Episode 55 – 2023 Year In Review

The Redemptification Podcast

2023 Year in Review with John Marsh

Welcome to “The Redemptification Podcast,” today, John goes through a recap of some of the amazing things that have happened in the year 2023 around personally and Marsh Collective.

Insights & Inspirations

John Marsh (00:02):

Well, welcome to the Redemptification Podcast, and today is going to be an interesting day as I share some of the highlights and some of the things that kind of happened and that we experienced during our 2023 year and do a slight year-end review for you guys to give you a little context of the things going on in our life and our work and our business, and hopefully bring some encouragement for you in where you are. So it’s kind of broken into two areas, personal and then our business areas. And I’ll start with the personal because it’s well personal. And if you’re not living the life you want to live today, the question is how long are you going to wait until you start? And this is something Ash and I ask ourselves all the time. So it’s really best. It seems to start out with things you’re grateful for.

(01:02):

And so there’s so much to be grateful for our health and our families and the opportunities that we have, the fact that God’s got his hand on us and that he loves crazy people, that he’s got to a supernatural plan to take everything you go through and make it a part of where you’re going to, that God understands that if you’re going in the wrong direction, he can turn the map and that he has a supernatural plan for mine in your life to use everything for his good and for his glory. And so one thing that happened this year started off in January, Nelson got married to MK, his new wife, and it was just incredible. It was in Barbaresco Italy and he had planned this for a year. And as quirky as Nelson is, there’s 20 something people going to an amazing farm that had never had a wedding on it before.

(02:05):

And Nelson’s friends there, two 80-year-old Vintners and their sisters, they just said, Hey, we want to open our home. And they treated us like family. It was beautiful. It was a small ceremony filled with fun and laughter and even Ash reading kind of the written words of a song that MK and Nelson, a Funkadelic song that they love so much that kind of describe their love for one another. What an incredible time. And I’m so grateful to have MK as a new daughter-in-Law, and for us to have this incredible journey of now getting to walk alongside Nelson working with us and our youngest son Joshua in the business. So started off with a bang, a couple of weeks in Italy with great friends experiencing amazing food. And during this time really what struck me was, and I called home and they always get a little concerned when I do that from a trip because what crazy things are they thinking of?

(03:11):

But I realized the amazing gift that Ash and Nelson had in food and beverage and hospitality. I don’t know how I haven’t seen it as clearly as that. Maybe it was that we were away for a while and that I just don’t know. But I saw it and I said, oh my goodness, they’re so much better than I ever imagined. And it really brought up the conversations that Ash and I had had in the past. And I kept thinking about and praying about this idea of going back. So I go back to read 2006. Basically I wrote a high level mindset of what we’re doing right now, this idea of diffused hospitality, of the combination of food and beverage, overnight stay and celebratory events. And then I rewrote that in 2014. Now in 2006 we had a plan in 2012 or so, we were working on that plan to get it ready to launch our first hotel and stopped when we met one of our mentors.

(04:24):

And that was the first time we had planned a hotel, had spent a lot of money on getting it ready and stopped. Then we waited 2019 comes along or 18, and we had a chance to do the first Southern Living Hotel in America with some developers that wanted to do it. We had a plan come together, it fell apart during Covid. And it was just interesting that during this time this year, I said, well, it’s been the same thing all along. And now I realize that Nelson and Ash had the gift to do it, that we had spent the last seven years working for clients and with them and had learned that a restaurant can transform a city, but boy, a restaurant with overnight stay and celebratory events that are done in a very iconic way with incredible attention to detail and sophistication could do tremendous things in a community.

(05:25):

So that’s what I learned there. And through the joy of being in Italy that kind of came about. We also have had some tough things this year. Ash’s mom’s been sick, she has cancer and she’s had to have her leg amputated. And all that happened in the last year or so. And so Ash has spent a couple of months on a hospital cot loving her mom and taking care of her. And that’s another thing to think about. I never thought that as we got older, we would need to take care of our parents and have bandwidth to do that. And boy, are we thankful for the margin that we have wise counsel and honoring God to build margin in our life, boy did we need as Ash is taking the time to walk with her mom and we ask that you be praying for her.

