[00:03:04] Brent Beshore: And then afterwards I said, Hey, do you mind if I give you call? I have a few questions I’d like to ask, he said, sure. Yeah, no problem. So we hopped on the phone probably a couple of weeks later and one of the questions I love to ask older, wiser people is, you know, if you were 35, 40, 30, whatever it is, age, you know, what would you, what advice would you give yourself kind of 15, 20 years ago that would be most helpful to you today?

[00:03:28] Brent Beshore: And so I asked him that question and he stopped and he was like, Well, that’s an easy one. Great. He said, I’d read the Bible every day. First thing I do is get up in the morning and read the Bible. It’s yeah, sure. I read the Bible too. And he’s and then I do this exercise. Know, be, do. What should you know based on what you read?

[00:03:47] Brent Beshore: Who should you be based on what you read? And what should you do based on what you read? And he said it and I kind of was like, yeah, great. Fantastic. Any other advice that you’d give me? And he was like, Hey, did you not hear what I just told you? And he was super, I mean, he was very kind about it, but he was like, he’s kind of a little bit like, I just told you the singular thing that if I could go back and tell myself earlier to start doing this, it would change everything.

[00:04:11] Brent Beshore: And I was like, really? Okay. It’s really that impactful. And he was like, it’s really that impactful. He’s I do it. I exchange these with a handful of guys every day. And we’ve been doing it for a decade plus now. And it’s changed all of our lives. And it’s this unbelievable, both accountability and the intimacy that it creates in relationship with not only God, but with each other.

[00:04:31] Brent Beshore: And so I said, And that’s great. The next day I texted him. I said, okay, I tried to do it this morning and I, feel like I’m stumbling through it. Could you send me yours anyway? He sent me his for two or three days. I replied back with one and then another. And we’ve been texting each other every day for the last over two and a half years now.

[00:04:48] Brent Beshore: About a year ago, it was Easter. I felt compelled to just, it changed so much in my life. I mean, I can literally chart exactly when I started that and the trajectory of my life since then, two and a half years ago, my marriages. almost infinitely better than it was two and a half years ago, my sort of inner life, the transformation I’ve had with health, everything.

[00:05:12] Brent Beshore: And, by the way, it’s not quote unquote magic in it is, not that you’re going to do this thing and it’s, you know, it’s going to transform. It’s just that getting in the word every day and taking it seriously and, developing a deeper and deeper relationship where you can focus on one thing, Jesus.

[00:05:25] Brent Beshore: it transforms everything around you. And so it’s a, practice. It’s, I mean, look, church fathers going back for millennia now have advocated for practices, right? Sabbath, prayer, I mean, all these things, fasting. And so this is a practice that he has found and that he was passed down to him that I’m now passing down to other people.

[00:05:43] Brent Beshore: And so I send it now to, nine guys every morning and I’ve been posting it to Twitter for the last year. I actually quit it today. Just because I want, I wanted to give people a full year view. So the entire Bible, in a year full year view of what does it look like to do it, to practice it for a year, that should be plenty of inspiration for people.

[00:06:03] Brent Beshore: And the whole idea was never for people to consume it. Cause that’s not the point. The point is not to just read another sort of Bible study from somebody else. The point is to put it into practice. And so my hope is actually by ending it. But I encourage people, whoever were kind of lurking in the shadows and reading it and, you know, sort of enjoying it, which a bunch of people have now come out and said that they have my encouragement to all of them is just get a partner, start exchanging it daily, hold each other accountable and see for yourself.

[00:06:30] Patrick Donley: I was one of those lurkers and, I really enjoyed it. I, it is a practice, like you said, it’s not something to just read. I mean, it’s great reading and you can get a lot from it, but like you said, it’s a practice that you need to actually do. And so you were using the one year Bible. Is that what you’ve got it right there?

[00:06:47] Patrick Donley: One year Bible. And then all of you, the nine guys or whatever would follow along. You’d have the daily reading and that’s what you would write on. 

[00:06:55] Brent Beshore: Yeah, so it’s a one year Bible. The one that I’ve been doing now is a passage from Old Testament. So I’m in Deuteronomy now and then passage from New Testament Luke and then passage from Psalms and or Psalms Yeah, and a passage from Proverbs and so it’s every day you get a little bit of taste of everything and it’s amazing to how At least I’ve found you’ll, see common themes that I would never connect because of the way that you’re reading them together.

[00:07:20] Brent Beshore: So it’ll oftentimes be something from Deuteronomy, something from Luke and something from Psalms will kind of all have a connected theme through them. Sometimes it doesn’t happen that way, but it’s just whatever stands out, you know, right? So I’ll just, I’ll go through it. I’ll highlight and I’ll make notes.

[00:07:35] Brent Beshore: And then it’s just whatever hits me. What should I know? Who should I be? What should I do? Write it down. It’s not for, like I said, it’s not for performance. It’s not like God’s happier with me or something because I did this. It’s more of just being able to align my heart to reality, to the truth of who God is and who I am, which I forget often and need a lot of help with.

