Speaker 1: 0:30

I'm Sharon Vertz and I don't have a name of a business. I have a lot of businesses. I had my own company for a very long time. I started it when I was 29, and I sold it in 2017. We were based out of Ashburn, and so when I sort of retired at the age of 54, I had to find something else to do, so I started writing books, and so that is like my Sharon Vertz books.

Speaker 1: 0:54

I'm an author. I have three published books and a fourth one that will be hitting bookshelves, bookstands next summer. But I also have a construction company called Selma Mansion Construction and we restore old homes, old properties, and we're working on four properties at the moment. I also have the Sharon Vertz Foundation, which is actually called the Wirtz Miller Family Foundation. It was originally called the Sharon Wirtz Foundation, but then I got married and we decided to make it a big family thing, and we focus on economic development for people who are in need, health care and cultural and historical preservation, because that's really my passion is saving the history of this wonderful county in which I was born and grew up in and still live in today.

Speaker 2: 1:42

Your eyes are mesmerizing, by the way.

Speaker 1: 1:44

Oh, thank you, Thank you.

Speaker 2: 1:47

We're going to just touch on some mission and values, because I think it's different than who you are because of all the different experiences that you've been through, as well as the initiatives that you've created within your business as well as your philanthropy work. So you said that the meaning of life can be found in giving. How does that philosophy guide everything you do, from business to philanthropy?

Speaker 1: 2:07

to writing. To me, it's always been about making a difference. Giving back it's never really been. Even though I built a very large company, it wasn't so much about how much money we made, but how much of a difference we made in the mission that we supported for our end users, our stakeholders, as well as for the employees, for the managers and the folks that worked. For me and as I've moved from that to what we do now, it's about giving back to this community. So, for example, when we do a construction project, it's about preserving the culture, the history, restoring that property as to the way it was beforehand and making certain that we add value to the community in which that property is located, so that property values don't go down as a result of an old, abandoned home, but they go up because we've got restored beautiful architecture in that community.

Speaker 1: 2:55

As it relates to education, my husband and I have been pretty active in the elementary school system here in Loudoun County, as well as things like Opportunity Scholars, helping people who are underprivileged, underserved, be able to find opportunities in the future.

Speaker 1: 3:12

To me, what that's about is making a difference and impact in someone's life, whether that is through what you do on the street, in terms of making a property look wonderful, or what you're doing in terms of helping education, or in healthcare the trauma center that we had built or helped build down at Lansdowne and Nova Hospital. So those things to me is what I find fulfilling. I don't really look back and say, gee, golly well, I did that. It's more like my goodness, we've made a difference in the community and the community is benefiting from it. It's fulfilling to me. I sleep better at night knowing that I'm giving back to the community in which I was raised, in which I was. Loudoun County has changed an awful lot from when I was a girl to as it is today. And you know, it's not just you know tax dollars, but it's the community, it's the people that live here. I think it really can inspire others to make a difference for the future generation, paying it forward, if you will.

Speaker 2: 4:15

Paying it forward is a beautiful philosophy. What other values do you and Scott consider non-negotiable when it comes to your philanthropic work Non-negotiable.

Speaker 1: 4:27

We don't really like to give to organizations that are focused on, or at least that are more administrative cost-driven If they have high administrative costs. We don't typically give to those organizations or organizations that want us to pay for an admin position. We feel like that should be a result of their own fundraising, as opposed to our overall donations for programs. We want to make sure that the end user is touched in some way. So, for example, even though most of our philanthropy is settled here in Loudoun County and in Virginia, recently, about a year ago, there was those horrible floods from the hurricane that came through North Carolina, and so it's the first time we've really done this in a long, long time.

Speaker 1: 5:10

I think I can't remember what actually I was doing this directly to the end user before.

Speaker 1: 5:14

I think I can't remember what actually I was doing this directly to the end user before, but we raised money for Samaritan's Purse, so that money went directly 95% of it to the victims in North Carolina, as opposed to the people in the back office that are running stuff or doing the marketing for the organization.

Speaker 1: 5:29

It really all went to support the victims. We fundraised painting pumpkins on the streets here in Leesburg during First Friday we received donations from the Rotary and from the Ruritan Club and from churches and from individuals, and so we matched that with our own dollars, dollar for dollar. That $37,000 turned into $70,000-some-odd thousand that ultimately went to the victims of that hurricane. So to me it's really what can we do to impact that stakeholder, that person on the other end, and not with a lot of admin costs? And so that's one of our non-negotiable things we're not going to pay for administrative staff. We expect that the foundations or the charities that we support to sort of take care of that on their own through their own auctions or dinners or whatever they do to do their own fundraising, but not from the big gifts that we give.

Speaker 2: 6:29

It's very financially responsible of you.