(06:21):

And also a lot of our, we’ve had multiple friends and people who work with us and people who work with us as siblings. We’ve had deaths and disease this year that just those things are so difficult and right alongside opportunity seems to run adversity. And so it was a season of joy from Nelson, getting married and enjoying grandkids and enjoying the work we’re doing here and great clients and amazing opportunities, but also tons of adversity in the sickness of people we love. And our prayer list is getting longer for those people, mentors, friends, colleagues, community members who are suffering. So that was important. We also, Ash and I spent some time personally and we do this every year and get help as we deep dive to get clarity on what our preferred future is. You have to set your preferred future. Like not having a plan is a plan, it’s just a bad one.

(07:28):

And a lot of people use that in their life. I’m just not going to have a plan. Well, not having one is one, it’s just a bad one. So you get what you get either by accident or by intention. We believe there’s a lot of need for in our lives. So we sit down and work on our preferred future. And when we do this, the best way we’ve had success is we had a friend of ours who sat in with us who’s wise, and that’s Steve Cochram, the founder of The Five Voices and one of the co-founders of Giant. And he helped us. But I think that’s the key. You don’t do your own heart surgery. We all need somebody to help us to sit down with us and ask us the questions who are not us. Because if you and your spouse sit down, they are you.

(08:16):

And so it’s like talking to yourself, and I’m sure you’ve had the privilege of trying to have big conversations with your spouse and it turned into heated fellowship. And if we’re not having those conversations, then the expectations are just building, but we don’t have intentionality around them. So what it allowed us to do is see our new roles in our companies, Ash and I as co-founders, but Ash as CEO, leading the company and she’s doing an amazing job. Honestly, it’s incredible what she’s done in a short period of time to unscramble a lot of eggs and to get us ready for this next season, which I am so excited about. I feel like we’ve been waiting our whole life for now, for the opportunity to take everything we learned and apply it in our own hometown, Opelika. We like to say Hope-u-lika, but Opelika to us is our testing ground.

(09:15):

It’s our laboratory and it’s also our responsibility. We steward 10 square blocks to the glory of God, and we do it for love’s sake. We work at the intersection of purpose and profit. So it’s odd people wonder where are you a hit and run developer or are you here to do it out of benevolence? And the answer’s no to either one of those. Our goal is to make our Sunday school teacher and our economics teacher happy with the projects we do and to build a generational impact that would last 50 years for the good of our city and its citizens and no one be able to undo it. So that’s been incredible. And as Ash and I realigned, we now know the project we’re going to do in Opelika, which is the biggest project and the most important project that we believe will have the greatest impact.

(10:07):

We think it’ll be bigger than everything we’ve done over the last twenty-five years combined. As you can see, I’m excited to talk about that. Also convening. We convene people and leaders here in Opelika, but we also share around the country. And this year we had the privilege to share the work we’re doing and the story we have of our marriage reconciliation with our friends at Generous Giving at the big celebration this year. We had a chance to share at FCCI in Tucson this year, the Teneo, which is a group of amazing conservative young people that are doing great work. We shared there, a friend of ours, Chris Powers, did a men’s retreat and I got to share there Brent Beshore and some other guys did Cloud Camp, which is 20 men, young leaders who want to be better fathers, leaders, business people, and fellow believers.

(11:13):

And we did two sessions, 20 leaders in each session. What was so amazing about that Brother E., my oldest mentor and disciple in his eighties, and he got to go and boy, what an incredible time. And Ty, my co-host, went and helped Brother E and also enjoyed it. So what an amazing time seeing God work in the lives of young people. It was Pete Ochs, me, Steve Garber and Paul Estes all shared in the session that I’m talking about. And it was incredible. Those are amazing godly men that I’ve learned so much from. Also Ash and I got to speak at Capital Camp this year, which is an incredible event around capital and all the things around investing. And it’s put on by Brent Beshore in Columbia Missouri. You have to check it out. It’s a waiting list for the event, but it’s a chance to spend time with four or 500 of the most unique people in the country.

(12:13):

And then lastly, at a very last minute, a friend John Rulin who wrote Giftology, which is a great book I recommend if you haven’t read it. He invited me out to the Hobby Lobby headquarters and had a chance to spend a day with David Green and John Maxwell and other leaders, tons of incredible leaders talking about how to use their gifts to make an impact. And that was such a great experience. It is just been an amazing year getting the chance to share and we plan on convening more, but we’re going to try to convene here in Opelika as you hear more about what we’re doing, you’ll see why that’s a thing where we can be close to our family and also add value. So the work we’ve done with couples has been incredible. This year we’ve done eight high impact intensives in Ash, and I usually plan to do a certain number.