[00:07:56] Patrick Donley: Yeah, we all do. So I know that you, influenced David Perell quite a bit. It sounds like I read something that’s all he reads now is the Bible. I mean, this is a guy that read widely and voraciously, all kinds of stuff. Now he just focuses on the Bible. It sounds like you made a big influence on him.

[00:08:13] Brent Beshore: Yeah. David’s become, I mean, truly he’s like a godfather to my kids. he goes to Disney with us every year. He’s he plays hide and go seek. In fact, we’ve tried to convince him to move to Columbia because he could, entertain our children. That’s really the main purpose. But, No, we love David.

[00:08:28] Brent Beshore: He, I think he’s visited us gosh, five or six times in the last year here in Columbia. my kids know him as uncle David, but yeah, David, David interviewed me actually on his podcast pushing probably seven years ago now. And, at the time he grew up secular Jew in San Francisco. He was living in New York at the early end of his career, didn’t know what he wanted to do, hyper energetic.

[00:08:52] Brent Beshore: And so anyway, we had a great conversation. We hit it off. Like you and I are now on a podcast and then it was probably two or three weeks after that he said, Hey, can I come visit you in Columbia? Sure. Yeah. Happy to have you. So we came out to Columbia and we sat down and, you know, I thought it was going to be what most people, when they visit me in Columbia, it’s Hey, how do, how can you help me get rich?

[00:09:14] Brent Beshore: or become successful in business, right? And we talked about that a little bit for I don’t know, 15, 20 minutes. He goes, all right, here’s the real, reason why I’m here. I’m like, great. I didn’t know there was an agenda. What’s the real reason? He goes, you’re the first person I’ve ever met who’s like a professing Christian.

[00:09:27] Brent Beshore: And I was like, really? I’m the first person. He’s you’re the first person I’ve ever known. Like I’ve, I like, I haven’t gotten to really interact with who’s a professing Christian. He’s I don’t get it. can you tell me like, who is Jesus and what is this whole thing about? And so we talked about mostly faith stuff.

[00:09:45] Brent Beshore: And I mean, he was very challenging to me, right? I mean, he, you know, David, he is, not taking any pat answer. He’s going to challenge everything. And I loved it. And we had just hit it off and it was like, there was no tension. There was no aggression or anything like that. It was just. Two people with very differing world views, very different perspectives on what was true, talking about truth.

[00:10:06] Brent Beshore: And we talked for seven straight hours. It was beautiful. And then this like really interesting thing happened. He started to kind of, you know, we’d talk, I don’t know, once every month or two, and he’d kind of say, Oh, I was reading about this and this can’t be true because of this, or I have a problem with this.

[00:10:24] Brent Beshore: Great. Let’s talk about it. So we talk about it and he kind of go away and research and It was over the course of six years and he had a lot of other influences other than me. But yeah, he came to faith last year and it’s been amazing to see his life and transformation. 

[00:10:40] Patrick Donley: That’s awesome. I love conversion stories.

[00:10:44] Patrick Donley: I think they’re absolutely fascinating. In college, I read, it was the Thomas Merton biography, the seven story mountain, who he was a Catholic monk, made a huge impact on me. At the same time I was reading that same, that Bible, the one year Bible, and it just made a huge impact on me. I love these kind of conversion stories, like how somebody goes from leading this very worldly, decadent, materialistic life to then becoming, you know, in Thomas Merton’s case, a Catholic monk in a very strict order.

[00:11:14] Patrick Donley: So I wanted to get back to like your conversion story, like you grew up pretty hardcore atheist. I think the search for truth was always there. It sounded like for you, like you were deeply hungering for truth in college. It sounded like probably even before that, but talk to me a little bit about that.

[00:11:32] Patrick Donley: Like this, hunger for truth, trying to figure out like what was going on here and, figure things out. 

[00:11:39] Brent Beshore: Yeah, I mean, I can remember I was nine years old when I told my mom I didn’t believe in God. And we, you know, we went to church, you know, half the Sundays growing up. We went to a PCUSA church in Joplin, Missouri.

[00:11:50] Brent Beshore: Everyone kind of was a, you know, you’re in the Bible belt there, right? It’s like the cultural Christianity is in the water. But I just, I didn’t get it, you know, I’m, not going to blame anybody. I mean, we had a, wonderful pastor. His name’s Bill Christman growing up. actually I set up a meeting.

[00:12:05] Brent Beshore: I can remember, I told my mom, Hey, I need you to drive me to the church. I was like 14, probably maybe 15. And I’d set up a meeting with the head pastor at the church, unbeknownst to my parents, you can imagine how terrifying I was as to raise me. You know, I just, do stuff like that. My mom’s you know, Hey, is everything okay?

[00:12:23] Brent Beshore: you know, you’re, I’m driving you to the church to meet with the pastor. everything all right? You know, it’s you know, what’s going on? And I said, no, I just, I have a whole bunch of faith questions. And so I had already determined at that point that I didn’t believe in God. I didn’t want kind of anything to do with it.

[00:12:37] Brent Beshore: I didn’t, the thing that I thought being a Christian was is honestly what I see a lot of people professing today who call themselves Christians. And it was just never interesting to me, which was, there’s a set of rules, and if you obey these rules, then you get favor in this life and the next, in order to be a good person, you need to follow the rules, I’m not a rule follower, I don’t, that’s never been attractive to me, I hate rules, I hate structure, I’m, you know, I, that’s just not my thing at all, and I definitely rebelled against that, I rejected what I thought was Christianity, what I thought was following Jesus, and became, yeah, like I said, an atheist.

