Episode 22 - The Four Quadrants of a Faith Driven Portfolio with Greg Lernihan
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Today’s guest is Greg Lernihan. Greg and his family work together to faithfully steward the resources God has entrusted to them. They grant to Christian ministries and invest from a faith-driven perspective, seeking spiritual, social and financial returns.
He is the Co-Founder of Convergint Technologies, which started in a basement in 2001, and is now the world’s largest electronic security firm with over 5,000 colleagues globally. He’s also been one of the leaders of this Faith Driven Investing movement over the past decade, and we’re thrilled to have him join us.
We’re going to hear some of his journey towards Faith Driven Investing and the insights he has for those just starting the journey. As always, thanks for listening…
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Episode Transcript
Some listeners have found it helpful to have a transcription of the podcast. Transcription is done by an AI software. While technology is an incredible tool to automate this process, there will be misspellings and typos that might accompany it. Please keep that in mind as you work through it. The FDI movement is a volunteer-led movement, and if you’d like to contribute by editing future transcripts, please email us.
Henry Kaestner: [00:02:44] Welcome back to the Faith Driven Investor podcast. It is a distinct pleasure to be back on with my co-host, William Norvel, and then also with a good friend of ours, Greg Lernihan. We'd like to think and maybe it's because we're involved in the production, a show that we get a great chance to talk to a great number of our friends, not just people who are guests, but people who have done some level of life with and have some kindred spirits with. And I can think of no better example of that than Greg. I have not known Greg for very long, but I've known him long enough that he's made such an impression on my life that there are few select people that I have put in this kind of almost macabre document that is to be open in the event something bad happens to me. And I've told my kids about this and told my wife about this because I really want to make sure that my three boys in particular get a chance to learn about different things from people who I know and trust, who are subject matter experts at a whole bunch of different subjects. But one of them is the topic of faith driven investing as the Lord might put them in a position to be able to steward his investment assets. I want them to learn well and I want them to learn from somebody who will be able to share with them their experience. And so I've put in this document. If something bad happens and I want you to learn about faith driven investing, I need you to call Greg Lernihan. And that's what we're gonna be doing today on this episode. We're gonna be talking to Greg Lernihan, somebody I personally admire, somebody who's thoughtful about this space and to talk to him about the way he thinks, the framework that he leads his family through, how he places investment capital, what's important to him, how his faith drives, what he does. Maybe one of the other things that really gravitates me towards Greg is the fact that we have very similar backgrounds. We both care a lot about college basketball. Different teams, but we more importantly have an entrepreneurial background. God used this to build different companies and both have had some degree of exits coming from those companies that has afforded us an opportunity to be thoughtful about stewarding resources. So Greg, with that, let me just say first off, give you a chance to say hi. It's awesome to ave you on the show. [00:04:48][124.0]
Greg Lernihan: [00:04:49] Thank you. Very thoughtful, Henry. And obviously an honor to be part of the team. I'm a consumer of the faith driven podcast and part of this community. It's a pleasure. [00:04:58][9.2]
Henry Kaestner: [00:04:59] Well, super grateful to have you on. As we get started, tell us about that background. It starts with an entrepreneurial background. It's creating wealth. It's creating a company. It's growing value in that undoubtedly informs also, of course, the way that you think about investments. But tell us about that story first. [00:05:16][16.9]
Greg Lernihan: [00:05:17] Yeah, I worked for Siemens for about 20 years, which is a large Fortune 100 company and various leadership capacities. And then in 2001, end of 2000, my co-founder and myself decided to start an electronic security integration via life safety company. It's called Convergint Technologies. And so what that means to the listeners is when you walk into a building and swipe a card, it allows you to go to certain parts of the building and there's cameras watching you. We design service, then install those types of systems for very large companies. Now, globally, the banking industry in the entertainment industry, Fortune 500 companies, airports, things like that. And it's been an incredible journey. We now have over 5000 colleagues across the globe. And what I'm proudest of is the culture that we built. Henry and