Speaker 1: 6:32

Well, we run our foundation like we ran our business. I often I was talking to someone recently who was asking me how can he help he just retired from an industry very similar to where I had been before. How can I help the community, what can I do in terms of getting financially? I said, well, that's all well and good, but what a lot of these charitable organizations need is good business management, good leadership, people who know how to run businesses and companies, to run the foundations and some of these boards in the same fashion, and I find that many of them don't.

Speaker 1: 7:05

When I took over the Loudoun Museum, as I was sort of drug into it by some of the people on the board of supervisors at the time, it was in financial in a bad way in the whole, really struggling and bleeding money and not well run. And so we ended up, you know, basically taking it over like I would take over a new contract or a company I might have bought, which is, you know, stripping the management, keeping what good talent there might be and streamlining and starting over. And so running foundations and running charitable organizations and sitting on boards to me is very similar to running a business and, you know, being financially responsible, focusing on, you know, cutting costs, not wasting money. I do a lot of that, and so I think those are talents that I bring from my previous life, not only to my own efforts in terms of what we do for our own foundation, but we do for other organizations that my husband and I both help, in terms of being trustees on boards.

Speaker 2: 8:04

A lot of organizations could use that.

Speaker 1: 8:06

Yeah, there's a lot of organizations as well that are struggling because of it.

Speaker 2: 8:10

How do you define? Legacy and what does it mean for you to leave one thing, both your storytelling and your community contributions?

Speaker 1: 8:16

Legacy to me can mean a lot of things, right, and I think a lot of what happens with legacy is the impression that you leave with others. It's not just the giving of stuff and things, but it's the intangibles. How have you made a difference in others' lives? And so I start with my children difference in others and others lives. And so I start with my children. Hopefully, you know they have picked up on what's expected from them and how they also too need to give back and be part of something bigger than themselves. So that's really important to me. And what's the second part of the question about the legacy? Both storytelling and, oh, stored storytelling.

Speaker 1: 8:53

So when write it's a number of things. It's telling a lot of the history that happened in the past, but also how it impacted the people who lived during that time and in our community. Because my books are all based on true stories set here in the 19th century in this county or has ties back to this county. But it's not necessarily about that particular event, a particular event. It's about how that particular event impacted the community and the community's reaction to it. And so when I write these stories, I also find the parallels between then and now just uncanny. So, for example, my first book, mask of Honor, that came out in 2021, one of the cruxes of the story was a stolen election. The Federalists were being accused of cheating and stuffing ballot boxes. They didn't have the ballot boxes, but basically, people fraud in the election, people voting multiple times and people being coerced to vote a certain way. Well, gee, golly, wow. That was sort of what was being said about the 2016 election. And then again the 2020 election, the 2020 election. So it's just interesting how history has a way of repeating itself. And you know, things aren't that much different today than they were 200 years ago, and if we survived it, then we will survive it now, and so there's some lessons in that. So I try to make those parallels when I can.

Speaker 1: 10:29

Not too obvious, but there, for example, in my last novel, graze of Truth, it was set between 1867 and 1871. And in 1868, there was the impeachment of Andrew Johnson. That was going on, and so that's a backdrop of the story. I mean, it's just sort of in the background, but the characters are talking about what's going on on Capitol Hill at the dinner table, just as we would talk about it at the dinner table. Now. It's not, you know, their lives aren't running around after being disrupted because of it. But it's a conversation and people have opinions on it, and so you're hearing those opinions, differing oftentimes between the characters in their conversation, just as we would discuss things today.

Speaker 1: 11:15

And I just, you know, I want people to get that sense and that understanding, that feeling that you know the times have changed, of course, but there's so many things that are similar and that we would behoove ourselves to learn from the past and, you know, and be wise in our choices going forward and not make the same mistakes over and over again.

Speaker 1: 11:35

Even though my books are whodunit kind of mysteries, at least these two I have in front of me and the Mask of Honor series or the Field of Honor series is coming out next fall, I mean next spring is more of the not coming of age but more of the historical drama, if you will sagas, that go on in people's lives, but the backdrop there being that the world hasn't really changed an awful lot, and saving those moments and making history and our culture approachable, you know, through storytelling, I think is really important. We waste so much time watching nonsense on TV or, you know, reading a book. That's just, you know, sloppy, silly romance. I try to write stories that have meaning and that are based on truth, which I find fascinating because I couldn't make it up. Honestly, it's just so much more interesting out there.

Speaker 2: 12:27

Oh yeah, Well, that's beautiful. Can you show us your books?

Speaker 1: 12:31

Sure. So Mask of Honor is being my first book is being republished, and it'll be. It's out of print right now. It'll be republished as part of the first book in a series called the Field of Honor series, and so it's got a new cover, a new look. It comes out in March of next year, republished. And this book, my second book, is Veil of Doubt and it came out in October of 2021.