[00:13:16] Brent Beshore: So I met with Bill Chrisman, the pastor, he was super kind and generous to me, sat with me for over an hour and, you know, I pounded him with question after question. At that point, and this is why I have, so much empathy for people who think Christians are idiots, who even would listen to this and think that we’re morons.

[00:13:33] Brent Beshore: Believe me, I was there, I was there. But yeah, I left that meeting, I left the rest of high school, into college, into my twenties. And I just kind of started drifting more and more towards what I would call like hyper rationalism towards, you know, New Atheism, Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris, that type of, you know, especially at that time, that was kind of the heyday for the New Atheist crew, and they were very bombastically aggressive towards Anybody of faith, including Christians.

[00:14:04] Brent Beshore: Weirdly enough, Dawkins now calls himself a cultural Christian. Weirdest thing I’ve ever heard. Anyway, there’s a whole transformation going on with a bunch of these guys now, but back then they were all, you know, if you believed in God, the sky fairy, all this stuff. So I adopted a lot of that language.

[00:14:20] Brent Beshore: and ultimately what I, grew up kind of thinking I knew and the way I thought the world worked was that the more, wealth and fame and power you could accrue, that would make up for everything. You could exert control. People would honor you. You could, you know, you’d live a good life with that.

[00:14:37] Brent Beshore: And so really the quest in my twenties was to accumulate as much as I could. And, you know, if I was God, I would have smited me, right? Like I would have, taken everything away. I would have said, look. Look at that guy. That guy thinks he has it all figured out. He’s arrogant. He’s condescending.

[00:14:55] Brent Beshore: I’d take it all away from him. I’m not God, thankfully, and the God who I now follow and worship is this loving, kind, generous, winsome God who instead of taking everything away and smiting me, gave me more than I could ever dream and hope for. And so I ended my 20s wealthier than I ever thought I’d be, more successful.

[00:15:17] Brent Beshore: We were 28th on the Inc. 500, invited to the White House to advise Obama on entrepreneurship policy. I started winning other awards. I had a thriving business, my beautiful wife who loved me, and it all tasted like crap. All tasted like crap. I mean, the best bottles of wine. I told my wife I didn’t love her.

[00:15:38] Brent Beshore: I tried to retire and play golf for a while. That felt terrible. I’d wake up every day with sweaty palms, anxious. So it was just, yeah, I was a mess. And it was about that time. In fact, I, met a, guy at the Inc. 500 conference in 2009, 2010. Maybe it was 2010 by the time it happened, because we were on the 2009 Inc.

[00:16:00] Brent Beshore: 500. And his name is John Garrett. He’s still a dear friend of mine today. And I can remember him. I met him there and, we were out and he’s a big Texan. He’s a Christian. He’s like great personality. he’s like, where do you say with the Lord? And I’m like, what do you mean? Where do I stand with the Lord?

[00:16:15] Brent Beshore: what are you talking about? You believe that stuff? I started talking with him. I started learning more from him. He is this effervescent personality, relaxed, rested, loving, kind, loves his wife, loves his kids, great relationship with his co workers. I’m like, wait a minute, what do you have that I don’t?

[00:16:33] Brent Beshore: Because you clearly have something. And sure enough, God started surrounding me with these people. They had something I didn’t have. There was an aroma to their lives that I didn’t have, and I didn’t see it in any of the lives of the people who I admired, frankly, who were super successful. That started the journey of God surrounding me, and they started, you know, giving me books and correct, kindly, some very directly, correcting my condescending personality, my, my lack of humility, my pride.

[00:17:02] Brent Beshore: And over time, I started really diving deep. I mean, I, behind me, there’s this whole, you know, these are all faith based books. I mean, I just read and read I think it’s the bottom of it. And I took seminary classes. I, bought all the books that you can, you could possibly buy on the historicity of the resurrection.

[00:17:20] Brent Beshore: I actually just got this monster. let me see if this book here. I actually just, I haven’t started reading it yet, but just got this baby. On the resurrection, it’s like a murder weapon, but I love to read stuff like this because it’s such a bolster to my faith of, Hey, if I’m going to believe something, right?

[00:17:35] Brent Beshore: And this is the thing that I admire atheists actually far more than I do most agnostics, because at least atheists are going to say, Hey, here’s where I stand. And here’s what I believe. And I think you’re wrong. And it’s great. Now back it up. And that’s when I, when push came to shove with me, I was that way when I was an atheist and a lot of people came to me and said, Hey, back it up.

[00:17:56] Brent Beshore: And I couldn’t back it up. Like I hadn’t thought about a lot of the questions, even though I took philosophy classes and religion classes in college at a great university, I had just not thought about a lot of the consequences of my, faith or my lack of faith, if you want to call it that. And so slowly, but surely I started reading more.

