rate that saves money for my investors. And I think the other part is the reputation. We’re building up our online reputation for the community. So as that builds, that creates a strong community itself. That’s a financial benefit that we realize.

Henry Kaestner: So if you spend 50000 thousand dollars on an issue like that for a property, do you think you get all 50 of that back or do you say, well, that 50? I think probably 35 or 40 that back, but because I’m motivated by my Christian faith and here’s an opportunity for me to love on people. I mean, I get all 50 back, but I’m happy having 10, 15 or 20 of that be kind of like my ministry spend. Do you ever think that way?

Steve Vecchitto: No. So I don’t think it’s cost us 50. What it cost is an apartment and our monthly fee. I always have a vacant unit. So to me, that’s a zero cost. I think my return is four to five bucks and that’s pretty high on any investment you can make.

Henry Kaestner: So you may give up the free apartment, but you still have to pay them. You still pay apartment, life, apartment. Life may be a ministry, but they charge a fee. And that’s what you’re talking about, getting the four to five extra turn on.

Steve Vecchitto: That’s correct.

Henry Kaestner: Yeah. David, how would you answer that?

David Snyder: Well, you know, I think that we have a spiritual benefit, obviously, from our extra effort with our residents. And we have a good financial benefit. And the financial benefits far outweigh the costs of the programs that we put in place. The typical turnover, and I’m sure some words in Steve’s mouth, but I’m sure he’s experiencing the same thing here. The average turnover in our industry is 75 percent a year. So if you have a 400 year. Apartment community, you’re turning over 300 of those a year, year in and year out. And over the last 10 years, that’s been the American average. With our history, once we’ve been in charge of an apartment community for a year and have our apartment life programs involved in some of our other management programs and ball are turnover down. The same property turned out to be somewhere between 47 and 49 percent. So we’re literally saving 25 percent turnover san in real dollars out of 400 unit community. If you’ve shaved 25 percent off of your turnover, that’s one hundred less units per year. That’s that’s turning over. And each of those units cost you an average of about 2000 or so to turn. There’s a term cost, says 200000. The bottom line and you keep that in your expenses. I would challenge Shane. I have tried. Many of my investors are not Christians. Many are of other faiths or no faith. And they oftentimes talk about the voodoo that we do on the property. And I think we’ll keep doing it because it makes us money. So I’m very high on this type of ministry and on those type of effort by apartment life and others in this space. But at the same time, I’m very transparent, very open that it actually makes us money to be good neighbors. To be good landlords is to love people. It is financially rewarding for us.

Henry Kaestner: Okay, that’s helpful. So we’ve made the case for multi-family and because of demographic shifts, this is going to be a sector that’s going to continue for a very, very long time. And as an investor, as a space you should be looking at also made the case that investing in ministry moves the needle in terms of loneliness and depression and community and sharing the gospel and discipleship without it necessarily costing. Why do you think the concept of faith driven investing in real estate? Why do you think there’s not more of a thing? It seems to be something that people are talking about very, very recently. And yet you’ve been implemented for a long time. Why do you think that faith driven investors, people who have a Christian faith who would like to see people in the workplace minister to. Why do you think that this idea hasn’t really caught on so much so that people are saying, I want to find a real estate manager that employs these things? If I’m going to deploy capital, whether I’m an institution, whether I’m a retail investor, I want it to go to those people. Why do you think that’s not a thing?

Steve Vecchitto: I think it’s not promoted. We do it because we want to. We do it because we believe in it. We think it’s right. It’s our faith, my investors, for the most part, trusting in what we do. As David said, the voodoo that he does on his properties, they get great returns and that’s why they’re in this. And they let us operate autonomously without really knowing what’s in the engine other than they know the performance. I can open a hood of a car and not really understand the engine, but I like the car. I like the way he drives. And I think that’s been the philosophy. We’ve sort of done this silently and maybe it’s our fault. But look, at the end of the day, our faith is driving, how we operate, what our morals are. We’re trying to expand the Lord’s kingdom. Then we’re doing that through the ministry that we’re able to provide while providing housing while we’re providing returns. It just becomes a win win win.

Henry Kaestner: We’d like to close out every one of the podcast episodes we do by asking our guests what they’re hearing from God and his word and see if you tell him that have gone through the Bible again recently. And David, want to hear from you about what you’re hearing, too. And so we’ll start there. Dave, what are you hearing from God in his word? Maybe it’s something that you heard this morning, maybe yesterday, May last week for some way that you feel that God is speaking to you.

David Snyder: I mentioned this to some of the guys on the podcast, the Steve and Justin before. For some reason, God has just brought the word sanctuary to my mind. And I probably haven’t thought about that word for forever. I don’t know why, but in the last few weeks, I’ve been studying how God gave sanctuary to Moses, who gave sanctuary, you know, to Jonah, to the King David J. Gave, say, a time of sanctuary and protected him. And I just feel I’m very at peace with one of the things I have been called to do in life is provide sanctuary for our residents and where it’s a peaceful place for them to grow, for them to grow socially, hopefully. Build or grow spiritually, and you try to take steps along the line. But this is very simplistic, open droid sanctuary myself during this time of. Because I’m up here in my mountain cabin. And I’m in sanctuary. And I think that’s maybe where this came from and that I’m just so excited. And so that piece about being able to provide sanctuary or residence.

Henry Kaestner: That’s a great word. Steve?

Steve Vecchitto: And if I may actually have two that are meaningful my life today. And the first is Galatians 522, which is the fruit of the spirit is love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. I just love that if I live my life through those words and have a wonderful life. And, you know, in the season we’re in with this Kofod, I have really been dwelling on Matthew six thirty, which says, Do not be anxious about tomorrow for tomorrow, we’ll be anxious for itself. Sufficient for the day is its own troubles. And I think the Lord gives us plenty and mercy today and provides for all we need today in with the Kofod and wondering what the economy is going to look like in our business is going to run. I could quickly run to tomorrow and be anxious about that, you know, so I go to this passage that just gives me peace that I worry about tomorrow. Tomorrow, though, and worries tomorrow. And he’ll give me mercy tomorrow.

Henry Kaestner: May that be the case for you and for me and our listeners. Great. And thank you both for your time. Thank you for your faithfulness in the market and sharing your stories with us and disinterested to see how this expands over the course next 10 years. I’ve really compelled by the ministry opportunity, and it’s just amazing to see that this ministry opportunity ministry investment on this is actually something that accrues to the benefit of investors. So much so that investors that don’t share fears like I want more of that. So super compelling. Thank you both.