that we really have a tremendous culture. We have people join us only for our culture and we give back to the community. We make it an environment that everyone feels special, very empowered. And it was a real delight to build that company still carrying on today. I'll tell you this story and how I got into faith driven investing in that in around 2011 or so God put on my heart Haiti. I really can't tell you why. Only thing I can think of it was on TV a lot from the earthquake in 2010. And so in 2012 I took 31 other colleagues to Haiti, which was my first trip to a developing country. I'd never been part of that. And so I was emotionally wrecked from the experience, the lack of infrastructure, the depth of poverty, the living conditions were deplorable. And of course, we've all seen that on CNN. But when you're in the environment and you're speaking to this people and they're so religious and thankful to God, it really, really changed my life. And it's kind of like a halftime moment, which is a book written by Bob Buford, where it was time in my life to go from success to significance. It really was clear to me. And at that same time, we were actually in a process and selling majority interests of our company to a private equity firm. And so I had to figure out how we were going to steward these new financial resources that were coming our way that we really weren't prepared for. So I decided to leave day to day operations still on the board. I'm still an investor involved in strategy, but day to day I'm not. And it was a really challenging time for me to leave a company that I co-founded. And all I knew was that I wanted to have purpose in my life. I wanted a purpose. Well, I think back to a quote from Steve Jobs, and you may know this from John Sculley. And I was it was in the 80s when Steve Jobs was young. And you need a gray-haired guys to be on the leadership team. And he goes to John Sculley and CEO of PepsiCo and says, Do you want to sell colored sugar water the rest of your life or do you want to come with me and change the world? And I can remember that resonated with me when I was young. A boy would I love to work for a company that's actually changing the world. And so I committed myself when I left to using the resources God had entrusted with us and our family. And I was going do something purposeful with it. And so that's my entry point now into impact investing was from that perspective. [00:08:25][187.7]
Henry Kaestner: [00:08:27] So expand on something I've come to know from many of the talks that you've given it, just about how you think about the assets you stored. So you think about generosity, for instance, and you've come to understand that we were served this generous God and think that a step towards faith driven investing begins with seeing the resources as his. And being generous with me modeled that out. But tragically, for a lot of our conversations, people will circle the subject of giving and focus on that and not so much. It invests things like they're focusing on the left pocket of giving and come to understand increasingly that guidance at all. And they can give away and and as they give, they come closer knowing God. And that's awesome development that's been happening in the global Christian church as the church becomes more generous, but not so much on the investing side. So a lot of people might think I've been in this kind of framework that I make as much money as I can on my investments over here in my right pocket. And then with all the money that I make from my investments, then I can go ahead and give it away. You, of course, have come to a different thought, different place where you've come to understand that the very process of investing your capital might advance some of the same goals that you feel that God has put on your heart as you do with your given goals. But I don't wanna put words in your mouth. How do you process that relationship? [00:09:40][73.2]
Greg Lernihan: [00:09:42] Well, it's complicated. First, after resigning from day to day operations, I actually thought it was gonna go into the nonprofit space and use my time talent resource the best I could to help the nonprofit world. [00:09:52][10.6]
[00:09:54] Then the first thing I looked at was how much capital is going into that space. And it turns out this past year, 2018 was 428 billion dollars. And the challenge with that is that had grown less than 1 percent net after inflation. It's been basically same over last 40 years. And there are 1.5 million nonprofits trying to get a piece of that pie. That's pretty much stagnant. So I happen to be on a trip that I went to with Bob Lupton and Charity Detox, also toxic charity author. And he talked to me about this in his book. You Can't Serve a Community Out of Poverty. And I remember sitting there saying that, you know, God had blessed me with some leadership skills and business skills, skills to communicate effectively with people. My brain was wired to be more in the for profit side. So I felt if we're going to make an impact. I had to look at the capital assets. And it turns out that the investable assets in the U.S. are 200 to 250 times