MI343: Beyond Business: Exploring Faith w/ Brent Beshore

23:14and I realized I don't believe anymore. And it's like, well, no, what you had before then was untested. And I think that's one of the things that I'm really grateful for is because I came to faith as an adult and I wanted nothing to do with it. I feel like that there's really, I haven't heard anything and I would love if there's anybody who listens to this who wants to provide a challenge. I mean, I've read hundreds of books from atheists about the faith and about their critiques of the faith. And I feel pretty comfortable now that there's nothing that I could know. And I've seen way too much at this point.

23:47Like my relationship with God, like I've seen miracles, I've seen things happen that I have no way to explain them otherwise. But like, that's where I feel like that rooted faith that where the reliance upon the trust in, it's not this like wishy-washy, oh, I guess I'm just going to comfort myself and have faith. And I think I thought when I was an atheist, that that's what being a Christian was. It was like, Well, hope things work out. Pascal's wager, maybe a lot of people lean on that, which by the way, I think Pascal is incredible. And I think Pascal's wager is a great technique to get people's attention.

24:18But true faith is not just being like, well, I'm going to take in a holy insurance policy. It is a daily walk of dying to self of reliance upon the Lord. And the fruit that it produces is incredible. It's unlike anything else. The love that I experience now, I don't think I knew what love was until I became a believer. Because I had to experience the love of God. If I hadn't experienced the love of God, you could only give what you already have. I didn't love my wife in the same way before I was a believer. So anyway, just beautiful. I just rambled on, but it was beautiful. No, I love it. I love to hear it.

24:57It just sounds like it was a slow progression of reading, being surrounded by believers. I like John Mark Comer, I think is the guy's name, who he calls himself an apprentice to Christ. And I like to think of it that way, just like you are apprenticing to this guy that has influenced the world more than anybody else. I mean, you've made this point about like Abraham Lincoln studied Christ, Einstein studied Christ, Napoleon studied Christ. It's like, there's a reason that we should probably delve into who he was. And it's the C.S. Lewis idea of he was either a liar, a lunatic, or he was what he said he was, or the Lord, right?

25:39That's correct. Often I challenge people if I say, hey, have you ever studied Jesus? And they're like, no, I've never studied Jesus. It's like, well, that's dumb. They're like, what do you mean? And I'm like, well, who do you study? And they're like, oh, I study all these greats in business. I study all that. And I'm like, well, do you know who they studied? They studied Jesus. And I was like, and by the way, even if you put his divinity aside, right? Like, let's just put that completely inside. Let's just say, objectively, he's the greatest leader in the history of the world. He has the most followers in the history of the world.

26:10Wouldn't you want to know how he did it? Like, if you want followers of your own, if you want to build your own quote unquote brand, or if you want to lead people, he's the greatest leader. So, why wouldn't you? You're going to study the leader who studied the leader that's actually the best leader? Why wouldn't you just go directly to the source and study the leader? And oftentimes when I get people kind of quartered like that, it's usually at a dinner or something like that. People are like, all right, fine, I'll study Jesus. And I'm like, great. It's amazing what happens. Yeah. That was my experience.

26:39I completely discounted Christianity right off the bat and explored all these other wisdom traditions in depth, but it wasn't until - And they have a lot of wisdom. Oh, they do for sure. For sure. And they have a lot of wisdom. impact quite a bit. But it wasn't until later that I really got back into reading and studying the Bible. And I like what guys like Thomas Jefferson and Kevin Kelly, I don't know if you're familiar with Kevin Kelly, the guy that Wired Magazine and Tim Ferriss has interviewed him. Fascinating guy. Just read the red of what Jesus said. You can condense the study and read, Just read what Jesus said and study that as an exercise.

27:21And I think that's great to challenge people that way. And I wanted to ask you, though, as you went through this kind of super gray nihilistic period of your life, and then you make this transition towards opening up, towards studying the Bible and being surrounded by Christians, it sounded like that was a slow process. Once you made that transition, did business become, did it take like a backseat? and did it become more difficult? I think you asked Chris Powers that somehow, did Christianity make you less of an effective business person or entrepreneur? Yeah, it's a great question. I mean, to be honest, when I surrendered my life and surrendered, including the businesses to the Lord and said, hey, all I have and all I am is yours.

