Episode 225 - I Married My Business Partner with John and Ashely Marsh
What is it like to sleep with the accountant? When your spouse is your business partner, it’s easy for business decisions to get personal, and personal decisions to seep into the business operations. John and Ashely Marsh know the tension first hand. The husband and wife team are the co-founders of the Marsh Collective, pioneering the redemption of Opelika historic downtown. Opelika’s story, an account of beauty from brokenness, mirrors their personal story. Through the sharing and walking out of their personal testimony of reconciliation, John and Ashely have given hope to hundreds of couples facing divorce and have inspired thousands of business leaders who aspire to live out their faith through their work. On this podcast, the couple shares helpful tools and stories for entrepreneurs who are partners in business and life.
All opinions expressed on this podcast, including the team and guests, are solely their opinions. Host and guests may maintain positions in the companies and securities discussed. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as specific advice for any individual or organization.
Episode Transcript
Transcription is done by an AI software. While technology is an incredible tool to automate this process, there will be misspellings and typos that might accompany it. Please keep that in mind as you work through it.
Henry Kaestner: Welcome back to the Faith Driven Entrepreneur podcast. I am here with William. William.
William Norvell: It's a good day. It's a good day to be here. We've got more Alabama people coming on the podcast, which is always exciting.
Henry Kaestner: Yes, it is. It is always exciting. We are missing Rusty, Rusty is driving cross-country. Rusty splits his time between the Bay Area and the beautiful, awesome state of Rhode Island. And he's en route right now. So we are missing him. It was so good, by the way William, last week you may or may not know this, but the day before you and I get a chance to do a lot of recording for season two of the Faith Driven Entrepreneur series in the Redwoods, you and I get a chance to do some of that in front of 2000 year old trees, which was really, really cool. I got to do a lot of that with Chip Ingram, which was neat, special for me. But the day before that we were at Crossroads Church, which is Rusty's church, met his senior pastor who's an awesome guy and and got to hang out with some.
William Norvell: Of the pastor. Terry. Yeah, he's great.
Henry Kaestner: Pastor Terry. Yeah, Pastor Terry is great. And obviously we talked a lot about college basketball. We were recording this right after the end of the NCAA and and everybody had a team.
William Norvell: And just how sad are you, Henry?
Henry Kaestner: I'm actually not really that sad. I'm not that sad because if you've been listening to this for a while, you probably know that I'm a Carolina fan. Carolina did reasonably well, did very well. It overachieved, got pretty close. But what a season. And the thing that was just so encouraging to me was that would be Duke. No, that's not what was encouraging to me. What was encouraging to me was the fact that Hubert Davis did such a great job. And winsomely talking about his faith. It wasn't an over the top thing. It came up in conversation. It was natural, it was sincere, and his love of God and love of his players came through. And that, I think was the big one. And yes, it's more it's fun to watch your team win, but it's really fun when the good guys win. And I think back to what we've had and by the way, this is not a sports podcast if people are just tuning in. But when I think back to Tony Bennett, UVA coach, just unapologetically talking about his faith as UVA won, and then I think last year, Scott Drew, who we had on the Faith Driven Athlete podcast, which was a Covid project, we did Scott Drew and now Hubert Davis. I mean, it's awesome when the good guys win and we saw that.
William Norvell: That's amazing. Yeah, it was a fun journey. And yes, everybody else's teams lost eventually. So as the podcast host, we're kind of glad Henry lost because the rest of us did too. So that makes us feel better.
Henry Kaestner: Misery loves company, but we've got great fans of the Faith Driven Entrepreneur podcast in Kansas. And who are Kansas fans? In fact, I was talking to one of them who's a watch party host for our conferences coming up. And Lacey Ellis is just a fantastic watch party host, had a watch party in Kansas City and 50 people came to it. So we've got a lot of people in our community that are really, really fired up. So we celebrate with them. But today we're talking about something much bigger than college basketball. We're talking about being just really committed to the creative process that is entrepreneurship, but also the creative never ending work of being devoted to one spouse. And as I was talking about this, as we were kind of quote unquote, backstage, I told Ashely something that I really mean to be really mean. And that is John has encouraged me and my love of Kimberly and that he will take any time when he's talking to a man to make sure that they are loving their brides well, and I'm grateful for that. And many of our audience will be very familiar with John and Ashely's story, which was so beautifully done by our partners at Seattle Pacific through their faith and company video on their story, which features as week six in the FDE video series where we have groups of entrepreneurs. We had 1600 and Jan - February across 88 countries getting together in community to talking about God's call to create our identity in Christ, etc. We've had John on the podcast before. We've never had Ash on the podcast before. We have not spent nearly as much time talking about how important it is that we love our spouses, well, and we're going to make up for that right now. John and Ash, thank you very, very much for being with us.