(13:07):

We’ve got six slots next year for high impact couples. I think four of those or five of those are already taken. But what was amazing is we spent three days per session, twenty-four days this year, eyeball to eyeball loving on high impact couples and saw God do miraculous things. We saw marriages reconciled, we saw healing from the past from brokenness. We saw people who believed and experienced having a great marriage find a lot more freedom and a lot more healing. Even saw that we had this couple we met with. And to see the husband was a tough man, a very tough man. And if I said the things that they did, he’s a Navy SEAL and so his job is specifically to do war things. But as he sat in, his wife asked, do you really love me? As their marriage was having trouble, I watched him just weep.

(14:17):

And the pain of being tortured as a soldier is quite different from the pain of being tortured as someone who wants to love and walk with their spouse and their spouse doesn’t want them. So I learned that lesson re-again. And then just the fact that we had the margin to invest 24 days into couples and watch God do miracles. Our prayer is a 50 yard line seat to miracles, front row seat to miracles. And I encourage you to pray that prayer and then for Ash and I to God be the glory that in just a few days we’re going to celebrate thirty-one years of marriage. And all I can say is I love her more today than I did yesterday, than I ever have. I’m more amazed that a beautiful godly woman like that wants to be with someone like me, and I’m so grateful for something that was lost and found.

(15:14):

And so know this, if where you are, you think, hey, there’s no hope for my situation, you don’t have God in it because God provides hope. Because if we have hope, there’s so many things that become possible. So in your marriage, I encourage you, if you haven’t checked it out, check out our resource page on our website from the couples section. You can do the five voices, I mean our 5-F survey, faith, family, fun, fitness, finance. You could go to the Five Voices website and take that which adds value. And then you could also on our website, we also have a resource page for couples. And if you really want to grow your marriage, go through all those resources, having a great marriage, great marriages are built, not found. And if you’re going to have ’em, they’re like abs, you got to do the work. You have to work to have a great marriage. Don’t believe the lie that it’s just going to happen. It’s not going to happen. Everything that the enemy does is against marriage. Marriage is a gift from God.

(16:25):

It’s one of the things that God let us bring out of the garden. It’s a little piece of paradise when it’s right and it’s a prison when it’s wrong. And if you’re not having the most incredible experiences of your life in your marriage, why not? If the person you’re married to is not the most interesting person in the world to you, why not? These are not feelings, these are facts. If we follow God’s truth, the feelings will follow. And then I guess, so we moved from convening to couples to companies, and our company this year has had an incredible year. We are privileged to finalize a deal to build a hundred ninety-eight apartments in Opelika, and we believe it’s going to be tremendous for our downtown. We need more places to rent. How long would it take us to build almost 200 houses in downtown Opelika, right?

(17:32):

A long time. If you had the land, if you could find it, this’ll be done in twenty-four months, and we’ll have the opportunity for a lot of people to be within walking distance of downtown. Now we get some pushback on these things and people are down on what they’re not up on and everybody thinks they’ve got a great opinion about what should be and what could be. But of course it’s a big difference between people who get out their wallets or sign the dotted line and put themselves at risk. But the ability to help this project come along and now to see the developers that are doing it Sierra Development, Jim Dawes and also his partner are doing this development and it’s going to be impactful to our city.

(18:25):

Also, we were able to finish our three event spaces. We’ve done 18,000 square foot of renovations in the last say, 12 or 14 months. We now have three event spaces, one dedicated to weddings, one to fraternity sorority, and to corporate, and one outdoor space that’s a pavilion that’s more for music events. And when the weather’s permitting weddings and things, this is the start of our community of being this diffused hospitality resort. We also have our first seven overnight stay rooms coming online in about a month, this will serve our weddings. The average wedding we’ve heard has 35 rooms it needs. So we’re counting on these seven being something people desire to bolt on to their wedding packages and ultimately, we hope to have more rooms as we finish out the project. But the seven rooms will be done in just a month and that’ll allow us next year to have our brides and grooms and their families be able to stay there.