[00:18:15] Brent Beshore: And then ultimately it doesn’t matter how much knowledge you have. Ultimately you have to surrender, right? And so there was a, there’s a moment where I was like, I believe this is true. I believe that this is real and my life’s never been the same. I mean, it’s been a clunky, difficult, not as far down the path journey as I thought I’d be at this point in terms of change, but there’s been some miraculous change too, so just God’s timing is perfect.

[00:18:40] Patrick Donley: I’ve got a mentor who says, you know, the whole idea of it’s the rich man getting into the kingdom of heaven. It’s more difficult, you know, than through an eye of the needle. He actually changes it. He’s it’s actually the intellectuals that have, it’s the intellectuals that are thought, you know, thinking and doubting and cynical that have the difficulty getting in, you know, it’s really difficult for heady people.

[00:19:00] Patrick Donley: But I think if you do the work, like you’ve given in the example I’ve heard in the past of C.S. Lewis. Mortimer Adler, what’s the guy’s name, the Chicago Tribune writer, Lee Strobel, who wrote The Case for Christ, basically, you know, these were all atheists, but actually dove in to disprove Christianity and actually ended up becoming believers, which I find fascinating.

[00:19:24] Brent Beshore: Yeah, GK Chesterton has a great quote on this. He’s a young atheist can never be too careful what he reads for he might convert to the faith. I mean, it’s like this idea. I think there’s a lot of people and I certainly had this idea that it’s like Christians were the uneducated ones. They were the ones who were not thoughtful.

[00:19:38] Brent Beshore: And by the way, there’s a lot of Christians who, I’ve met who, you know, they grew up in the faith. It’s a faith that they adopted that they didn’t really like they, they didn’t grind through and work through. And some of them, yeah. Truly are believers and have just have been given this amazing faith, which is great.

[00:19:55] Brent Beshore: But some of them are not. Some of them when they get tested and tried, I mean, this is the seed being scattered on different types of soil, right? It can easily be choked out. And I think this is where you see a lot of people who all of a sudden, even some pastors who are all of a sudden Oh, I read this argument against whatever part of faith is, and it totally rocked my world.

[00:20:16] Brent Beshore: And I realized I don’t believe anymore and it’s 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.

[00:20:32] Brent Beshore: 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, like my relationship with God, like I’ve seen miracles, I’ve seen things happen that I have no way to explain them otherwise.

[00:20:55] Brent Beshore: But that’s where I feel like that rooted faith that were 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’s what being a Christian was. It was like, hope things work out, you know, Pascal’s wager, maybe a lot of people would kind of lean on that, which by the way, I think Pascal is incredible.

[00:21:16] Brent Beshore: And I think Pascal’s wager is a great technique to get people’s attention, but True faith is not just being like, I’m going to take in a holy insurance policy, right? 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 Like 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 like You can only give what you already have.

[00:21:48] Brent Beshore: Like I, I didn’t love my wife in the same way before I was a believer. So anyway, it’s just beautiful. I just rambled on, but it’s beautiful. 

[00:21:56] Patrick Donley: No, I love it. I love to hear it. It 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.

[00:22:11] Patrick Donley: 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. You know, I mean, you’ve made this point about Abraham Lincoln studied Christ, Einstein studied Christ, Napoleon studied Christ. It’s there’s a reason that we should probably delve into who he was and, you know, 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? 

[00:22:40] Brent Beshore: That’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 that’s dumb. They’re like, what do you mean? And I’m like, who do you study?

[00:22:52] Brent Beshore: And they’re like, oh, I study all these greats in business. I study all that. And I’m like, do you know who they studied? They studied Jesus. And I was like, and by the way, if even if you put his divinity aside, right? let’s just put that completely inside. Let’s just say, objectively, he’s the greatest leader in the history of the world.

[00:23:08] Brent Beshore: He has the most followers in the history of the world. Wouldn’t you want to know how he did it? 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’re going to study the leader who studied the leader that’s actually the best leader?

[00:23:26] Brent Beshore: 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, you know, it’s usually at a dinner or something like that, people are like, Alright, fine, I’ll study Jesus. And I’m like, Great! It’s amazing what happens. 

[00:23:39] Patrick Donley: Yeah, that was my experience.

[00:23:41] Patrick Donley: I completely discounted Christianity right off the bat and explored all these other wisdom traditions in depth, but it wasn’t until much later. And they have a lot of wisdom. 

[00:23:50] Brent Beshore: Oh, they do, for sure. For sure. And they have a lot of wisdom. It can impact your life quite a bit. 

[00:23:55] Patrick Donley: But it wasn’t until later that I really got back into reading and studying the Bible and I, like what like guys like Thomas Jefferson and Kevin Kelly.

[00:24:06] Patrick Donley: I don’t know if you’re familiar with Kevin Kelly, the guy that Wired Magazine and Tim Ferriss has interviewed him. Fascinating guy. He just read the the red of what Jesus said you can like condense the study And read just read what Jesus said and study that as an exercise And 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.

[00:24:42] Patrick Donley: 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? 

[00:24:57] Brent Beshore: 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, I’m All I have and all I am is yours.

[00:25:08] Brent Beshore: I mean, that’s what’s required. That’s real faith, right? The Lord, 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.

