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On today’s podcast we have the joy and privilege to hear from an investor and entrepreneur team that met via the Faith Driven Marketplace. Investor Tom Lernihan was moved by the mission and simple solution of the company Pureflow founded and led by Jared Fulks and Collin Wenrich. 

After traveling around the world to Uganda, Collin had a revelation as his calling zipped past him on the road in the form of a motorcycle… also known as a boda. Anyone who has visited this part of the world knows that motorcycles are the one primary way to get around. In fact, being a “Boda Boda” driver is one of the fastest growing occupations in East Africa–home to more than 1 million motorcycle drivers. However, after further research, Collin discovered that less than 20% of all these drivers actually own their motorcycles. And so began Pureflow. 

After investing a few thousand dollars of his own money and striking up a deal with only 6 boda boda drivers, Collin went pedal to the metal. Since launching Pureflow and partnering with Tom, Pureflow has grown to more than 100 drivers and counting. Together Collin, Jared and Tom share why they do and how they continue to grow without outscaling their culture, purpose and impact.

Episode Transcript

John Coleman: Welcome to the Faith Driven Investor podcast. This is John Coleman joining you today and I’m here with my good friend and partner, Luke Roush. Luke, how are you doing?

Luke Roush: I’m doing great. It’s going to be on. I love the story we’re going to be able to profile today. I love seeing entrepreneurs and investors coming together to further the mission that they’re on. So I’m excited for our story here.

John Coleman: That’s awesome. I think we all are. And we’ve got three fantastic guests today, all coming together with a similar mission. They actually met through or at least started interacting through the marketplace, which we’re going to come to, which is a really exciting story. But we’ve got Colin and Jared and Tom here coming from different walks of life to really invest for the kingdom. And so maybe just to start off, guys, give us the two or 3 minutes on each of you, just your backgrounds and how you got interested in this space. And then let’s start to talk about how you got introduced to one another and came together, maybe lead off. Jared, let’s start with you.

Jared Fulks: Yeah, awesome. So, Jared, folks, I’m based in Atlanta, Georgia. My wife and I live right outside the city. And my story began in Columbus, Ohio. I grew up a pastor’s kid. And I thought I went to college to play basketball and I thought that was going to be the end all, be all, become a college basketball coach. I quickly learned that there’s a lot of steps between dreaming that and actually doing that and after an injury in college, ended up transferring to Liberty University in Virginia. That’s a part of the story later. But after college, God did let me live out the dream a little bit, coaching semi-pro basketball in England. And the reason I got pulled back to the States was I was now dating my now wife and so came back and we got married four years ago and quickly jumped into entrepreneur space here in Atlanta in the tech space. And I loved it. I had this tension, though, full time ministry, full time business. God, what did you want to use me for while you’ve given me this life? And so my wife and I started praying. And after about three years of praying, God reconnected the dots with the fellow peer from Liberty, which was Colin. So I’ll kick it over to him. But that’s how our stories got reconnected five years later, after we’d both gone our separate ways.

Collin Wenrich: So my name is Collin Wenrich born and raised Bay Area out in California. And my story really starts when I went to school at Liberty University. And so when I was over at Liberty University, I was pursuing an electrical engineering degree. The Lord quickly rerouted me, sent me on a commercial corporate aviation path, and admits that after about two and a half years, he then sent me on a wild adventure to Uganda. And at that point I teamed up with 15 other young adults based out of actually right outside Atlanta. I think it was over in Gainesville, Georgia, through adventures and missions and sent us for four months to Uganda. I had no idea what I was going to be doing other than I was going to be in Uganda for four months. So we ended up partnering with some local organizations, some local churches out there, and I quickly fell in love with the culture, quickly fell in love with the people. I had no idea how my skill set or what I was passionate about in life was going to align with the future in Uganda. And the Lord did His work in the near future after that. But I knew quickly that it was going to be a part of my future. So I called my parents, called my family. After three months, I said, Buckle up, it’s going to be a wild ride because Uganda is going to be a significant part of my future. So I finished up my four months, came back to the States, finished up my degree, moved over to Uganda to start a ministry. And this is where I had some of the similar tension points that Jared It was like I was full time missions, but then people would always ask me about the sustainability aspect. And so two years after being a full time missionary in Uganda, I started to wrestle with God on what it looked like to start a business. And then we’ll fast forward to Pureflow here soon.

Luke Roush: Awesome. It’s awesome. Awesome.

Tom Lernihan: Guys, good to be here today. My name is Tom Lernihan based in Indianapolis and I lead a venture fund called His Fund as a reference. These are God’s resources and we’re here to steward them on a way to bring him glory. And we focus on investing in faith driven entrepreneurs that have a social mission and an opportunity to create jobs in under-resourced communities. And I can’t think of any better example than Pureflow in what Jared and Collin have built over the last several years, we’ve built up a portfolio of investments that are industry agnostic. They’re focused on four main geographic regions, US, primarily, East Africa, Southeast Asia and Central America. And what we’re really looking for is just partnering with entrepreneurs that have, you know, an opportunity to do incredible things. And we get the blessing to work with great guys like what we’re here talking to about today.

Luke Roush: So the beginning of every great love story or every great investment partnership, there’s a spark usually. Thank you for sharing a little bit about each your backgrounds, but I want to hear about the spark when you guys first connected and what caused you to want to learn more and get to know each other and do life together.

Tom Lernihan: Well, I’ll start first. If you haven’t heard the story of Pureflow, what they’re doing. A great place to start is by going to their website and watching their founder story. That’s my first exposure to what they’re building, what they’re trying to do, and it’s an awesome example. It’s a four minute video and I can’t recommend it higher. It gives a great lens into just the mission and the focus on what they’re trying to do at Pureflow. And after watching probably 2 minutes of this four minute video, I was hooked. I said, I’m in, I’m ready to go. Let’s do this. And then got an opportunity to connect with Jared and Collin shortly thereafter and just was instantly connected and aligned with mission and what they’re doing and just was really passionate about finding a way to join on and help in the mission, what they’re trying to do.

Luke Roush: And so what was the original inspiration around the idea? Maybe Jared and Collin share a little bit about what got put on your heart or what you saw that then forced you to say, Hey, we’ve got to do something here, which is usually what creates new companies. Great companies are born out of an unmet need that an entrepreneur resonates with and then wants to do something about. Maybe just share a little bit about that founding vision story.

Collin Wenrich: Yeah, absolutely. So when I was full time ministry out in Uganda, I had about it was about a mile and a half walk to and from our partnerships every single day. I did not have a vehicle and I wasn’t riding motorbikes at the time, so it was like good old fashioned two feet. Took me everywhere. And during that walk, I would just stop and talk. You know, I didn’t really have a lot of time constraints. So all along the way there would be these Botha stages which are like these areas where the motorcycle taxis would group together, they’d hang out and that’s where their business would be focused out of. And so I would just stop and talk with them, just shoot the breeze, just catch up, get to know their names, what they’re doing, their families. And I knew a little bit of the local language at the time, so I would say a few things and make them laugh and we’d joke around and then I’d continue, you know, after building some of those relationships through some months into the years, you know, I started to ask more in-depth questions and started to realize that, you know, these guys were on these motorcycles. Some of them looked absolutely terrible and they didn’t own them. They had no ownership, no equity within these motorcycles that at that point had no idea how much they cost it. But when I soon started to figure out, like, you know, what are the values of these motorcycles, it was raising some red flags and some questions that guys have been paying seven or eight years on these bikes, but there were only 12, 13 hundred dollars to acquire. And so really it was just through walking up and down town, asking questions, building relationships with these guys over a period of two years. Then we started that’s when we started to address the issue that was literally right in front of us the whole time.

John Coleman: That’s wild. So you got a sense of this market that most people probably wouldn’t even know exist, or actually it’s a market failure over there where there’s not really local financing available in the way that we’d think about that in the U.S.. How did you start to identify the way in which you could engage with this problem, and how did you begin to set up that business in its infancy?

Collin Wenrich: Yeah, so it was that was the fun part of it. When we saw the issue and I say we at this point it was a business partner. He was actually working on the ministry side with me at that point and myself. And we knew at the centric focus of why we wanted to do what we were doing, it was all Christ based. It’s like we want to share the gospel with these guys. You see them working day in and day out and I mean seven days a week, 14, 15 hours a day. They’re driving people, they’re driving things, they’re putting bunk beds on the back of hundred cc motorcycles, and they’re going and there’s no time for rest. There’s limited time for family, and there’s absolutely no time to sit and worship. And so it was one of these instances where it’s like, okay, you can rent to them, you can make some money, you can pour it back into the ministry. That’s great. Okay, we can sell these bikes, but we’re still not doing anything of significant value here. How do we give them a chance to own the bike but go on a journey with them? And in that journey, how do we teach these guys, teach them about their finances, teach them about how to lead their families, and ultimately, how do we get them around the table to share the gospel with them? And so it was all based around how do we get these guys together at a table to share the gospel?

John Coleman: That’s awesome. And at some point, you know, every business for most businesses come to this point where they can’t bootstrap it anymore. Their personal finances aren’t going to cover the model, which is where the investment community comes in. Maybe Jared and Collin talked to us about how you got to that point and when you needed the capital, when you realized you needed to go out and find capital to support the business, what was that decision making process and how did you decide to go where you went?

Collin Wenrich: Yeah, so originally we had started with $6,000. We bought a six bikes at that point, and so we would inject revenue as fast as we could to get another member on the bike, because as soon as we launched this program, it was a hot commodity and people were signing up. We had over 100 applications. Within ten days. So at that point, it was inject revenue as fast as we can and then it was do it again, get to bike seven, get to bike eight, get to bike nine. Then Grandma came on board and was like, I love it. I was like, All right, let’s do it, grandma. So Grandma buys Bike ten. But we started to grow and we kept growing organically for a while until we got to about the 100 bike mark. And at the 100 bike mark, you know, Jared came on board and this is where we really started to analyze our finances and our growth and a whole different line of sight.

Jared Fulks: I saw the business for the first time and like you guys would be if you watch the story, as Tom did, I’m in the same boat as Tom. I was just inspired by the story. And so at the time, my wife and I agreed that I could just give 40 hours of work to Pureflow for free because I was about the vision. And I said, this is going to serve a lot of people. And so that’s how we started. Collin was back stateside because of the pandemic. It was early 2020 and the businesses is kind of in this uneasy ground of does it grow organically? Does it scale now? And I saw the model. I said, look at the numbers and come out of the tech startup space where we had raised money. I was like, I think there’s funds here. But we battled the back and forth of nonprofit or for profit. Could we crowdfund motorcycles? And the challenge with that is, is, you know, how do you move the money? How quickly can it scale? And are we just trying to put heart strings to tell the story to people to get crowdfunding? Or on the flip side, do we go to investors? And Collin and I had no idea about the impact investing space. I mean, Faith Driven Investor Faith Driven Entrepreneur was not on any of our radars, and so we started just doing a little digging in and that’s how we got into the space and sort of finding the right partners to partner with.

John Coleman: That’s awesome. And I think you all actually connected with Tom via the marketplace. If if if I’m correct, Tom, maybe just from your perspective, talk to us about why you got involved in the marketplace and why you viewed that as a platform where you could find great entrepreneurs like this and how you came together with this team.

Tom Lernihan: Yeah, absolutely. The marketplace has been an excellent resource for the work that we do. We built up a network over the last several years where most of our investments have come through some sort of warm introduction into a business. But the marketplace is quickly replacing that for us, where we can go on and find really high quality investment opportunities that are very much right in our wheelhouse and the types of deals that we like to support. And one of those that we came across was Pureflow. It’s just really easy to see the impact and alignment on what they’re trying to do with square in the center of what our fund is set up to achieve. So it was a very seamless process for we’re able to connect with Collin and kind of reach out via the marketplace and get scheduled on a call. And from the very first interaction, we knew right away that this was a business that we wanted to partner with and help them grow to, you know, significantly more bikes than they had in the first round.

Luke Roush: So there’s always these choices to make around how quickly you want to grow and the pace of expansion of the business versus sort of control and the ability to kind of measure carefully before you have to start cutting. How have you guys modulated that sort of desire to have more impact, but also desire to understand the mission in the model of the business? Maybe just speak a little bit to how you’ve regulated on that front?

Jared Fulks: Yeah, it’s a question we ask often, and guys like Tom, Luke, you might know from spending time over in Asia, but there’s a lot of bikes, there’s a lot of guys that don’t own the bikes. So the market’s big. You don’t have to look very far to find market opportunity. And Tom, having spent a good bit of time in East Africa, understood that more so than I think most partners would understand if you haven’t set foot on the ground there, and honestly, more so than I understood until I first saw it. And so you would then ask that question how fast you scale. And to be honest, when we first did our first round of debt financing, we really didn’t know what the end goal was. And we still don’t really know what the end goal is. But what we knew was that we want to scale where our culture doesn’t get lost in the scaling. So we kind of measured our scale speed based on our culture and our people. That was kind of from day one. It’s about the people on both sides of the coin. And now we’ve kind of refined that more specifically and our growth strategy around this concept that we never will out scale the table. So Collin mentioned earlier that the goal is to get these guys around the table every week because they’re not in a local church. A lot of them are not in relationship with Jesus. I mean, a lot of the places we work, you have many different religions represented. And so the heartbeat of Pureflow is to get guys to the table. Because if we read through Jesus’s life, that’s where change was happening. That’s where brokenness was revealed. That’s where he was able to be love, light and speak truth to people. And so our goal is to get people around the table as often as we can so our guys are paying off their loan over two years. 104 payments. That means 104 times they’re getting fed spiritually and physically for 30 to 45 minutes at a table with ten other guys. And there’s no misses. So that’s for 104 weeks. Again, have been worked in the church before? That far outweighs a lot of the small group models that I’ve tried to implement. And so we love that. So at this point, yeah, we want to scale to more markets, but we don’t want to out scale the table. And in order to serve people at the table, it requires the Pureflow team to be understanding of our core values, which the number one is serve with purpose. And so if we outgrow our values and we outgrow the table, it’s our indicator, if you will, of or out scaling the impact we want to have.

Luke Roush: So I want to ask the question actually, it’s a little bit awkward and I’ll go ahead and acknowledge the awkwardness on the front end. But I want to hear actually challenges maybe Jared and Collin, from your perspective as you progressed through the last couple of years and then maybe also from Tom’s perspective, key obstacles, challenges that you’ve had to overcome.

Collin Wenrich: Yeah, I can start on like in the beginning when we first launched this program, we had a little bit of backlash from like local loan sharks and some guys who are running some mom and pop shops with spare parts and fixing bikes. And especially when we built our first permanent building, you know, day one of opening, they shut us down and they shut us down for about two and a half weeks as it was kind of there was a lot of like petty litigation that we had to proceed through. And so really on that part, too, it was getting the community to understand, like, why we’re here and what we’re doing. And it wasn’t because we wanted to sell more bikes than a distributor, right? It wasn’t because we wanted to take the other loan sharks and take all of their bikes. Our core focus. Right, was to disciple these guys and get them financially literate to get them and savings groups and just give them and allow them the opportunity to become the godly men that we see in them. And so once we really built some platforms for the community to also get involved and for us to get integrated within the community, we started to see those type of challenges subside. So that was like the first, probably first two years. And then I can let Jared share on the most recent ones.

Jared Fulks: Yeah, anytime you run to come to an organization, you guys can imply some of the challenges that you might face, starting with, you know, the Zoom stuff that we all love. And so that’s one thing. And structuring our leadership to scale was a big shift that we made over the last 18 months, putting people not only in the right place in the bus, but also ensuring that their understanding of what that role and responsibility entails. Because our team is really young, we have 27 full time team members now, which is awesome. I mean when I came on, I think we at like maybe seven or eight two years ago and so scaling that along with the member side of it, again, we really want to focus on our team and now we have five branches, three main branches and two sub branches. And so the dynamics of that are a great healthy challenge for Collin and I on a daily basis of how do we best serve our team, how do we best cast a vision that pulls the people and our team towards the vision and it develops leaders? Because what we realize is that we’re going to promote from within. And so we need people that are focused on developing leaders and not just ensuring that we we get paid by our members. So I think that’s a good challenge to have, but nonetheless a challenge that we’ve come across.

John Coleman: So I love that y’all have talked about the spiritual impact on the individuals that you’re working with, and that’s such a neat engagement model. Talk to me about the broader impact. So obviously you’re filling a need in the community. What is that doing to these communities, the kind of economic and social impact on the community itself, on the individuals involved. And maybe, Tom, as they describe that, I’d love to hear you describe how you think about this difference between the social and individual and spiritual impact in the financial return that you’re getting. How do you balance those things as you look at the model that they’re creating?

Jared Fulks: I think the four big things we look at in the community that happen as a result of these guys owning this asset, which just for some frame of reference, when they own it, they double their take home income. So I kind of ask the question to everyone listening and I ask it to myself when I think about the impact financially is what would happen if you double your take home income? What would you do? And it’s surprising enough they do the same things that we would do. And it kind of comes in these four buckets of build. They build things, they invest in things they give and they save. And I think those are the same buckets that we would find ourselves in if we doubled the income that we took home. And so you can imagine what that does. Downward effect for families, multi-generational impact around kids not getting private education. They’re growing up under a roof now that’s stable. I mean, you can hear the stories of our members that have finished move to ownership. They’re now getting meat on the table more frequently. And a big thing that happens very, very common. Either they come back for a second bike. So what that means is they’re taking the first bike and they’re going to somebody they’re serving a market that we wouldn’t serve that needs to pay for a used bike. So they’re creating more jobs downstream, but they’re also creating a second source of income either through that second bike or their spouses starting a shop that happens a lot where they have now two incomes for their family because they’ve kind of gotten the chance to get above water to breathe for a little bit.