Speaker 1: 13:02

Three, and it is based on a true story of a woman here in Leesburg who went on trial for the murder of her four children, her husband and her aunt, and it's the story of Pal Harris and the attorney who decided to defend her when no one else would, and so it's a whodunit. A lot of forensic science 1872 style is in the book. So if you like chemistry and if you like CSI and a good John Grisham kind of legal thriller, you're really going to like this book. Like I said, it's set here in town and I also do walking tours, so I'll start over at the St James Episcopal Church and we'll walk around town and I'll point out all the buildings all the way up to the cemetery of the characters and where they lived and the settings in this story. So it's kind of fun.

Speaker 1: 13:52

My third book that came out last October, which would be October 2024, almost a year ago is the Graze of Truth. It is set in Washington DC, in Baltimore and a little bit in Philadelphia, and it's the story of a woman. She's a member of the Wharton family and she believes her sister-in-law is killing off members of the family one by one. And no one believes her, primarily because Jane Grey Wharton, the sister, the protagonist of the story, jane, has been hospitalized for debility which was depression in our world, but craziness back then and they think she hears voices and therefore no one pays any attention to her. But also the woman that she accuses, ellen Wharton, is being protected by the governor of Maryland, who at the time was Thomas Swann, who was the president of the B&O Railroad and who lived over here at Morven Park. This is all real stories, all real stories, right? So it's her story. It's Jane Grey's story, all real stories, right, so it's her story. It's Jane Grey's story and her quest to find the truth of what's really happening to members of the family that keep dying when they visit one Ellen Wharton's house in Baltimore. So that's the next one and the one that's coming out. That's the one that just came out and, by the way, this just won the International Book Award for Best Historical Fiction. Yeah, I'm really excited about that. I mean Best Historical Fiction. Yeah, I'm really excited about that. I mean best historical fiction. So you can't go wrong with an award-winning book.

Speaker 1: 15:08

And then my fourth book is called Bargains of Fate. It comes out next June. It's a sequel to my first book, mask of Honor. You don't have to read Mask of Honor in order to be able to read the other one. They stand alone.

Speaker 1: 15:20

But it's the continuation of the story of Jack McCarty who, if you read Mask of Honor, everyone loves Jack, a handsome, good-looking guy who can't seem to keep his temper under control and himself off a dueling field. And it is his wrestling with the aftermath of the duel that he fought with his cousin and brother-in-law, armistead Mason, but also his defense of his cousin, dennis McCarty, who stabs a man to death at Aldi Mill at a turkey shoot during Christmas, and his way of the drama that ensues as a result of his defense of Dennis and his sort of enmeshment with a woman named Josephine Beatty. So a little bit of romance, a lot of intrigue and just good old-fashioned drama right. I wish, I wish this one actually has been considered for maybe Netflix. There's some folks looking at it. Historical fiction is interesting because people don't. Necessarily it's more expensive to produce, obviously, but the grace of truth.

Speaker 1: 16:25

What's really interesting about this story is that Jane Grey Wharton, in real life and in my book, lived two doors down from Edwin Stanton, who was Secretary of War at the time.

Speaker 1: 16:34

Mars Stanton, lincoln called him, and if you've ever watched Manhunt on Netflix, manhunt is about the 12 days in the search for John Wilkes Booth and Mars Stanton is the protagonist in that story and his house, right next door to Jane Gray's is up on K Street, is featured in that movie or in that Netflix series and Jane Gray, you know, is living right next to him during that time. So it's really kind of a sweet. I mean I didn't plan it that way, but it's pretty exciting when you look at how Hollywood portrayed his home and his life and knowing that Jane lived just a couple doors down it gives you a really fresh perspective on what life was like in 1868, 1870. This book is my husband's favorite Greys of Truth, which is a female protagonist in this one and Vale is a male protagonist, pal Harrison, is my favorite character of all times, even more favorite than Jack McCarty, if you can believe that.

Speaker 2: 17:34

Wow, what drew you from a successful business career, kind of taking us back to this world of historical fiction.

Speaker 1: 17:40

So, yeah, I sold my company. My company was FCI Federal and we had 5,000 employees and subcontractors when I sold it. I started in my basement 25 years before that, when I sold it, I just didn't know what I was going to get into. And I'd always wanted to write. But I thought I was going to write a nonfiction how to build a business in 25 years, kind of thing, or whatever.

Speaker 1: 18:04

And I was at the Middleburg Film Festival and I'm on the board there and I ran into a friend of mine, anthony McCartan, who is a screenwriter. Anthony is known for his work. He wrote the Two Popes, he did the Theory of Everything, he wrote the Darkest Hour, the Bohemian Rhapsody biopic. He's known for his biopics. So we were at the film festival and probably imbibing in a few glasses on something late in the evening and I was telling him about the story of my house we bought out in Selma and the history of the two men who fought this duel. And the more I told him about that, the more he said to me he says you got to write that, sharon, you got to write that. You write that, I'll help you. So he really inspired me to take it on and so I did and he did. He did some editing on the executive summary. Sorry, on the prologue. Now back to business.