John Marsh: Thank you. This is awseome.
Ashely Marsh: I am glad to be here.
Henry Kaestner: So we want as we do with every podcast, we want to do an autobiographical flyover of the stories of our guest and where they've come from, how they came to know the Lord. We're not going to be able to do as good of a job right now as that video does, but nonetheless, give us some broad strokes on that. And then let's go right into the things that you guys are doing. And William will take us on this part because, of course, this is near and dear to William, because just being involved in the creative process in his beloved state of Alabama is huge. We want to talk, of course, about community revitalization. But yeah, we really want to talk about what you have learned about loving on your spouses. But please give us that autobiographical flyover either of you can lead.
Ashely Marsh: Are you deferring to me? So I am from Opelika, Alabama, of course, and I grew up in a pretty hard situation most of my life, and I always wanted to be loved and accepted by my father. And definitely by others. But whenever I was a young girl, I was pretty much just left to myself and I didn't have a lot of confidence. And I finally met this man, John Marsh, and he's bigger than the world to me and the universe. I've never met anyone like him. This is all obviously. Praise Jesus. We met each other at a very young age and ended up just doing everything wrong and hurtful to each other, not knowing the consequences that would be there and not knowing that there was another way. And I ended up putting me in a situation where I committed adultery against John and actually ended up at one point being pregnant, not knowing whose child it was. And just it drove me to the absolute end of myself to where I had no other option but to cry out and ask God to help me save me from me. That's the best way I knew to put that. And of course, God did. God is so faithful and such a blessing. But what I realized through that is what I was looking for was for someone to accept me and love me. And I was looking for someone to anticipate me and want me. And even though John, you know, before Christ and knew how to love me, he was trying. It just was not what I was built to receive. God made us [...] save that [....] so now we have a life that is so full and I'm so loved. I sometimes walk around and feel really full of myself because I know how well loved I am by my father, by my husband. He doesn't just say those things. He acts this out and he walks everything that he speaks and he does it. Even whenever he doesn't do it perfectly, he tries absolutely righteously. So that that is my short take is that God met me on a floor in a huddled heap of me trying to get away from myself. And thankfully he wasn't trying to get away from me. He was trying to get to me. So, that's me.
Henry Kaestner: John
John Marsh: Well, I led my family in a way that didn't honor God. And I planted corn. I got lots of corn. The responsibility for that was on me. If I was a godly man, she would have had something to follow. And so even in the garden. God, wouldn't calling anybody's cell phone number, but Adams. To ask what he did with what he's been entrusted. And so because I didn't lead my family in a way that honored God, I planted the wind and reap the whirlwind. But there is something beautiful about something that's lost and found. It can even be more precious and something that was never lost. And so we can be new again. That's the story. The story seems too good to be true. I think that's why you call it good news. But what happened is I grew up my mom tried to have a child for 13 years, could not adopted me and 18 months later had my little brother and she took despoiling me to telling me I could do anything, that nothing was beyond what I could do. And I was very special and I followed God until I got to the place. That made it a choice to step across the lines with a young girl and do something that I knew would be against God, my family, and started rebelling. And you know what, when you start rebelling. And me and my brother walked side by side and I rebelled and he didn't. And the rebellion, some of that choose it. The hardest thing is when you most need something, the thing you most need is what you least deserve, which is praise. And so as I was hurting and doing all the wrong things and looking for acceptance in them, ended up getting hooked on first on money because I was so entrepreneurially, promiscuous, I've never had a real job. I just wanted to build, make stuff. I love business. I felt like a mosquito in a nudist colony everywhere I look was opportunity. And so I would start things and do things. And without God, I was just so unhinged. So at 23 years old, Ash and I were a million and a half dollars in debt, $99,000 overdrawn going through a divorce. I went in the attic of our house to hang myself, kept hearing, Kill yourself and kill yourself. And God reframed that and touched me and said, die to yourself and don't take your life, but lay your life down. And light lightning struck me. I got touched by life and it got past the fence and I was forever shook up from that moment. And so I just realized that there's a God that loves us, that can redeem anything. Nothing is too broken to be made beautiful. And we worked our way out of that debt, repented one check at a time for about seven and a half years and cheered when we got to zero. And God has been so faithful that took everything we went through and designed it for what we're going to.
William Norvell: It is amazing. Thank you both for sharing that and for sharing your hearts and where God's taking you through these moments and apologies. It feels like a rough transition, but I really want to dig in to the business that God bless you to steward, and walk alongside. And I know your story continues to intertwine with all these businesses because I've been grateful to hear some of it. But, you know, maybe I'll start with you, John. I mean, you know, I hear you describe yourself in lots of fun phrases, so I'm going to spin you up. I'll let you go. Right. Because I think that's the best strategy here. But, you know, you call yourself a hybrid at some levels. You know, you're you're you're part this, your part that. Tell us a little more about how you define your entrepreneurial journey and how you see yourself in this landscape.