Tom Lernihan: And from an investor perspective, we came into this investment at the onset really excited about the opportunity to create jobs and really substantially increase their income, as Jared had mentioned. And that was our first lens, right? That was what we were really excited about. And you asked a question about how we balance the financial return and the social and spiritual impact. We’re blessed that our fund is set up in a way that we don’t have any financial objectives on what we’re doing. We’re trying to really achieve excellence on finances, but we’re not tied to any sort of metric to hit or to achieve. And so we get the opportunity to deploy capital with a social and spiritual lens first, and they just knock that out of the park. So if we were just looking at this from a job creation perspective, the opportunity to change the communities of these serves is exponential and something, you know, we could totally see this being replicated in many more cities around Uganda and East Africa and encourage that. But it’s really exciting for us when we see the intentional ness that’s there, focus on really investing into the lives of these drivers and focused on how they can serve them in their kingdom lens and really be partners with their drivers. And that was just an incredible experience for us, something that we aspire to replicate in other investments in our portfolio. They’re really leaders in this space and really pouring into the opportunity that they have.

Luke Roush: What you’re also speaking to that resonates with me is just this idea that and it’s sad, but it’s a very rare thing in an emerging market, particularly with jobs or individuals at this level that are not using private cars but are instead using bikes. It’s very unusual for people to actually, you know, care for them, to reach out for them to invest in their kind of growth and development as individuals, to help them think about what is my pathway going forward from here. And so, you know, my guess is that you’ve got raving fans with a really high net promoter score on the individuals that you serve as clients. Is that often the case?

Collin Wenrich: Yeah, I would definitely say that once you are embedded and integrated within the Pureflow family, I mean, it’s a beautiful thing and we love to invite and we love just to remain in relationship with them. You know, one of the hardest things, too, is when you bring new members into the program, is really sometimes getting past the barrier of the core essence of why we’re doing what we were doing, and that is bringing people to the table. Right? So they’ve got to come from where they’re at and we’ve got to come to the table. And sometimes they have to disrupt their daily schedules. Could be 30, 45 minutes to come sit at the table and conversate with us and share a meal. And sometimes it doesn’t make sense, right? Because of their lifestyle. It’s hustle, bustle, go, go, go. And every lost trip, right? That’s the money out of their pocket. That could be less lunch or less a soda or something small, but it’s still less something. And so, you know, Jared and I talk about that to what’s the value add of these touch points, these 102 and 104 touch points that we have with these guys through the duration of their loan. So sometimes is that pushback, right, of I can pay you for this bike, thank you for the program. But I don’t really want to show up at the table to where it’s like you come to the table, you have a meal, you meet with some great guys. Okay, I love it. But you have to do it again. Yes, we got to do it again to really like you start to build the trust, you build the relationship, and then they just keep coming because they want to. And then they get their buddies and they call you from another town and they’re like, Hey, I’ve got buddies who want to do this as well. We want to be discipled. We want to sit around the table like we’re hungry for more of what God has to offer. And those are the beautiful things that we love to experience and be a part of. But sometimes you just got to push through that first barrier.

Jared Fulks: Yeah. And Luke, I’ll say too, you raise an interesting question about the neglection that this part of society faces across most developing countries. And I’ve got a chiropractor friend that I spent some good time with, and he always talks about how we, especially in America, we neglect our backbone, a lot of vertebrae. And so but it has a lot of bad effects. And what people fail to see is that if you look at we estimate there’s over a million boda bodas in Uganda population around 4850 million. So that’s a lot of people doing this one thing. It is the backbone of society. We talk about homes and we talk about health and food and education. Those are all big things. But a lot of times we leave out transportation and you’ve got to have transportation. And so they don’t have a train system and people don’t own cars themselves. And so they have to get around these bodas. So you have two options. You can neglect them or you can figure out how to serve them in the way we look at it is every one of these bikes has a big light on the front of it. That’s the style of the Bajaj Boxer. And what an opportunity as we aim to disciple these guys that they could truly be light moving around the city in thousands at a time and the amount of impact that they have is far greater than we could ever have because they’re touching 50 people a day, giving rides in the back in a pretty intimate setting. Honestly, as close as you are, especially if you pile a whole family on the back of a motorcycle. So yeah, it’s often that neglected part of society, but. So important because they are the backbone of society.

John Coleman: So in a moment, we’re going to pivot and we’re going to ask each of you guys, if you don’t mind, just to comment on a scripture that you’re reading right now and what it means to you and just what you’re learning in the word. Before we do that, just one more thing. Tell us what’s next for Pureflow and is additional capital going to play a part in that as you think about further investment?

Jared Fulks: Yeah. And I’ll pass it off to Tom real quick, because Tom is such an integral part. And I mentioned we raised a little bit of money in 2021 and we saw that and we forex in 2021. And a lot of those great things happened and a lot of the challenges came as well when we did that and we were really not certain what was next. But Tom, can I pass that to you to kind of share maybe a bit of how you encouraged us in the growth stage? Because this really came around that the partnership that we found in Tom and their fund.

Tom Lernihan: Yeah. From the very early days, the vision that Collin and Jared had cast and how many bikes they were hoping to serve and what they could see as their their big, hairy, audacious goal. I looked at and I said, Guys, we can do more. We can serve more drivers. I know that there’s plenty of capital in the market that’s looking to support visions exactly like this. Let’s dream bigger, let’s move faster and let’s go crazy. And it even got to points where Jared and Collin has. Hey, we’ve got a real back, time a bit here. We want to stay laser focused on serving our customers and making sure that we are excellent at Kingdom Impact in everything that we do. So they’ve been really pouring in to me and like at myself, just making sure that I know we’re impactful, focused investors, but still we want to do it with excellence and we want to make sure we’re moving at the right pace. And so I think we’ve gotten to a point where we have a great plan moving forward. I think they have an excellent opportunity to serve a tremendous amount of drivers, and we’ll grow at a pace that’s really sustainable and allows them to continue this for many years to come.

Jared Fulks: Yeah, and to speak to the partnership side, John and Luke, it’s Tom was a huge asset for us in this next stage of funding. We are finishing up 2021 and we’re looking ahead to say if we’re going to continue growing at the pace we are, we’re going to need more cash. So raise a little more debt. And we had a call with Andrew Firman at Faith Driven and he encouraged us to go back to our partners because that’s what they are. They’re partners. And so we went right back to Tom and Tom once he saw where we wanted to go and he aligned again. When you have alignment in this partnership, you can have a lot of fruit that comes from that. And it took us, I think, maybe six months to raise the first bit and we raised like three exact and about six weeks to start off 2022 thanks to the partnership that Tom brought to the table and and being able to connect us to other people on the side of the table he’s on that we don’t spend as much time on. And so we can’t speak highly enough to the value of the partnership and what that means and why we look at our investors as partners and not investors, because we truly are trying to steward resources. That God is given us on all sides of the table to advance the gospel in places all over the world.

John Coleman: And that’s an awesome word. I mean, we see that all the time where, you know, folks will chase the highest value or they may think about their partners in the wrong way, capital partners in a more transactional way. But finding the right capital partner at folks like Tom and others that y’all probably met in this process can be transformational, both on a personal level for an entrepreneur who’s struggling through a ton of problems every day and, you know, encountering things, and then also on an organizational level where they can really help to cast vision, connect you to others who share that vision. And so I think it’s wonderful that you highlighted the depth of that partnership before we close out today. We do like to close just with what you’re learning from the scriptures, what you’re learning in your own spiritual walk, and maybe start with Tom and then go through to Collin and then Jared. Tom, what are you learning from Scripture right now that you want to share with the group?

Tom Lernihan: Yes. Now, I’m always learning, but right now I’m working through Hebrews and it’s the idea that God is an anchor in my life and all that we do, and that we tether that rope tight so that as the world drifts us and as we find ourselves ultimately following that flow, that the anchor, he’s the center of our lives and that we continue to stay on that path. And I share an example earlier. Jared and Collin have been great at just reinforcing that and the work that we do and keeping him central to our investment strategy. And just as a man of faith, keeping that central to my life is what I’m working on right now.

Luke Roush: Love that. You know, if there’s no current, then we don’t need anchors. Except there is a current. The current of this world is not the current that the Lord is necessarily want us to move in the direction of. So I love that word. That’s a good word, Tom.

Collin Wenrich: Yeah, thank you very much. Tom that’s good. I would say, you know, this has been a crazy season of life in such, so many beautiful ways. We were just over in Uganda for the past three months, my wife and myself, and just got back to the States and we found out that we’re pregnant with our first. So we’re very excited. But through that journey and through this time of prayer to have been. Praying and proverbs and Lord has put Proverbs 14 on my heart actually the last few days. It says, Whoever fears the Lord has a secure fortress and for their children it will be a refuge. And it’s really this like my hearts cry, my heart’s call on to the Lord of light. Man, I want to be just one with you attached to the vine. But also, as I raise my children, that they get to see that right, that they seek refuge under their father, who has submitted first and foremost to the Lord. And so that’s been my prayer. Navigating through a future fatherhood here soon and just seeking wisdom in the Lord.

John Coleman: That’s awesome. Congrats, Collin. What a great word. And Jared, I don’t know how you’re going to top a birth announcement to close us out here.

Jared Fulks: I’ve got nothing, man. Can someone closes in prayer? You know that that might be my role here. Now, I have been reminded, and this is part of the journey that I’m so grateful to. Collin, if you talk about partnership, there’s no other word. I would define what happened two years ago after literally stone cold silence for five years, no conversation. I would never have thought of Collins name again. Honestly, he probably wouldn’t have mine other than God intervening at the right time and reconnecting us. But I’m grateful for his partnership. But in this journey to have some perspective shift, when you work with people that live in a different culture than you every day, your perspective just shifts. And I praise God for His grace in allowing us to see that in different ways, that before we didn’t and the psalmist I was reading the last few days is Psalm 48, and it just says like your name oh God, your praise reaches to the ends of the earth, and sometimes the task can seem a little overwhelming. Thinking about Thailand and the Philippines and Russia and Ukraine and and Uganda and the challenges and then looking at, you know, the United States. And that has been a reminder to me that he sees way further than we see. And he’s a creator of it all. And his praise will be made known across the world. And so that’s been a great refresher for me to know that, yeah, there are challenges out there and yes, there’s a urgency to go show the gospel. But but his creation is going to sing his praise, whether we do or not.

John Coleman: It’s a great word, guys. And look, it’s been awesome to learn about Pureflow. Tom, it’s been great to learn about your investment strategy. Great testimony to the marketplace and to faith driven investor broadly bringing folks together like this. And we wish you great luck. I know the prayers of the community are with you, as well as a number of other good capital partners out there, hopefully as you encounter the next wave of growth. And we’re grateful for your time today. Thanks for joining us.

Luke Roush: Thanks, Colin. Thanks, Jared. Thanks, Tom.

Collin Wenrich: Thank you, guys, for having us.

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Patrick Fisher founded Creation Investments in 2007, leaving JPMorgan with a vision to find profitable solutions to difficult social and environmental challenges. As Founder and Managing Partner of Creation Investments Capital Management, Patrick and his team oversee $1.8 billion in assets under management with investments in financial services for the unbanked, supporting international development, poverty eradication, and wealth creation.

Episode Transcript

Henry Kaestner: Welcome back to the Faith Driven Investor podcast. This is a special edition, if you listen to this semi-regular, you’ll know that all too often say this is a special edition of the Faith Driven Investor podcast. Maybe it’s because I think they’re all really special and they are today, in particular because microfinance, Christ centered economic development, human flourishing through capital markets and in the marketplace is a great passion of mine, and I can think of few guests that kind of embody all of that altogether. Dan Patrick Fischer He runs a fund that invest in microfinance. And so I’ve had the great privilege and honor of getting to know Patrick. Over the years, I’ve been involved in microfinance. I’m not an expert. I did get a chance to serve on the Board of Hope International, and so many of our audience will know Peter Greer and think highly of him. And I was on long enough to get a working knowledge of how effective it is to alleviate financial and spiritual poverty, but not long enough to be an expert, which is why we’ve got Patrick on board, who brings us all together. How do you think about an investment fund? How do you think about emerging markets? How do you think about the underlying investment of microfinance as it deals with poverty alleviation? All these things together and throwing the other thing I care about too, which is Faith driven entrepreneurs ship and is an itinerary because he’s launched his fund. So. Patrick, welcome to the program.

Patrick Fisher: Thanks. Thanks, Henry. Really great to be here.

Henry Kaestner: So we’re going to get into law here. We’re going to talk about the pros and cons of microfinance. We’re going to ask you about the things you’ve learned and how your working theory of change has changed over time. Some of your experiences love to hear some of the stories. But before we do all of that, we do like to get an autobiographical sketch of Who’s our guest? Who are you? Where do you come from?

Patrick Fisher: Sure. Well, I was born and raised in Southern California. My father left right before I was born. So my mom, a single mom, had to raise my older brother and me and L.A. and Orange County. I went into Boy Scouts as a young kid, and that’s where I came to faith. My scoutmaster brought so many kids to Faith Cliff Mauvais, which I’m really grateful for his ministry in that role. He also gave me my first job as a landscaper using, I guess, cheap labor, cheap kid labor, but also it as a great way to administer to kids and build them up and equip them for life. So after going through high school, I got a scholarship to go to a Catholic high school in Southern California, and I went to Notre Dame in Indiana and studied philosophy, theology as well as computer science, and came to Chicago and got a job at a bank. I was part of JPMorgan for about seven years, eight years, worked overseas in China and came back to the US actually during the start of the epidemic in 2003. And that’s really when all the lights started to come on about economic development, the use of capitalism and business and investment capital to achieve missional goals. I finished my MBA at Northwestern at night and continue my career at Morgan until taking a leave of absence actually from a bank to become an executive pastor at my local church here in Chicago, which is a church plant, helped launch a couple other church campuses within the Chicago area. And at that time had already been incubating the idea of creation investments, which is when I formally left both JPMorgan and the church in 2007 to start creation investments. So it’s been quite a ride. I’ve got amazing and beautiful wife and we’ve been married for 14 years now. We’ve got three young kids, got a dog named Bacon, and we live in the city of Chicago. We very much believe in living in the city, and they just really haven’t had an amazing life.

Henry Kaestner: So that’s amazing to me. And yes, we’re going to get to the idea of the lights coming on. But your dog’s name bacon. I have a dog. We’ve got a dog is a Newfoundland. His name is Gus. If I were to say something smells like Gus, everybody here knows exactly what I’m talking about. And that’s not necessarily a beautiful thing when you say it smells like bacon. Do people think about bacon or the dog?

Patrick Fisher: Probably the actual food. No, he’s a he’s a great dog. Know, being a philosophy and theology major, I have a love of sort of the writers and great thinkers, so I wanted to name our kids, you know? Oh, but my wife wouldn’t allow me to. Exactly. Sir Francis Bacon. But it works both ways, which I hope is how all of us, you know where we were able to laugh, but also allude to sort of bigger ideas. Bacon is what my wife allowed me to name our dog, not our journalism.

Henry Kaestner: There’s nothing deeper theologically about Gus talking about the lights coming on, though. Talk to us about that experience as you are thinking about starting creation. And so fast forward a bit. How big is creation today? And then, yeah, we’re going to go right back into what do you mean by the lights coming on? And then how do you say, Well, you know, this is the opportunity?

Patrick Fisher: Yeah. I mean, you know, by God’s grace, we’ve been in existence for 15 years now. We managed $1.6 billion in assets, and they’re all dedicated to impact ESG investing in financial inclusion, which is this bigger category. Microfinance is a part of it, but a bigger category. How do you provide financial services to the poor, the unbanked, the underbanked women? How do you give them access to capital savings insurance payment tools all to help them manage risk and get access to the productive means of our day to increase income and improve livelihood? So that’s the mission of creation. We have offices in Mexico City and Bangalore and through those offices in our office here in Chicago. We make investments and own banks, non-bank finance companies, insurance companies, payments companies, fintech tech enabled businesses that makes these kinds of investments and loans to the marginalized. So yeah, that’s I mean where we are, we’re scc registered, and that’s a big part of one of my messages to Faith Driven Investor use the structures that exist, but within that do it differently. And that’s a way to get to scale because the problems we’re trying to deal with are massive and require scale and require the use of all the tools we have available to achieve true kingdom and scalable impact.

Henry Kaestner: What was it that you saw during your time at JPMorgan, where he said, OK, there’s a problem. Any good entrepreneur is about solving a problem and bringing something closer to the way the Kingdom of God might look like? Was there a formative experience where he said, OK, this is where I know that I’m called to do, and here’s why.