Speaker 1: 18:52

And I've always been fascinated by history. My father loved to tell old stories from the old days. My grandmother, when she was alive, always had some story to tell, and so I sort of grew up in that world where we would drive by a building and dad would say, well, so-and-so lived over there and so-and-so did this there and this happened in that house, and so the buildings began to have stories too, and you know it just sort of. I found it intriguing and I loved to research. I love it.

Speaker 1: 19:16

I love reading about, I love reading old newspapers on microfilm Call Me Crazy I love reading the ads and what they were buying and you know who was hunting for who and you know just all of it. And so it just brought me away a way for me to bring that writing passion I have together with sort of that knowledge or that, you know, the love of history and stories. And when I ran my company, by the way, I mean my experience really was mostly in business development and in proposal writing, and so I was pretty good at writing compelling arguments for customers to buy from us, and so, really, I'm writing compelling arguments for you know you to fall in love with a character, or in love with a story, or in love with a place, and that's what I've done with these stories, wow.

Speaker 1: 20:04

That's beautiful yeah.

Speaker 2: 20:05

That's beautiful. How does your experience as a visual artist influence the way you craft characters and settings in your models?

Speaker 1: 20:16

This is easy for me, so I paint. My father taught me how to paint when we started with I was about six, I guess and the most important thing he taught me is you just paint what you see. You haven't got to interpret anything. Just paint exactly what you see to see. And sometimes colors. You have to look for colors, but you'll see colors there that if you think about it too much, you don't see them. If you just paint what you see, you see. So I write the same way. I paint what I see. I'm sorry.

Speaker 1: 20:51

I write what I see in my head and what I hear in my head, so it plays in my head like a movie. I can hear the conversations. I can imagine that and I write it exactly as I hear it. I describe it as I see it and I will go to a place and into a building and describe what I smell and what I see the dust, motes in the sunshine coming through the window, whatever it might be. That's how I write.

Speaker 1: 21:08

I will often go to a grave. I spend a lot of time in graveyards. Ask my husband. He thinks I'm crazy. The people over at Tony over at Union Cemetery thinks I'm nuts too, because he says she's a crazy woman that comes in and sits on people's graves and talks to them. But I listen to them, I sit on the graves and I sort of try to imagine, you know, try to get in touch with whatever. But you know, have conversations probably mostly in my head but about what were you thinking, pal, or what were you thinking Jen? You know what were you thinking when you were doing this or this was happening, and it really helps me create a narrative that's very cinematic. Folks will say my work is very cinematic. You can read the pages and see it unfolding in front of you. So that's how I write.

Speaker 2: 21:53

We were saying before we started recording it took you a few months to write one of your novels. Is that why? Because you'll see it.

Speaker 1: 22:01

Yeah, bargains of Fate, which comes out next June, is. I wrote that. I started in January. I already had a lot of it in my head and we have a house down in Florida where we spend the winters because I have asthma and I can't stand the cold up here any longer and I finished it in April, first part of April, so about three months it took me to write that book. Now it was pretty ugly. It needed a lot of work. You know some editing on it, but my editors are great and you know they said it was pretty clean. I mean, yeah, there's some work that needed to be done here and there, but yeah, I wrote that book in three months, first time I've ever done that.

Speaker 1: 22:36

It's kind of unheard of. I think I don't have a ghostwriter or anything. I just get up in the morning and then get up at six and be at it again. So, or get up at four If I go to bed at 11, you know I'm just it's crazy, but I'll write all day. I'm not one of these that I have to write in a certain window every day. No, no, no. When it's in my head, I got to get it down. It may take me forever for it to get in my head, because sometimes I'll just go for a couple of months without writing.

Speaker 1: 23:04

So the new book that's coming after Bargains of Faith, it's called Swamp of Lies. I'm only like 45,000 words in. But I started that in July and I wrote. We spent the whole month of July at our beach, at the beach, and I wrote 30-some-odd thousand words, 35,000 words in that month, and I haven't written since.

Speaker 1: 23:26

I've kind of stopped. When I got home I was like okay, because I need to. I'm like okay, now to where I take it, and so I'm kind of, you know, letting it sort of gel in my head yeah, download, that's right. But then when I start again, lord help us. My son, my third son, is getting married in October. So I dare not even look at that manuscript until after this wedding because I will be glued to my computer and no one will ever see me again. But I have a window. We're going to go on a trip in November and in December for about a month and a half, about a month, and I'll probably write another 30,000 words while we're gone. He leaves me alone, he gets it. Yeah, yeah, that's how I write.

Speaker 2: 24:08

Switching gears here over to business. You built a career which I think direct employees. The other 1,300 were small business subcontractors.