28:07I mean, that's what's required. That's real faith, right? The more it's his, it's his in the beginning, right? If you're a trillionaire and you gave everything away, you've given nothing to the Lord. I mean, it's all the Lord's anyway. But it's interesting, God gives us free will for a reason, because without free will, there was no love. Love has to be able to choose. And so, once I chose to surrender, once I gave those things to God, the businesses exploded. The businesses have done far better. And it's interesting because I've had the pleasure of having dinner with quite a few successful, famous people, billionaires.

28:47And one of my favorite meals I've ever shared is with the Green family, with David Green and his sons in Oklahoma City. And I remember asking David this exact thing. I said, David, like, Hobby Lobby is this monster organization. Put the politics aside. Put what people think aside. They're easy to lambast for some of their views. I'm just putting that aside. Just take for a second. This is a family that has deep convictions, loves the Lord, and that puts their money where their mouth is. They give away an unbelievable amount of money to support organizations that are helping the poor, the disenfranchised, women, children, orphans, the foreigner, all around the world.

29:25It's incredible. They take 50 % of the cash flow of Hobby Lobby. I'm not giving away anything that I think is confidential. They've written publicly about this. And now the entire Hobby Lobby organization is actually in a trust. They've given it all away. In fact, David wrote a book called Giving It All Away and Getting It All Back Again, which is just a beautiful imagery of this. But politics aside, if you just look at what they do, I asked David, I said, how do you compete? It's a highly competitive thing that they're doing. I mean, they're brick and mortar retail. And I said, how did that work?

29:58I mean, you're giving 50 % of your profits away. That's 50 % less to reinvest. That's 50%. I mean, that's a big deal. And he said, yeah, we have double the margins of everyone else. And I was like, wait, what? And he said, yeah, we have double the margins. And I remember this was probably, oh gosh, six or seven years ago when I heard this. And I said, I said, when did your margins double? And he was like, they doubled the year that we gave it all away to the Lord. And I was like, your margins doubled. And he said, yeah, the day that the year, literally that we decided to give 50 % away, our margin doubled.

30:33So we actually had no net impact to the reinvestment of the business. It's been that way ever since. We have doubled the margins of all of our competitors. And I said, how is that? And he's like, we don't know. He's like, we have things that we do differently. We've got about 10 or 12 things that we know that we do differently than everyone else. We don't know which ones do what, and we don't know how the Lord works in this, but somehow the Lord provides. And the Lord honors the fact that he knows that it's his business. It's not our business. He knows that we need the resources to be able to accomplish certain things on behalf of the kingdom.

31:04And so he's blessed us. And I remember thinking to myself, I remember like, man, that is crazy. And sure enough, when I started, and in fact, this is still a process I'm actively doing. It's like, the more that I have surrendered, the more that I've said, hey, this is not about building my kingdom, about my gain, about trying to be the wealthiest person or however, whatever you want to say, the most famous or the most powerful or most well-respected, the more that I can just say, hey, look, all of life's a gift. I'm not trying to gain anything. There's nothing that I can lose. I'm just going to try to hold it with open hands, which by the way, I fail daily at doing.

31:38It's amazing how quickly your hands close when you take your eye off. Jesus. But I'm telling you the way that the business, it's just exploded. I mean, The idea for the funds, the partnership with our investors, all of those things happened within a reasonable time right after I came to faith and that it really solidified and I really started to surrender to the business side, which that was a progression too. It was not obvious to me in the beginning when I gave myself and my life over. It's just weird. It's like a muscle like anything else. You've got to develop a taste for what does it feel to be surrendered?

32:14and what does it feel to be unsurrendered to even understand what it is to give. And so it took me a while to give the businesses and money. And I mean, I used to be obsessed. I could tell you down to the dollar what my cash balances were. I could tell you what our rates of return were. I could carry all that stuff. And the more that I open up my hands, the more I release that, the more God multiplies. And you don't do it. Again, this is where you get into prosperity gospel garbage. I'm not saying you give it away so that you get your triple portion or whatever kind of language that usually happens, but that's not the purpose.