(19:35):

But also for us to do programming around bringing in groups. And right now our house where Ash and I live is we use it like a boutique hotel. I mean we’ve got guests coming in tomorrow actually, there’ll be seven folks coming in and they’re coming in to see Opelika, see the work we’re doing and just experience what it is that God’s doing here. I tell people it’s important that you come here because first I don’t want you to not know what we do and what we start with. We start with some of the most difficult structures that we see. We usually laugh at how nice the buildings are other people get. And what we start with, a lot of people say is that a building may not have a roof on it or something or a floor in it. And so it’s interesting when people come and see, I think I tell ’em, if you don’t see God’s hand on what we do, if it’s not better than we are, I probably wouldn’t listen to us. But if you come here and some miraculous stuff is happening, then I’d be dang listening. And so that’s it. If it’s God, it’s worth having and if it’s not, I think I keep moving. If you’re looking for God answers, now if you’re looking for worldly answers, if you just want to be a hit and run developer that makes some money and doesn’t stay, we don’t have a good plan for you. Just keep running. That’s all you can do I guess. But we also,

John Marsh (21:05):

So this consulting. That we do in our community, so we’ve done a lot in our community, Opelika, which is where we work, and it’s why we have such empathy and also authority. We have empathy because we suffer, we have authority because we have suffered and found some ways to make these things work. So that’s been a blessing. We also are consulting in other cities and I wanted to highlight a few accomplishments in a few of the cities that we have. So the first one is our largest city, Winterhaven, Florida.And what an amazing year

(21:40):

We’ve had there. They’ve done so much work this year that has really kind of fulfilled a lot of the things they were hoping for and working on for a long time. The first being they had a development mindset that, hey, we want to create downtown living that is beautiful and meaningful. They hadn’t had any really new scale downtown living in a long time. So this year, full Masonry built units and built a 106 unit apartment complex called Rain Dance. And it’s a part of a larger scheme that they’re working on, which is to build 500 residential apartments in downtown Winterhaven, 500 in 5 years on scattered sites. And it’s just a powerful thing

(22:45):

What that many people living downtown can do. And so the first 106 was done this year. Rain Dance, the project the Breeze, which will be the next over a hundred units. It’s going to be coming out of the ground soon, so that’ll be 206 down of the provisional 500 that they want to do. That’s been incredible. Next move to right outside Fort Worth, Texas, a project we’ve done there called in Everman. And this project is called Timberview and it’s pretty unique because it’s a family that we really like out of Midland. They’re an oil family, but they’ve decided to develop this 175 acres into something pretty unique. So it’s a teaching farm, which is part of their foundation, but it’s also going to be take our model of iconic food and beverage overnight stay and celebratory events and weave that together on a campus that will ultimately provisionally hold a middle school and a high school, as well as Compass Financial, a headquarters there for an institute that’ll help biblical values around finances.

(24:00):

And so incredible project. We finished that plan this year. We also were brought into a conversation in Upland Indiana with Taylor University and had the privilege of working with those guys on a really short timeframe to create a very sophisticated RFP request for proposal that that was for the Lilly Foundation, a Lilly grant, and it was to connect and empower downtowns and higher education and what a great project and so many unique things we’re able to do to finish that. The team worked very hard on that this year. We also have had tons of guests in Opelika, John Rivers from the four Rivers, Smokehouse, Chip Hight, our buddy and friend from Midland that owns Opel’s Table, Austin Tunnel, which is building culture, who’s building some of the coolest places in the country. Check out his work in Carlton’s Landing. He’s building full masonry structures inside and out.

(25:04):

They’re fabulous. Doug Wilson and his friends are coming tomorrow. That’ll be the seven folks that are from the region around Carmel Indiana. We’ve got the team from Kennett Square, Kennett Square Collective, and Mike Bontrager came earlier this year. We had Eric Weatherholz, who’s a crazy developer from Atlanta, Weatherholz Healey Weatherholz Properties. It’s really, I call him the patio prince, and he’s passionate and persistent about creating patio experiences and creating the halo effect to impact all the development around him. Brent Beshore of Permanent Equity has been a incredible friend and blessing, allowing us to speak at Capital Camp and Cloud Camp and encouraging us and coming to Opelika a couple of times we had Steve Cockram who visited and I told you he helped us through our heated fellowship and provided some adult supervision for Ash and I working on our preferred future this year.

(26:08):

We had Rob Parker from Trillith who’s doing an incredible development for Dan Cathy and also is on the board of the National Town Builders Association with me. Incredible guy had Kyle Morris of Revive Church out in Arvada, one of our clients whose project has brought in millions of dollars and is transformative for the way we do church. And the plan we created for that is fabulous. Brad and Ty did tremendous work on this plan and what it really lays out is how do you impact vulnerable families as a church? How does a church steward its property well and work at the intersection of purpose and profits creating social, spiritual, and economic capital. How does a church handle leasing and picking the right tenants and how would they handle if they needed to evict someone? It was a hundred seventy-five page plan that is absolutely fabulous and so grateful to have Kyle and his wife visit us and hang out some and hear how their project’s going there.