John Marsh: Well, I think is when we find our gifting, they make room for some put us before kings and men. And my gifting in so many ways is vision and connection in what's challenging sometimes is fun, where your vision lies underneath all the things you've been good at. Like what's really behind it? And for me, I believe I have the gift of seeing potential in people and places, and that's what allowed us to do all the work in our city, do over 275 properties in ten square blocks and start over 60 businesses now and just learn and grow and stumble all the way. You know, we failed more than I ever imagined we would, but we've had some things really work and it's been incredible and we've learned a lot along the way. And it's like we got a practical Ph.D. in building businesses. And and once you find the place of your anointing, like for us and the ten square blocks that we've loved for 25 years, we're in no need to do work there. We were called by God to love a small place with all our hearts, and in loving those ten square blocks for 25 years now God's opened up the door and we help ten cities around America now steward their towns. So we loved one town and God gave us ten. And so that's really the divine story that if you honor God and use your gifts, he'll make room for you. And we get to do things that I'm amazed right now that we get to do. I can't believe we get to get up every day and love people and places at the scale we're doing it and do it together.
Henry Kaestner: Can you give us an example of some of those places? We've talked about Opelika before on the podcast, but tell us about some of those other cities that you've been entrusted with and what that looks like and their stories and what your projects have been.
John Marsh: Great. Well, the smallest town is a town of 800 in Kentucky called Bloomfield, Kentucky. Our clients there invested a lot of money there and couldn't make it grow. And that's one thing we realized. I asked them, Where is your town? They said, all dressed up and nowhere to go. Money can't do this alone. It's like putting out a forest fire with hundred dollar bills. So small or large our towns from 800 all the way to about 180,000 Winter Haven, Florida is a great example of the largest town we work in. They purchased the bulk of 80 blocks of downtown Winter Haven. And what they did, it's a $200 million portfolio and they raised $100 million close to it from 60 locals, a community development fund to love the place they live and have really accomplished some incredible things. Like now we have 500 multifamily units going infill in between the historic buildings and it's so powerful. What we say is we create and curate irreplaceable real estate and say, Well, why is that irreplaceable? And I said, It's built with materials we don't have anymore by people who don't live anymore and methods we don't do anymore with entitlements we can't get anymore. And so it's how do you love a place in such a way that will make your Sunday school teacher happy and your economics teacher happy? Is that possible to do good and do well? And we found that it is.
William Norvell: Wow, that's amazing. That's amazing. So that comprises Marsh collective, right? And kind of what you're doing there on the real estate side and that is that fair?
John Marsh: So we do that. We say we invest in companies, couples and communities. That's kind of through Marsh Collective. And then we still steward we own close to 200 properties in Opelika and steward that and the five companies we have there. And Ash five years ago and interesting transition Ash had been homeschooling for 20 years our sons that was up and she asked what did she want to do? She said, I want to run these companies. And so I stepped out of the way and she stepped in. And really it was hard not to feel like, [...] I'd messed it up all along after I saw what she was capable of and the amazing detail. And you just realize that what got you here won't take you where you want to go. And her gifts were ideal for the season to go from, you know, entrepreneurship to establishment in some ways. And in these businesses.
William Norvell: Now that's real. And every entrepreneur, goes to do that, right? I mean, you build things and you have to start slowly giving pieces to other people. And Deer Point, a lot of times those pieces are the people that I'll say as nice as I can that actually know what they're doing as opposed to people like us sometimes that are just building things and seeing what happens. And so we're going to get to I want to hear Ashely's part of that story in a minute. John, what are you doing now? So as you stepped away, what is God called you to next?
John Marsh: Well, we say that, you know, these cities I do believe there's some new things we're involved with. We believe we're creating a new asset class of real estate that's irreplaceable real estate. I mean, we've been through the commercial real estate. We've been through residential real estate. Imagine real estate portfolio that is designed with irreplaceable real estate, with historic downtown small towns. This built in such a way that you could have it at scale. That was some all the tools we've learned along the way to make them work would be there and it would give some liquidity options for people who want. I mean, what do you do with portfolios like ours and all these other cities? How can we make them generationally stewarded? How do we love and steward them well for the good of our community for the next 50 years? And so I'm interested in that. Henry has helped in some of the guys in a meeting recently encouraged me to write a book or two, so we got our first book that we've kind of decided to do, and that's going to be on this idea of redemptive real estate or irreplaceable real estate. And then we're also going to write a book on marriage about how do you work together, husband and wife. What does it mean to be a high impact couple that does life together at the scale? We're doing it. So it's content. It's some consulting and it's really kind of developed the consulting. We used to do it for fees and fixed price and we started do it for fees and we take some equity in certain situations and now it's fees, equity, and we bring capital. And so this is the new model of how we're deploying our gifts into a unique way of dealing with real estate portfolios and projects.