32:49If you do it for the wrong reasons, like God wants our heart. So, if you give with a heart posture of trying to get, God's not going to honor that. It's not going to work. God just wants our heart. And so, yes, the business, I mean, has there been consequences that have been negative for the business that I'm a sort of an out Christian? Absolutely. Are there people who haven't sold to us, you know, the business where the business of buying other businesses who haven't sold with us? Absolutely. Are there people who have invested with us because they think I'm an idiot because I'm a Christian? Absolutely.

33:18But we also have a lot of people who aren't Christians, who are sellers to us and who are investors with us. And I love it because Jesus collided with the world. Jesus didn't isolate himself with the religious elites. It's the exact opposite. So my whole view is you don't have to be a Christian to invest with us. You don't have to be a Christian to be hired by us. You don't have to be a Christian to work with us. Like we want all people that we agree on certain values, but you don't have to be a Christian to be in relationship with me. That'd be the, that'd be the anti-Jesus thing. Was it difficult for you to become public with your beliefs?

33:54Like you've, you've really put yourself out there and I really admire people like you and people that John Marsh that we talked about earlier that are very open about their beliefs and you're going to take shots. So I just wanted to hear how that has been for you, that being as open as you are and transparent and vulnerable. It's hard to do. I find it incredibly hard to do. I had a lot of trepidation. A mentor of mine and senior pastor of church, Dave Cover, who I've had a longstanding relationship. He was one of the people who helped bring me to faith originally. I remember having long conversations with him about being more known publicly as a Christian.

34:32And I remember thinking to myself like, gosh, people are not going to like me. If anything, I have a tendency to want to people please. And so, I was like, oh man, this grates against all of my people pleasing. And ultimately, I said, look, either I believe or I don't. Either I'm going to be authentically me or I'm not. And if I'm going to be authentically me, if somebody asks me a question, I want to answer them truthfully. And if the true answer is because of this or that in the Bible or because this is the way my belief system works, let the chips fall where they may. And I'm just going to trust that the Lord has me and will keep me as my refuge.

35:07You know, what's interesting is the shots that I take are actually the best conversation starters. I've developed so many great relationships with people who have said something negative or condescending towards me in sort of a public setting that I've been professing my faith. And they start the best conversations. And by the way, it's not like they're like, you know, ultimately convert to following Jesus. Some have, but like many of them, it's like, we're just friendly and we care about each other and they think that I'm wrong and I think they're wrong and that's okay. We can be wrong and still care for each other.

35:40the people who actually i probably struggle with the most publicly are the christians that have a very different form of professing christians a very different form of beliefs than i do and who dog pile on you know oftentimes when i'll say something on twitter you know about faith you know you'll have people saying oh you're an idiot you're wrong blah blah and all the stuff my answer to them is like i totally get it because i said the same stuff about people as an art atheist i was also bombastic about it the people that really struggle with this the people who were like, well, actually, yes. And here's this crazy thing that I'm like, whoa, I don't believe that.

36:13But they're like, they're like, trying to be on my side and trying to like, go at people. And I'm like, I'm having to like, simmer them down. And anyway, so I don't mind when people are opposed to me. It gives me anxiety when people who believe different things than me, who profess, and it's really hard for me outside. I mean, it's one of the things I talked about David Perel. Like, he was like, people will say that they're Christians, and they don't believe the divinity of Jesus. They'll say that they're Christians and they haven't been to church in five years. They'll say they're Christians and these are all the cultural Christians.

36:42Christianity has been now identified with Republican politics. It's all this other stuff. And by the way, shocker, people have been trying to use religion and tried to use Jesus for their own ends since the beginning, right? I mean, this is nothing new. The problem is from the outside looking in when you talk to somebody who's like, Christians are hateful, spiteful people. I'm like, I've never met literally in my entire life. I've never met somebody who has surrendered their life to the Lord, who is seeking humility on a daily basis, seeking to die to themselves, seeking to serve others, seeking to love the God with all their heart, mind, soul, and strength, love their neighbor as themselves, who is hateful.

37:23I've literally never met. Now, can we all have moments of anger and all this stuff? but I've never met somebody who's a quote-unquote horrible person. I've never met them. Now, I've met plenty of people who profess Christianity who are people who I can't see Jesus' work in their life at all. And then you dig deeper and you ask them, well, okay, when was the last time you read the Bible? When was the last time you prayed? When was the last time you went to church? What was the last time? What do you actually believe? Well, it turns out they don't believe Jesus is Lord. They don't surrender to him as king.