more Finance Square that we're giving away. So if we're gonna solve these social issues that we're facing, both in the US and globally, we're going to need other capital matter if you grew that by 50 percent. There's you maybe from wealthy ones sustainable development goals for 2030, where they talk about all major issues facing the world, whether it's poverty, health, education, and they have goals for every one of them. And they estimate that will take two to three trillion dollars each year for the next 15 years. So impact investing started to gain traction. And the reality is, if we're going to make a difference in this space, we can't do it with just care of capital. It's not even up for discussion. We need both investable capital plus charitable capital. And fortunately, this impact investing market is emerging and trying to fill a space that has been doubling over years. There's now 500 billion in market size and all predictions are it'll be 3 trillion the next five to seven years. And people are pouring money in from foundations, from private equity firms, from investment banks. And so now we have more capital coming into the space. We need better deal flow. But I want to make sure that I comment that I'm not talking about not doing granting. This is in addition to we have to do granting. We just can't rely on social and government programs and grants to solve our problems. We need more capital from the outside world. So that's why I focused my time. [00:12:17][143.5]
Henry Kaestner: [00:12:18] So I think that that's incredibly important. I think of, you know, just set box of Tic Tacs and all of them, they're kind of like allocated for being able to achieve the different goals that we might all have with this U.N. Millennium Development Goals or whether it's goals that we have that are driven by our faith. But one of those tic-tacs is giving three or four of them are government spending plus giving. But the rest of the entire box of those tic-tacs are all units of investment. And so if we really want to move the needle, harnessing the power of the rest of our Tic-Tac box, and it's just a lousy illustration, but you'll see it from the slide in show notes is super important. And yet you're saying, of course, as important as it is, it's also really important to give as well. Tell us about as you have progressed in your giving, in your investing. What are some of the aha moments that you've had? What are some of the things that have been kind of several places along the road where you've made some shifts, maybe some pivots to kind of get where you are right now? [00:13:15][57.0]
Greg Lernihan: [00:13:16] Yeah, there's been a few of us here. When we started back in 2013, we had this philanthropic focus and then also added onto it a family fund that we were gonna start investing and impact investing I'd say I entered the space from a secular perspective. I wasn't really familiar with or connected to this emerging faith driven movement back then, but it started reaching out to people and connecting and we ended up going to some Christian conferences, one of which being the gathering. And there's where we got connected with leaders in this space, specifically from Praxis, which was a light bulb moment for us because their thought leaders and everything they were presenting was challenging the way we were going to steward God's capital. So over the next year or so, I would say we finally got exposed to social, spiritual and financial returns. Up until that point, we were just social and financial. [00:14:07][51.0]
[00:14:08] And this was an aha moment that we can literally go out and invest in entrepreneurs and companies that are going to disciple and make more followers of Christ. But the biggest moment for our family, I would say, was when we figured out that these really aren't our resources. Henry, I'd like to say that we've known that for our entire lives have been a Christian my entire life. But it wasn't until we prayed on it. We had excess capital. We didn't feel good about it. And we finally understood. [00:14:37][29.1]
[00:14:37] It took years because I literally wrote in my prayer journal. Lord helped me to get comfortable with giving all of these assets away and that these are not ours. And the steward them as you would want us to. And I remember, not wanting to write it in my prayer journal at all. But my wife talked me into it and then slowly praying on it, it came to be and now we were very comfortable. [00:14:58][20.8]
[00:14:59] So all of our internal discussions with our family are stewarding his resources, and we believe God wants us to not only steward them well, which is by everybody's definition, what well is we can discuss that, but to take risk. These are God's resources and to take risk and then to completely trust him. And that's the journey one. And that's possibly the hardest part, because when you're looking at investment, you really don't know whether they're gonna be successful or not. And when you put a faith lens on, it gets a lot harder. And you have to. And we're learning and growing from this to trust him. [00:15:31][32.3]