Patrick Fisher: Yeah, it’s a very much so. When I lived in China, I was living in Beijing. At the time, JPMorgan Morgan was getting a local bank license, which allowed us to make local currency loans in renminbi and going through that licensing process and realizing, you know, JP Morgan was going to make loans of the equivalent of one hundred million two hundred million dollars to large corporations. Yet on my way back and forth between the regulator and our offices, you’d pass by a little shop after little shop, after a little shop that had no access to a bank loan. And after coming back, I started to read about microfinance. I started to read about all the NGOs, in particular Christian NGOs that were doing phenomenal work and making small loans of poor. And that’s really when the connection came in. Of all the mission trips, all the work we’ve done, all the experiences I’ve had in particular in high poverty situations and to see how banking as a core service use of capitalism could be leveraged to that very problem. And so I wrote in my journal in two thousand three. I love Jesus and I love capitalism. You know, how do we put these together? And I happen to be somebody who’s sort of a bank nerd just like the rest of my team. For some reason, we love banks. So that became a very obvious place to say, how do we use our our interest or curiosity in banking and our love of God to propel us down this road to read every book, went to every conference, met all the people from World Vision, from Opportunity International, and really started to talk to them about the difference in paradigm between giving as a mechanism to achieve these goals versus using investment capital and why investment capital had some attributes to it that would first allow it to scale. Because we all know there is an order of magnitude of investment capital than there will ever be on the charitable side to. How do we free up the charitable money to do only what charitable money can do, which is, you know, evangelism and church and other kinds of things without a business model. But how do you tap in and leverage investment capital for mission driven investments that really do have a true business model and a track record? And how do we deal with the risk return within that? And so over time, just start to develop this and other funds were coming about at that time. But there is a real need in private equity in particular, and that’s what fit my background and the background of my team members. That seemed like a pretty obvious place to put our time and energy.

Henry Kaestner: So when you talk about private equity, can I say that there’s some level of an entrepreneurial ecosystem of folks that are trying to solve problems in their local context, but they themselves need capital to, in turn provide capital to their customers? Am I getting that right?

Patrick Fisher: Yeah, yeah. I think capital is the ultimate phrase here. I mean, we all know there are certain kinds of capital, there’s financial money, there’s intellectual capital, there’s social capital, there’s spiritual capital. God is the ultimate investor of all of this has given us all different kinds of capital to use. So how do we involve ourselves? Seize our intellectual capital to channel financial capital to those that need it? Unfortunately, poverty in America is an incredibly complicated thing. Know I’d say by and large, when you go to rural India, let’s say it. Very uncomplicated, if there is a lack of financial capital in those markets where you wish a $200 loan could affect you in major ways, poverty on the south side of Chicago and effectuate job creation and economic development. $200 loan can actually do that in certain places in the world, where in other places they’re more complicated problems that need to be untangled and worked on, not just plugging a financial capital hole. So then that’s where the whole spectrum of charitable capital and financial capital really have a role to play in all of this. But what we’re narrowly focused on is where we can use pension funds, insurance, high net worth family assets, capital where there are going to be investing it anyhow. But how do you invest it in a bank that is specifically targeting low income women? A lot like my mom, who was the working poor working to provide for a family as a single mom? How do we get behind those entrepreneurs who are forced to be entrepreneurs but don’t have access to the productive means of their day and the Bible and biblical times? There was land access to land, which is why cleaning was so important for gleaning even involved work and effort. And there’s something beautiful about that. But how do we give people capital so that they can get a return on their effort? And that’s, you know, ultimately in something we’ve talked about probably years ago, Henry might have forgotten. But when I read Isaiah, 65, to me, that was really when it all came together. And for those like all of us who might not know Isaiah sixty five by heart. Just to recap, in the middle of the chapter, Isaiah is saying he sees the new heaven in the new Earth. God is declaring the new heaven in the new Earth, and this is what it will look like, and it will look like a person is able to plant in a field and they eat of the harvest and a person builds a house and they live in that house. It will no longer be that somebody builds a house and a different person lives there, or a different person gets to eat on the field. And that no longer will children be born into misfortune, and that if that’s the new heaven and newer that’s really being depicted, it’s really one of empowerment. How do you help somebody build their own house where they live in it? And how do you help them plan to feel where they get the upside of the production? And that ultimately is what alone and other kinds of financial services help people tap into. And we actually make affordable housing loans. You know, our newest portfolio company, Vastu, has now over $400 million of $10000 apiece single family loans to help people construct their own home. And, you know, it’s just unbelievable. Company 40 percent loan to value. So from a banker standpoint, very low risk. Yeah, we have a point four percent delinquency rate. So again, very low risk, we’re growing at almost 100 percent per year, which makes it a very exciting investment proposition, profitable company. But to be helping, you know, hundreds of thousands of people build their own home and living, it is very much a fulfillment of Isaiah, 65.

Henry Kaestner: So I love that passage. And now we’re going to use Isaiah, 65, much more freely. And I may or may not give you credit for it. Now I will. I will. I think that that’s really important. I think that we all are wondering what the new heavens and the Earth look like. And I I know that I’ve read Isaiah, 65, but I don’t think through that context. So that’s a blessing for me. The question for you on how you think about and you can correct me if I’m using my terminology and the concepts wrong. But a lot of times I think the general concept of what you’re talking about being the fortune at the bottom end of the pyramid and having spent some time with microfinance, I know that in many communities you’ve got usurious money lenders who are out there, and the way that people are able to access capital is just really just exacerbates poverty. So if somebody is borrowing money at what effectively might be a couple hundred percent on an annualized basis, right? You borrow five at the beginning of the week and you go up six back at the end of the week and it compounds pretty quickly when you do that as an entrepreneur. What’s the temptation to come in and say, Well, we’re not going to charge 100 percent annualized basis, but we’re going to charge 60 or 70 percent. We’re still 30 or 40 percent under. But the market is, you know, because users money lenders have been out forever. There’s clearly a big enough market and we can make a lot of money and still be a third cheaper. How do you process that conceptually? And then presumably, as you invest in these different institutions yourselves, you have to have some sort of guidelines because some of the companies you’re investing in might also be tempted to have something less usurious, but still in a way that doesn’t allow the poor to really escape. This cycle of poverty, how do you process that?

Patrick Fisher: Yeah. No great questions. I mean, first and foremost, the money lenders are the people that we want to put out of business through our activity. And the best way to do that, I feel, is through the power of markets. There always be room and importance for good regulation and laws and consumer protection. And those are the markets we invest in that have good consumer protection and laws against serious money lending. But it’s one of the reasons why we focus on regulated banking institutions that comply with not only the consumer protection requirements, but also a part of our own code of ethics and policies about client protection principles where under what was called the smart campaign, but also using capital to drive interest rates down and drive access and capital is the best way of doing that introduction of competition. And this goes back to the sort of the love of capitalism and there always needs to be. Maybe before I go on sort of a healthy sense of distrust of any system, any human system, there should be a sense of distrust of socialism, as well as a sense of distrust of capitalism. We shouldn’t, you know, anticipate that these systems will create in a fallen world some perfect utopia. There’ll always be a tendency toward abuse or some form of misuse. But capitalism is the best system we have and has demonstrated results over and over again of having a unique ability to allow people to bring whatever capital they have to the system and participate as equals and to participate once given access to further levels of capital to generate their own returns on that. So what we really like to see is where Christians in particular get off the sidelines and get into the mess of what these situations are. And by bringing their capital in, it drives the costs of money down. By using technology, it drives the cost of client acquisition, client transaction costs, collection costs down, increasing transparency drives risk costs down. So all those things are really good for the business model. We actually make way more money as just a pure financial investment by having lower interest rates and sticky customer relationships, customers that not only have a willingness to repay but such excess returns in their own business that they want to borrow more for the next loan because of the returns they’re able to generate. It’s often why you see, even if we look around Chicago, you know, title loans, which are pretty dodgy, payday lending, you know, they’re always these kind of one or two stop to location places. You know, JPMorgan’s got trillions of dollars under assets. You don’t get the trillions of dollars and that much market value by trying to eke out a couple more percent on folks. You do it by building enterprise value, by helping people flourish, because then they won’t only need or want a home loan. They’ll also need a small business loan or an education loan for their children. Don’t need insurance on top of that. That’s really what I see how the financial, social, spiritual returns all come in, especially when you’re acting like an equity owner, thereby really delivering excellent value to the client by lowering rates, increasing access it leads to. It is a direct contributor to our financial returns, and that’s why I love the alignment. But I would say with all things, everyone should wrestle with what it means to lend money, what it means to charge a customer or whatever business you’re in. How do you judge a fair price? How do you judge a fair wage? And that’s something we rely on the Holy Spirit to work in us and to help us use our wisdom. You do that in community, but also we do have this functioning market. When a market does function, it by definition will help you price something. The laws of supply and demand really do help you find a price, and that essentially leads to what is now a burgeoning market of individuals who now hundreds and hundreds of millions of people now have access to financial services that didn’t, and they’ve come out of the shadow banks and into formal regulated opportunities. And that’s a whole part of the mission. That’s why it’s called financial inclusion, bringing people into the systems that we get to use and benefit from every day.

Henry Kaestner: So I’d love for you to talk to us a little bit more about that. You said at the outset, of course, that financial inclusion is much more than just microfinance, though that that’s an element. And you mentioned that this home fund. Give us some more examples of the types of investments you make and kind of the larger cornucopia, if you will, of financial inclusion. Sure.

Patrick Fisher: So we’re the largest owner of a licensed bank in Mexico called Tim Keller Amos. It’s the number two in terms of market penetration micro lender, so they do three hundred dollar loans almost exclusively to women in Mexico.

Henry Kaestner: Well, I love the name and this is me dropping that. I know you’re still there. Yeah, but you know, we believe in you, right?

Patrick Fisher: Is that exactly what a great name? Yeah, I agree. From that core micro loan of three hundred dollars, they’ve also added through their app the ability to make utility payments, the ability to save in a savings account and have access to a savings account and Braun Insurance. We do life insurance health insurance now, and that’s been a big draw. That creation investments brought to the company helped them expand. Also in Mexico, we’re investors in a company called Plus Corp., which does $100000 to $500000 small business loans and leases, mainly for equipment. Somebody needs to buy a machine. We have a fleet for people need trucks, all the small business needs. So we’re involved in the one hundred thousand dollar loans. We’re investors in several different companies in India, one being that the affordable housing finance lender that I mentioned, Vastu, another one which has become a unicorn over the past couple of years, have been our best investment ever. But a company called Of Business, which has a technology platform that allows small businesses to go online and order basic materials, lumber, steel, concrete bags of concrete. And so this company handles the ordering the logistics to get 10 bags of concrete delivered to your small business. And then they’ll also provide the financing they’ll give you that, you know, a couple thousand dollars you need for your order of lumber for the 90 day period in which you’re using that lumber to build furniture, for example. And that business has grown dramatically, and COVID has only accelerated all of the digital adoption and efforts there. We’ve been involved in used vehicle finance, so we do a lot of two, three and four wheel vehicles. So if you know your motorbikes and took trucks and all in Southeast Asia, still in Sri Lanka, as well as Cambodia and Thailand, we’ve done other kinds of products like pure insurance. So we have a company called Afler Insurance, which is in four different countries in South America and Mexico, Brazil, Peru and Chile. And they provide a variety of different kinds of insurance products, including now mortgage insurance. You know, you don’t think about the role that mortgage insurance plays even here in America to help people get access to that loan. The banks wouldn’t lend money to a first time homebuyer, typically if there wasn’t some form of insurance or other kind of securitization pool or a Fannie Mae or all these systems that we really take for granted. But they’re what’s required there, the pipes that are required to be able to channel money to these underbanked folks. And maybe with that, I’ll just use our last example, which is where the majority owner of a company in India called the Greedy Capital and the variety really is building the pipes for the entire debt capital markets in India. They have a digital business called Credit Avenue, which allows for institutional money to flow and make a digital debt market. But they also have their own balance sheet in which they channel capital to lenders like a micro lender, like a fusion microfinance or an education finance that’s doing small ticket loans to help pay for school fees. Because school fees in the majority of the world are due upfront before you start school, you have to pay as you go, and that just shows you how much capital is still needed to help our whole globe really take a big step up in economic development. So those are a few of our companies.

Henry Kaestner: So this next question to ask you is going to sound, by the way, I ask it to be prescriptive or presumptuous. It’s not meant to be that way because what you’re able to do in the marketplace in terms of offering up financial inclusion is very much about human flourishing. And yet I also know, of course, that you’re very much motivated by your Christian faith. What are opportunities that you see on the ground to be able to address not just financial piety, which is huge issue to be clear, but also maybe to partner with others. But what does it look like also in some of these markets to be able to address spiritual poverty as well? Are there opportunities that you see that or is that just, hey, actually, you know, maybe didn’t catch me at the beginning? I said that there are opportunities for charitable capital, and that’s an evangelism in church planning. And so I’m not meant to say be judgmental because if you say no, we don’t do it, that’s the wrong answer. Not at all. But do you see operating? How do you process that?

Patrick Fisher: Yeah. Well, I mean, I would say, first and foremost, you start with your own calling as a teenager as coming to say that I was, I did. Street witnessing in Southern California, so on Friday nights, you know, so so, you know, God is fed a desire to evangelize in my own heart and hopefully a gift in that. And so doing that through my own personal work here at the firm with every employee that I have here and my partners and and our team members, as well as on the boards I sit in and the regulators that I get to meet with, and I’ve been invited to speak at the Vatican against Jesus

Henry Kaestner: of regulators

Patrick Fisher: to death. He does, you know, interestingly, when we need to sign forms and certain parts of Southeast Asia, I have to sign Patrick Fischer Comma Christian comma here by saying as a director, so it’s very much there on my director forms as well. But with that, I think there’s just something that really needs to be communicated about how we work with our management teams, too. And we have CEOs in all of these businesses, men and women that are amazing leaders and teaching them how to lead with their faith and to communicate our own faith. Now, of course, we have Hindu and Muslim and Christian and Protestant Christians, Catholic Christians, we’ve all sorts of and atheists, management teams as well. So this is a great opportunity for them to know why we do what we do and who we are. And I’ve always very much believe that Christians should be leaders in the impact investing space. I mean, nobody should be able to put all these components better than a Christian, especially creation care the environment who should care more. You know, somebody that sort of says, we’re here randomly and we evolve with no real design. Why would you know we’re just a bunch of atoms now? It should be people that really believe that we have a creator, and that’s part of the name. Creation is the creation of opportunities, the sense of that we’ve been created to do something and that we need to care for all of God’s creation, as well as wealth being created, not exchanged. And that’s one of the big misnomer is that we try to deal with. But with that, there is a spiritual element, of course, that goes into our work. And I think it goes back to some of the principles even Martin Luther talked about with with the Cobbler and his example, which I’m sure you’re very familiar of, which is how does a cobbler best represent Christ? Is it by putting a cross on every shoe or is it just making really good shoes? And Luther says it’s by making really good shoes and maybe a misattributed that maybe it’s somebody else, but I led the group. We’re going to go

Henry Kaestner: with it offered this thing.

Patrick Fisher: Yeah. So it’s about being excellent at what we do in financial services, knowing we’re going to work with diverse teams, knowing we’re motivated by our faith and knowing the best way to honor God and inspire others is by creating the best financial institutions that will really be a light. Now through that, it gives us a platform and I’ve had a platform to speak to our investors. Some of our investors just see this as one of the best opportunities to make a financial return because we’re in emerging markets where in high growth financial services has a great track record behind it. Our own track record is fantastic. But there’s an opportunity to say that’s not all we’re doing here. We’re a part of the idea. Sixty five that we talked about earlier and we’re doing it motivated out of our faith. That doesn’t lead to any fuzzy thinking, though, of why we do or how we do what we do with rigor. But also, you know, we have and will continue to give to things like city to city and other kinds of churches that are in and involved in these areas to strengthen the local church around where our investments are. We give to other NGOs as well that are doing health care, education, spiritual evangelism and church and other kinds of community work as a way to know what we do has a very specific focus, but clearly for a whole human flourishing, we’re going to need all sorts of groups to be involved and address a particular community for the resources that they need and the sharing of the gospel.

Henry Kaestner: So I love that perspective. I think back to an NPR report that I heard recently. I actually went online. I found it, but it was probably 10 years ago, and they’re doing a 40 year retrospective on the Green Revolution in India. And they talked about how, you know, 40 or 50 years ago, people weren’t talking about the climate as much. They were talking about worldwide starvation. That was the big problem. People in India are going to starve. And so the Green Revolution came about increasing crop yields, and they were looking at doing this retrospective and I thought was very curious the way they did it. They looked back and said, you know, with the advent of pesticides and water and financial tools, the crop yields have absolutely increased. But 40 years on now, instead of using two bags of pesticide per hectare, you get to use 20 instead of drawing 20 feet for water. You’ve got to draw 80. And because of the proliferation of that vehicle, some number of Indian farmers have gotten overextended, and depression and even suicide have become rampant. You know, it’s kind of a cautionary tale. And it ignores the fact that, you know, millions of people didn’t starve to be clear. Many more millions of people were saved from starvation then and having mental illness and suicide. But as I’m listening to this, I thought, Oh my goodness, this was great in terms of addressing financial poverty. But if the church had been able to have this thoughtful partnership in there. These are people may come to understand that not only am I not concerned, but there actually a guy that really loves me and gave me this gift of life. And so I love to hear that where you can’t necessarily do the type of things that you have a heart for in evangelism through the model, you’re able to supplement some of those things by knowing the communities in which you serve. In some cases, it means working with church planners and doing it holistically, but with an idea that there is an opportunity to alleviate spiritual poverty in addition to financial poverty. And I suppose that some part of that includes addressing the the spiritual poverty we all have inside ourselves, too.