37:52They don't read their Bible. They don't go to church. They don't pray. And it's like, why do you say you're a Christian? Oh, because I vote Republican. And that doesn't make somebody a follower of Jesus. As you said, John Mark Comer, and I just got finished reading his book, I should recommend it on Easter called Practicing the Way. And especially when you pair it with Dallas Willard's book, Discipline of the Spirit, or Spirit of the Discipline, excuse me, amazing combination. But as you said, he's like, following Jesus is about practice. It's about apprenticing under him. It's about learning a way of life that gives freedom.

38:25I mean, that is what being a Christian is. It's not even about, I mean, yes, we go to church because we're called to be a body of Christ. We're called to be united. We're called to be in community. But it's not like God's like, oh, well, you check that box. Great. You went to church. Okay, now you're a Christian. That's not being Christian. There's plenty of people who go to church who aren't Christians. If there's somebody listening to this and they're on the fence, they've been struggling with issues of faith and things like that, aside from the Bible, do you have a couple go-to two books that you recommend to people that you're like, read this and then get back with me?

38:58Yeah, it's so interesting. It really depends on where they are. So, there's categories of people I've learned as I've talked to people about this. And people ask me a lot of questions about my faith background and my faith journey. And there's a group of people who grew up in the faith and who just faded away from the faith is what I would say. So, just like they got busy, the cares of the world choke them out. Now they're in their mid-30s, maybe in their 40s. And they're like, I want my kids to go to church. I want my kids to be good people. I kind of followed away. I still believe there's God, but I haven't prayed much in the last long time, whatever it might be.

39:36For those people, you don't need to convince them that there's a God. You don't need to convince them that they need to break their worldview and that there's a supernatural world to this. And the world is actually really upside down. I think all that stuff, you don't need to tell For them, they need to understand what does it mean to really follow and practice following Jesus and what is the fruit of that. And so, books like Practicing the Way, books like Spirit of the Disciplines, those are really good books for kind of getting people reignited. Another book that he's become a dear friend of mine, his name is David Gibson, wrote a book called Living Life Backward.

40:12That's the best meditation on Ecclesiastes I've ever read. It just has so much wisdom and it's like the smelling salts of life. That's another book that I really tried to... Oh, there you go. There it is. Yeah, look at you. It's good right there. So trying to get people just reconnected to feel, what does it feel like to be back in relationship with God? God's always been there. God's not distant. If God's distant, you're the reason. But there's another group of people. And I would say, I didn't have this experience. So I have to be careful with how I speak about this who have been hurt by the church.

40:43And unfortunately, there's a lot of people who sit in this category. And man, my heart goes out and stories I've heard are just heartbreaking. I can't imagine the pain and suffering of somebody who put their trust and faith in people who were leading them spiritually, who abused them, either physically, sexually, emotionally, spiritual abuse is a real thing. Now, here's the problem. I told somebody the other day, you know, Gandhi's quote, he said, I love Jesus. I really like Jesus. I just don't like people who follow him. And I would say, I think it was Gandhi who said that. Christians are a terrible representation of Christ.

41:21You got to be included. Like, we are deeply flawed. I mean, we believe as part of our core belief system that we are depraved in many ways, that it left unredeemed that we are capable of terrible things. And I think that that's obvious in this world, right? I mean, it doesn't take long, read the news. The sin is about the only thing that we can all agree on. There's something terribly broken about this world. And that doesn't stop when you enter a church or you enter a religious organization. And unfortunately, people are messy. And when you get people together, whether they are followers of Jesus or not, there's going to be messiness.

41:58And so, with people who have been hurt by the church, you know, there's some books about And there's all different kinds of lines of reasoning. Does the church encourage certain types of abuse? Does the church encourage this or that? And my answer is, I think you can go back and read through the history that it is not that anything that Jesus said, it is not anything that's biblical that encourages abuse of any type. It is fallen people doing fallen things. And unfortunately, they were a victim of fallenness and brokenness of this world. And the problem is always sin. And the answer is always Jesus.