William Norvell: [00:15:33] It's amazing. William here, thanks so much for walking us through that and your story. You know, it's funny. I do want to share one quick story I ran into the other day, though I don't think I've shared with you yet. We're talking about Convergint. You talked about the culture and how much that meant to you and how much you thought about that and spent so much time. Well, I ran into a business leader who's in a similar space as yours. [00:15:53][20.0]
[00:15:54] And unprompted, I was talking about, you know, where you get people that are kind of getting going a little bit. So they're taking people from other companies. They're like getting people from those places. Just this one company. No one will leave it. We call them all the time and no one will lead this company. And it was Convergint. They just said, you know, we feel like we can get anyone we want unless they work for them. And they were like, we don't know what they're doing over there. [00:16:20][25.7]
Greg Lernihan: [00:16:20] Well, that's a great compliment that I get to receive today. We're proud of the culture. And as you know, people can work for anyone and they choose to work with. We never say they work for us. They work with us. And we use verbiage that matters to their colleagues are equal. They're not employees that work for me or anybody else that comes. That's that's a real compliment. [00:16:40][19.4]
Henry Kaestner: [00:16:41] I want to expand on it a little bit. If you know, of course, that we also have the Faith Driven Entrepreneur podcast, which is a sister podcast. And there's a lot of there's a good amount of overlap. And so on one hand, you say, well, this is just about investing, you know, Henry, just stay to the script. And yet as investors, we're investing in other companies. Angel investing through funds, et cetera. And maybe one of the biggest things that you might be able to impart to some of these entrepreneurs that are starting and running their businesses that you're now investing in is how to help them to understand how to think through a framework of culture. Culture leads to more employee retention, which is what William just spoke to. And that leads in turn to better investment returns. So I think that maybe it is helpful if you just spent just a minute or two. What is the framework that you went through a conversion that led to this culture where Wayne says nobody would leave? [00:17:29][47.6]
Greg Lernihan: [00:17:30] Well, as I mentioned in the open, he worked for a Fortune 100 company for 20 years and were very well trained on business processes and leadership in growing PNL. And we had responsibilities for it across North American. When we started our own business, the first thing we did was just stand and myself, we were in the basement. We wrote down all the things we liked about big companies, professional think about growth, no such thing as not thinking about growth, well-trained, strong leaders, things like that, all the things they're not good at, not necessarily giving back, not necessarily treating people the way you become a number of not very family friendly. You don't know everybody. It's more of you're just there to get through with your day. And then we went to small companies which are small companies do well, president answered the phone in the middle of the night. They're easy to do business. They have the easy button. They're never hard to do business with. They're always local. Hyper-local tough side is very normally live. Lifestyle businesses. You know, if they're successful in Birmingham, Alabama, they have no reason to go to Florida. It's just hard. I don't know how to do it. They're generally smaller in size. They generally don't spend as much money on training because they try to cut corners. What we did was we knitted those together and came out with a company with the infrastructure and body of a Fortune 500 company with professionalism growth. But now we added in the ease to do business. Local president type of mentality. And so what we ended up building is this company now that can serve customers globaly, but very decentralized. So our culture was about I am converging. I own my position on the team. You pick up the phone, you own it. It doesn't matter who you are. We're all equals. We just have different sets of responsibilities. We expect to be our customers best service provider no matter what business we're in. That's a standard that no one can really meet. So we literally say to our clients, well, we're at other companies, we'd say a one to 10, a scale of one to 10. He'd sit in a room going it went from 8 to 8.2. Aren't we doing great? And then our company is. Are we your best service provider against Amazon, against the painter, against whoever you're dealing with? Will you give us the mark that says Convergintis the best. And if they say no, we can accept that because we don't skew to any of this. We want the real truth. And what that drives is a culture of accountability, empowerment. And I read this book. Our whole company read this book called Founders Mentality, where they studied that only one in ten companies grow their EBITDA, their profits for more than 10 years and