Speaker 1: 24:29

But the way we managed our business, we managed it all. It was a lot of staff. We used the subcontractors mostly for staff augmentation to meet government requirements. But yeah, I started in my basement when I was 29. It really wasn't a government contracting firm at the time, it was more of a consulting seat. And then I sort of changed direction in 2004 timeframe and then by 2007, we were 37 people and $1.5 million in revenue. Ten years later we were close to $300 million in revenue.

Speaker 2: 25:02

Yeah, how do you approach collaboration, speaking of which, whether with editors, preservation partners, community leaders, to bring big ideas to life, especially after running such a big company?

Speaker 1: 25:14

I found that you know, and my publisher is probably going to shoot me when they hear this podcast but I found the way in which you know they tracked not they, not my publisher, but the publishing industry. My publisher is fabulous, but the publishing industry, the way they track data, is antiquated. It's not quite stone age but close. It's really difficult to get good numbers to figure out which levers to pull in terms of sales and marketing. I find it frustrating. I don't know how they handle it and it's just because it's a different industry, I guess. But in my old world I knew how many this we were processing an hour and how many that we were doing, I mean, all over the country. We had built these systems to bring in those metrics Because there are so many different middlemen and distributors and sellers. You don't have any granularity into that data. So if Amazon buys 1,000 copies of your book, you don't have no idea who's Amazon selling it to, so you can't tell what demographic you're touching. And a lot of book sales go through Amazon, as you know. So it makes it really difficult to get a handle on that stuff. So for me I find it frustrating, pretty frustrating, but in terms of collaboration, what I really my editor development editor on this last book is fabulous and she has some great ideas. And I find that if I'm in trouble in a book so I'm working on one that I've kind of parked, it's got about 20,000 words, which means it's about 20% done and I consulted what I call a book doctor, an independent editor His name's Peter Behrens, he's fabulous as well and said hey, peter, go read this and tell me where to go, because I'm totally stuck. And he's like okay, you got to kill all these characters, not kill them, but like get rid of them and consolidate. And this is your narrative and take it this way. So sometimes I just find it's easier, because sometimes you just can't see the forest for the trees, so you just have to reach out and get help. Also, I find that and this is my first book before this publisher, with my last publisher they have this situation where they want to kill a character, they don't like a character, they want to go or they don't like a scene, and so you have to listen to your gut. You have to know I've always said which cow is. Not be afraid to kill your sacred cows, but also know which ones are sacred. Right and it's a gut thing and what I tend to do.

Speaker 1: 27:32

Where I go, I have what I call my beta readers, and they're not people that I am friends with, necessarily, but the people all over the country as part of my book club who are religiously and I come to my book club every month and really have a lot of really insight into a particular book or a particular line or character whenever we do these book club discussions and I'll have them read a particular book when it's really ugly, when my publisher's already saying that's got to go, this has got to go, and if they concur with the publisher's decision, I'm okay with it. But if they say no, no, no, no, no, we love JW, we love you can't kill JW, you can't get rid of JW. So I'll keep it and I'll push back and I'll say here is data from these 10 people who all think you're wrong and you know, and that was the case. So, in Veil of Doubt I know you haven't read it, but there are three attorneys on this case Hal Harrison, his older brother, who's 15 years older than him, matt Harrison in real life and a guy named JW Foster, a young, good-looking, at the time bachelor, kind of you know a bit of a rake, you know a bit of a libertine, and they wanted me, not this publisher, but one of the editors suggested the development editors suggested that I get rid of JW there's too many lawyers and I said I can't, because Powell needs someone, he needs to be controlling, he's not going to boss his older brother around, so he has to have this younger.

Speaker 1: 29:00

And I fought for him. We kept him, and I'm glad we did, because in another story I'm writing he's another character, because he shows up later in life here in Leesburg doing things he shouldn't be doing, surprise, surprise.

Speaker 2: 29:10

And so it works out pretty well, it's fascinating that I've heard these type of conversations for like record deals and music and history, I had no idea that the same thing happens with the book publishing. Oh yeah, as well.

Speaker 1: 29:24

Yeah, yeah, and I'm lucky. I have a great publisher and they let me have a lot of input on the covers. They don't push me too hard on the title. They didn't like the Grades of Truth title so much and they wanted me to put the V in there. I said fine, but they really take a lot of. They let me have a lot of leeway. A lot of publishers don't do that and you lose control over your book, especially when you sell it. So they've been fabulous to work with and I had some issues with my first publisher in that regard.

Speaker 2: 29:57

So one of the reasons I switched was because, yeah, yeah, so we talked a little bit about this, but what role does curiosity play in both business and storytelling?