Patrick Fisher: Yeah, I mean, I think the farmers in India and I’ll bring up a couple of different points here. I hope I can be articulate, but one is, yeah, it’s been an amazing revolution that it’s occurred within India and China as well. I mean, hundreds of millions of people over the last decades have moved from extreme poverty now into being low income, which is even out of the poverty level, which is unbelievable and wonderful from a reduction of human suffering. With that comes, of course, you’ll always get excesses. And it’s again one of the things we want to drive out through our operations. You know, there was a survey done even 10 years ago looking at Indian farmers and prior to financial services being offered. There are about 11000 suicides a year within the Indian farmer community after financial services, those with financial services from a regulated institution. There were 30 suicides total. Wow. So the reason I bring that up, and it’s not to say that, you know again, that these are magic bullet solutions to all you know alone can only do so much, but it does impart dignity and hope in a very powerful way. Now it’s incomplete without the whole picture of Jesus, but it’s the cup of cold water in Jesus name. It’s the opportunity to play a role in your community. It’s the path out of dealing with the local money lender. You know, it’s really substantial. And then the crop increases to me. Is it getting back to even the why I named the firm creation to begin with is exactly the point that there’s always been a fear that by investing in social enterprise that deals with poverty or the poor, that you’ll be extracting rents essentially from the poorer that we make money because they lost money. But the point of planting seeds and knowing that you can plant and have a harvest that yields a normal yield, or five fold or 10 fold or biblically 100 fold. Now how do you account for that game? And how should it be split? And that gain is the essential framework that God put into our whole world system is that, he adds, increase and that wealth can really be created. It’s not just exchanged. And so how do we provide financial capital and not just financial capital, but other kinds of services? I mentioned this company of business on logistics and ordering and inventory management. We do the same in agriculture. Our latest company, Rusty Amundi, does a ton within the silk and cotton supply chains in India. And that’s a very interesting case because those supply chains are dominated at different points by Hindu or Muslim communities. The Muslim community are primarily weavers within silk, but they don’t trust the other Hindu communities by and large. So how do you have an intermediary help those two communities trade with one another, their inputs and outputs so there can be an increase of wealth for both sides? And you do that through transparency, through financial services, by injecting liquidity technology so that there’s trust and that’s what this company recombined. Mandi has done an amazing, amazing ways. But it all goes back to that metaphor of planting and really trying to create excessive yields because the Earth and we have a god of abundance who wants to have excessive yields. But the economic yields are not the only ones here. There are other things happening, but just the core financial service alone actually does. It’s not a complete evangelism, but there’s so much dignity and hope that’s in part of that is very easily measured just through that sort of farmer suicide ratio.

Henry Kaestner: So we’re coming down to the end of the podcast. And just so, you know, if you’ve listened to podcast before we get to, we’re going to finish this up by asking you a verse. Or something that you feel or understand that guy speaking to you through his word about two things you come through and let’s hit them in rapid fire, kind of like the ESPN 30 for 30 at the end, just kind of rapid fire. First one is I love the fact you brought the parable sower in. It’s my favorite passage actually in the Bible on investments. Not the parable of the talents is not even it when a treasure in heaven where moss and rice don’t destroy, it’s actually the 36.0, as you mentioned. And the thing that holds us back from that 3500 is you’ve gone through the things like that. The sea has been picked down, and all this stuff with the final one is the worries of the world and the deceitfulness of riches as folks come out of poverty and are looking at are now in the low income. At what point in time is there opportunities to have kind of like a crown? I’d see I’m being too prescriptive, but you know, a crown, financial type of thing like all these things you thought you might have, you know, in the emerging consumer class. And to be clear, Sovereign’s Capital, which I co-founded, is involved in the emerging middle class and it’s based on a consumer economy. And yet we know that the worries of the world and the deceitfulness of riches can hold us back from that 30, 60 100. At what point in time does the people that are coming out of poverty come to realize some financial wisdom? That’s above the context in the scope of what you do with your fund, but I’m curious on any thoughts you have on that as these folks start getting money.

Patrick Fisher: Yeah, I love it. I mean, I think essentially and you mentioned hope and hope and again, World Vision or are working in the hardest places in the world that are fundamentally on investable investment capital won’t go there. There’s just too many risks. But as a donor, we should take that risk essentially by the money already being given away. It doesn’t require a return. Put it in these hard plays that make it work. Give these people access as that access increases and as people are more and more well-off, they start to put their excess income into protein. So they’re stronger education, health care into their children, really into better homes, which lead to health outcomes that are great. But then they move toward some more business opportunities and consumables, so use vehicle televisions, access to internet and information. And as you move up that chain, there’s now going to be a push toward how do we offer wealth services, wealth management services for our client, who 10 or 20 years ago made less than a couple of dollars a day and now has access income to invest for the future? And with that, our financial literacy courses that we offer through our institutions, there’s financial literacy and training also needs to adjust because financial literacy for someone who’s basically on the margins of poverty and survival needs to be about how do loans work, how to use it for productive purposes, how to repay, how to save, how to become more resourceful and use the capital over time. It needs to start dealing with the other issues that money provides and brings out, which are issues of the heart and of abundance. And what do I do with my money? How do I cultivate a generous giving heart and we’ve all had to go through that in our own journeys? And that will just naturally happen as we move along, but that’s definitely the goal.

Henry Kaestner: OK, last question before we get to the scripture, and it’s as follows You start in 2017, you talked about. Twenty seven. What are and you knew enough in 2007 because you talked about running your journal in 2003, but you knew enough in 2007. Here’s a problem. I’m called into it. And yet, undoubtedly, over the last 15 years, you’ve learned a lot and you spent a ton of time in these different countries. Can you talk to us briefly about the lessons you’ve learned and the things it may not have been as you thought they would be? When you first got into this, because most of the listeners this podcast are starting to get involved in frontier in emerging markets and thinking, You know, what can I expect? I’m feel drawn into it. I see the biblical mandate, the opportunity to participate in what God is doing in the world. But what’s something you’ve learned over the last 15 years that maybe you didn’t expect?

Patrick Fisher: Yeah. Well, I would say a few things, but maybe like if anyone’s going to do a construction project on their house, you know, anticipated it’ll take twice as long and cost twice as much. So it is just sort of anticipate and normalized disruption failure even and really try to strip out that really easy to slip in notion that if it’s successful, that means God’s in it. And I tried to debunk that every time people say, Wow, you know what you’ve done, accretions gone so well and been so successful. It’s clear God’s in it to try to wave my hands and say no way, you know, God was in it. If we failed, if we failed at year one or year five or had to shut down, God was in it because my job was to follow him every day and do the job that he asked me to do that day. And that’s still the case today. The numbers may have changed. And the details are different, but it’s very much the same calling, so that to me is a fundamental. If you focus on that, then all the rest can come and go and you’ll be completely grounded in what is, you know, especially when dealing with emerging markets. But even just look over the last 15 years from a global financial crisis now to COVID and in between, we had a bank in Russia in 2014, when the first Ukraine crisis and issues were going on. We went through demonetization in India, so currencies and out of pandemic. I think what what remains to be true is that the mission is unbelievable and that our work has a real, tangible impact. I’ve never believed in financial services for the poor more. It’s never been more investable. But what I also know is that just it’s constantly changing and complicated world. And if you put your identity into anything other than being a servant and following God and doing the job we asked you to do, you’re going to get away, of course. Real quick.

Henry Kaestner: OK, well said. I lied. I’ve got one more before we close with scripture, and that is that the listeners to this podcast are going to go the whole spectrum. They’re going be qualified purchasers, accredited investors, folks working for foundations, endowments, hopefully right down to the word owner. Might some number of the people listening to this and this is not a fun pitch, but some number of people are going to listen. It’s like, Oh my goodness, I’ve got to be an LP in something like this, and that’s awesome. Some other number won’t be able to. Or maybe they can. How would you speak to a listener in this audience that says, Oh my goodness, I get it. I want to invest in financial inclusion? What’s the spectrum of what’s available to them as they are called to participate?

Patrick Fisher: Yeah, great question. I mean, again, we still continue to give out of a charitable bucket to financial services for the poor, in particular in frontier markets. So that’s the Congo and Haiti and, you know, really almost failed states where, you know, it’s the ultimate of risk. But you’re thrilled that Christians in particular are they’re leading the charge and helping build the foundation such that as those countries and communities grow, that really you could utilize them this next bucket of investment capital and within the investment capital world, there are a number of different options. Obviously, creation is one that’s focused on financial inclusion. Again, we’re only open and eligible for qualified investors, accredited investors because we’re scc regulated and under private funds and private placement rules. But within that, there are other firms that offer private credit, private equity opportunities and more and more. We’ll see public investment vehicles allow for this. So there’s a whole spectrum of what’s available. I think most people tend to fix their capital toward a geography of Tennessee. So if you’re hired as for Africa, it’s going to end up being a donation to one of the great charities doing great work. If your heart is for a place like India, there are a number of amazing investment opportunities there as well. And I’m thrilled that some of our investors obviously are very large institutions, but others that really believe this is the best social return they can generate. Because the use of investment capital and the structure that business and shareholding naturally provides actually creates better impact than a charitable structure. And I don’t like to compare one versus the other in terms of effectiveness. It’s really all good, but I’m really excited about where investment capital can go.

Henry Kaestner: Outstanding. What’s something you’re hearing from God in this word? Maybe it’s today. Maybe is this week. Maybe it’s recently, but how is he speaking to you?

Patrick Fisher: Yeah. I mean, I think for me, the you know, it’s the come with me over to the other side, Praxis scripture, where you see Jesus challenging his disciples to take the next step with him. Me and my own leadership journey is what made us quote unquote successful or at least survive for the first many years was being scrappy, you know, really kind of a DIY mentality. Now that sort of early scrappiness startup mentality needs to shift into how do you build structures, policies, procedures, scale layers of teams really to manage more and more that we have coming in? And that’s a really exciting but scary calling to come to the next kind of level of leadership. And I know and I’m very familiar with the founders trap and really trying to buck that. So it really is trusting God that he’ll continue to equip me as a leader to hire and find great people because that’s always the fear. Whether you know you work in a church or a charity, or will God bring the next people that we’re going to need for the future and to trust that he will and that will be ready to empower them and, you know, in the right seats on the bus? When they come, so that’s really the word come with me to the other side. Yeah.

Henry Kaestner: Patrick, thank you. Very grateful.

Patrick Fisher: Yeah. Always great to be with you, Henry. Thanks for all you’re doing for faith driven entrepreneurs and investors.

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Today’s episode takes us to jail. Well…not exactly. But we are interviewing a man who owns and operates a business that is run out of a high-security prison. 

His name is Pete Ochs, and in addition to working as founder and chairman of an impact investing company, he’s also working to make Hutchinson Correctional Facility in Kansas the best prison in America. How? Well, we’ll let him tell you…

Pete is an expert when it comes to multiple bottom line investing—something many Faith Driven Investors are familiar with—and in this episode, he walked us through what that means, what it can look like, and how others can apply this approach to their own lives.

As always, thanks for listening.

Useful Links:

Jailhouse Business of Generosity

Inmate Confesses God’s Love at Seat King

Work as Flourishing in Prison

Enterprise Stewardship

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Today’s guest is one we’ve been excited about for a long time. Bob Doll is a leader in the faith-driven investing movement from his work at Oppenheimer Funds, Merrill Lynch, BlackRock, and now, Nuveen. 

You may have seen him on one of his frequent appearances on CNBC, and we were honored to have Bob join us last summer for the Faith Driven Investing gathering in Utah. The work he’s been doing for the best few decades has been instrumental in shaping the conversation this website is stewarding.

We owe a lot to Bob Doll and we’re excited to share the hard-earned wisdom his experience has yielded. As always, thanks for listening.

Useful Links:

Bob Doll’s 10 Predictions for 2020

Bob Doll on Faith and Finances

Maintaining a Christ-Like Attitude with Bob Doll

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 [00:02:11] Bob, we’re very grateful to have you on the show today. I hope we had time to cover as much of your journey as we possibly can, because I think it’s a really powerful one. I know it’s a really powerful one. I want to start with you, Tom. On Wall Street, some of audiences are retail investors are going to be familiar with Merrill Lynch, acid massage men and BlackRock in a lot of the places that you’ve been. But as we get started. Walk us through your journey and maybe some of the size and scope of the funds that you’ve been involved with, because I think that probably most of our listeners have interacted with some of the products that you and your teams have created at some point in time all along the way.

Bob [00:02:44] Yeah. First of all, thanks for having me on my professional journey. Henry started when I graduated from business school in 1980, and since then I’ve been on Wall Street. So next year we number forty hard to believe. Like many in this business, I started as an analyst, equity research analyst, disect ing companies figuring out what makes them tick. They make their money, got a break a couple of years and to be a junior portfolio manager. And that was my objective to manage money. I’ve managed U.S. large cap equities all my career at Citicorp and then at the Oppenheimer Funds where I did that, but also became CIO of Equities Chief Investment Office for the whole firm, was recruited to Merrill Lynch investment managers in 1999 and a couple of years became CEO of that business all along continuing to manage money. That was my trade. Always has been Lord knows, but probably always will be. BlackRock bought Merrill Lynch investment managers half a dozen years in and I worked there another half dozen years. And now I’m Nuveen, where I’m chief equity strategist. And guess what? A portfolio manager. So I spend time analyzing companies, creating portfolios, talking about markets, if you will, waving the flag for the firms I work for in the media and in the press more generally at the U.S. about scope. Again, all U.S. large cap, my team, my individual team and our peak, we managed $42 billion. But as CIO, I was responsible for over a trillion dollars of equity assets. And the firm BlackRock was the peak in assets of four trillion dollars under management. So it was a fair number of dollars to slosh around and be a steward of over those years. So it’s been a great ride.

Henry [00:04:33] Oh, my goodness. That’s right. I knew that when we were talking about Merrill Lynch asset management in some of these funds that I had not expected that it was as big as that. Trillion dollars is a lot of money to be responsible for. Tell me when a lot of our listeners think about Wall Street or at least let me tell you how I used to think that Wall Street, my introduction to Wall Street came back from I guess it was late 80s early 90s in the movie Wall Street. Michael Douglas in is Gooding Greed cuts through and captures the American spirit. And that, of course, is Bud Fox and the two phones. And it wasn’t necessarily a place that would be known for maybe family values. You’ve been a Christian on Wall Street for a long time. Where are some lessons that you’ve learned from your time on Wall Street as a faith driven employee, faith driven leader, faith driven manager, and a guy that’s driven by his faith and yet has real responsibility to run lots of people’s money?

Bob [00:05:27] Absolutely fantastic. I wouldn’t trade it for anything. I think like everybody who’s a follower of Jesus Christ, you know, there are issues that come up that are easy to deal with and some that are harder. I think one of the beautiful things that I’ve enjoyed is the different types of people that I run into, other real strong believers that I can learn from and fellowship with some people who are totally and this will be the norm, totally apathetic to the things of God. Others respectful of the fact that somebody is a believer. And then, of course, you have those who under certain circumstances, particularly when you bring it to work, quote unquote, get a bit antagonistic. But as you point out, watching the movie, yeah, there’s greed like any business, there’s greed, perhaps a bit more of it than usual when you’re dealing with money on Wall Street, but certainly manageable. And that’s more the exception than the rule. At least that’s been my experience. What I also enjoy is money’s a topic that can lead to all kinds of discussions about who God is and whose money is it in the first place. So it’s been a fertile ground for learning and. If you will.

William [00:06:36] That’s great, Bob William here. I mean, I got a little off script here. I’m always fastenings hours and about the baggy prabhat. We must make rear end. A recently was talking to a younger person and they honestly felt like as a believer they couldn’t go into investment banking. There was just a broken industry that had no redemptive value. I obviously don’t believe that. And my question for you, as someone who’s been in this for 40 years, what is sort of your restorative redemptive view of the financial markets in your case? Probably the public markets. What does that mean, that holy ambition that drives you to continue to work here and try to make it some part of bringing God’s kingdom on Earth?

Bob [00:07:15] Yeah. So in money management or investment management more generally, a bit different from investment banking, of course, where it’s, you know, one deal after the other. And you’re not that investment management’s now, but investment bank can be intense and tense hours. I guess what I would say is comes at various levels.

[00:07:32] You know, as I went through my career and realized that the money is not named money. It’s not his money. It’s not her money. It’s all God’s money. All of a sudden, the stewardship challenge just rises to an unbelievably phenomenal occasion. You know, I say to people, if the money I have were really mine, who cares what I do with it? Maybe I do. Maybe my wife does. But it’s not mine. It’s God’s. And therefore, we have an unbelievably holy, if I can use that word, an awesome opportunity and responsibility to take good care of it. And as a money manager, I view it the same way if I’m managing somebodies money. Well, yeah, it’s Joe Smith’s money, but it’s really God’s money that Joe Smith happens to be a steward at that particular point in time. So whether it’s, you know, helping Joe give more money away, that’s that’s the most beautiful. But also for Joe to have a retirement, for Joe to pay for his kids or grandkids education. All this is very motivational and I think a very high calling a man.