[00:25:28] Brent Beshore: Love has to be able to choose. And 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. And one of my favorite meals I’ve ever shared is with the Green family, with David Green and his sons in Oklahoma City.

[00:25:55] Brent Beshore: And I remember asking David this exact thing. I said, What is David like? Hobby Lobby is this monster organization. Put the politics aside, put what people think aside, you know, they’re easy to lambast for some of their views. I’m just, put all that aside. Just take for a second. This is a family that has deep convictions, loves the Lord, and puts their money where their mouth is.

[00:26:13] Brent Beshore: 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. It’s incredible. They take 50 percent of the cash flow of Hobby Lobby, and 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.

[00:26:40] Brent Beshore: In fact, David wrote a book called Giving It All Away and Getting It All Back Again, which is just a beautiful kind of 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 bricking, brick and mortar retail.

[00:26:57] Brent Beshore: And I said, how did that work? I mean, you’re giving 50 percent of your profits away. that’s 50 percent 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’ve doubled the margins. And I remember this was, probably, oh gosh, six or seven years ago when I, heard this and I said, when did your margins double?

[00:27:21] Brent Beshore: 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 percent away. Our margin doubled, so we actually had no net impact to the reinvestment of the business.

[00:27:37] Brent Beshore: It’s been that way ever since. We have doubled the margins of all of our competitors. And I said, how is that? He’s we don’t know. He’s 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 what, 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 we, it’s His business, it’s not our business, He knows that we need the resources to be able to accomplish certain things on, you know, on behalf of the kingdom, and so He’s blessed us, and I was, I remember thinking to myself, I remember yeah, that is crazy, And sure enough, when I started, and in fact, this is still a process I’m actively doing is the more that I have surrendered, the more that I’ve said, Hey, this is not about building my kingdom, about my game, about trying to be the most, you know, the wealthiest person or however, you know, 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.

[00:28:31] Brent Beshore: 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. It’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.

[00:28:53] Brent Beshore: 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. Like it was not obvious to me in the beginning when I, you know, sort of, I gave my myself and my, life over. It’s just weird. It’s like a muscle, like anything else, you’ve go to develop a, taste for what does it feel to be surrendered and what does it feel to be unsurrendered to even understand what it is to give?

[00:29:19] Brent Beshore: 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 care, you know, 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.

[00:29:39] Brent Beshore: Again, this is where you get into prosperity gospel garbage. I’m not saying you give it away so that you know, you get your triple portion or whatever kind of language that, you know, that usually happens, but that’s not the purpose. If you do it for the wrong reasons, like God wants our heart. So if you give with a heart posture of trying to get it, God’s not going to honor that.

[00:29:59] Brent Beshore: It’s not going to work. God just wants our heart. And yes, the business, I mean, has there been consequences 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?

[00:30:15] Brent Beshore: Absolutely. Are there people who have invested with us because they think I’m an idiot because I’m a Christian? Absolutely. But 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, like 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.

[00:30:47] Brent Beshore: That’d be the, that’d be the anti Jesus thing. 

[00:30:50] Patrick Donley: Was it difficult for you to become public with your beliefs? Like you, you’ve really put yourself out there and I really admire people like you and people like John Marsh that we talked about earlier. that are very open about their beliefs and you’re going to take shots.

[00:31:07] Patrick Donley: 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. 

[00:31:17] Brent Beshore: I had a lot of trepidation. Yeah. A mentor of mine and a senior pastor at church, Dave Cover, who I’ve had a longstanding relationship. He was one of the people who helped bring me to faith originally.

[00:31:28] Brent Beshore: I remember having long conversations with him. about being more known publicly as a Christian. And I remember thinking to myself like, gosh, you know, people are not going to like me. I, if anything, I have a, tendency to want to people please. And so I was like, oh man, this greats against all of my people pleasing.

[00:31:44] Brent Beshore: 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.

[00:32:04] Brent Beshore: And I’m just going to trust that the Lord has me and, will keep me as my refuge. You 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, who’ve said something negative or condescending towards me in a public setting that I’ve, been professing my faith and, they start the best conversations.

[00:32:27] Brent Beshore: And by the way, it’s not like they’re like, you know, ultimately convert to following Jesus or some have, but like many of them, it’s 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.

[00:32:42] Brent Beshore: The 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 the least that I do. and who dogpile 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.

[00:32:59] Brent Beshore: You’re wrong, blah, blah, blah, and all this stuff. And my answer to them is I totally get it. Cause I said the same stuff about people as an ardent atheist. I was also being bombastic about it. The people that are really struggling with this, the people who were like, actually, yes. And here’s this crazy thing that I’m like, Whoa, I don’t believe that.

[00:33:14] Brent Beshore: But they’re like, trying to be on my side and trying to go at people. And I’m like, I’m having to 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.

[00:33:30] Brent Beshore: I mean, it’s one of the things I talked about with David Perreault. Like he was like, people will say that there are Christians and they don’t believe in 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, you know, I mean, these are all the cultural Christians, you know, Christianity has been now identified with, you know, Republican politics.

[00:33:47] Brent Beshore: Like it’s all this other stuff. And by the way, shocker, people have been trying to use religion and tried to use Jesus to, for their own ends since the beginning. I mean, this is nothing new. The problem is from the outside looking in when you talk to somebody who’s Christians are hateful, spiteful people.