42:31And so, there's a whole line of books. There's a great book called Questioning Christianity. Let's see if I can find it up here. Or Confronting Christianity. She's a wonderful author. Anyway, Confronting Christianity. McLaughlin. So she has, let's see here. I'm going to actually, Rebecca is her first name. And so, yeah, so she's a great book came out a little while ago, but the chapters are, aren't we better off without religion? Doesn't Christianity crutch diversity? How can one say that there's only one true faith? Doesn't religion hinder morality? Doesn't religion cause violence? How can you take the Bible literally?

43:08Hasn't science disproved Christianity? Doesn't Christianity denigrate women? Isn't Christianity homophobic? Doesn't the Bible condone slavery? How could a loving God allow so much suffering? And how could a loving God send people to hell? Those are hard questions. Boom, right? So this isn't like another one of those books that I think she does a really great job of approaching them. And I'm pretty, I mean, there's a lot more deeper reading on each one of those subjects. Is she, I'm sorry to interrupt. Is she a professor in Boston or somewhere? Do you know her background? Yeah. Okay. I saw her speak this past summer.

43:40She spoke at, in Columbus and I got the chance to see her. She was amazing. Yeah. She's great. She's great. Yeah. We had her, when she spoke in Columbia as well, we had her for dinner at my house through a little dinner party and just really enjoyed getting to know her. My point is for, for somebody who's coming out of a broken relationship with the church, quote unquote, or, I mean, this is also a good book for some people who have, their only exposure like David Perel to Christianity was watching Netflix, right? And seeing some, you know, KKK, Lily White church service, and then people go out and, you know, murder black people or whatever the depiction is.

44:14You know, there's a lot of these common misconceptions. And by the way, I had all of these, like, I thought a lot of those things were true. Like a lot of those questions, I would have come down the other side. So, it took me a long time to really dig deep and to understand, okay, wait a minute, the Bible is not prescriptive in many ways, it's descriptive. So, in the Old Testament, when it talks about all these people having lots of wives and terrible abuse and murder and rape, I mean, all kinds of crazy stuff. It's not that the Bible is saying, hey, you should go do these things. In fact, the exact opposite, it's saying, this is just what happened.

44:50And by the way, here's the consequences of what happened, and they're terrible consequences. Because all those things go against the grain of how the Lord created the universe. So, anyway, there's a lot of misconceptions. My point is it depends on if somebody's listening to this and they came out of, look, I don't think there's a God. I think science is the ultimate arbiter of truth. There's a whole line of things. I'd recommend a lot of Keller's books. He has two in particular. Let's see if I can grab Making Sense of God and Every Good Endeavor back here. See if I can grab them here real quick.

45:20So, Making Sense of God. He's got a good one on marriage too. Oh my gosh. I'm actually reading his marriage. We have a 20s group that we're reading his marriage book with right now. So these two books, Making Sense of God and Every Good Endeavor, or not Every Good Endeavor, shoot, that's the business one. Making Sense of God and The Reason for God is the other one that's really good somewhere back here. These were really impactful for me as an atheist to read about how much faith it takes to be an atheist. Let's put it that way. And I never framed it that way, but that's honestly what these books provided.

45:55And so, yeah, there's a lot of books. Honestly, my DMs are open. I get questions all the time on Twitter about book recommendations and podcasts to listen to and kind of just to help point people in the right direction. If anybody's listening to this and has a question, I'd be happy. Just DM me. I'd be happy to connect. I've got a guy that's in my Bible study that will listen to some of our podcasts. We Study Billionaires is our kind of flagship podcast. And it's all about studying Buffett and Munger. And he was just asking me, he's like, it seems like Buffett and Munger are Christians. I don't know that they ever have said that publicly.

46:28Charlie, unfortunately, passed away recently, but you've had the chance to have dinner with or a meal with both of them, break bread with both of them. I am really interested to hear your thoughts on that experience for sure. But were they just steeped in Midwestern Christian values and it's just a part of just who they are? Or were they practicing Christians? Look, I don't know ultimately where anybody stands. I can tell you when I had meals with them, I actually asked them both this question and neither of them were professing Christians at that time. So, that was six years ago, five or six years ago.

47:08And so, but yeah, look, I mean, I think there's the world we live in is a Christian world. The West is a Christian world. We have a world that's made around Christian values, whether or not you believe in Jesus or not, whether or not you think it's true and right. I mean, we are swimming in Christian waters. And so, yeah, a lot of the ideas, I mean, they've won out because they're true. And so, why do we say that people have dignity? Because we're made in the image of God. Again, a lot of my atheist friends would argue that there's nothing special about humans. We are no different than animals.