William [00:08:39] And as a money manager, we really able to have you out to an event we had, which our listeners might hear as reference. We hope that more we have done more widespread events where we’re out in Salt Lake City with a couple hundred people and you challenged the table and kind of an exercise all the different tables to say, you know, what would it look like to create a fund that is faith driven? And of course, that elicits a lot of different responses from people. But maybe as you’ve had, you know, months removed from there. And also something I just know you been thinking about for probably decades. What does that mean to you? What does it come to mean you to have a a fund or a money management philosophy driven by your faith?

Bob [00:09:17] I first say that was an incredible event. In fact, I think I made the comment from the podium. Had you all tried to put something like that together 10, 15 years ago would’ve been a very small crowd. But the fact is, so many people are thinking and doing around these things, which is great. I think the interesting part to the specific exercise is everybody had a different answer. I don’t know. The people’s answers were contradictory to one another, but it just points out how faith driven investing is in the early days. We may never get to a standard, just like there’s no giving standard where it says that you and Henry and I all have to give our money to the same place or have the same criteria. But it’s the same principles, if you will. So when it comes to managing money, it’s, you know, both what we’re for and what we’re against and hopefully what we’re for and what we’re against is what God’s for and what God’s against. The against things that’s been going on for four years, if not decades. And, you know, abortion, pornography and then lots of other things get added. Depending on who you talk to, the more interesting and newer is, OK, what are we for yet? The flourishing of humanity, the flourishing of the business that you’re investing in, the flourishing of the employees. Of course, that means lots of different things as well. Education, alleviation of poverty. Is there good governance in this business? How do companies treat their employees? You know, there’s a whole long list of things one can think about. And of course, once you come up with a list to repeat, my list may be different from yours, but then it becomes an interesting exercise. Do you actually quantitatively score these things or is it a qualitative review? The same token, you’re not going to ignore kind of the principles that got you there. I’m not going to want to buy a company that has great governance, but the earnings are gone straight down the tubes. Sure. I do not want to go to buy one that treats their employees really well. If the stock is selling at ridiculous valuations. So it’s a combination. Can I save the sacred and secular things that we’ve all learned to appreciate?

Henry [00:11:27]  I also appreciate the plug for the event. Was awesome to have you there. Maybe close to 200 people showed up because you were a headliner.

Bob [00:11:34] That’s not. I don’t think so. I think it was your name, Henry that got them there.

Henry [00:11:38] But that’s not the case. But one of the things that I think really is a great thing to underscore, and that is in this larger movement of faith driven investing, there are gonna be lots of different answers for how people might feel that they’re hearing from God or learning from him in his word about how to deploy investment assets. And that’s one of the things I think that we did agree on, which is how important the heart posture is. And that as we get down on our knees with our spouses and ask guy that he might lead us in the direction that we might steward assets are, we’re going to come away from it. And we can have a different perspective than we had before that exercise about where we would invest. And yet some people might say, gosh, we really feel compelled to invest in solar farms in Nevada desert. And somebody else might say, I won’t invest in publicly traded companies. They’re run by crossfires. And someone else might say, I wanted your resident. Multi-family real estate was resident chaplains. And so there are no pat answers or a prescriptive way to go about asset classes. But it’s the heart posture. And I love what you just said there, which is what are the things that God is for and what are the things that he is against? Let that be our guide in because he doesn’t give you specificity. Then what that ends up meaning actually drives you. I think closer to him in trying to know him. Understand what does that mean or was that mean for you?

Bob [00:12:54] Totally agree. That’s a great way to put it. And again, as I said, many of us have been on that journey in terms of where we give our money. And it’s the same process. It’s just nowhere for most people as to where we’re going to invest our money. It’s the same sort of principles and characteristics. And God and his word are the guide for both avenues. And just the one is newer to most people than the other.

[00:13:21] And as you hinted, it’s not an event. You’ll get down on your knees and get up after you’ve prayed and have the answer. It’s a journey over time. As God matures us and puts us in directions and we interact with other people like we’re doing on this call that informs us and takes us in directions, that is very exciting.

William [00:13:43] So when you talk about the for and against and do things against is very easy for a lot of people. I think you’re right. There’s a lot of controversy for gets a little more tricky. I love the way you laid that out as we’re not all gonna be for the same things. God and his spirit manifest itself in different ways through each of us. And that’s what builds a beautiful world. One of things I would love and it can be a particular company. Obviously you can iwa competed as to. But I’d love for you to walk us through maybe your analysis on a company and kind of what in your opinion makes maybe you something that was a little bit in the gray area or something that’s a little hard to think through that you really took some time with and said, you know, at the end of the day this was complicated, but I do think it’s something God’s for. And here’s sort of the criteria I walked through to come to that conclusion.

Bob [00:14:30] So I start with kind of what got me here before I even debated these things with myself and with other people. That is, the company has to be a good company that makes money than I can see they’re going to continue to do that. They have some sort of growth rate and they’re selling at some reasonable valuation and all of that stuff. Believe it or not, is hinted at in God’s word. But the issues that God really cares about and we put it well, are the heart issues. So once we pass those I say secular tests, then it gets a whole lot more interesting. While I spent a lot of time on that’s controversial, is that the relationship between how the executives get paid and how the rank and file get paid and also the amounts. You know, I’m not crazy about a company where I’m going to exaggerate where the CEO makes one hundred thousand times what the average employee does. I’m not sure that that’s working in God’s principles of sharing, not the CEO can’t be or shouldn’t be one of the eyes, if not the highest paid employee. That’s absolutely fine. God doesn’t say everybody gets the same number of dollars per hour, as it were. But what should that relationship look like? And we’ve spent a lot of time deliberating about that. So I’m talking about both the quality and the quantity. And therein lies a lot of gray space. And I’ve had discussions with other, I think, well-meaning Christians that we come to different conclusions on that. And that’s the richness of the dialog that we’ve talked about here. And, you know, I want to have a dialog. I learned something and perhaps my views change over time. But that’s been an issue across a lot of companies that we’ve spent time on. That’s very difficult and a lot of gray.

Henry [00:16:17] Yeah. So I want to shift gears a little bit and go to some of the developments that we’ve seen in the public equity space, which is the space that you know, of course, best, although you, of course, are very fluent with other asset classes, too, like real estate. But on on the public equity side, there’s been some things that we’ve seen. They’ve been encouraging. And, of course. The event we had, Christine Ricoh, has also been on a podcast talking about the emergence of faith driven employee resource groups as some of the largest publicly traded companies and of course, we know about corporate chaplaincy ministries like corporate chaplains of American workplace chaplains. As you see, there’s shareholder conversations happen at the highest level where people are caring more and more about the environment and other stakeholders. You see that being more focused just on the environment or just on equal pay for women, which is awesome. To be clear, this isn’t coming about that. But you see a shift or an opportunity for publicly traded companies to offer a spiritual mentoring and counseling to their employees. Or is it just a fringe thing? Do you think it will work? Any comments you have at all about that? Knowing that somebody is large cap publicly traded companies that you invest in has so many different employees and faith is joining become more and more of a conversation in some of the technology companies out here in Silicon Valley where it Apple, Google, Facebook, they now have federal and play research groups. Is that just the next thing just in Silicon Valley technology or do you see an opportunity for that to be more pervasive through all of the large cap public stocks?

Bob [00:17:48] Thankfully, it is growing in lots of ways and lots of places. I’d set two sets of comments, one generally, as you point out, and you name some specific companies in Silicon Valley. There are a lot of companies that, you know, not too many years ago would have maybe tolerated your come together for a faith based discussion, a Bible study, wherever the issue is, as long as you do it kind of often the corner and way before most people show up for work or whatever, you’ve got to do it off premises. That line of thinking is changing. I think people are recognizing and perhaps through more and more companies having a corporate chaplain or something like that, they’re recognizing that those kinds of things increase the productivity, the positive view of the company, and they’re all self-reinforcing. So even from a secular standpoint, people are coming to the view that we’ve got to do more of this sort of thing. Isn’t that great? Because God smiles even when it’s a secular way of getting there. The more specific is because I’m more familiar with it. And the financial services industry, how so many of the financial service firms are recognizing that there is a strata of the public who are Christian and they want to understand what Christian investment principles might be. So could you give me a Christian financial adviser, please? And now these firms are having groups and trade associations from their own employees that fit this bill. Kingdom. Advisors, you both know that organization works in that venue and helps employees come together and approach their senior management to get some of these things done. So this is all going, in my opinion, and a good and accelerating direction. And this is good news.

Henry [00:19:44] It  is. A little further afield from what you may know best. But to the extent that you have any comments or thoughts on other asset classes or other things as crossfires look distorted, there are capital aside from what’s going on in public equities. Is there anything that compels you, anything in your travels that you’ve seen about ways that Christians are stewarding investment capital in a way that advances the kingdom?

Bob [00:20:10] Yeah, I think there are more and more organizations, more more investment vehicles that focus on their actions. Some of the good work that you guys are doing and your offerings, for example, there are more and more investments you can make, whereas there might be some financial reward, but also a reward that comes from the fact that somebody is going to flourish. It may reduce the return, but that’s stated right up front and some are putting it all together and say, no, we’ve got to move forward. I was just talking to a guy yesterday who’s in the process of making Christian films for young people and trying to get them on media that young people are watching. I mean, I’m talking about kids to compete with some of. Can I say garbage stuff that these kids might be watching? So there are lots of great things that are happening as more and more people are waking up to the fact it all starts with the faith and work movement that says, you know, our sun is not different from our Monday. It’s in an integrated place. And if we approach things that way, it’s going to be very natural we pursue these paths.

Henry [00:21:23] Yes. One other question related to that is do you see a time and I’m wrestling with this myself. But you see a time where there might be a. Product that might be created where an investor might choose to invest in a fund where there’s an open ended Feiner Unit Investment Trust or closed end fund that just invest in faith driven CEOs? Or is that potentially a problem and becomes a holy hurdle and kind of separates out the financial markets is a product that may be well conceived or the heart rate, but it just ends up it just doesn’t go over well. Any any thoughts on that?

Bob [00:22:02] Oh, yeah, I think. Let’s take the ETF world. I mean, there are a zillion ETF. They’re more E.T.s now than there are securities on the exchange. So it’s only a matter of time. Maybe one already exists and we just all know about it. That does just what you’re saying. Here’s an ETF you can buy and the holdings are just fill in the blank. CEOs, you know, a believer, the CEO is a public believer or whatever descriptive words. Oh, absolutely. I think we’ll get a lot of those sorts of things and it’ll be fun to get track records on these things to see where we get positive signals that make a difference.

Henry [00:22:38] So I think that that leads into another point, of course, which is a concept of excellence. And so what guidance would you give a listener to this who’s saying, okay, so I want to be more intentional about how I allocate my investment assets according to my faith? How do they look to do so with excellence?

Bob [00:22:54] So I don’t think you abandon. I called it a few minutes ago kind of a secular investment techniques that you would use, for example, in public equities. It’s what’s the company selling for, which is valuation and what’s its growth rate to keep things simple. I don’t think you say, oh, well, that’s not in the Psalms. Therefore, I’m not going to pay any attention that you still use the mind that God gave us on this planet to do those things. But then you layer on top of that who we’re doing good things. I’ll use the very broad phrase, human flourishing, what companies are doing that, you know, I think most of us over time are going to say, if I can make the most money by investing in a company where they, you know, they kill their worst 5 percent of their employees every year. You know, I’m not going to invest in that because it’s not gonna smile on me. And that’s not honoring who he is. So there will be tradeoffs to be made. And therein lies the excitement and I think the adventure that God’s putting this on.

Henry [00:23:56] Yeah. Know when you talk about track record, it makes me also think about how important it is that we endeavor to understand the backgrounds of our portfolio managers. All too often people think of Christian music has been not as good as the secular counterpart. I think our hope collectively of this movement is that the funds that are run, the exchange traded funds cetera will be run with excellence, with great auditing, with great reporting, with fund managers that have got great track records. And so as you speak to track records in Morningstar ratings. I think it’s really important that a Christ follower does their diligence last. Otherwise, this be a movement that’s characterized by mediocrity with just different products that are created, but they’re not done with excellence. And I think that that’s what you speak to. Also track records.

Bob [00:24:41] So agree. You said it better than I could. Henry, there’s just no way that this becomes second class. There’s no way that this becomes something often the corner that has a lower standard. The standards are high because you know what? We are made in the image of God. God is a worker. Last I checked, his work is a plus. Therefore, we as believers, whatever field we’re in, need to be a plus workers too. So we strive the best for his glory and for the clients and customers we’re gonna be serving.

William [00:25:12] Amen, amen, that’s a great place. Bob, as we moved the. We always like to bring our listeners in to where God has you in your story right now. And it’s always amazing to hear how that intersects with some of our listeners and our guests. And so specifically, when you think about God’s word in the scriptures, we’d love if you wouldn’t mind inviting us in. Where God maybe has you somebody you may be telling you in a new and a fresh way. It could be today could be the season that you’re in, maybe a passage you’ve been meditating on, or just something that’s always been a guiding principle for you.

Bob [00:25:43] So you prepared me for this. So I did give it some thought and it didn’t take much thought because it hit me across the head as what I’m about to tell you is hitting me across the head. I’ve known all along, God cares for the poor, but God really cares for the poor. And I think in my reading of the word in my prayer life, in people I’ve come in contact with in the last couple of months, God has since so president on that particular point, feeding the poor in spirit, feeding the poor materially. And as a result, among other things, my wife, Leslie and I, we are significantly increasing the percentage of our philanthropy that goes to the poor. We’ve always done it, but it’s not been, in my opinion, having been hit over the head a big enough percentage, given how much? Importance. God places on that we as many people do we on Thanksgiving, our family went to a center city mission in Philadelphia and serve the homeless, a Thanksgiving meal and yet one more time. They are God’s people who died for those very same people. And so I’m impressed with that part of who God is. We’ve got to care for the poor.

Henry [00:26:57] I love that illustration. But I’ve got to ask a phenomenal investor that really feels that God has a heart for the poor and wants us to care for the poor. Of course, as well. Whereas a really good investor invest in the poor. Is there a ministry or two that are particularly compelling to you by virtue of the excellence of the work they do and being able to serve and equip the poor that you have come behind that maybe some somewhere our listeners need to know about?

Bob [00:27:24] Yes, there are a lot of missions that do that and lots of different places. The Bowery in New York City is one of the biggest and one of the leading. The one we talked about for Thanksgiving Sunday Breakfast mission in Philadelphia. It’s the only mission in the country. I’m told it serves 365 days, three meals a day to the homeless. So kind of cool.

Henry [00:27:47] Very, very cool. Excellent. Bob, thank you very much for spending time with us. You’ve been a great encouragement to us at the event that we had in our calls and everything we’ve done all along the way consistently. Men in our sales and we thank you for your time. And I know that that’s a big deal for you. And thank you.

Bob [00:28:03] My privilege to serve with you guys.

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On today’s episode, we’re talking to an expert on capital, influence, and how investments can serve the common good. Finny Kuruvilla is the Chief Investment Officer for Eventide Funds, and if you haven’t heard of them, you’re going to be glad you did. 

They’re on a mission to pursue investments that make the world rejoice—and today, Finny is going to tell us just how they do that. With a unique background in healthcare, statistics, and investing—not to mention two postgraduate degrees from Harvard and one from MIT—Finny is the type of guest you just can’t get enough of.

As always, thanks for listening.

Useful Links:

Eventide

Priorities and Investing

Do You Know What You Own?