William Norvell: Oh, it's amazing. That's amazing. And okay, I'm going to go to your second book first because I'm going to get your answer and then we're going to get swing over and get Ashely's answer, as we did when we started. So working together in marriage, what works? What doesn't work? What advice? I know you're not the only team walking through this journey together. And as most entrepreneurs know, my wife doesn't technically work in the business, but she sure part of it, you know? And so we have to talk about those things, too. What do you think of what's the outline of the book? Walk us through it.
John Marsh: Well, that's still we're working at it, but it is this is you know, if I had to say on one level, what's it like to sleep with a bill collector or what is it like to have, you know, all these roles and hats at the same time? If you're sideways at work, you're sideways at home, and that can be really difficult. And how do you honor the different roles that we have? So what we've done is pulled down sophisticated business tools into our marriage. We've created frameworks. We have a weekly meeting that's her and I'm meeting over what we say is a visionary integrator meeting using the kind of the rocket fuel mindset from iOS. And so we'll have the meeting and we'll do all of our detail, guardian detail, we call it that Ash works all the details of what we're doing. And then the last section will move to another place and she'll let me just vision and be excitable and she won't shoot me down. Because what used to happen, I called her the dream squisher, or I'd be getting all excited about stuff. Oh, man, we gonna build an indoor skydiving arena a 700 horsepower diesel motor so it could be amazing. And she's like, How you gonna finance that? Who's gonna insure that? What about the permits? And so I'd say, Baby, it's like we get the room set up with beautiful candles and everything's going good, and you turn on a bunch of fluorescent lights. I said, You're killing the mood when I'm visioning here. And so we had to learn how to vision together. And so the second part, all she does is, hmm, tell me more interesting. And she just she says that over and over and I get more excited the more she says it. So it's a weekly meeting, just like our business meetings that are divided in such a way that we can work together and have our heated fellowship, which we call our conflict heated fellowship, and to engineer our heated fellowship weekly.
Ashely Marsh: He's right about every bit of that. And I will add that two of the things that actually I believe are key to what has helped us so much and working that way together. Well, but it's not always that way. Our heated fellowship is really when it's heated, it's robust, and it gives us a great opportunity for just wonderful repentance and forgiveness, you know? But that's how we grow and that's how we learn about each other and how we continue to challenge and change. But honestly, learning which one of us has a future voice and the present voice that's been really huge. And I bet you can't guess between us, well, who has what? But John is very future oriented. He's always looking for the next greatest thing. Actually, his car tag says great idea on it because he's always got a great idea, you know, and I'm very present. And so I have a hard time getting in the future. You have to convince me that it's safe to go there. Once you give me enough markers on that, then I'm your greatest person to help you get there. But if you try to drag me, I'm pretty ferocious on the other side. But the other thing is the plan, promise and provisional. And so we speak a certain way. All of us do I speak in promise? Definitely. That means if you if you hear me say it or if you say it to me, I think it's actually happening. That's what we're doing. John speaks provisionally, and pretty much everything he says is not really what we're doing is what he's thinking about or have an idea about. And so if you are a promise person and you're hearing a provisional person talk, you're thinking this is what they want me to do. Oh, my gosh. And so he's talking about these meetings we have. And when we first started these, I was so overwhelmed because all of these details that he's talking about that we go over are needed. But because there wasn't a direct information coming to me saying that these were again, their details are just ideas. So is that every one of them became a task to me that I was trying to accomplish. And so we finally realized that what I need to have is give me the top five, give me the top ten that I need to accomplish this week for you to feel good about where we're going. And then let me know when you're talking provisionally, because I call it open browser syndrome. I can't deal with it. It took some breakers.
John Marsh: And the idea of plan so what provisional know ideas. A bad idea plan is we're going there, but we don't know how. Promises come hell or high water we gave our word. And so she'll ask, Are we? And sometimes I'll say we're plan visional or I'm moving from provisional to a plan and we get to a plan. You know, the greatest thing we have together as husband and wife is to get on the same page, lay our hands on something, get in unity, and ask God to bless it. It's the most powerful force for us in our life and even our. We'll do one meeting a year. We call our State of the Family where we bring in two of our mentors and they'll sit down and we'll try to do all of our years heated fellowship in one day. We'll talk about everything we don't want to talk about, try to get aligned with it with adult supervision, and then put our hands on it and ask God to bless it. And we've seen tremendous power because if you don't have a vision, you've got division. That's two visions and that's not blessed.