[00:34:06] Brent Beshore: 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.

[00:34:24] Brent Beshore: I’ve literally never met. Now, can we all have moments of anger and all this stuff, but I’ve never met somebody who’s. Oh, quote unquote, horrible person. Like I never met them. Now I’ve met plenty of people who profess Christianity, who are people who I can’t see Jesus’s work in their life at all. And then you dig deeper and you ask them, okay, when was the last time you read the Bible?

[00:34:44] Brent Beshore: When was the last time you prayed? When was the last time you went to church? When was the last time, what do you actually believe? it turns out they don’t believe Jesus is Lord. They don’t surrender to him as King. They 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?

[00:34:58] Brent Beshore: 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, especially when you pair it with Dallas Willard’s book, Discipline of the Spirit, or Discipline, excuse me, amazing combination.

[00:35:15] Brent Beshore: But I just, you know, as you said, he is, 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. I 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.

[00:35:32] Brent Beshore: We’re called to be united. We’re called to be in community. But it’s not like God’s Oh, you check that box. Great. You know, 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. 

[00:35:45] Patrick Donley: If there’s somebody listening to this and they’re on the fence, they’ve been, you know, struggling with issues of faith and things like that, aside from the Bible, is there do you have a couple go to books that you recommend to people that you’re like, read this and then get back with me?

[00:35:59] Brent Beshore: Yeah, it’s so interesting. It really depends on where they, are. So there’s categories of people I’ve learned as I’ve kind of, you know, talked to people about this and people ask me a lot of questions about my faith background and my faith journey. There’s kind of a group of people who grew up in the faith and who just kind of faded away from the faith is what I would say.

[00:36:18] Brent Beshore: So just kind of like they got busy, the cares of the world choked them out. They just kind of, you know, now they’re in their mid thirties, maybe in their forties and they’re. You know, 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 a God, but I, you know, I haven’t prayed much in the last long time, you know, whatever it might be for those people.

[00:36:38] Brent Beshore: You don’t need to convince them that there’s a God. You don’t need to convince them of, They need to break their worldview and that there’s, you know, supernatural world to this and, you know, the world is actually really upside down, all that stuff, you don’t need to tell that for them, they need to understand sort of what does it mean to really follow and practice following Jesus and what is the fruit of that?

[00:36:59] Brent Beshore: And 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. That’s the best meditation on Ecclesiastes I’ve ever read.

[00:37:16] Brent Beshore: 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, you know, what does it feel like to be back in relationship with God?

[00:37:32] Brent Beshore: 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, you know, 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. And unfortunately, it’s, there’s a lot of people who fit in this category.

[00:37:48] Brent Beshore: And man, my heart goes out, the stories I’ve heard are just heartbreaking, heartbreaking. I, you know, 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, you know, spiritual abuse is a real thing.

[00:38:09] Brent Beshore: 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. You get me included. we are deeply flawed.

[00:38:26] Brent Beshore: I mean, we believe it’s part of our core belief system that we are depraved in many ways, that it left unredeemed that we are capable of terrible things. I think 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.

[00:38:44] Brent Beshore: 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. And so with people who have been hurt by the church, you know, there’s some books about And there’s all different kinds of like lines of reasoning.

[00:39:08] Brent Beshore: 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.

[00:39:30] Brent Beshore: The problem is always sin and the answer is always Jesus. And so there’s a, whole line of books. there’s a great book called questioning Christianity. 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 make sure here, Rebecca is her first name, and yeah, so she’s a great, book came out a little while ago, but, so the chapters aren’t we better off without religion?

[00:39:59] Brent Beshore: 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? Hasn’t science disproved Christianity? Doesn’t Christianity denigrate women? Isn’t Christianity homophobic?

[00:40:15] Brent Beshore: 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 you know, pretty I mean, there’s a lot more deeper reading on each one of those subjects Is she 

[00:40:34] Patrick Donley: I’m sorry to interrupt.

[00:40:35] Patrick Donley: Is she a professor in Boston or somewhere? Do you know her background? Yeah. Okay I saw you this past summer. She spoke at in Columbus and I got the chance to see her. She was amazing. 

[00:40:46] Brent Beshore: Yeah, 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 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 Perell to Christianity was watching Netflix, right?

[00:41:06] Brent Beshore: 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, You know, there’s a lot of these common misconceptions, and by the way, I’ve had all of these, 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.

[00:41:42] Brent Beshore: I mean, all kinds of crazy stuff. It’s not that the Bible’s saying, Hey, you should go do these things. In fact, the exact opposite. It’s saying, this is just what happened. And 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.

[00:41:59] Brent Beshore: 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. You know, I’d, recommend a lot of Keller’s books. He has two in particular.

[00:42:14] Brent Beshore: let’s see if I can grab them. Making Sense of God and Every Good Endeavor back here. See if I can grab them here real quick. So Making Sense of God. He’s got a good, one on marriage too. Oh my gosh. I’m actually reading is marriage. We have a, twenties group that we’re reading is marriage folk with right now.