To Change the World by James Davidson Hunter

Episode Transcript

Henry: [00:02:52] Finny, thank you very much for being on the show today. We’re excited to hear all that you’ve got going on at Eventide to get things started. We want to give the reader some insight into your background. Tell us a little bit about your personal journey and the steps that led to where you are today and then bridge into what is Eventide. [00:03:08][15.9]

Finny: [00:03:09] Sure. Yeah. So my journey started in the 1990s. I moved to Boston, where I am right now in 95 to go to medical school. And while I was in medical school, I had a scholarship. I was doing an MGP PHC program. And this is common among the MGP h.g students. You get a modest stipend. It’s ten thousand dollars a year, not a lot. This was back then and my parents were encouraging me at this phase of life here. You’re in your 20s to start to think about saving and in particular saving to buy a house one day. And so here I was, a single person at the time and very low overhead and very low expenses. And so I said, hey, that sounds great. And so I went to the newfangled Internet was just coming out around that time and tried to figure out what kinds of options were available for investing. And you could see even back then this vehicle of the mutual fund and I could see the top 10 holdings of these mutual funds through the various literature brochures that they have available. And I couldn’t bring myself to invest in any of those funds because I would look at the companies that they were invested in and these are top 10 holdings and saw a lot of things that as a Christian, I felt a personal objection to. And so my roommate at the time, he was doing his PhD in economics and he said, hey, you should just learn to invest on your own. And so he gave me a book by Peter Lynch and I kind of self taught myself the investing world. And Peter Lynch’s Paul thesis, as you probably know, is by what you know, his basic sense is that a specialist who really knows an industry well can far outperform a generalist, because by the time it gets to Wall Street, by the time everyone’s covering it, well, one, you’ve missed a lot of the. And 2, they’re not going to be able to really understand a company or an industry as well as someone who is a practitioner of the field. And so if you’re a construction person, you’re going to know the tools and the instruments that are used. Much better than someone who is a financier who’s going to have no idea who’s just going to be basically looking at the financials. And so I thought, hey, that makes sense. And so I decided to start to invest in the biomedical realm and pursue that just at the time on the side as a hobby, because I was in medical school, obviously. But for the next 10 years, kept that up and found that one, I enjoyed it. And two, I thought I was decent at it. And that was the early days of what became even tied to finishing med school, did my residency at a local hospital here and saw mostly patients who had a variety of blood disorders sickle cell anemia, leukemia, lymphoma, people who required bone marrow transplants, things like that. Did a residency fellowship, a postdoc and eventually started even at the end of that. And the vision that we started was if it was that much work for me to do all that, I had to go off and read all these books and leverage the expertise that I had accumulated in the medical realm, more democratized and accessible for the everyday Christian who wants to invest in ways that are more compatible with their values, both on the negative side of things. So not investing in objectionable areas abortion, tobacco, gambling, things like that. But then more importantly, or as importantly, embracing the positive capacity for change that we as investors leverage and as those who supply capital to investors leverage on behalf of causes that we feel really good about. So we started it in 2008. And here we are 11 years later. We’ve got now several mutual funds, a little bit more than four billion dollars under management. And it’s been a blast. [00:07:08][238.9]

Henry: [00:07:09] So I see that a tagline for Eventide is “investing that makes the world rejoice”. Talk to us about the mission and vision of Eventide Fundss. It look like when the world rejoices at the investments we make. What does that mean? [00:07:23][14.3]

Finny: [00:07:24] Yeah. There’s a great verse in Proverbs Chapter Eleven, verse 10 that says When the righteous prosper, the city rejoices, and that this has become our theme verse and the way that we define righteous and many others we follow in the steps of many others who have done really great work in understanding the Hebrew behind it. But the term righteous basically refers to people who put others interests ahead of their own. They’re willing to disadvantage themselves for the sake of others. [00:07:56][32.3]

[00:07:57] And the opposite is, of course, the wicked. Who are those who put their own economic or social or personal desires ahead of others? There is a great book by Amy Sherman called Kingdom Calling that she also really develops that verse in a beautiful way. The term rejoice there as well as a special word. [00:08:16][18.6]

[00:08:16] It’s not the ordinary term that’s used for rejoice. It’s something that is used as the handful of times in the Hebrew Bible, for example, is used after Hannah gets the good news that she is now pregnant. And I’m thinking there, Samuel. [00:08:33][17.0]

[00:08:35] And so that’s been something that we have used in our own thinking quite a bit, that when the righteous prosper, it’s supposed to be the case that the city rejoices, meaning that they’re blessing redounds to those around them, that there’s such an overflow of prosperity in all dimensions that the city rejoices and isn’t a kind of tragic today, that when people prosper, when the rich get richer, people tend to go around. It’s the opposite because it tends not to lead to that overflow of blessing that makes the city rejoice. And so our aspiration and eventide is to instantiate that for the cities and the communities that we’re at, that they can experience some of the blessing in the rejoicing that should come from biblical and wise investing. [00:09:24][48.8]

Henry: [00:09:24] That’s awesome. That’s a great vision. I want to pivot right into the heart of the episode. Some of the things that we picked up in the past and some of the times you’ve given. Oftentimes we hear that phrase and oftentimes we say the phrase capital equals influence. And most of us in the Western world throw that around. But I’ve heard you share some interesting thoughts on the importance of recognizing that capital does have influence and how we see that in history. Talk us through that. [00:09:49][24.7]

Finny: [00:09:50] Yeah, well, let me start with a book that if you haven’t read it, if your listeners haven’t read it, I highly recommend it. It’s a book that I think is a classic and everyone who’s a faith based investor or entrepreneur should read. It’s called To Change the World by James Davis Hunter. And what he brings out in this book is there’s really a widespread myth out there, which is the myth of the heroic individual, that individuals have the capacity and the ability to change the world. And what Hunter, I think very persuasively argues and demonstrates in his book is that the real. The power is, in fact, within institutions and institutions, far more than individuals shape us and shape the world in very profound ways. And so if you really want to change the world, then you have to be able to either change institutions. But as it turns out, it’s very difficult to do because institutions generally resist change or start institutions. And that turns out to be a much easier act, because as I said, there’s this natural resistance to change that institutions have, whereas starting new institutions is much more likely to be in line with the values of the founders. And he shows, as I mentioned in the book, that virtually all, if not all of the great change movements that we’ve seen in the last several hundred years in the West have been the result of institutions. Although we often put the credit on individuals, it’s really more of the institutions that deserve the credit as having the ability to affect change in broader society. So with that thesis and again, you can read that or anyone can read that in his book, which I do highly recommend. I like a look at this from historic perspective and I like to go all the way back to Christopher Columbus. So all of us know Christopher Columbus, who sailed the ocean blue and fourteen ninety two. It’s one of the most famous voyages of all time. But what people don’t realize is that he was doing this as part of a for profit venture and he was looking for investors to finance his voyage there. [00:12:00][129.7]

[00:12:00] So if you think about it, the whole enterprise of exotic ship building and these faraway voyages was fraught with risk. I mean, it was something that unlike today, you had very little hope or very little confidence the person would come back on any kind of known schedule safely with goods intact. And so this was the basis of what most historians would say is the modern corporation that modern corporations were born out of the necessity to share the cost of financing these expeditions as well as sharing risk. And Christopher Columbus in particular was looking for investors and he traipsed all over Europe trying to find investors and eventually structured a fairly sophisticated deal. So if you go and actually study the specific terms that he received, he was going to receive 10 percent of future revenues that came from later expeditions as well as he played or not, got an option to invest in one ace, a future commercial businesses that were formed as a result of his adventure. So he had a quite sophisticated financial contract that he negotiated, but was as interesting is to think about the fact that he went to France. He went to England. He went to Portugal. And he could not secure investors from those countries. And in fact, although he ultimately gained investors from Spain and the Spanish investment ended up being very, very lucrative for those who were behind it. And importantly, this is why so many people today from the Caribbean on down all of South America, why they speak Spanish. [00:13:45][105.0]

[00:13:46] You know, literally world history was written with the decision of who financed Columbus’s expedition there. If it had been the French, there would be French speaking. If it had been the British, it would be English speaking. But lo and behold, it was the Spanish. So to think about the decision there that investors made. That was literally shaping the religion and languages of millions and millions of people. It was all bound up in the choices and the decisions that investors made at the time. And that goes on. And so that was obviously in the late 40s, hundreds, early. Fifteen hundreds. But this continues. And so Columbus is one of the pioneers were the trailblazers of this industry. But in sixteen hundred and sixteen 02, you have the British and Dutch East India companies form. So these were formed explicitly with the goal of trading with India as the name communicates there. And same thing. [00:14:40][54.3]

[00:14:40] So they have incredible capital requirements. You have capital calls that are required. You have something like dividends that were paid out. And so those companies were financed using a mixture of stocks and bonds. And again, most historians, economic historians will tell you that the modern corporation was born around this time, complete with liquidity. And in fact, the very first exchange was developed in the early 60s, hundreds in Amsterdam so that people could trade shares of these. In this case, the Dutch East India Company. And for those who know I’m ethnically Indian, even though I was born and raised in the US, for those who know anything about the history of India, you will know that the British East India Company defined so much of what we today call India to be. So India, as it turns out, just like America, ended up being a colony of Britain, which is why today the official language is English and India was really defined, the borders were defined, the culture was defined, the railway system was defined by a group of investors who form this British East India company. So you talk about massive implications for culture, for language, for religion. It’s all bound up here in the choices that investors and these these corporations made. So I think it’s very profound. There’s a lot more that could be said on the historic side of things. But if we now then maybe jump forward into modern history and think about what this looks like here. I mean, surely we would agree that our world is shaped very profoundly by Facebook, by Netflix, by Google, by these entities that we’re all venture backed. When you go back and trace how these companies began, they’re fascinating stories in some cases. Movies have been made about these companies that have really changed the whole world. I mean, it’s hard to even imagine how differently the world would be without some of those companies there. So I think from the genesis of what we would today call investing in the sixteen hundreds and fifteen hundreds to today, I think we can confidently say that that James Davis at Hunter thesis is correct and that it’s really something that is an amazing testimony to the power of investing and the power of entrepreneurs and those who are minded to change the world through the power of business, to tell us how that impacts the way that you invest. [00:17:09][149.0]

Henry: [00:17:10] So understanding that business can be used to explore and to be able to solve challenges that exist in the world and to be able to advance trade. What’s it look like for the themes that you look to invest in where the modern day equivalents, the eventide as you get out to put your investors money to work? What are the themes and the adventures that you want to invest in? [00:17:31][21.6]

Finny: [00:17:32] Yeah, there’s a lot that we can talk about there. So what we have done is we have made a list of themes, as you pointed out, that we believe are themes that have great capacity to change the world and to positively advance human flourishing. One of my favorite quotes that I say often in different context is from Henry David Thoreau, who says For every thousand people hacking at the leaves of evil, there’s one striking at the root. And that’s true in many domains of life, but probably none as true as in medicine, where we’re definitely dealing with symptoms. And so just to illustrate with a little bit more specific up an example here, we have a number of investments where what we do is we will finance companies, both private companies as well as public companies. And we’re very active in our investments. We sometimes even take board seats on our investments. But what we’ll do is we’ll find companies that are getting at that root cause level of disease. So companies that are doing DNA sequencing to figure out what is broken in a particular patient and using the sound sci fi. But believe it or not, it’s true, you can actually take a virus. And we think of a virus as being bad. Right. We get a call that’s from a virus influenza. There’s all these diseases from a virus. But what you can do is you can take a virus and you can engineer out the bad parts of the virus that cause disease and you can drop in to that virus. The good part of a gene that’s broken in a person. So let’s say there’s a patient in front of me who’s got muscular dystrophy, a real example for us. And you can sequence that little boy. Those boys typically die around 20 years old and figure out where exactly is that break? Where is that mutation would be the technical term in that little boy’s DNA. And then you can make a virus that has that same gene, but the corrected good copy into that virus and then give that little boy a one time injection. This is what’s amazing. So you just go into the hospital, get a one time injection, and we only have a couple of years of follow up now. But in theory, you’ve now cured that boy for life. They want to come back into the hospital for later treatments. I mean, you’re talking about an absolute game changer. I saw some videos of some of the boys that were treated in a clinical trial that we helped to find along with many others. And it literally brought tears to my eyes where I saw the pre and the post videos of these boys. One video there was a boy who was going up the stairs and he was dragging himself up by the rail because he didn’t have strength in his legs coast. This injection of this virus. The boy was running up the stairs. There’s another one where a boy could barely walk. And then in the second video, he’s playing soccer in a field. I mean, it’s the kind of thing that when I was in medicine, when I was still practicing, nobody believed this was possible to actually reverse the kinds of. Damage that these muscular dystrophy patients have suffered. So you talk about massive changes in the way that health care is done. You know, it’s so exciting. I’m giving you here just one little slice of why we’re excited about these kinds of therapies and how much we think that investors can get really excited about putting their dollars to work to change the lives of thousands, if not eventually millions of patients in route causeways. [00:20:56][204.4]

William: [00:20:58] That’s amazing. That’s amazing to think about. It does kind of sound Sci-Fi at some level when I think about Capital equals influence from your perspective, maybe let us in. Do you focus more on the products and services that you’re investing in or do you also take potentially board seats or do you have influence over the company? You know, there’s lots of different types of influence that capital provides you. Could you drill down on which ones you think you’re focused on and where you get to kind of bring the gospel to life and maybe some others that you maybe look at in the future? [00:21:28][30.2]

Finny: [00:21:28] Yeah, that’s a good question. So we don’t often take board seats. That’s the exception, not the rule for us. And most of what we do is public investing. But because we’re a decent sized firm, as I said, we’ve got a little over four billion dollars when we invest. We’re usually a top 10 shareholder. It’s not a top three shareholder. And so, not surprisingly, you’re going to have the ear of management there. And we’ve used that position quite successfully in a number of ways. So the first is having conversations about the ethics of products and services. So we will have very direct conversations with management about, hey, why do you want to go into this particular area? Not that particular area. And speaking as a Christian here, obviously we have a set of values that we believe should inform those discussions. We’ve had discussions and we’re going to be releasing some of these examples pretty soon. We’re very excited about where we’ve been able to change corporate giving. So giving to causes that we would look at and think like, hey, one, you’re actually giving to causes that are going to alienate those who are traditional faith based employees and customers there because they’re pursuing one particular agenda. And by us having a conversation around inclusiveness. Now, when you hear the word inclusiveness, people tend to not think about the inclusion of the Judeo-Christian moral view in that. But we remind people that a traditional world religions, whether it’s Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, you name it, they stand for, for example, certain views of sexuality, certain views of how to look at the world, that you can alienate your customers and even employees over there. And have you even thought about this significant source of constituents here that are right under your nose? So we’ve had some great conversations and even positive examples of change, as I said, that we’re hoping to release shortly there. In general, we believe that every business has six primary stakeholders that they need to think about. So number one is customers. Number two is employees. Number three, it’s supply chain. Number four is the host community, wherever that business is located. Number five is the environment and then number six is broader society. And as we engage with our companies, at least we use those six stakeholders as our basic framework. We call it Business 360, which is our way to make sure that a business is operating ethically and compatibility with our views of what the common good really is and what human flourishing really is across those six stakeholders. So, yeah, we’ve got a lot of great examples there that we’ve been able to come up with over the last several years and now that were the size that we are. It gets a lot easier because our size in that whole capital equals influence idea, right? People pay more attention to you. The larger you are. And so I’m very excited about what you all are doing, number one, because the Christian community has the potential to be a much bigger force for change. And it currently is. I mean, it was Martin Luther King and the church was a sleeping giant. And I think that’s a good term to describe the latent power that is resonant but unused as we band together around causes that we care about. So, yeah, we’re very excited about that overall potential. [00:24:50][201.6]

William: [00:24:51] That’s awesome. I love that phrase. Sleeping giants. I’m going to give you a little bit of a soapbox here. One of the things I love about some of your presentation does I think you do an incredible job of challenging and pushing people to think about the world in a little different way. So we have investors through the podcast. Some are just getting started. Some may be tuning in, some in the business a long time. If you add a challenge from the capital equals influence and from a perspective of people may not have been thinking about this the right way. What would that be for some of our listeners to maybe take away a challenge to think about what their own portfolio or what their own job in general? [00:25:28][36.8]

Finny: [00:25:29] The world has bought this. I would say lie that investing is largely a passive activity. And even that term passive, you know, people think about ecac think about very low cost products where there’s minimal basis points. The whole world of investing has become commoditized where and it’s becoming something more and more where people think about the market as this abstract entity that is is almost divorced from the productive capacity of the underlying companies. And if you ask most people what they own, they have no idea. Investing in general has just become very divorced from its original purpose, which is supplying capital to companies. And when you think about that original purpose of investing, then it starts to reframe and hopefully rekindle how exciting investing is, right? It’s giving capital to companies. It’s not just being a passive participant in a larger world where somebody else determines the rules of the game. And when we begin to recover that very simple thesis that investing is ownership, it changes everything. I mean, if you’re an owner of a small business down the corner, you care a lot about that business, right. Because your name is attached to it. You would care about the investing practices. You care about the practices that the company had. If that company going to legal trouble, you’d be in trouble. If that company got accolades, well, then you would look good as a result. We get it. If it’s a private business that is owned by a couple of people, even though it is quantitatively different, it’s not qualitatively different. Investing is ownership and we should have a real degree of pride in the companies that we own and I like to use as a test. [00:27:11][102.3]

[00:27:12] Would I be proud to tell people that my son or my daughter worked at that company as a way to kind of just calibrate myself about is this company that I want to invest in here? And if it’s not, then we shouldn’t be investing. And if it is, well, then that’s great. But, you know, using just some really simple tests like that, some really basic reminders of what the purpose of investing is, I think that’s extraordinarily helpful. And we are standing against a tsunami of, like I said, information that goes the other way where it’s all about, like I said, being passive low fees and profiting from this thing called the market, which somebody else is going to determine who the market is and that scheme and why not take more more of a stake? Given the ethical implications to the downside as well as to the upside. [00:27:58][46.3]

Henry: [00:27:59] In some of your time to get it both the negative and then also the positive aspects of being an active investor. And I like this a lot. [00:28:05][5.5]

[00:28:05] And in particular, to go to the illustration you have about apartheid, how people of faith got together in the early 70s and use their influence to be able to help some large companies curtail what they did. But then also on the positive side, which is less of going ahead in time, people stopped doing bad things. There are also three themes that you guys like a lot. Cyber security, clean water and then also some aspects of mental health that you think that Christ followers might be able to be proactive and invest in key touch on both of those. Absolutely. Influence of the negative screen side. Maybe. But then also on the positive side, yeah. [00:28:43][37.9]

Finny: [00:28:44] So I love both sides of this. And the Christian community should realize that there have been all those small. There have been some small efforts through history that have had very dramatic effects on history. [00:28:55][11.9]