Speaker 1: 30:07

Actually it's the same in a lot of ways. So in business, when I was a consultant, I used to consult to some of the largest systems integrators in Washington DC and one of the reasons they hired me is I'd come in and I'd look at a bid that they were considering and I'd ask questions that no one else thought to ask were considering. And I'd ask questions that no one else thought to ask and the answers to those questions also oftentimes made the difference between winning and losing. When I took over a new contract, when I started working for the government directly, we ran this country's immigration system for USCIS, for State Department, all the background investigations on immigrants at the FBI, so we had a fairly large set of contracts and I would take over a contract from an incumbent contractor that had lost the bid and I would ask questions like why are they doing it this way? Why? And in doing so we were able to streamline operations and find more efficient ways to doing things and we made more money that way. A guy I worked with named Dick Braun was also very, very good at that. The two of us together were probably a lot of these new contracts. People that hate to see us coming like, oh my God, they're going to ask all these crazy questions, not being afraid to ask things like that. So that curiosity. Why are you doing it that way? It makes zero sense to me. We've always done it this way. Well, it doesn't work. What if you did this? Simple things like moving production operations closer to the mail when the mail comes in. Why cart the mail all the way across the floor? Take it simply, process it right there where it comes in and cut down on footsteps, because footsteps add into time and time adds into money and that kind of thing.

Speaker 1: 31:41

So in this book, in the book writing world, I'm presented often with a set of facts from the historical record and then I have to figure out the in-between to be able to tell the story, and oftentimes the facts don't make sense. So, for example, in Mask of Honor, my first book, lucinda Lee lives over here at Coton Farm, which is now Lansdowne, and she's part of the Lee family and she and her sisters, we find out, have no dowry, that their father was in debt when he died and they were left with no dowry. Now, apparently their uncle worked out some scenario where they could stay on the farm and pay their debtors as they go. They didn't have to sell everything at once, but those girls had no dowry and she was a pretty girl. And Jack McCarty, who's the protagonist of the story, is a very attractive man from one of the wealthiest families from Fairfax County, the McCarty family, and Jack asks her to marry him the first time and she says no. Now why in the world would she say no? Why would she say no? Well, that was the key to everything.

Speaker 1: 32:47

When I figured out the reason why, when I came up with what the scenarios were and if I tell you it's going to ruin the story, it made for great storytelling. What makes you think the doctor was having an affair with this woman? And I said, because I asked myself a question why? Why would he deliver a baby that had no complications in 1868? Why would a man deliver a baby in 1868 with a noncomplicated birth? He wouldn't. Midwives did that. So there was a reason why, maybe because he had a relationship with that woman that was maybe inappropriate, I don't know. But asking yourself, why would he do that? They didn't do that back then. So when you start asking those kinds of questions, those kinds of curiosities, it makes for some great filling in the gaps, answering those questions, why? And teeing up a story makes for some great filling in the gaps. Answering those questions, why? And teeing up a story makes for some pretty compelling storytelling. And if you ask some of the readers and bail it out, they'll go oh my gosh, I didn't see it coming. I didn't see it coming, which always makes me happy if you don't see the ending coming, but not to where you can go back and you can say oh, there it is, oh, there it was. Now I get it, yeah. So I think people need to just go and ask why yeah and why Right? It's interesting my son.

Speaker 1: 34:14

He was interviewing at a private school this one's getting married a number of years ago and he was going from ninth grade to tenth grade and he was thinking about going to board and his favorite subject was history. Surprise, surprise. And he decided that anyway, he was in this interview and the interviewer said to him your favorite subject is history. He said yes and he goes. Well, why do you have a C in history? It's your worst subject. He goes because it's all based on memorization of facts and I could care less about memorizing facts. Of course, the interviewer is kind of taking it back and he says well, explain that. So Zach pulls out his iPhone and he says 1492. What happened in 1492? And the interviewer goes Christopher Columbus sailed the ocean blue. He goes, right, he goes, and that and a billion other facts are a Google search away. He goes.

Speaker 1: 35:08

But no one ever asked the question why was Christopher Columbus sailing the ocean blue? The answer was because the Silk Wars, the Silk Road and the trade wars. Because he was looking for a way around having to go through the Ottoman Empire to get to the Far East. So they decided to sail around because they needed to find another way to avoid what was going on in the Silk Road, much like, as Zach says, the trade wars that were going on between us at the time, the administration in China, much like that wasn't happening back then. So those are the reasons why we need to understand why and in school, public school we're not being taught anything other than that Christopher Columbus sailed the ocean blue in 1492, and nobody cares why. No one asks the question why? So I think that if we had more of that, we would learn, we would use history to learn from it and have a better understanding of the impact of what happens today. If we look in the past and see what happened then, sometimes great discoveries can be found from it.

Speaker 2: 36:08

Yeah, not just seeing what happened, but why it happened. That's so true. You have to take a whole change in our education system.

Speaker 1: 36:16

Generational change. Unfortunately, Some teachers still do it, though there's some really great ones out there.