Henry Kaestner: John and Ashely, I'm curious about what you had seen in your decades now of working with other couples and seen the most common areas of dysfunction and the best way to fix it. Clearly, you just give some great tactics. And I think that there are a whole bunch of different things that we can employ as we endeavor to speak a different language to our spouse and work differently. But what do you see out there? Because my sense is that more couples come to you for counseling than most. What do you see is the common thing, common challenge and what you tell them to rectify it?
Ashely Marsh: I believe from my perspective, what I see and is typically the woman, but not always, but most of the time the woman, they don't speak up and actually bring their true gifts to the table because it can sound easily like we're being resistant or be controlling, or maybe we're worrying or we're not trusting. But it sounds negative. Typically, when we bring challenge, it can sound negative and it's not well received. Now sometimes I believe that that's because of how we deliver that information. If we don't know how to really speak to our spouses in those situations or whenever we're trying to either dream or execute, then it can get sideways really easily. But that's the thing that I have seen, honestly, is that women a lot of times do not stand up and actually participate in a way that brings their greatest gift to the table. And honestly, I believe our husbands want that. I know they need it. God created us to meet each other, but like my husband and he says it and I hope it's okay to say to somebody, you can take it out. It's not been used to say like, Hey, as long as sex is up or was okay, everything was fine.
Henry Kaestner: Yes. I think that's going to get past the censors. That was the first time we were you know, we had 200 episodes in its first time. The word sex has been mentioned. I think it's can be good for ratings. Thank you.
Ashely Marsh: You know, but yeah. In other words, it's like as long as nobody is fussed about anything, obviously everything's okay. And I believe that most women have the ability just to put their heads down and do the work and they take care of the home, they take care of the kids and take care of their husband. They do all the things. So it's easy to think that everything's okay because they're not saying anything and they might not have a different opinion or a resistant opinion, but they might not give all of the information that they have that can actually benefit the decision or benefit the business. And so that's what I see most of the time, is that women are withholding their gifting and they're not being bold with what God has for them to bring to that. So that's my take on that.
John Marsh: One I think it's hard because most I think spouses don't know enough to comment. They think and that's on the husband. If your spouse doesn't know enough to comment intelligently, that's on you. And you don't have to have logic in everything because there's a Holy Spirit guiding us. And so, you know, people are down on what they're not up on. And so Ash and I had to get to the place. My thing is I did promiscuous visioning with everybody but her and then came back to sell her heart on what I wanted to do. And I just overwhelmed her. And she would say about three questions in and I'd just get mad and holler at her so I have done strap myself to the Unabomber because we can't get to a decision with everything I try to do. You're telling me no. Your dream squisher. And so she would say, No, do you want me to help or do you just want me to say yes to whatever you say? If you want me to do that, and I'm like, No, no, no, that's not blessable. So we'd be in this trap situation. And what I realized is we had to learn to vision together at some level because without a vision, people and relationships perish. And so I had to slow down long enough. And it took us three years to get aligned in envisioning where now my number one vision partner is my wife and I could have done that all along if I would have taken the time, been patient enough, and asked myself, Do I really want to make half brained decisions or do I want to stand there with my wife and make decisions about how it's going to shape our life? And so that's been really difficult. And then it is a thing you don't want a lot of conflict. I mean, like she said, the sex and supper thing is really true. If you get sideways, one of those could go out the window quickly. And you'd really don't want that. You want everything to keep moving along here. And so it's kind of this, you know, we say expectations are unvoiced demands. So without a place for us to have those hard conversations, we'd have them at the time that would blow up what I was looking forward to. And so we had to engineer an environment, a safe environment, to talk about those things that were hard to talk about and did bring effective challenge and support.
Ashely Marsh: An attack on that. To give an example, when he called me a dream squisher and that has been a real term that's been used for me, so to say. I know that.
Henry Kaestner: Oh my.
Ashely Marsh: Am the bill collector as well, but, you know, the questions that I would bring were ones that to me were very logical. I'm a very logical person. I don't deal with a lot of emotion in my decisions, but I would ask things like whenever he would say, I don't know, I think he's giving the example. He want to do an indoor skydiving. He really did want to do that. But that's not a made up conversation.
William Norvell: I love that. It's the past tense, though. That's pretty clear. That didn't happen. But you wanted it too.
Ashely Marsh: I dream squished it, but my questions were okay, so how are we going to pay for that? Why would you ask me a question like that? But the next question was, what about the liability? Where do you I mean, how do you even insure that? I mean, what if somebody hurts themselves or dies? You know, and so I'm asking these questions and all he's hearing is rejection, rejection, rejection. So it took us a few years for him to trust that when I bring these questions is because I'm trying to help you resolve all of the avenues that could possibly come against this very idea to make sure it's bullet proof. And then if it needs to go forward, it's not because I'm trying to shoot it down. I have no desire to shoot you down. Of course, he taught me how to bring those questions and challenge to him. And as both sides, he has to hear the questions. And I had to learn to be quiet and let him actually give the explanation.