47:42They would just say, look, Scott Adams calls us moist robots. I mean, there's this idea. I mean, truly, and I don't know how you get to meaning and beauty and morality outside of faith. And that's honestly one of the things that scared me when I first started exploring these. And I was really offended, like angry when I was an atheist. And I was given some of these books. I started reading to them and I'd be challenged with that. They'd be saying, look, there is no morality unless there's a moral lawgiver. Like, where does morality come from? If you say that it just comes from you and I agreeing on what is moral, well, that's fine, but there's nothing sacrosanct about.

48:17There's nothing. It's just me and you having a social contract, right? So this is actually, you know, in political theory, it's called social contract theory. It's just, look, we have a social contract and you and I agree that like murdering people just doesn't work very well for our society. That doesn't mean it's wrong. So like when you judge somebody or we say, oh my gosh, what a horrible person. There's no oughts. There's no shoulds. like we're just random co-location of atoms. We randomly developed out of goo, right? And we're headed towards nothingness. We came out of nothingness. There's no actual underpinnings of morality.

48:52It's just what we create. We create meaning. There's actually no ultimate meaning. We just create meaning. That's fine. But that means there's no ultimate beauty, right? There's all these things that are these big challenges. And so, what I would say is that getting back to Buffett and Munger, I mean, I shared a lot of values with both of them. I think they are incredibly wise in many ways. But look, I mean, Munger's book that was written about is called Worldly Wisdom, right? I mean, the book is about worldly wisdom. And I think that you can, there's this idea of common grace, like God lets the rain and the sun come on the believers and the unbelievers alike, right?

49:27There's this idea that God showers down blessings. We have 10 ,000 blessings every day that we don't even realize. Wait until your toe hurts to realize you have a toe. Most of the mornings I don't wake up and say, man, thankfully, my toe works today, right? But I guarantee you have a huge problem with your toe and you're going to be aware of your toe. So I would say is for both those guys, they were deeply steeped in Christian values. I think both of them came out of families that were faith-driven, but neither of them I think professed faith. Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors.

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53:14That's theinvestorspodcast.com slash tip-finance. All right, back to the show. I want to kind of switch gears a little bit. I've got a buddy of mine who he's got a couple of kids in college and he's encouraging them to use an SBA loan, buy a business, use an SBA loan and come right out of college firing with a business of their own. I know that you have done that. That's a little bit how you got your start. You used an SBA loan. So can you talk to that, speak to somebody who's young, who may be listening to this, who is interested in what you've done and wants to get started? What would be some of the steps?

53:55What would you recommend? That kind of thing for a young person or middle-aged person who wants to do what you've done. Yeah. So I got my start by... I started a business and then And I ended up buying a sort of adjacent business with an SBA loan. And that's how, yeah, I mean, that was ultimately how, that's kind of foundational, how I got started. It's all about risk reward. I mean, ultimately comes down to, if you're a believer, what do you feel God's calling you to do? Do you have peace about it? Do you pray about there's a, yeah, anyway, we can talk about books and going that path. But ultimately, if you decided that you want to get into business, you want to own a business, SBA can be a great route.

54:32It can be a higher interest rate. It's a 10-year fixed rate, which right now is pretty darn high. I haven't looked recently, but I think it's like 10 % or 11%. That's nothing to sneeze at. That's a lot of interest you're going to be paying. And there are prepayment penalties, I think, associated with it. So it's not like there's no free lunch, right? I mean, it's real. And you personally guarantee it. So things go bad. And by the way, the visibility principle of like you only see winners, winners are the ones that raise their hand and say, look at me, I'm a winner. I've had four people in the last year, maybe a little longer than the year, 18 months, who have reached out who have declared bankruptcy as a result of buying a business with an SBA loan.

55:09And there are a few people on Twitter who will talk about this, but most of the time, it's, oh, it's free money. It's easy money. Look, here's your interest rate. Here's your multiple you pay. You do the math on it. You get to keep the difference. And by the way, all that's true. I mean, look, if you buy a business for three to five times multiple on free cash flow, which is kind of the standard what most small businesses go for, you're talking about what a 33 % to a 20 % cash yield starting yield. If it's true, if it's true owner earnings, just stick to your bones cashflow, you're paying 10, 11 % in interest.