Speaker 2: 36:22

So let's touch on a little bit more on philanthropy and community impact. Both you and Scott have given generously slings to education, healthcare and historic preservation, like you mentioned earlier. What do you look for when deciding which causes to support?

Speaker 1: 36:35

outside of making sure that you know the biggest portion goes towards the actual A lot of it has to do with how many people are impacted by it. If we look at an organization and it's going to let's just put a number, let's say it's $100,000. Let's say we get $100,000 out there and it only impacts seven people, that's not a whole lot of return on our investment. Or give $100,000 to a school and that school is going to touch how many hundreds of kids over the next three years, then it has a greater impact and a greater return on that investment. So a lot of it has to do with, you know, the number of people or the number of folks that are impacted by it. And then also we look at so in historical preservation doesn't quite work the same way, right, because in healthcare you can quantify it, in education you can quantify it, but in historical preservation you can't necessarily. So we ask ourselves questions like where else might they get the funds? What happens if they don't do this? How much money is it going to cost versus how long will it last?

Speaker 1: 37:44

So, for instance, there was an historic church I can't remember where it was that we restored. I think it might have been Middleburg that we restored. I think it was like $6,000 we gave them to restore three windows, stained glass windows. That was a pretty good investment. So $2,000 a window. It's going to last for how long Decades? And you're going to preserve and keep that in place. So that to me made sense. A museum I think we helped the Lovettsville Museum with a new wing or a new briefing center. That was important because it allows how many people can use it, not just for the museum's purposes of sharing history, but they do other lectures. It provides the community a space to come together without charge to be able to discuss whatever they want to discuss, whatever kind of meetings they want to have. So we kind of look at impact as well in terms of how many people does it help and then how long will it last? That's important, yeah.

Speaker 2: 38:40

Looking at the big picture and not just yeah, what does it mean to you personally to restore and live at Salma? Has Salma been something that you saved from destruction?

Speaker 1: 38:49

Well, we love it right there. Right, I mean, it's a beautiful property and we try to restore it, you know, in the spirit of Elijah Brokeboro White, who was the guy who built it in the first place, and at the time he wanted the best of everything in there, and so we tried to restore the things that were broken and not working, but upgraded them to the best that we could get our fingers on. So we went to Europe and bought some of the furnishings and some of the fabrics and the draperies, as he might have done when he was there. So we sort of put that love and attention to it and the details really are important, right, Really important.

Speaker 1: 39:23

But also the fact that we don't just live there. I mean, A, it's our residence. B it's sort of a place where our kids come. It's sort of like, you know, the home base for everybody, even though they all have their own spots that they go to afterwards. But we also we don't rent it out, but we do allow charitable organizations that have similar missions aligned to ours to use it for fundraising events and we underwrite those events. It's not just that we just don't charge, but we will underwrite it in terms of providing the food and the beverages and the service and the parking attendance, so that there's no cost to the organization and they get to keep all the money that they raise as opposed to having to pay out of pocket for stuff. And we have a fundraiser.

Speaker 1: 40:07

We open the house up once a year at Christmastime for the Loudon Museum and I have between seven and eight, depending on how many. I decide to put up Christmas trees. They're always different Every year. I design them myself and Carlos puts the things up top and I do most of the decorating. It takes me about three weeks, but we open the house up. It's usually the second Sunday in December to the public. I think it's $85 a head and all that money goes to the Laudan Museum for historic preservation.

Speaker 2: 40:34

Wow yeah, that's amazing. What advice? My last question to you, sure, what advice would you give to entrepreneurs or executives who are considering transitioning into their creative or philanthropic passions?

Speaker 1: 40:47

First, make sure that you can afford to do it. Okay, because making money on it is more difficult than you'd think. But I think absolutely you should. I mean, if you spend I think I spent, I think I did the math. It was like 35 years of my life, you know, working in a professional capacity and I was lucky to be able to retire at 54. But you know I had enough put aside so that I could do so. But I think absolutely you should do that. I think there should be a combination of following whatever creativity, what you love in life, and doing that, because if you're doing something you love, it's never really work, and that really is true. But I also think you have a responsibility if you retire and or you know you sell your business, to share your talents with others. So, either mentoring another business or what we do on boards we go in to charitable organizations on their boards, usually in leadership roles, turn things around, get good governance structures in place and turn things about and then again mentor folks to leave behind.

Speaker 1: 41:54

My husband's much better at operations and maintenance of an organization. I'm one that likes to stress, test it and break it, so it's much better to have me come in and do the heavy lifting and then get me out once it's fixed, because I'll just break it again. I like doing that. I'm not saying I like doing it, but I like to clean up.

Speaker 1: 42:09

I said to somebody the other day I said you know, if I'm lucky enough to go to heaven, god better have a job for me, he better have something, because that would be hell, having nothing to do all day. I need to have something that keeps me busy and basically fixing things that are broken. I like to do that, but I think you shouldn't be afraid to follow your creative passions or whatever your passion might be. You've spent 30, 40 years of your life working, 50, however long it is, and in retirement. Once you've decided to move on to another chapter, spend a little time on yourself doing what you love, but also making sure that you give back, because this community helped make you, and then you need to leave some legacy behind for others to help them. It's that paying it forward, that movie, paying it forward, something like that.