[00:42:31] Brent Beshore: So these two books, making Sense of God in 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 are really impactful for me as an atheist to read about the how little, how much faith it takes to be an atheist, let’s put it that way.

[00:42:52] Brent Beshore: And I never framed it that way, but that’s honestly what these, books provided. And 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.

[00:43:06] Brent Beshore: If anybody’s listening to this and has a question, I’d be happy. Just DM me. I’d be happy to connect. 

[00:43:12] Patrick Donley: I’ve got a guy that’s in my Bible study that will listen to some of our podcasts. We Study Billionaires as our kind of flagship podcast, and it’s all about studying Buffett and Munger. And he was just asking me, he’s it seems like Buffett and Munger are Christians.

[00:43:27] Patrick Donley: I don’t know that they ever have said that publicly, you know, Charlie unfortunately passed away, you know, 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 like that experience for sure, but were they just steeped in like Midwestern Christian values and it’s just a, you know, part of just who they are or were they practicing Christians?

[00:43:52] Brent Beshore: Hey, 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. And but yeah, look, I mean, I think there’s the world we live in is a Christian world.

[00:44:15] Brent Beshore: The West is a Christian world. Like, 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 Yeah, a lot of the ideas, I mean, they’ve won out because they’re true.

[00:44:32] Brent Beshore: 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. Like we are no different than animals. They would just say we’re, look, Scott Adams calls us moist robots. I mean, there’s this, idea.

[00:44:49] Brent Beshore: I mean, truly. And I don’t know how you get to meaning and beauty and morality outside of faith. And that’s what, honestly, One of the things that scared me when I first started exploring these, and I was really offended, angry, when I was an atheist, and I was given some of these books, I started reading through them, and I’d be challenged with that, and I’d be saying, look, there is no morality unless there’s a moral lawgiver.

[00:45:11] Brent Beshore: Like, where does morality come from? If you say that it just comes from you and I agreeing on what is moral, that’s fine, but there’s nothing sacrosanct about it, there’s nothing that’s just me and you having a social contract. So this is actually, you know, in, in political theory, it’s called social contract theory.

[00:45:26] Brent Beshore: It’s just, look, we have a social contract. And you and I agree that 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.

[00:45:44] Brent Beshore: We randomly developed out of goo. And we’re headed towards nothingness. We came out of nothingness. There’s no actual underpinnings of morality. It’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?

[00:46:02] Brent Beshore: 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 share a lot of values with both of them. I think they are incredibly wise in many ways. Look, I mean, Munger’s book that was written about is called Worldly Wisdom, right? I mean, it’s the book is about worldly wisdom.

[00:46:19] Brent Beshore: And I think that you can, there’s comments, idea of common grace, like God lets the rain and the sun come on the believers and the unbelievers alike, right? There’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.

[00:46:36] Brent Beshore: Most of the mornings I don’t wake up and say, man, thankfully my toe works today. But I guarantee you have a huge problem with your toe and you’re going to be aware of your toe. you know, 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.

[00:46:55] Brent Beshore: But neither of them, I think, profess to faith. 

[00:46:57] Patrick Donley: I want to kind of switch gears a little bit. I’ve got a buddy of mine who, he’s got a couple 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.

[00:47:15] Patrick Donley: I know that you have done that. that’s kind of 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?

[00:47:30] Patrick Donley: What would you recommend that kind of thing for, a young person or middle aged person who wants to do what you’ve done? 

[00:47:36] Brent Beshore: Yeah. So I, got my start by, I started a business and then I ended up buying a sort of adjacent business with an SBA loan. And that’s how, yeah, I mean, that was ultimately how, this kind of foundational how I got started.

[00:47:50] Brent Beshore: It’s all about risk reward. I mean, ultimately comes down to, you know, if you’re a believer, what do you feel God’s calling you to do? You know, 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.

[00:48:07] Brent Beshore: Makes me 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 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.

[00:48:21] Brent Beshore: So it’s not like there’s no, it’s a 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 you only see winners are the ones that raise their hand and say, look at me, I’m a winner. You know, I’ve had four people in the last year, maybe a little longer than a year, 18 months, who have reached out who have declared bankruptcy as a result of buying a business with an SBA loan.

[00:48:44] Brent Beshore: and 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, you know, 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.

[00:49:07] Brent Beshore: Starting yield. If it’s true, if it’s true owner earnings, you stick to your bones cash flow, you’re paying 10, 11% in interest. You get to keep 10%, you get to 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.

[00:49:27] Brent Beshore: 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, you, and it just doesn’t work out, you declare bankruptcy and you’re 24, 25, you’ll be fine.

[00:49:55] Brent Beshore: I 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 know, you’ve got two or three kids and you’re in your thirties 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, you know, turns out things are hard.

[00:50:12] Brent Beshore: And there’s a reason, you know, most things are efficiently priced is how I would say it. I remember when I first got into buying small companies, you know, 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.

[00:50:30] Brent Beshore: It can get pretty dicey quick. So 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, three years of full time work because over those three years, you’re going to see a lot of stuff.

[00:50:47] Brent Beshore: 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 know, you first get introduced to a business. So the time you close, usually for smaller companies is at least four or five, six months, at least.