55:40You get to keep 10%. It's keep 11%, right? I mean, it's not complicated. The challenge is if you falter a little bit and the business goes down a little bit, you lose everything. Now, if you're right out of college and you don't have anything, I mean, the reality is the bankruptcy laws are there for a reason. And I mean, this is, again, I'm just speaking to strict financial reality here, nothing, you know, sort of no moral judgment one way or the other. But look, if you don't have much and you can convince a bank to do an SBA loan and you've got the ability to negotiate it and to run it and you feel good about it and it just doesn't work out, you declare bankruptcy and you're 24, 25, you'll be fine.

56:20I think you'll be fine, right? I mean, you know, I think it's a little more complicated when, and I've seen this sad scenario play out where you've got two or three kids and you're in your 30s and you've got a good job, but you haven't saved much. And you take all of what you saved and you put into an SBA loan and it turns out things are hard. And there's a reason, most things are efficiently priced is how I would say it. I remember when I first got into buying small companies, I was like, man, you could pay three times. And this is incredible. Yeah. Except for when you buy decades of problems, and that three times quickly diminishes and turns into eight times, it can get pretty dicey quick.

56:57So I would say is just generally principle that I would have is from the time I started searching till the time that I bought a business, I'd budget three years of full-time work. Because over those three years, you're going to see a lot of stuff, your tastes are going to change, you're going to dodge a lot of bullets, and a lot of the seeds you plant in year one are going to start flowering in year three. And so from the time that you first get introduced to a business till the time you close, usually for smaller companies, is at least four or five, six months, at least. So if you got to back up from that and say, okay, look, I start searching day one, I start making phone calls, I start interacting with people who have access to these types of deals, I start calling potential sellers.

57:40It's going to take a long time, you got to get a lot in the pipeline. And by the way, something's going to come along early, you're going to say, oh, that looks attractive enough, I might do that. And then you're going to dig in a little bit. It's going to get real hairy. The more you dig in, the hairier it's going to get. Hopefully, the deal falls apart and you don't get blind. Deal blindness is a real thing. And yeah, it just takes time. And the joke in the private equity world is the deal has to die three times before you can close it. And it's usually pretty true. I mean, usually there's about three times where somebody freaks out, something happens, the deal's called off, and then you got to kind of regather.

58:14And by the way, sometimes it never happens where you close, but deals that close, you got to regather things and it takes time. And if you have a time pressure and you're running out of money and you've got people who are breathing down your neck to do a deal, you just start getting incentives that are all off and wonky. And so it's complicated. I actually wrote a piece. It's on the permanent equity website called How to Buy Your First Smaller Company. I recommend people read it. I go through a lot of these questions on there about how should you think about financing? How should you think about geography?

58:42How should you think about industry. And then the funny thing is most people are like, oh, I succeeded. I bought a business. Oh, it's just the starting line. You worked your tail off for years to get to the starting line. Now you've got to run the thing. That's really hard. All that to say, it sounds like I'm being down on it. I'm trying to be neutral on both sides. I don't want anybody to listen to this and say, oh man, I'd never thought about buying a small business. It sounds super easy. I can get rich quick. Whoa, that's not what I'm saying at all. I'm also not saying on the other side that there's not gold in the hills.

59:11Absolutely gold in the hills. You just got to be ready to mine for it and it's going to be pretty hairy. And so as long as you go into eyes wide open, yeah, go for it. So you've done both. You've started your own company. You've bought existing companies. Looking back on things like for a young person, is there one avenue or another that you would recommend? Yeah, it's all hard. I would say it's all hard. It depends on what you want to do is spend on your skillset. If starting a fence builder from scratch is brutally difficult, and there's a reason why most fence builders are tiny, and there's a reason...

59:44But let me tell you, you'll learn a lot and you'll put less capital at risk. So I would say starting a company puts more time at risk. Buying a company puts more capital at risk. So basically, the way to think about it is by buying something, you are buying a big chunk of time. If I wanted to build our portfolio that we have today, the portfolio that we built over, call it 15 years of doing this, it would take me hundreds of years to get them off the ground and to get them all up and going. So I bought hundreds of years of progress in 15 years for a lot of capital, for$200 million of capital, plus$1 million of capital that we've invested.