(27:13):

And we’ve had tons of other friends and patrons visit over this year. It has been truly incredible. We’ve got such a great team now. Our team keeps growing. We’ve got new team members, Barend, who’s from South Africa, thank you to the friends that recommended him, Jess Correll in Stanford and his son Preston have recommended him and they said, Hey, this guy’s moving to your area. If you are looking for good people, you ought to hire him. And we did. And we are darn grateful. I pray God send me winners. I need people who can win at what we’re trying to do and I need your help. And Barend certainly did that. We also have added other team members. We’ve got Natalie helping us in the office and with creative things and Ash, we’ve got just our whole team. We’re launching restaurants all over the country and we’re doing these things.

(28:10):

And what’s happened is our consulting, at first, we didn’t know what to charge, so we just did it for Godly people and said, hey, pay us what it’s worth when we fix it. And they were generous with us and then we could figure out the fees. So we started doing projects and we still do for fixed pricing for fees, but then people said, we’d love for you to be our partners. And we said, okay, well how about we take part of our fees and you pay and the other part what it’ll take to cover our costs and then we’ll take the other part in equity. And so we started doing that and then we started doing fees, equity, and we bring capital. We started investing alongside our Patrons. And so it’s been an incredible journey so far. We’ve made some darn progress on the book.

(28:55):

We had another meeting today and I think within the next six months we’ll have a book that we can put in people’s hands that will be the operating system for transforming broken places and creating meaningful projects that have God’s momentum behind them. We’re going to try to put decades in a few days. Our goal is not to be just entertaining, it’s to be an operating system and a playbook for how do you save cities from what we know because we need lots of Patrons in America. We need people who will love a place and commit themselves to it because love is a dang difference maker. I love what Brother E said, and we had such a great call in the last, every week we do this Bible study. And this week he said, well, I want to share with you something I learned out of what we’re out of the specific scripture we’re going over this week. And the scripture was one Peter 4:7-14.

(30:04):

And it says, but in the end of all things is at hand. Therefore, be serious and watchful in your prayers and above all things have fervent love for one another. For love will cover a multitude of sins, be hospitable to one another without grumbling as each one has received a gift, minister it to one another as good stewards of the manifold grace of God. And that was powerful to me. I mean, I said, elsewhere, the kind of prayers. I want to have serious and watchful prayers. I want fervent love for other people and

John Marsh (30:44):

We want to be hospitable Without grumbling. But what we began to dig into that really struck me is the definition of hospitable. If you look it up, it’s “The love of strangers”. And boy doesn’t that align with Ash’s revelation of what our companies are all about. “We thought of you before you got here.” And so that’s kind of to wrap it all up, we are moving more into a season where all we’re going to focus on is biblical hospitality and how that applies to investing in redemptive real estate. How do you take irreplaceable real estate because of the way it was constructed and make it irreplaceable because of the way it’s operated and the income it generates and we believe we’re on to something. In fact, I’m so darn excited. I think we’re on the thing. What this was all about to this point is to get to the place we could take in historic downtowns like ours and do a project like we’re going to do, which will be 60 boutique hotel rooms, three event spaces and eight restaurants, all as a diffused hospitality urban resort. And this thing can create tremendous impact from social, spiritual, and economic capital. And that’s our future is codifying this and clarifying this to where it is our model for the future. When we talk about how you can impact the town, we’re going to be talking about these things. Here’s our models. And remember, it’s hard to get to the models. It took us forever, like 20 years and all to get to a model that we understood. And it’s 80% models and 20% miracles, and all you can do is get on your dang knees for that second part.

(32:35):

And so our hope is that next year it’ll be full of meaningful work. We’ll see. We’ve seen five marriages reconciled in the last year or so. We hope to see more Ash and I have helped reconcile over 200 throughout our time serving and following God and sharing our story. I tell you, there’s a lot of hope for America. There’s a lot of hope for broken families, and there’s a lot of hope for those who believe. And here at Marsh Collective, we are here to fan the flame of all the good things God’s doing and to give you hope. Because if there’s hope in your future, there’s power in your present. If this is added value, I hope you’ll share it and keep checking us out here as we continue to charge hell with a squirt bottle and work in such a way that we believe people should see God’s hand on what we do. Blessings.

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