convert. We've been blessed with 18 years of record growth each year, even through the difficult times. And they said two or three things. And number one is you have this enemy. They call something else in the book. But it's where you are. In our case, it was the big billion dollar companies that we wanted to go and beat and we wanted to be better, more professional prepared. They wouldn't be able to tell the difference because we had capital and knowledge and expertise. And the second one was ownership and we shared equity. Henry, William, quite a bit of equity, but really it's also shared ownership that they own the success of those offices like president's. And then the third one is it's very decentralized and we allow our colleagues to make all the decisions. So our decisions are on the edge. Nothing came back to Dan or I. If it's a customer issue ann you're in San Francisco, you know what you need to do you're empowered to do that. So I'd say putting all that together now, 18, 19 years later, people join because they like the empowerment. And then we have one last volume. We have 10. I go my last value and belief is fun and laughter on a daily basis. So our whole culture is it's OK to make fun of ourselves. It's OK to have fun. We constantly are doing events and dressing up as rock stars at our national meetings and anything we can do to make the environment a fun work environment. [00:21:19][229.1]
Henry Kaestner: [00:21:20] What rock star did you dress up as well? [00:21:23][2.7]
Greg Lernihan: [00:21:24] That's a very good question. In my case, since I was the leader of the company at that event, they were kiss rock stars and I was more the director. But I've been a Cookie Monster before and I called booking Monster and I had the Cookie Monster outfit. We've had all types of things. I'll just leave it at that. But the kiss one is actually one of our famous ones, all just in full gear. We didn't short suit it either. [00:21:46][21.7]
William Norvell: [00:21:47] That's incredible. Thank you for going on that tagent with us on that will shift back a little bit. You bet you if you'd ever terms on the show. We tried to get into these terms with a lot of people. Of course, you know different people to find them differently. You mentioned impact investing. You've mentioned faith driven investing. How do you define these terms? How do they work with your investing strategy, with the assets and resources that you're stewarding? [00:22:10][23.4]
Greg Lernihan: [00:22:11] Well, there is some differences in the interpretations of each and from the impact investing side. Boy, I would say there's broad agreement across the entire investing spectrum or impact spectrum. That Global Impact Investing Network, which is known as GINE, is the central repository for these types of things. And everyone's accepted the definition of investing in enterprises with the intention to generate measurable, beneficial social enviromental alongside a financial return. That sounds like a lot of words, but what it really the two key words are intentional and measurable. So for to be an impact investment can't say that I've invested in Yahoo or Facebook and they connect people in world. It has to be an intent. Your intent is to make a difference in the world. Your intent is to drive behavior and then you're going to measure that social behavior. And in our case, that could be measuring jobs in impoverished areas. What are we paying them? Are there children now going to school? Do they have medical benefits? Those are measurable social issues on the face driving side. Everything starts now with a faith lens. So in our case, we refer to ourselves as faith driven investors. And we start everything from the Christian entrepreneur is that that he or she is faithful and Christian in this case and that they're going to. Lead that company from a kingdom world view. They're going to use biblical principles to run their company and the leadership is willing to share their faith openly throughout the company. In the end, we seek a triple bottom line and spiritual impact, social and financial. And so at the end of the day, as investors were investing from Christ perspective, and we're hoping that these companies will honor God and the way to conduct business and they'll do business in an excellent way. [00:23:53][102.0]
William Norvell: [00:23:54] Hey, Greg, thanks so much. You know, we've been going through the conceptual stage, which is awesome. Thank you so much for walking us through how you architect the assets that you're steward egg. That's just so interesting. And it's one of the best articulations of it that I've heard. I've got to hear you do this a few times. If you could go a layer deeper for us to be really, I think, great for our listeners to hear maybe about some specific companies and how this has actually played out, both from the leader perspective, the product and then the returns, of course, both in all those categories. [00:24:22][28.3]