William Norvell: And I heard there was a small mistake of around $7 million or so once, just a tiny little error that may be a great story to, you know, put a bow around this discussion. Can you tell us a little bit about that?
John Marsh: This is back when the defecation hit, the ventilation in our life and we were having a whole lot of problems. We were in that situation. And so the bank is going to take us and they're going to wrap up all our unpayable small loans into one large, unpayable loan. And so they were doing this for our benefit, of course. And so I thought, man, this is great, Ash. This is going to be killer. They're going to take they can give us a consolidation loan. And so she was like, baby this thing don't feel right. They gave us this paperwork Friday at five in the afternoon and we got to sign at seven on Monday. How do poor people like us get any legal counsel. No, no, no, baby, look at the numbers. Are you crazy? And so we went on and on about this and and I said, logic, look at this thing. And this was one of the times that she was being more emotional and I was maybe more logical, which is a unique change for us sometimes. And she said, Well, it just doesn't feel right. I said, It looks right. And so what I realized, feelings ain't nothing and logic ain't everything. Because we made that decision and the bank actually defrauded us and had a sign, a document at the end that we didn't understand called an arbitration agreement to waive the right to a trial by jury of 12 of our peers before group of arbitrators. But God used it in a powerful way because that thing was a double edged sword. It required 10% of that total amount to be paid in order to bring this back up. And so God used it. But when we went to some attorneys and said, Here's what we did, they said, y'all guys were defrauded. This thing could be worth $7 million if you didn't sign that agreement. And Ash said, I told you it didn't feel right. God was showing me it didn't feel right. And I told her, I said, I'll never make another decision that you don't have veto power on. There's nothing. I said, You've got veto power in anything in our life. And guys, here is mentors that look at our stuff, a board of advisors, people, team of bright people who we all know. But if Ash says, no, we don't go in. I don't care what it is now, that's just for us. But she can stop anything. And she I can't think of the last time she used it, but believe me, she has all the power to and she doesn't have to be able to explain why, we feel like for us. We've got to do it together and we've got to be totally in unity.
Henry Kaestner: Does John have veto power, too?
Ashely Marsh: He does. I just don't make a lot of decisions. I don't lead a charge in a lot of directions the same way he does. But yeah. He absolutely. Yes.
John Marsh: We mutually [...].
Ashely Marsh: [....] area of my life. He has freedom. If he wanted to speak into what I was eating, I would let him. I mean, I trust him with everything. So because I know he has best for me and he loves me through that lens of care and just authentically wanting to walk life together. So, yeah, absolutely.
John Marsh: And we just value unity more than correctness. Her opportunity, I mean, opportunities are like busses. They come by every few minutes and we see him all the time. But boy, for us to be in unity is the biggest thing. You know, the Bible says that unity is the place of command and blessings, and we love working in the command and blessing through him.
Ashely Marsh: Yeah, that was our word last year for his and for our lives. And this year it's relentless peace is actually more a phrase, but still, we always come to a place where we want to have a word that God gives to us, that we focus on, and that that's the center of what we're doing and why we're doing it. And we do that every year at the beginning of the year.
William Norvell: That's amazing. That's amazing. Such a thoughtful strategy to sort of go about life. And then I love the I love the the phrase of unity. I can definitely think back to moments in my marriage where that wasn't a phrase I would use and moments where they were and some seemed to go better than others. You know, I'll let our listeners answer the poll on which one they think, but I think it's one over the other. Well, before we go a little deeper into that, Ash, I wanted to I've heard you talk about how you are you consider yourself a curator of all things beautiful, people, places and spaces. And so you've taken over a good bit of the business. How do you see the purpose of your work and how would you articulate that to our listeners who may find themselves in similar situations?
Ashely Marsh: You know, that was a challenge for me to actually understand the value of that, because whenever you say that you are curator of beauty or that you're I used to say I'm the bringer of beauty, but it sounds like you're just talking about pretty things and you're talking about what it looks like. And that's something that I believe God actually withdraws beauty from within, obviously. But how that comes into our community and how it comes through me doing the work and how I see that in the bigger purpose of things is that it keeps me focused on who's got what God's character really is and who I'm supposed to imitate in every action that I do. And so he's so intentional and he's so anticipatory of me and he has such a passion to make sure that I am well loved and well cared for. Well, those are all signs of hospitality. And so to me, that's the curator of beauty is bring in hospitality. And then once you bring that that people that are you can see love because love shows up in beauty. You can see that it's delivered because it's delivered through hospitality. And so I'm bring that to our businesses and bring it to our clients, bring it to our tenants. And I do it all in different ways. That mainly is me looking at through the lens of I thought of you before you got here and how can I be intentional and how can I anticipate you and make sure that you know that you are anticipated in the same way that God anticipates us is such a big part of my life. I do it at home, I told, John. Every time I think I talk about it, I tell one more area I do. And he's just like, That's the wildest thing I try to think of who is the next person behind me and how will they experience themselves where I was. It doesn't matter if it's the bank teller that I'm giving my deposit to. If it's at the grocery store, how I'm putting back the car, if it's at home, how I'm making sure John's creamers in the refrigerator a certain way, whatever it is, I'm making sure the next person is set up for success and also set up to know that they were thought out and they might not even know that. That's why I'm doing it. And honestly, I don't need them to know. I just I want to do it because it's what God does for me.
