In 2011, we started our consulting firm with the goal of making a generational impact, for ourselves, our clients, and the leaders that we could influence.  At the time, we just knew we wanted to work together, and we were committed to not just working for inked up paper (money). Consulting was born out of a desire to share our gifts, to bring practical wisdom, and to help people & places reach their full potential. 

Our approach to consulting has evolved over ten plus years. It is a journey that looks like a detour. Our first engagements were centered around digital marketing. We knew that the most sought after real estate would soon become the 3”x5” screen that everyone totes in their pockets. We had spent years learning and growing in all things digital marketing, and the early years of our consulting journey was sharing these tools with local operators. 

Our first large consulting client came from within John and Ash’s real estate portfolio, a major addiction recovery tenant who was doing meaningful work in the community and throughout the Southeast.  Applying what we had learned in digital marketing, we took on a small project of co-developing 40 short videos to syndicate on emerging social media and video platforms.  The videos were a huge success, generating hundreds of thousands of views and unique followers. We measured intently the traffic we generated, and began to ask how the traffic was converting to patients. No one in the organization could give us an answer.  We questioned many, but each time it was like looking at a deer in the headlights. We were bowling in the dark, hearing pins crash down but never knowing how many.  

We continued down the journey of working within their organization, identifying and solving problems with fervent curiosity, and quickly realized that they needed more than “marketing”.  We worked for free for over a year discovering, defining, and designing what they needed. We looked within the industry for best practices from leading addiction recovery programs.  We interviewed everyone we could, all over the country, and distilled down what every patient really wanted to know when they reached out for help…. “Do you care for me?”, “Can I trust you?”, and “Can you help me?”.  Almost everyone in the industry was violating one of these questions in a short phone call.  We took what we learned from our “boots on the ground” approach to research and ended up designing and executing a three year overhaul of their entire patient intake system from the time a cry for help was made until the patient was admitted into recovery. 

This experience launched us into consulting, a business we never intended to be in, but one we have grown to love. It has given us a platform to bring our unique gifts to all types of organizations from technology companies to catfish farmers. For a season, we never said no to a prospect or a problem, and approached every conversation with curiosity, vulnerability, and a willingness to share the truth, even when it was messy. 

The consulting business continued to grow alongside our real estate portfolio. In 2013, after years of persistence, John and Ash purchased the old Davis Dyar building in Opelika. A 40,000+ square feet historic brick factory hidden behind sheets of cementitious siding. The aspiration for the project was always to launch a boutique hotel in downtown Opelika. In the development process, the team met Jess Correll, a like minded Patron who loved their town and had acquired over 100,000 square feet of historic main-street real estate in his Kentucky hometown. John and Jess were quick friends, and began the process of becoming partners. At that time, John and Ash had never taken any outside capital. Jess and his team looked at the hotel project and the Opelika portfolio, looking at every building, every tenant, and every business. We had never been through an underwriting process like it before. At the end of the process, Jess and the Marshs decided not to partner on the hotel, but Jess was so impressed by the work in Opelika, he invited us to Stanford to look at his portfolio of historic structures and help vision beyond what his team had accomplished to date. 

Our team took over two years, speaking into the hospitality businesses within the portfolio, developing a full plan for the 100,000 square feet. Jess and Angela Correll were our first Patron clients. It was this engagement where we began to codify what John and Ash had done in Opelika, and what Jess and Angela had done in Stanford, that could be a model for redeveloping historic downtowns. We realized through the engagement that there was a larger need for practitioners of redemptive real estate. Specifically, developers who felt called to a place they love, to make that place flourish, not just for economic gain, but to make a generational impact for love's sake. We realized that sophisticated real estate development, performed with love, requires a platform strategy led by a visionary leader with a Patron’s heart; one who is implicated by a place for its spiritual, social, and economic flourishing. 

Jess opened the doors for our team to work with a number of Patrons whom he personally knew. For years, we did no outside marketing or even told our Opelika story, but we have never lacked work. It wasn’t until a trip across the pond and a challenge from a friend that we decided that it was time to focus on scaling and growing the consulting business, understanding that our past has aligned us for this platform. We began the work of using our gifts to influence people and places all over the world, to bring beauty from brokenness, helping people and places reach their full potential. Today, our consulting business is centered around helping Patrons. We define Patrons as those who are stewarding a company, a real estate portfolio, and other projects for the flourishing of their communities. We put our focus on the Patron, helping them clarify their vision, making it clear, and aligning resources for provision to follow. 

Our team has both formation and education. The work we have done in Opelika has uniquely prepared us to pioneer a new asset class of real estate, Irreplaceable Real Estate, by helping Patrons build platforms that both serve the business of property, which sets the scene for a community, and serves operating companies who are the actors that bring the programming & life to the built environment. All of our Patrons have different callings of stewardship, but there is one common element to them all, they all have families and key relationships in their lives that enable them to make an impact. Our work with Patrons often includes deep work to align those who matter most. 

It is our greatest pleasure and calling to serve Patrons, to be for them, guiding them as they make a generational impact in their communities, companies, and relationships.