Speaker 2: 42:58

Actually, my last question is why do you do this? Because you've been doing it for a while and, as much as I would like to say that's normal, it's not A lot of people. They work hard their whole life, they take the money, they go retire somewhere exotic and they just kind of live off of that for them and their family.

Speaker 1: 43:21

Well, you're going to think I'm crazy now, but that's okay, because I believe it's true. I know it's true. It's a voice that speaks to me, that tells me what I need to do. Call it my conscience, call it Jesus, Call it whatever you want to call it, but I am led and I just do what I'm told. You know, god tells me I need to get involved with this. Something in my gut just compels me to do it, and so I just go where I'm led. I wake up in the morning and I have sort of a guidance of where I need to be and what I need to do, and I need to get busy doing it. It's like a homing beacon kind of a thing pulling me. I don't know where it comes from. Honestly, I don't. I just do what I'm told, I tune into it and I think we all have some sort of voice and I think oftentimes we just don't listen to it, we just tune it out. I don't know if it's your conscience. I don't know if it's spiritual. I choose to believe it's spiritual. Other folks think it's just the universe. They think I'm crazy. You can call me whatever label you'd like, but to me it's the good Lord speaking to me and saying you need to get up off your haunches and do something and make a difference.

Speaker 1: 44:28

And so we recently donated a house to a pregnancy crisis clinic, and I did so because I was told to do so. I didn't come up with this on my own, it was just something that just occurred to us. My husband and I were both on a cruise and we both had the same message at the same time and said okay, here we go. And so we reached out to our pastor, gary Hamrick, over at Cornerstone Chapel and he pushed us. He sort of had talk to these folks. We said, okay.

Speaker 1: 44:57

So to me it's listening to whatever that voice is inside yourself and following it. And we all have it. I know you have it someplace right, just being sensitive to it. And I think that as you get older in life and you have I haven't got little kids running around making me busy constantly and distracting. I haven't got company and employees and managers who are yelling at me. I haven't got board members that are yelling at me. You know what I'm saying. I don't have all those distractions now, so I do have more time to focus on those kinds of things.

Speaker 1: 45:31

Your life changes If you look at your life in terms of thirds or quarters right, I'm beginning in the last quarter of mine, if you will, if you divide it up over however long, many years 23 years, a quarter I'm entering in that third, fourth quarter. And it's just a whole different way of thinking, you know, because you know there's only so much, only so many days left that you have to do things. And to me, I feel like I have to do what is right and what deals right for me. And sometimes, that's most times that's not self-focused. It is when I get my nails done, of course, you know. Or my hair done, my hair done, got my hair done. But and when I go shopping, oh, my gosh, the shopping. So I do have vices, don't get me wrong. I'm not completely selfless in that way. I guess I could just donate that money too, but no, I just do what I'm told, I just follow where I'm told. I just follow where I'm led.

Speaker 2: 46:23

I think it's beautiful and I think the voices just makes it that much more powerful, not crazy and like you said, like maybe sometimes whether it's because you're getting older and some of those other things are dropping off, such as the kids getting older, the business, life changing, but maybe it's just you have more time to hear the voices.

Speaker 1: 46:40

Yeah, I think that's true. Things are a lot more quiet. I don't find myself. As you know, when I was younger, I always used to tell myself live in the here and now, just focus. Stop worrying about tomorrow, just focus on the here and now, and I don't worry about tomorrow anymore. I'm all focused on the here and now. It's interesting how that shifted and for the longest time I had to struggle to make myself stop worrying about tomorrow.

Speaker 1: 47:06

Just focus on what you need to do today, and age helps you do that. And I know a lot of young people feel that way today. My son, for example, my youngest son. He's getting his MBA right now. He's going to go law school next year, he's about to sit for his LSATs and he's all worried about tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow. I'm like Nick just settle down, dude, just worry about this next class, what you have to do today, just stay on your path, right? Don't look too far in advance. You know where you're going. Just stay on the path and you'll get there. It's hard because I know that sort of anxiety that builds up in them. It's not going to change a thing. Turn it over. That's what I do. Turn it over to the good Lord and say you know you deal with all this. I got to take the wheel.

Speaker 2: 47:54

Somebody take the wheel. Take it from me. Is there anything else you would like to add before we wrap?

Speaker 1: 47:57

it up. No, I'm just thankful that you I really appreciate you having me on today.

Speaker 2: 48:02

Thank, you so much. You have so many great things to share stories, inspiration, motivation, all the good things.

Speaker 1: 48:09

Thank you for having me Thanks.