[00:51:04] Brent Beshore: So you go to back up from that and say, okay, look, I start searching day one. I started making phone calls. I start interacting with people who have access to these types of deals. I start calling seller or potential sellers. It’s going to take a long time. You’ve got to get a lot in the pipeline.

[00:51:17] Brent Beshore: And by the way, something’s going to come along early and you’re going to say, Ooh, 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. It’s going to, the more you dig in, the hairier it’s going to get. Hopefully the deal falls apart and you don’t get blind.

[00:51:31] Brent Beshore: Deal blindness is a real thing. And, yeah, it just takes time. And the joke in the private 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.

[00:51:49] Brent Beshore: And by the way, sometimes it never happens where you close, but deals that close, you got to regather, you know, things and 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.

[00:52:03] Brent Beshore: 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. Recommend people read it. I go through a lot of these questions on there about, you know, how should you think about financing? How should you think about geography? How should you think about industry?

[00:52:18] Brent Beshore: 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 got to run the thing. That’s really hard. All that to say, it sounds like I’m being down on, I’m trying to be neutral on both sides.

[00:52:34] Brent Beshore: 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, absolutely gold in the hills. You just go to be ready to mime for it, and it’s going to be pretty hairy.

[00:52:51] Brent Beshore: And as long as you go into eyes wide open, go for it. 

[00:52:56] Patrick Donley: 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? 

[00:53:06] Brent Beshore: Yeah, it’s all hard. I would say it’s all hard. It depends on what you want to do.

[00:53:09] Brent Beshore: It depends on your skill set. 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, I mean, but 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.

[00:53:26] Brent Beshore: 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, right?

[00:53:46] Brent Beshore: So I bought hundreds of years of progress in 15 years for a lot of capital for 200, 000, 000 of capital, right? Plus 1, 000, 000 of capital that we’ve invested. Actually, maybe more than that now. But anyway, so that’s the way to think about it is if you know exactly what you want to do and there’s no one else that you can go buy, build it.

[00:54:05] Brent Beshore: 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. 

[00:54:17] Patrick Donley: Yeah, I guess it’s just case dependent and people figure it out as they go along, right?

[00:54:21] Patrick Donley: I mean, you know, in your own case, it doesn’t sound like you, there was no playbook, right? You didn’t have this playbook that you were following. It’s just like you figure stuff out as you go along. 

[00:54:31] Brent Beshore: Yeah. I know most people don’t, I mean, I don’t talk about this publicly a lot, but just to be honest, like my line is it’s not a straight line from Oh, Brent started a business, then bought a business.

[00:54:40] Brent Beshore: And then, you know, rocket ship. 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. you know, I invested in startups for a while. Some very successfully, some most of them bombed. I’ve kind of tasted and tried a lot of things.

[00:54:57] Brent Beshore: The 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. I, 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 like a lot harder than buying one business.

[00:55:24] Brent Beshore: And then the third tier, which we’re kind of going through now, is build an organization that can repeatedly search for, negotiate, document, close, and operate. Businesses at scale, you know, balancing capital, balancing opportunities, balancing talent is a heck of a lot harder than the second level. It’s just a heck of a lot harder than the first level.

[00:55:44] Brent Beshore: And the first level is brutally difficult. So I’ve watched, you know, there’s a lot of people who are like, Oh, I’m building a hold co. 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. Like the best way to build a whole co is buy one business.

[00:55:59] Brent Beshore: 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 and then try to operate that really well and install leader. I mean, that’s that’s the steps that you have to go down. I don’t understand it. If I had been given 50 or a hundred million dollars when I was two years into this, I would have lost all the money.

[00:56:20] Brent Beshore: 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. Like the going slow aspect. if you asked 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 started to have to, you know, scrap and claw and fight and learn.

[00:56:41] Brent Beshore: and go slow. It then allowed us to create all these systems, create the processes, create culture, get everything gelled together to then go in it. look at Berkshire. Berkshire was tiny and Berkshire was, you know, no one knew who Berkshire was until, gosh, Buffett was 55, probably, maybe 60, like that’s, most people just don’t understand, they look at somebody like a Buffett or Munger, since you mentioned them, and they say, Oh, I want to build the next Berkshire.

[00:57:10] Brent Beshore: Great. They went at it. Berkshire is the result of compounding over 70 years. It’s 70 years of compounding. That in and of itself is just, it’s hard to wrap your head around. It’s not like you can build a Berkshire in 20 years. I mean, you know, you talk to like, 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?

[00:57:36] Brent Beshore: But people don’t realize that, that portion’s a really long time. it, was working, but it’s just, it was nothing for a long time. 

[00:57:44] Patrick Donley: 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 Capitol Camp and so many other things I wanted to ask you, but this has gone by really quickly.

[00:57:55] Patrick Donley: I really appreciate your time and just being, sharing about your, faith journey. It’s super interesting to me. So I hope it’s a value to somebody, one listener out there, it’ll be worthwhile. And, yeah, Brent. Appreciate your time. 

[00:58:08] Brent Beshore: Thank you, Patrick. Happy to come back on anytime. That was a wonderful conversation.

[00:58:11] Brent Beshore: I really enjoyed it. 

[00:58:13] Patrick Donley: 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. 

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