Greg Lernihan: [00:24:23] Sure. Let me highlight two. One is a company called Join and they're based in India and the founders, a person by the name of Mel Murray. And she went and actually moved to India for better part of six years and immersed herself living amongst the poor and tried to figure out how she could use the skills that they have there locally. And so what they could do is manufacture high quality, high end purses. And so she has a nonprofit side called Joy Corps that takes care of all the holistic services for these women that they don't even know what to do with the capital, that they're paying them, how to go to work. What are the responsibilities of, you know, having these resources? And then on the other side, she's selling purses through boutique shops and online. And we bought them for my wife and her daughters. And we're not buying them because we're trying to be nice. It's because they're really, our daughters and females in our lives that get these, love them. And what we're doing there, William, is she's probably between 2 and 300. She may be as much as 400 now people that she's hired in the poorest areas of northern India. And she got a low interest loan from us. We didn't do equity. We wanted something that would allow her to start to think bigger and still afford to be able to do it. And so we've been doing that for about four years. I speak with her almost on a monthly basis. We're very connected with her and we're actually going on trip for the first time. I didn't tell you that she ends up getting kicked out of India due to Christian beliefs in her company and some other nuances. And she came back to states for a couple of years and then moved back to northern Thailand to ching ry so she could be as close as she possibly could to still living amongst the poor. And she's kind of a modern day Mother Teresa in my life that really makes us better for just being around her. So the spiritual is she walks up and down the streets and converted people to Christ on a daily basis. Just when you meet her, speak with her and just have the opportunity and presence with her. Our social impact is tremendous with the hiring of the colleagues that we have. The pay we track, the pay, the benefits and those types of things. [00:26:34][130.9]
William Norvell: [00:26:35] That's a perfect place. Great. So we've mentioned a few different types. You said you've invested debt. You've obviously invested equity convertible notes a couple of times. Then obviously there's the spiritual financial impact. I've seen you talked before about how you think through four different types of investments and how this graph, both from a financial return or a spiritual return, you might walk in our listeners through that framework. [00:26:54][19.8]
Greg Lernihan: [00:26:55] Sure. I'll do my best to make it easy. A couple of years ago, we started to literally plot out our investment on a two by two, which is on the X axes or the bottom axes is financial returns and on the Y up-down axes of social and spiritual terms. And then you divide that into four quadrant. So in the lower left quadrant would be low social, low spiritual and low financial where you generally don't want to be. And in our case, we called that buried talents because we studied the parable of talents. We're all familiar with that. You're not using those resources appropriately. And then if you go to the right. So now you're in a high financial still low spiritual, low social. We call that capitalistic. And most of the capital in the world is in this quadrant. These are investors seeking the highest returns. First and foremost. That's perfectly normal. Nothing wrong with that. But then as you go to the top right corner is normally the winning quadrant because it's high social and spiritual and high financial. And of course, we had investments in that quadrant. But what we didn't expect is we had investments in the upper left quadrant, which is high social, spiritual, but low financial. And we tried to understand it, you know, how did this happen? And so what we learned is that these turned out to be some of our favorite investments. And we ended up kind of. These are all internal terms that we use in our family is called spirit led because we couldn't justify financially why we made investments on this left upper quadrant, because there's always a better investment further to the right. There's always a higher return. And so after study in those, William, we learned in the upper left quadrant in particular and how it happened and why it moves us. We found those four things. The first thing we found is it's biblical. This is we have gleaning going on in here the dignity of work for the underserved. And then we found it. Our faith in God and our faith in the entrepreneur superseded our fear of losing dollars or capital. We were willing to accept lower returns because we believe so much. In this case, Join is an example. If all the business opportunities that we invest in. Look perfect on paper, we said, where are we allowing God to show His Majesty and his power and give them glory and impossible situations? We like that these require God to be successful. The second is we employ the marginalized. This is where all the people are uneducated, lack employable skills, returning citizens in rural areas and predominantly women. And