William Norvell: Amen Amen. And I want to switch to one more thing, local community. So obviously that's something near and dear to your heart. I think a lot of entrepreneurs listening. I speak for myself, you know, we read stories of people change in the world. We can get caught up in that. That's what's necessary to make an impact on God's kingdom, right is giant scale and success. And everyone knows. And that's the vision of the Elon Musk and the Steve Jobs of the world. And of course, some people may be called to that. Right. My general feeling as I grow up a little bit and get a little older is that that's not the calling for most people. There's a lot of work to be done where you can throw a stick to and where you can see. And I'd love to just give you both a little bit of an open mic to talk about what you've seen, the influence of walking on your front door and trying to make an impact on the places you walk past and the people you see and how you've seen that in these ten locations that you've been building and how you might encourage people to look for those opportunities.
John Marsh: I think it's so important that you got to have a vision. People perish without it. And so vision is the answer for perishing predicaments. If you have a vision, it. It's going to be something powerful in your life and you need a defined vision. So Ash and I first work to have it in the five areas that matter faith, family, fun, fitness and finance. So for our five Fs, we have that vision. This is sophisticated for our faith as it is for our finances, as it is for our fun and our family. And what we do is we take that for our own life because you can't export what you don't import, and then you just walk right out the door and begin to say, Who can I love today? What's God going to do today? And so for us, loving ten square blocks in our city means all different kinds of things. But it does mean that we want to look for human flourishing and we define human flourishing in our community. When the people who have the least are experiencing the most, that's when it's flourishing. We ought to look at it and say, who has the least and are they experiencing the most? And then we kind of coined the word because people used to say, Well, you're doing gentrification. And we said, No, we're not. Not at all. We're doing what pleases our Sunday school teacher and our economics teacher. So that means we've got to add value and not extract value. That means we want to do good and do well and we want to work at the intersection of purpose and profits. And that truly the thing for us is to do that and say, can we do that and can we do it in the even the most basic unit of measurement, which for us the most basic means of measurement for a city is a family. One man and one lady. Raising some kids that they love makes the key metric for building a town and then they run a business. And so it's those people who invest into operating a business or living in our properties. And so we just ask ourselves, what does love look like? Because love is not what God does, it's who he is. You cut his finger off as a hunk of love. How does love start a house? How does love fix the roof? How does love deal with late payments? How does love walk down the sidewalk with trash on it?
William Norvell: So, so much here. For those of you who are just listening to this now, you now know why I encourage John to write some of this down. And I and dozens and dozens of others. And he's done that also has a podcast called Redemptivefication. I love the way you've defined redemptivefication. Define it for us. Tell us about the podcast. Tell us about your ongoing work, how people can just get some more of this wisdom about creating community, loving your wife well, and just coming to know the God who loves you all more fully.
John Marsh: We just said that gentrification was not what we did, but we did redemptivefication. So is gentrification redeemed? And we said it's the creative work of returning people in places to their intended beauty and glory. And the podcast was just a way to start talking about it from Ash and I are talking about people problems to place problems and see. It's interesting real estate that they are so driven by the private equity mindset, they remove all the love out of things and what would love do, won't you build for love sake. We say it's 80% models and 20% miracles. It's sophisticated real estate development with love. And so we believe that so powerful and we don't ask ourself just what could we make? We ask our self, what should we make? And we come at it from a totally different way. We want to leave a generational impact. We ask ourselves, what could we do in service of our city that would last 50 years and no one be able to undo it when we find that we got to go big on it. And then within the relationships, one of the greatest things if God had a currency, it would be forgiveness. And if we're going to help people, we're going to help them learn how to love and help them learn how to forgive. And I would always ask God, God, this love is a hard jump. Ball is too high. You expected of me. You want me to be patient, kind, long suffering, no records of wrong, hope all things, believe all things Oh, I'm sunk and I felt No, no, that's not what I wanted you to do. That's who I was going to be to you just go give it away. And so that love and forgiveness and if you wonder if you have unforgiveness, just tell, tell me or your person with anybody in the shower and they're not there because if you are, you got it and you're usually winning. And if you have an argument and it always starts as microwave popcorn and ends up at Yo Mama, remember win and you're back in the past again, it's there. You can put all the concrete over the nuclear waste of unforgiveness you won't your life and this going nowhere do you deal with it and the way to do that as I was wrong were you please forgive me that's the key phrase and people and forgiveness. So those are a part of redemptivefication redeeming people and redeeming places to that intended beauty and glory.