1:00:22Actually, maybe more than that now. Anyway, so that's the way to think about it is like, if you know exactly what you want to do, and there's no one else that you can go buy, build it. If you know exactly what you want to do and somebody else is willing to sell it to you and you can take capital risk and exchange it for time risk and jump 15 years ahead, that's a good thing to think about doing as well. Yeah, I guess it's just case dependent and people figure it out as they go along, right? I mean, in your own case, it doesn't sound like there was no playbook, right? You didn't have this playbook that you were following.

1:00:53It's just like you figure stuff out as you go along. Yeah. Well, and most people don't, I mean, I don't talk about this publicly a lot, but just to be honest, like my line is like, it's not a straight line from like, oh, Brent started a business, then bought a business and then, you know, rocket ship, right? It's like a very squiggly, you know, I invested in real estate. We bought some things that haven't worked. We've had to shut down a company now. Like, you know, I invested in startups for a while, some very successfully, some, most of them bombed. Like I've kind of tasted and tried a lot of things.

1:01:22The thing that I knew that I could do, I thought better than a lot of people was offer a good long-term home to smaller companies and do it in the right way. That's what I thought I could differentiate around. And that's what we've done. And I'm really grateful for it. Though I've watched, maybe to back up, buying one business is brutally difficult. Buying a handful of businesses and having to step up out of that one business is a lot harder than buying one business. And then the third tier, which we're going through now, is build an organization that can repeatedly search for, negotiate, document, close, and operate businesses at scale.

1:02:02Balancing capital, balancing opportunities, balancing talent is a heck of a lot harder than the second level, which is a heck of a lot harder than the first level. And the first level is brutally difficult. So I've watched... There's a lot of people who are like, oh, I'm building a holdco. I'm like, fantastic. Where are you? and they're like, oh, I haven't acquired a business yet. I'm like, you should probably just try to buy one business. The best way to build a Holtco is buy one business, operate that business successfully, get it under control, install great leadership, treat them really well, then try to go out and buy a second company.

1:02:33And then try to operate that really well and install a leader. I mean, that's the steps that you have to go down. I don't understand it. If I had been given$50 or$100 million when I was two years into this, I would have lost all the money. I would have lost everything because I would have made the worst decisions. I would have thrown money around. I would have known what's important, what's not important. The going slow aspect, if you ask me, what is the single thing that's probably enabled our success is that we were capital constrained to start. By being capital constrained to start and to have to scrap and claw and fight and learn and go slow, it then allowed us to create all these systems, create the processes, create culture, get everything gelled together to then go.

1:03:16And look at Berkshire. Berkshire was tiny. And Berkshire was... No one knew who Berkshire was until, gosh, Buffett was 55, probably, maybe 60. Most people just don't understand. They look at somebody like a Buffett or Munger, since you mentioned them, and they say, oh, well, I want to build the next Berkshire. Great. They went at it. Berkshire is the result of compounding over 70 years. 70 years of compounding. That in and of itself, it's hard to wrap your head around. It's not like you can build a Berkshire in 20 years. You talk to Mark Leonard who built Constellation Software. Constellation was nothing for the longest time and then all of a sudden compounding takes over and it's a rocket ship, right?

1:04:02But people don't realize that that portion's a really long time. It was working, but it's It was nothing for a long time. Brent, this has been a lot of fun. There's so much I didn't even get to touch on. We didn't get to talk about Main Street Summit that's coming up and Capital Camp and so many other things I wanted to ask you, but this has gone by really quickly. I really appreciate your time and just being sharing about your faith journey. It's super interesting to me. So I hope it's of value to somebody, one listener out there. It'll be worthwhile. And yeah, thank you, Brent. Appreciate your time.

1:04:33Well, thank you, Patrick. Happy to come back on anytime. That was a wonderful conversation. I really enjoyed it. Okay, folks, that's all I had for today's episode. I hope you enjoyed the show and I'll see you back here real soon. Thank you for listening to TIP. Make sure to follow Millennial Investing on your favorite podcast app and never miss out on our episodes. To access our show notes, transcripts, or courses, go to theinvestorspodcast.com. This show is for entertainment purposes only. Before making any decision, consult a professional. This show is copyrighted by The Investor's Podcast Network.

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