then the third thing was difficulty in raising capital. I've certainly heard Henry talk about walking up and down Silicon Valley's Sand Hill Road saying he got turned down 40 times. Imagine and he was trying to raise capital in the capitalistic square. Now go up and over to a very high spiritual social content, but low financials, it makes that look easy. It's impossible, difficult to raise capital in this quadrant. First and foremost, because they don't have any planned exits, there's no venture capital is going to come in. And most likely by a rural business in northern India, it's probably not probable or strategic. Most of these are debt instruments in our family. About half of the investments in the upper left quadrant are debt versus equity. And we have used charitable capital, which I'd encourage other listeners to think about. Less than half of our capital net Quadrani from charitable from our daughter advice fund that you can use Impact Foundation or other people to help you invest in that. And then the last thing in that section is scaling is not important, William, to these particular entrepreneurs. Sustainability is they're not looking to go global. They're trying to keep people employed and adding. And then the last one, which is why we call this spirit led, is because these entrepreneurs are truly spirit led. The impacting humanity or human flourishing is more important than their return on investment. That's the honest truth. Most of these investments are with women or minority led founders. And then the last thing is these, whether it's Britney or whether it's male. That reference, Sherley are incredibly humble. Leaders have no egos and they're just there to serve the poor to the best of their abilities. And our family's very motivated by them. [00:30:56][240.4]
Henry Kaestner: [00:30:57] So great. I think that's also one of the things that I heard from you. That this upper left hand quadrant is comprised some of your favorite stories, people who have been taking great risk for the gospel, getting out there in very difficult places and their encouragement to you and their encouragement to me and our listeners. One of the things that some people who are listening to this might wonder is, do I have to in order to be able to have a gospel integration to what I do, do I have to find out that all of my investments are going to be in that upper left hand quadrant where necessarily in order to be able to have spiritual impact, to be able to invest as the Bible might lead me, that I have to have a lower financial return or take on higher risk or something like that? What does that upper right hand quadrant look like? Maybe. Maybe it's not there the way you want to see it right now. But maybe you have hopes. You see developments in the industry so that somebody listens to this podcasts and say, well, I might have investments in both the upper left and the upper right. And the upper right doesn't necessarily just need to be Fidelity Magellan Fund. It could be some other things that have some gospel inclusion as well. Talk to us a little bit about that. [00:31:59][62.1]
Greg Lernihan: [00:32:00] Well, it's a good question, Henry. We definitely are fans in favor of companies are in the upper right hand quadrant. We would not expect, orwWhat we learned from this exercise is that in our view, kingdom, impact investing isn't one quadrant over the other for our families. Both quadrants. And so we actively seek investments in both areas. Those have higher social returns, spiritual returns and financial in the upper right. And then we are willing to sacrifice some financial returns. And we also have funds in both sides. Henry and that we have a great investments, for instance, is a fund that does microfinancing in Southeast Asia and Indonesia, and that's a very high performing fund, very strong Christian principles and leading it. And at the same time, we have a fund in the left quadrant, which is talented, which is trying to leverage companies in East Africa to give them capital to scale. And so they can go across both. And I wouldn't want anyone that's listening to think that it has to be in one quadrant of the other. First, Fortis is a family decision between you and God. And second of all, we're fortunate that we have investments that look just like a cola or just like joint that are in the right quadrant. And One World Pharmaceuticals, which is this company called OWBP, where they're actually making a drug. Multiple drugs. One of them is epileptic drug. That's a branded generic that they make profit high margins here in the states. And then sell it for pennies on the developing world because they can't afford it. And one of the problems with epilepsy is once you're on that drug and you create a generic, if it's not the exact same ingredients, which according to these scientists, it only has to do with eighty to one hundred and twenty percent of the actual brand, it can cause them seizures. So they created an exact duplicate, called it a branded generic, so that, you know, when you take this drug, you're not going to have epileptic procedure. And so they're making profit here in the states and then using that goodwill in developing countries. And it has a great opportunity to make good money and change the world. And it's an upper right hand quadrant investment. [00:34:06][126.1]