Henry Kaestner: That's beautiful.
William Norvell: Yeah. We're always sad to move to a close, but with that we are going to move towards the end of the episode. And you know, what we really love to do at the end is on that really just bridge God's word between our listeners and our guests. And so what we love to do at the end is just give an opportunity for both of you to share something. You know, it can be something you read this morning, could be something you've meditated on your whole life, but maybe something from God's word that you feel might be an encouragement to our listeners and how it's impacting you today.
Ashely Marsh: And we'll let you get Mr Marsh.
John Marsh: Well, I guess mine is kind of came out of two places, Exodus four, where, you know, Aaron and Moses, they did the signs in front of the people and they believed in them. Circumstantial faith is lost when the circumstances change. But what God's putting on my heart right now around Hebrews is faith, is the substance of things hope for. And I'm learning again that if you have hope in your future, you have power in your present. If you want to know one thing that when you get words from the enemy, they're hopeless and God's hopeful. That's why he condemns us instead of convicts us. That's how you know the difference in condemnation and conviction is. Condemnation is hopeless and conviction is hopeful. And what the Lord put on my heart today is, John, your faith should inform your sight and not your sight inform your faith. And so I'm asking, God, give me your eyes to see. I want front row seats to miracles, 50 yard line seats to miracles. And I want to see things in my heart that my eyes can't yet see.
William Norvell: It's beautiful.
Ashely Marsh: So he's also going to [...]. So for me, honestly, it's focusing on what God says about me as the daughter of the king. A few years ago, God gave me when I brought before us, took over running our companies when I was just trying to figure out how to manage everything. And God gave me a vision and it was just all he aspects of me are all he wants of me is to be his daughter, to be my husband's wife, and to be the mother to my children. And that was the word that was given to me and so on, that that is where I keep my focus. And right now I'm asking, you know, okay, I found the daughter of the king. What does that mean for me in my everyday life and how I use my hands and my mind and the decisions that I make that actually impact so many people. And so one of the things that I'm learning right now is to either delegate or execute it. And an either one of those, if I delegate it to others, to be gracious and kind in delegation, and if I execute it to be excellent in [....] and what I do and to make sure that I'm just saying a woman that is strong, that gentle, John calls me the weakest strong woman, by the way, but to be strong enough that I have the liberty to be gentle with others and to be wise enough that I can actually carry humility in my decisions that I'm doing and also just be compassionate with others. And I believe that that is really being a true woman that sits right there with God as his daughter and kingship and saying, Hey, I am a daughter of the king and I know how to execute his kingdom well. And I'm going to do that by loving the others that are around me, in the places that he's given me to love. That's what he's working with me right now staying on purpose with being the daughter of the king.
Henry Kaestner: It's a great focus. I'm grateful for both of you. Thank you. Check out the redemptivefication podcast. If you're listening to this and you're an entrepreneur who loves your community, whether it's a small town in Kentucky or whether it's a big town like Winter Haven, Florida. Ash, how do people get in touch with Marsh collective?
Ashely Marsh: Well, you can go to our Web site definitely, which is marsh collective dot com. I'd be more than happy to take some emails and I'm a really great person to connect with. And it's just Ashely @ Marshall Collective, right?
John Marsh: With an E!.
Henry Kaestner: What do you say? You can't say I'm a great person to connect with, but.
William Norvell: You work out so well.
Ashely Marsh: I will e-mail myself too.
William Norvell: She she is a great person to connect with. If you can find a way to connect.
John Marsh: Her name spelled tricky as h e l y.
William Norvell: That's good.
Ashely Marsh: Special. I'm a special. I'm better glad. There.
Henry Kaestner: That's awesome. All right, you busses both. I can't get enough of the Marsh isms and just whether it's sex and supper or what was the.
Ashely Marsh: Sex and supper was. Okay, it's all good.
Henry Kaestner: Yeah.
Ashely Marsh: Now I can throw another one out there for you Henry. And I pick it, John all the time and tell them I'm on. So people that he uses the F word because we talk about the F words all the time in our house, the faith, fund, family, fitness and finance.
Henry Kaestner: What a great way to get an audience kind of interested in what you're going to say, talking about your husband's use of the F word at home. And now listen, and now you get a chance to witness with him. Thank you both for your faithfulness and the way that you've encouraged our community.