[00:28:56] So the one that you mentioned there is apartheid, which I love that example. So in 1971, four years before I was born. But I know that the government of South Africa had ignored U.N. sanctions and multiple embargoes that were already in place specifically over the issue of apartheid. And so the governments stick didn’t work. And as it turns out, the way that that ultimately shook out was it was a group of Episcopal shareholders that filed what’s called a shareholder resolution with General Motors, the automotive company. So the shareholder resolution is a tool that public investors have. All you have to own is a thousand dollars of stock in a particular company. You can file what’s called a shareholder resolution, which will then be put up to vote at the next annual meeting of the company. And this is widely regarded to be one of the very first examples, if not the first example of modern shareholder advocacy. So this group of shareholders basically said, hey, what are you doing in General Motors with respect to working conditions, to employing whites and blacks, separate bathrooms, you know, all those types of issues and longer hold. What they did was they enlisted the wisdom of a Baptist minister whose name was Leon Sullivan, who was an anti-apartheid activist. And he proposed specific resolutions for the board of General Motors that they ended up adopting because of that shareholder resolution. And then, not surprisingly, after GM. Adopted those what are often called the Sullivan principles after Leon Sullivan. Then Ford and Goodyear followed suit. And so most historians will tell you that the key instrument in the fall of apartheid was investor pressure. And that’s great. I mean, that is so exciting that this small group of investors leveraged their influence to change General Motors, which in turn changed Ford, which in turn changed Goodyear, which then changed corporate practice and ultimately led to the dissolution of apartheid, although not quite as moderate. There’s a similar story to be told with abolition. So if you look at the history of, for example, Quakers, people like Charles Finney and others, they certainly used the power of business and investing to assist in the demise of abolition. So those are powerful examples on the negative side. And I think that there’s a lot of examples today that we could think about. One example that I really like is mental health. Mental health is something that we don’t realize how big of a problem it is. So one of the examples that I really like is schizophrenia. Schizophrenia afflicts about three million people today in the United States. And a lot of people don’t even know what schizophrenia is. They think of it as having multiple personalities. You know, this alien schizophrenic because you’re acting differently. That’s actually not what schizophrenia is. That’s a completely different disease called multiple personality disorder. And it’s kind of offensive, actually, to people who have schizophrenia. So we need to make sure that we use more accurate terms there. Schizophrenia represents something very different, which is a set of positive and negative symptoms, but in particular on the positive side. For example, it’s hearing voices coming from a wall. It’s auditory and visual hallucinations. On the negative side, it’s the inability to initiate. People just have a very flat affect. This is ranked by the W.H.O. as the third most disabling condition in the world. If you ever encounter homeless people and you actually talk to them, you’ll find that a huge percentage of homeless people have schizophrenia. And if you could fix the schizophrenia problem, you would be dealing with a root cause of a lot of homelessness. And right now, for example, we actually financed a private company that has since gone public that has had one of the most game changing results in schizophrenia and probably the last 30 years. And so this is really, really exciting, right? So if you care about homelessness, you care about mental health, there’s excellent ways for Christians to be deploying their capital in ways that support very high innovations. [00:33:11][255.0]

[00:33:12] And again, these are companies that aren’t in indices. If you just go out and buy the S&P 500, you’re not going to be participating in these kinds of companies. Why not consider moving our investments into areas like this that are so high yield in terms of net positive impact to society? I used to work in a homeless shelter many years ago, and I’m sure many of your listeners have as well. And while your heart breaks and you interact with these patients and you realize there’s some very profound issues there that you can’t even deal with, you don’t have the tools to deal with with what we have today. When you have somebody who’s coming in, who’s a true schizophrenic and they’re totally disassociated from reality, well, you give all the warm meals you want, but you’re not really going to be changing the trajectory of that person. What we really need there is to change the underlying disease and to begin to heal the pathology that we have in their brains. [00:34:05][53.3]

[00:34:05] I’m really excited about that as yet another example. [00:34:08][2.3]

Henry: [00:34:08] So you talk about that and I’ve heard you talk and present before about clean water and some other issues, including cyber security and maybe on another podcast we’ll get in. It’s clear to me as a listener how your investment in these types of industries, in some of these types of problems can advocate for human flourishing. But I also know that you are a fund manager that is graded on your performance. You hit Morningstar reviews and things like that. You ever find that where you as an investment manager say, oh, my goodness, this company is doing things are super important, but it’s just not representing the stock price. [00:34:43][34.2]

[00:34:43] So therefore, we have to sell the stock, whereas their attention with delivering shareholder returns versus some of these themes that you think are so important, you ever find that they’re at odds with each other? [00:34:53][10.0]

Finny: [00:34:53] You know, there is. But I would say that in general it’s an overblown tension. A lot of people think that if you can kind of dance in and out of a stock at the right time, you’ll be able to do much better than those who are just more patient, long term buy and hold investors. [00:35:08][14.5]

[00:35:09] And it sounds really easy, like, oh, yeah, it’s overvalued sell. And when it gets undervalued by and to some extent people try to do that. We try to do that. But in general, I think there’s lots of data. I know there’s lots of data. And we certainly have found this to be true, that you’re much better off as an investor finding great companies doing your homework. They are investing and then a while the magic of compounding to do its trick. And most of the time I think people would say that when they found great companies, the main problem they’ve had is they’ve sold too early and they haven’t allowed time and the greatness of a management team to really prove itself. And when you look at some of the investments that we’ve had that have been 10 baggers, 20 baggers over the years, it just takes time. And yeah, you could try to game it from month to month and dance in and out quarter quarter. But it’s a fool’s game. And although, like I said, in theory, this pension does exist, and I think there are times where you might want to lighten up a little bit. I would say it’s way more important just to make sure that you’re in great companies and that you feel confident in the companies that you’re investing in and you’re spending your time and your energy not on watching the day to day stock moves, but on understanding the people and understanding the industry. Warren Buffett has said this before and I think he’s spot on that the market would be way better off if it was open for trading one day a year and that was it, so that people could spend more of their time on what actually matters, which is the fundamentals and not the gyrations of the market, which are just very difficult to predict and very difficult to handle. [00:36:41][91.7]

William: [00:36:41] I love your quote about would you want your son or daughter to work at the company? I had a similar experience recently where at a good friend going through a couple a job interviews and he got some offers. I wrote a column in one of these companies as well-known companies and as I don’t work there. Why would you work there for this reason? This reason, this reason? And then literally, I looked like the weight I own stock in that company. It was so obvious to me and to him what I laid it out to him. He’s like, oh, yeah, you’re right. Why would I go work for that company? And so I sold my position the next day. And, you know, I’ve lost money on that. The company has done well, but I know it was the right call. So I love that framework. And so maybe people don’t have children, maybe think three, you know, would you want a good friend of yours going over there or would you go work there? Right. Another good screening thing that was really interesting for me is I think you bringing that up and it reminds me of something recent. And then as we do come to a close, one of the biggest things in particular, the most important we love asking our guests is if you’d be generous with us is where is God? Have you right now in his word, in his scripture, maybe during the season, maybe this morning? You know, what might he be taking you through that you could share with our listeners and let us into your world and your journey? [00:37:49][67.8]

Finny: [00:37:50] Yeah, sure. That’s an excellent question to do. Well, this is by way of encouragement. I am married with I have seven children. And one thing that I would highly recommend that everyone do is as a family and this is what we do. We pick one passage per day and we’ll generally pick a book of the Bible and do one chapter per day. Then we journal everyone journals who can write all my children and write. But those who can’t write, we have a set of questions that we go through every single day together. And we started the morning when we wake up. Open up revivals of George Arnwine. And then in the evening we discuss what we’ve learned. And the questions that we ask are what did you learn about God from this passage? Second question, what do you learn about the nature of humanity from this? Question is this what did you read in this passage that makes you want to worship God? Fourth question is what promises did you find in that passage? The fifth question is what did you see in yourself in this passage that you want to put to death? You want to mortify in some way. This question is what are you going to do differently today? What kinds of applications are going to put into practice? And then the seventh is to write out a prayer. So those are the seven questions that we do as a family every single day. If there’s any parents here who don’t have a practice like that going, I will say that it will be a complete game changer for your family to do that. [00:39:10][80.6]

[00:39:11] And your children will form with scripture. God will bless you in ways that you can’t even know until you go through it and probably even in this life fully understand it. [00:39:19][8.4]

[00:39:20] So that’s my general encouragement. I’ll give you a passage that we were just talking about the other day. It’s a very familiar passage. In fact, yesterday we were talking about how so much of the life of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, you know, those first three individuals is it’s almost representative or emblematic of the whole rest of the Bible. I mean, you can see so much of the gospel, even in the stories of those individuals. So, you know, one famous story of Abraham offering Isaac, for example, that even though the New Testament doesn’t explicitly mentioned that, I think we all justly take that as a foreshadowing of the father offering the son two thousand years later. And I remember when I was reading that passage, it struck me that at the end of it. God says to Abraham, he says, Now I know that you fear me. And I thought, wow, this is Abraham, who already left her of the calley’s. He left his father’s home. You became a sojourner in Tainan. [00:40:21][60.8]

[00:40:22] You talk about someone who was a radically obedient follower of God and what it took. Was this episode of offering his beloved Isaac on the altar for God to say. Now, I know that for me, you know, you did all that before and what it led me to be reminded of and to share in my family was you can be an amazing person. And so many ways and I sometimes like to point out that you can confess 98 percent of the stuff in your life, the junk in your life, but it’s that last 2 percent that will ruin you if you don’t confess it, that there’s often this like the hard thing in your life. There is something deep that God has for all of us that he wants us to put it on the altar, so to speak, and that Abraham like manner, that even though he had done so much, much more than I think most of us would probably have a tolerance for. But that final 2 percent is where the real gold is. And I would encourage everyone to think about what does that look like in your life? What is that, 2 percent? How do you confess that? How do you work through that? How do you lay out on the altar? And I believe that God would give a significant blessing on those who are willing to go that final step into that full hearted obedience where you’re just putting your most valuable person possession, whatever it is on the altar for God to use it as he was. [00:41:43][80.9]

Henry: [00:41:44] So this has been a great podcast, but I’ll go with what you said. And that is the real gold of this podcast is in the last 2 percent. Yeah, that was awesome. Thank you very much for your time. Thank you very much for sharing. We look forward to having you back on the program and God bless you and Eventide. Thank you very much. It was a pleasure being with you. [00:41:44][0.0]

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If you’ve been following the Faith Driven conversation, you’ve no doubt heard the name Tom Nelson. He’s been featured on the Faith Driven Entrepreneur podcast twice, and we’re so glad to get to talk to him about the investing side of this conversation. Tom recently wrote a book titled, The Economics of Neighborly Love. 

In the book, Tom brought his theological insight into the realm of finance and investing. We talked to him about all of this as well as what the good news of Jesus means for economics. 

Marrying biblical study, economic theory, and practical advice, he presents a vision for church ministry that works toward the flourishing of the local community, beginning with its poorest and most marginalized members. Find out more in our conversation. As always, thanks for listening.

Useful Links:

The Economics of Neighborly Love

Video of Tom Talking about the book

Tom Nelson TGC Breakout

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: [00:02:24] Tom, thank you very much for being on the show today. We’re so grateful that you’ve joined us on the Faith Driven Entrepreneur podcast on our other channel. Your episode there was fantastic. And we’re pleased and privileged and blessed to have had you on before. But we’re also really sad to have you on today to speak to the FDI audience. This is an audience of investors who are looking to store their investment capital for God’s glory. And we all get fired up about having you on board because you’re one of the few writers and authors and pastors. Somebody comes out of the workplace that speaks about not just the workplace. And that’s a great thing that more and more people are focusing on what the church has to do with the workplace. But also economics is a part of your teaching and your ministry. And so you’re in a great perspective to be able to share the views that you have on the economics of the kingdom of God in such a way that I think that we’ll be in a better position to invest better. So perfect for you to be on before we get going. [00:03:23][59.0]

[00:03:23] I’d love for you to tell us a little bit about just generally Made to Flourish. What is Made to Flourish, what’s the work you’re doing, and then generally even go so far as maybe even suggest how it might be able to be helpful for us, an audience of faith of investors. [00:03:39][15.3]

Tom: [00:03:40] Yeah. Henry, great to be with you and your team. And yeah, Made to Flourish. I have the joy of serving a remarkable organization. It’s only four years old. So we’re involved in the expansion of a really important mission around the world, particularly in the United States first. And so, yeah, our mission is really about helping pastors first and foremost. I mean, we work with business leaders and parishioners as well, but helping pastors to more effectively empower them and encourage them and equip them to connect Sunday to Monday better. [00:04:07][27.6]

[00:04:08] So what we really do is we emphasize the importance of the integration of faith, work and economic wisdom for the flourishing of your communities. We’re deeply committed that the Christian faith profoundly speaks into the common good and the flourishing of all humans made in God’s image. So we are a national network. We’re growing and we’re trying to make a big difference in helping pastors and churches more effectively be whole like disciples and really impact the marketplace. And I’m really, really thrilled that I’m a part of this FDI conversation because all who are listening. You matter. Your work matters. I just want to say that the importance of investing well in building capacity, providing dignity and opportunity and jobs for the world, and it is so important what you’re doing. I just want to thank you for the work you’re doing. First and foremost, I’m a big cheerleader. It’s awesome as well. For God’s glory, for the kingdom and for God’s people. [00:05:02][53.6]

Henry: [00:05:03] Amen, brother. Amen. So let’s jump into your latest book. You’ve got a book out called The Economics of Neighborly Love. Rusty has joined us on this podcast because he’s such a big fan of your work generally. And then this book specifically, you talk in the book about a broader definition of the economy and not just in our business, but how and where we do our business. [00:05:29][26.3]

[00:05:30] It’s a big thought and we’d all love to hear you expound on this more for our listeners and now and invite Rusty on to narrow in on some of the different lessons and some of the applications that he took away from the book. But just a broad overview first. [00:05:42][12.7]

Tom: [00:05:43] Could I just briefly give you my autobiography because so much to understand if that’s okay, Henry. You know, I grew up in a faith tradition where I was in church on Sunday, but there was very little connection with my life on Monday. And as a young boy, I grew up in an impoverished economic life. My dad died when I was young. My mom really worked hard as a single parent to help us survive. Some say saying this conversation of economic flourishing and the importance of economics is not an abstraction to me. It’s deeply personal in my own autobiography and I share that in the book. And again, that helps inform, I think, my understanding of the theology and practicality of what it means to connect our faith with our work with the economy, with investment and so forth and how we invest. That has been a part of my story that is so important to me in terms of how I understand the importance of economic flourishing as it relates to human flourishing, as it relates to our faith. [00:06:39][55.2]

[00:06:40] I think when we look at the economy and economics, whether it’s entrepreneurship or particularly investment. We have to understand that economics is woven into the creation account. [00:06:54][13.9]

[00:06:54] So I may be a bit theological, but that’s sort of my bent. Right. I mean, wisdom, we understand. I’m saying in creation, we understand. We were designed to be fruitful. That’s woven into the Genesis record. Right. The cultural mandate is to be fruitful. Multiply, fill the earth and have dominion and fruitfulness in the Hebrew text means productivity and pro creativity. And this theme of fruitfulness is woven all the way through the Bible. So we think about economic life. We find this command to be fruitful. And then we were created with community so it can bring these two together. Right. Right. We’re male and female. Marriage is created that once Eve arrives on the scene in the creation story. We have an economy. We have an economy. We have a household stewardship. So God created us as economic creatures who create blessing from the creator order and share that blessing with others, whether it’s monetized or not. Some say this idea of an economy is woven into creation, it’s woven into the idea of being fruitful and fruitful in all dimensions of life. [00:07:54][60.2]

[00:07:54] So I think what you’re asking me in the beginning is when we think about Jesus and his teaching the economy, Jesus teaches us that we are to be fruitful “by this is my father glorified, that you bear much fruit. And so prove to be my disciples.” What I simply want to say is that all the way through scripture, the follower of Jesus is to be fruitful, fruitful in intimacy, relational intimacy, in productivity and neighborly love. So my book unpacks that, that’s one thing about the economy. Our economic life embraces intimate relationships with others because it’s a relationship and poverty is ultimately a relationship of impoverishment. Productivity and fruitfulness with the work of our hands or investments. And then the neighborly love that makes that possible, something the economy, economic life is a reflection of the great commandments and loving our neighbor and loving God. In one short statement, it changes how it’s not just about a graph, it’s not just about monetization, although that has an implication or supply and demand curves or leftward curves. It is about loving others in the world. Man, it’s a little long, but I’m just saying it is about really loving others, loving God and others. Great commandments stuff. [00:09:02][67.6]

Henry: [00:09:03] What does it look like? You’ve got incredible ministry that’s meant to equip pastors to equip the deployed, as you’ve talked about before, people, they’re already out there. So you haven’t yet written a book to help pastors to equip investors and help them to think through how they encourage their parishioners to think about how to invest in real estate or the public stock market or in private equity, et cetera. But do you have any just general thoughts knowing how important the economy is that we live in, that it’s biblical, you call it in the story. We’re in the garden. Our work was fruitful. We invested from the beginning. We’re meant to multiply. And that obviously has some application for investors. But when you look at the marketplace and the way that you might invest or other people invest is there are some things that are just observations that you have about way the easy Christ is investing. Well, or maybe the inverse of that is when you see Christ-followers, maybe not investing well. What does that look like for you? [00:10:02][59.5]

Tom: [00:10:03] Oh, that’s such a that’s a question that’s so important, Henry. And it needs a lot of reflection. A couple of just the initial thoughts. One is let’s just take biblical wisdom, because we have parables like Matthew 25, where there is an expectation of a financial manager. Right. Managers to make more right to invest. Well. So the expectation of return on investment, whatever is very much woven into faithful discipleship for God’s people. [00:10:28][24.1]