Henry Kaestner: [00:34:07] One key takeaway and we can't go over too quickly is that you said that the process doesn't lead with a prescription of how much you put in the upper left or the upper right or even if you're in all the different quadrants. But the prescription, if I heard you right, is it's the process by which you submit that decision to God and do that as a family and then seek his direction. I think that's really important that this is a heart posture thing rather than cash. You have that 20 percent in this fund or 10 percent of that fund. How do you do that as a spiritual discipline, particularly with your family? A lot of people, listeners are going to be doing this multi generationally. What kind of format? How do you guys do that in submitting that to God? [00:34:46][38.3]
Greg Lernihan: [00:34:47] Well, you're right with your answer, Henry, and that it isn't scientific as much as it's more heart. We have three measurements that we use. The first thing we use is, are they Christ centered? So it starts with a scale of 1 to 5 and 5 is now and in some cases living amongst the poor. Their entire lives are dedicated to the marginalized. And so they get a higher score and it's all subjective. Between 5 down to 1 1 would be somebody who's not necessarily faith driven and they shouldn't be in investment criteria anyway. The second would be are they employing the marginalized for our family? That's our number one criteria. If we have a choice, we won't invest in companies that are spiritually strong and invest in the marginalized. So marginalized to us includes returning citizens, previously incarcerated individuals, one of the hardest to employ. It also includes people that we described earlier in Uganda and also includes people in the south side of Chicago that are under-educated or un employed. And so we write that in and the last thing we write for is the potential for a financial return. And so we arbitrarily go through one through five that some of the funds I referenced earlier have a higher opportunity for higher returns. The debt ones that we've invested in the debt companies or companies we provided debt to are always lower. We know that going in. We know that they can't afford generally the capital, but they can have a good business that's sustainable, repeatable and can pay us back our debt so that we can redeploy it. And I think some people think if you're in that upper left hand quadrant, it's a bad deal. It's a weak deal. You're not supporting excellence. We just fundamentally don't agree with that. It can be an excellent company that can afford a 4 to 5 percent return that's helping marginalized or underserved community. And we'll do just fine. [00:36:34][107.3]
William Norvell: [00:36:35] Thank you so much for walking us through that. Unfortunately, as this happens, sometimes we're going to have to move towards closed now. But will love will likely beg you for more time later. We do that with a lot of people, too, as we'd like to close. Loved to just let our listeners in to your world a little bit. Amazing how God's word continues to be alive life every day. And we would love to maybe let our listeners know what is God doing in your life through his word in this season, potentially, or today, even maybe this morning. Just where is he taking you? What is he teaching you and what journeys have you on right now? [00:37:06][31.0]
Greg Lernihan: [00:37:08] Well, William mine has has been today. It's been for weeks and probably over the last year or two. And that's for me and my family working to be obedient to God's wishes. In the short scripture that works for me is "apart from me you can do nothing," which is John 15:5. And I would say I mentioned earlier, I've been a Christian my entire life, but I'm not sure I believe that verse until the last several years have really been working, I thought. And even my Convergint days, my hard work, extra hours, motivating people was more my efforts. And I don't think I gave God enough credit. And I now have completely understood in the past several years in particular that without reservation, I need the Lord. I can't do this on my own. It's not from my efforts. And so surrendering and being obedient to his wishes is far and away. The number one thing I'm working on, and that includes everything from small sacrificial things on a day to day to him trying to memorize scripture and make sure that reading the word morning and night praying over every decision we make. And so I don't think this is going to end in a week or two. I think it's a lifelong journey. But we're going to continue to. I'm going to continue to do my best to render complete as well. [00:38:21][73.7]
William Norvell: [00:38:24] Amen can't think of a better place to end. Just thanks so much for joining us, such a gift, such pleasure. [00:38:28][4.5]
Greg Lernihan: [00:38:29] Thanks, William. It was an honor. [00:38:29][0.0]
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