[00:10:28] I mean, Matthew, 25 is just I think most of us know the parable of talents. It’s such a rich teaching on the importance of investing. Well, yes, but not risk-free. So there is a sense of deep risk that is built into the system. And the one investor who is strongly reproved, I mean, is one who wouldn’t take the risk. Right. So I think there is a sense of God has an expectation of multiplication for the good of others, not just for self-indulgence, where multiplication, fruitfulness, thriving, living. So investment to me is forward looking. It’s opportunistic looking at what’s the need, what are the opportunities right now. Also, progress has more of a long horizon. Right. So, so much of it depends on tell us and time horizon. It makes sense. Like what is your purpose in investing? What’s the target? What are you trying to do? In theory of God, of course. Right. If you’re a follower. Well, what’s your tell us what’s your purpose? What’s the big why? I think we all have to answer that as investors or leaders. But then what’s our time horizon? Are we investing for a year, for 10 years, for a generation or multiple generations? So when I started cross-community community 30 years ago with my sweet bride to questions. What is the purpose? What’s the time horizon in our institution is built for a time horizon. Should the Lord tarry, much more than 30 or 50 years from now will be here? William James says the greatest use of a life. William James was a Harvard professor. The greatest use of a life is to invest it in something that outlasts it. I’m just saying, I would suggest and I’ve not written on this, but I’m just giving you my thoughts more than tactics. It’s more clarity of the why and the time horizon that guides that investment decision. Ultimately it’s the glory of God in the furtherance of his kingdom. But what’s the time horizon? What’s the long play? [00:12:23][114.7]

[00:12:24] And so within that I would just say I think proverbs has several themes of wisdom. One is. We need to think about economic life, investing, whatever it is, consumption through the lens of diligence, justice, generosity and ethics of what is right. And we can talk some more about the practicality of it. But I would say tell us some time horizon. And then I would suggest that risk has to be measured. What level of risk? And then the fiduciary responsibility if you’re investing someone else’s resources. [00:12:56][32.3]

[00:12:57] But the importance of investing before God, it’s a given in scripture. The outcome is not certain. Right. But you can have a tell us and time horizon. So I think it’s very important what my underresourced friends in under-resourced communities keep telling me to invest my life, not just my talents, my resources in giving others access and opportunity. So that would be another thing I’d love to engage with. We think about investment. Are we investing not just for a particular return, but to provide other people opportunity and access? Yeah. So I like that. Thanks. I mean, I haven’t written this out, so I’m just… [00:13:36][39.0]

Henry: [00:13:37] No, no, I think is great. I mean, effectively, we’re doing this core collectively crowdsourcing your next book, which is awesome. But I rarely get an opportunity to do this where I get the real time process, something with a pastor and who’s an author. And so this comes to me because the two things you said. One is that you talked about the biblical mandate, the creation mandate, the charge to take dominion. The fact that we were designed by a creator to operate in an economy. Second thing you talked about was the parable of the talents. Matthew twenty five. And their lesson from that and I thought popped to my head as you’re talking about it. So it’s also partially formed. But I’d love to riff with you about it for a second. I’ve always thought it was a great lesson about investing, but I’ve always been thrown off by the part at the end where one of the sevants comes back and says, I was afraid of you because I know you’re hard, man. And his master replied, You wicked lazy servant. Well, then, you should have put my money on deposit. What do I even make of that part? [00:14:37][60.9]

[00:14:38] But the thought I had from it is is the lesson that the servant should have endeavored to understand the intent of his master before he invested. And clearly, God is not the type of hard person that the servant saying. But the lesson there is, you fool, you should have understood what the commander’s intent was. What would have pleased your master? You went off and invested, or in this case, didn’t invest you, regardless of what I would even think about it. And that’s what really makes me mad to you. And I wonder if there’s application for us as Christ followers and that rather than just going to investing with Fidelity and Merrill Lynch are all fine institutions, but just kind of passively investing, kind of going through the motions. What’s it look like for us to really endeavor to understand what is our master’s intent? Our master is not a hard man. He’s a generous person and he wants flourishing. And so are we as investors really endeavoring to understand this is what God would have us do. And it’s that kind of the message is that maybe I’m one of the takeaways from Matthew twenty five. [00:15:41][62.3]

Tom: [00:15:41] No, I think you’re right. I mean, I’m just saying I think one of the things I’m most encouraged with you and Eventide and others who are thinking about this space is as just an individual investor. What are the implications for my investment? Does it own or God does it further the mission in the world? Common good. So I’m just saying, even this kind of movement of thinking investment, not just to prevent bad things, but to nourish good things. So I’m just saying I’m really excited very early in the conversation, FDI and the movement of investing wisely. But I think we’re on a good trajectory. Heart hard as you know more than I do. It’s hard to know what is exactly good and not good and where you draw the line. But I guess that’s right. The incredible opportunity for creativity, for impact is thinking more dynamic on the area, not only of diligence, but of justice and goodness that guide that investment decision. [00:16:32][50.4]

Henry: [00:16:34] And what does the master tell us elsewhere when he reveals himself to us about the things he cares about. And it’s those very things you’re talking about, about justice and access, opportunity for the marginalized. [00:16:44][10.1]

Tom: [00:16:44] Yeah, job creation. Right. To me, one of the great questions of our investing, not only return, but is this creating that energy of job creation, good job creation and dignity and opportunity for people. That’s a part of that investment ripple effect. [00:16:59][15.0]

Rusty: [00:17:00] Tom it’s Rusty and I want to thank William and Henry for inviting me into this FDI podcast. I’m a big fan of your book. I feel a little bit like a fanboy at this point because I’ve marked your book up like crazy and there’s at least a dozen, if not more thoughts that you bring in the book that I really hadn’t thought about. And one of those is you say those who apprentice their lives to him will bear much fruit. And what really struck me there was this word apprentice. I mean, I’ve never heard it put that we can apprentice our lives to him to bear the fruit. So I want you to dive a little bit into that as faith driven investors how we can apprentice our lives to him and you start to talk a little bit more. But I’m really interested in how you’ve apprenticed your life to get you to this place where you’ve written and can speak so eloquently about, you know, the economics of neighborly love and the economics of the kingdom. [00:18:00][59.9]

Tom: [00:18:01] Rusty. It’s a great question and my heart really animates with it. First of all, the word apprenticeship and fruitfulness, the biblical text we use the word disciple or student or pupil as a follower of Jesus and that word not to get into biblical languages. But one of the primary meanings of that and the early understanding of that word in the Greek text is apprenticeship, which again, apprenticeship is a really good word because it captures a holistic life, not just skill, but intimate relationship. And the best metaphor that captures this is Matthew 11:20-30 when Jesus invites us. And he just quoted two because he gives us this metaphor of the yoke, which is an apprenticeship metaphor of two animals being brought together in the first century to cattle or two oxen who learn how to plow others. They’ve learned how to be a part of that farm and what their purpose is in the world. So he takes this idea of learning from him, like being in the yoke, not like this, not an egg yolk. So he says, come to me, all who are wearing heavy laden and I will give you rest. Rest is a picture from Genesis of the Life. God has forced the full. I’ve got his words. But how do we do that? We take his yoke and learn from them. Right. And then he says, you’ll find rest of your soul. [00:19:15][73.8]

[00:19:15] But this idea of learning from Jesus in an intimate apprenticeship captures a sense of submission to him, relationship with him, and learning from him and in and through him. So what I’m saying is this apprenticeship piece ties to fruitfulness. So in John 15- Jesus and all who are my disciples, my apprentice, same Greek word, all who are my true followers are not only my friends. Remember that intimate with me, which is the number one thing of all of life, is relationship intimate with him. But as I’m intimate, I bear much fruit and so proved to be my father’s disciples or my disciples. So fruitfulness here has not only intimacy first, but it has character transformation and productivity and love. Right? This idea of productivity. So apprenticeship with Jesus is not just a vertical, it’s a horizontal that I take with me in my vocational life and many smart people. Dallas’. Well, one of them said that Jesus is the most brilliant person to take with you on the job. Right? Jesus, the most brilliant economists. He’s the most brilliant psychologist. I believe that from the core of my being. [00:20:20][64.8]

[00:20:21] So when I’m saying that connects to our work life now, because to be an apprentice with Jesus is not just something I do on Sunday. So I’m just praying to him and with him, which is important. But it’s all of life. So when I enter my investment zone, when my work zone, my primary teacher is Jesus in that career, that endeavor, that skill, that wisdom, not Jesus doesn’t give us the technical pieces, but he gives us the wisdom and empowerment and spirit, creativity to live into that world. So apprenticeship is the best summary of the word for disciple in the New Testament. And it’s all inclusive. My intimacy, my work, my relationships and marriage all of life. Our apprenticeship is comprehensive and holistic. So it profoundly shapes my Monday life and its shape and life. You ask me about me. I look to Jesus first and his teaching and his presence and his empowerment to do my job today, whatever it is. More than anybody else. I mean, I learn from everybody. But Jesus is my ultimate teacher. Every moment when I’m leading a meeting, when I’m planning, when I’m creative, when I’m making an investment, I mean that that’s the paradigm. It’s profoundly transformational. [00:21:31][70.2]

Rusty: [00:21:32] Right. And was there a catalyst in your ministry, in your life that opened up this window for you around how we can be better faith driven investors? [00:21:43][11.3]

Tom: [00:21:45] Yeah, I think the catalysts, first of all, would be, as I mentioned, that I am an apprentice with Jesus 24/7 in all dimensions of my life, that I look to Jesus for wisdom and guidance. And again, if I have that Rusty fire that then when I think about my understanding of work, economics, all aspects of economics, including from spending but also investing, that I am going to try to listen carefully to his voice, look at what he said. Think as he thinks, love as he loves, and try to make a wise decision about a particular investment or investing in the market. Where is I look to Jesus? I pray in making those decisions. So this is not weird. This is deeply existentially true. So I’m saying when I think about that. Of course, I look at all of the wisdom of scripture as an investor of my time, talent and treasure. So I’m looking at proverbs, but Jesus is the most brilliant investor. I believe that he’s the wisest person who ever walked this earth in all dimensions of life. And he’s invited me. And a great invitation. Matthew Levitt to come to me. Take my yoke and learn for me. And I believe that’s true every day. [00:22:56][70.6]

[00:22:57] So that’s been the transformation. And that does guide my decision. One of the struggles I have was how much do I invest now for later return? How much do I give now? And I’d say that that is the hardest decision for me. Do I give more now? Do I wait and invest? Hopefully with a greater return later. So maybe you guys are wise and your listeners, how do you do that? How do you navigate the goodness of giving now of your capacity, but also taking some of that capacity and hopefully multiplying it for greater generosity later? That to me is a really crucial question. I’m turning it on you now. [00:23:32][35.1]

William: [00:23:34] That’s a good question So, yeah, so you haven’t figured it out. That’s all right. Now, that’s one to pray about. I would love if any of our listeners have thought through that. Please let us know. I Feel like we hear that a lot. You know, there’s great principles around, you know, giving. You can see needs everywhere in the world. But God does tell us to be wise. You know, I feel like that’s both with disposable income but also with retirement income. I mean, all different types of investing are wrapped up in that. [00:24:00][26.0]

[00:24:00] And I feel like you can find biblical wisdom to support some version at least. Of course, there’s bad versions of all those, but some good version of most of those things. So yeah, if any listeners have thought through that, let us know and maybe we’ss bring Tom back on as he continues to think through it and to shift gears a little bit as we’re coming towards a close here. [00:24:19][19.5]

[00:24:20] You know, we usually ask kind of where God has you right now. So if you want to answer that and be great where God has you and his word. But also, as we think about that last question, I’m interested. I’ll change the question in the moment here from the spirit, hopefully. What could be a verse or a story that maybe our listeners could meditate on with regards to how to invest well, with how to think through that paradigm, maybe something that’s not the parable of talents, because I feel like we’ve all thought through, not all of us, but a good number have thought through that and not really found that answer in there, you know, is it in the easy yoke? [00:24:52][31.5]

[00:24:52] I’ve heard pastors say, you know, the yoke is a set of teachings in the ancient rabbinical tradition. So while it is an oxen analogy, it’s also more about come to me, be an apprentice, learn my ways, learn my yoke, my set of teachings, and then your burden will be light. And I’m interested if there’s a piece of that yoke that stands out to you in this moment for our listeners to maybe go to the great imitations. [00:25:15][23.0]

Tom: [00:25:16] Matthew 11:20-30 is a very misunderstood text, so we could spend time talking about that. But I think the invitation is so important. It follows from Genesis 17 and the texts of Torah because God says to Abraham, Here’s the picture of the life God has walked before me and behold, I will make you fruitful. I mean, that’s the big idea for the world. [00:25:37][20.9]

[00:25:38] So what I want to suggest is that the great invitation and Abrahamic covenant of Genesis 17, is this really an invitation first to intimacy with Jesus, with God, then out of that is wholeness, this integral life of rest and wholeness and then fruitfulness. So that tax particular I mean, if I might just want to finish in terms when I’m meditating on Jesus invitation. You think about to be his apprentice to find rest. We can not fulfill the great commandment. And again, investment fits into that loving God and loving our neighbor or the great commission of making disciples if we have not embraced the great invitation. So here’s one I simply want to say is that the great imitation is Matthew Levin, 20 30. It’s often a misunderstood text and lost text. But Jesus gives us the path to loving God and loving our neighbor in all its comprehensiveness and also making disciples of the world. If we do not embrace the great imitation, if we do not enter his yoke, which demands submission, submission to a person first and to his teachings, then we cannot love God and love our neighbor. It’s truly the Great Satan. And so many people talk about loving God to love your neighbor, but without apprenticeship to Jesus without entry is a joke with learning from him becoming like him. We cannot do that. So it’s the great I called the great set up. Just love God, love your neighbor. But if you’re an apprentice with Jesus, we’ve not entered his yoke of apprenticeship. We can not do that. On the other side, the great commission. Think about Mathew’s design. It ends with the great commission, which most of us know make disciples of all the world. Well, the problem is, if we’re not an apprentice or so we are making Fawlty disciples. So it’s the great mission. We call the great set up a great mission. So I do think this affects our investment group. Because when you think about our stewardship on Monday and the different vocational stewards we have of what God has given to us. How do we love God and love our neighbor? Well, with that investment. But the stewardship God has given us and how do we multiply that in apprenticeship and helping others? Right now, I assume that’s a big part of our mission is how do we help other investors? Other followers of Jesus invest? Well, we can’t do that apart from truly inviting them into the yoke of apprenticeship with Jesus. I just think that is being a yoked apprentice of Jesus to learn to live our life like he would if he were me. That’s the basis in all dimensions of life really connect. The great commandment and a great commission and profoundly, I think would speak into our investment challenge in our Monday vocation of investing well for the glory of God. [00:28:09][150.9]

William: [00:28:11] Amen, amen. I love what you said at the end there, too. You know about how, you know you learn how he would live our lives. And that’s not the same for everyone. My favorite little books on calling vocations come out of your life speak by Partner Polymer. And he gives this great phrase. He talks about how, you know, the rabbis of old want to be like Moses, right? That’s the person who they’re trying to model their life after. And this rabbi, Rabbi Zusa is passing away at the end of his life. And he’s lived a good life. And they and his disciples are saying, how do we be like you? [00:28:42][30.8]

[00:28:42] You imitated Moses to the greatest degree. How do we know that it will be like you? And he says this amazing quote that has stuck with me for a long time. He says. When I get to heaven, I don’t think that God’s going to ask me why I wasn’t more like Moses. He’s going to ask me why I wasn’t more like Zusa. I think it’s through that deep apprenticeship that we understand our unique calling and who God’s calling us to be and what our supporting role in his kingdom is. [00:29:07][25.1]

Tom: [00:29:08] Yeah. And the hope is rest for our souls, isn’t it? I mean this word rests on Genesis, but it’s living a life of good truth and beauty that God has called us to live and experience in all dimensions of life, that we experience that kind of life. That’s the hope of it, isn’t it? I just love it. And I will give you rest. Rest is repeated twice in that text. So the rest theme comes right out of Genesis to the life God has force inside of rest. Great, great. [00:29:30][22.7]

[00:29:31] So on this podcast, the feature investor podcast, we’re going to spend lots of time interviewing great folks that are experts in opportunity zones and who are experts in international currency arbitrage. And we’ve even heard from some people recently that think that there’s a great opportunity experts, spiritual integration and cryptocurrency in bitcoin investing. So we’re going to get pragmatic and actually look at actually how you deploy investment dollars. But if we miss as Christ followers and understanding about an invitation to apprenticeship and really to know God and to enjoy him forever, to know God, to love God and love our neighbor and to really endeavor to understand the master’s intent. If we don’t do those things first, then all the other things about how we think about asset allocation and ubit blockers and all the other things that we will absolutely take in this podcast, they will all ring hollow. And so, Tom, I’m grateful for the time you spent with us to help us to further our relationship with God, the father, to know him better, to respond positively to the great invitation, to encourage others to do the same. And I’m grateful for your leadership. [00:30:39][67.8]

Tom: [00:30:40] Thank you, Henry. [00:30:40][0.0]

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