Andy Cook: Parenting 10 Kids and CEO @ Promise686. [How do you do it all?]

Andy Cook is an amazing individual! 10 kids and CEO of a successful non-profit aimed at helping orphaned kids find homes. Andy talks about his days as Dean of Admission at Wesleyan School in Norcross, GA along with the pivotal times in life that shaped him into the person he is today. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_01: 0:00

All right, today I want to introduce you to a friend of mine, Andy Cook, his name is. And Andy, for starters, has, they have 10 children. I think I have a thousand questions, so a hundred per kid. That's what I was thinking. I did the math real quick too. It's incredible. But Andy's also started a really, really fascinating nonprofit called

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Promise 686. So we're going to dive into those two things today. I want to see a day in the life, Andy. I'm dying to hear it. You wake up in the morning, we got school. What does it all look like?

SPEAKER_01: 0:34

How does it work? Well, it better start with me being out before them. That's been the key over the years is start early. Recently, I've gotten back into working out. I took a 20-year break, a college athlete. I like that. Retired. Except for a nonprofit, there's some fundraising. So once a year, we would do this fundraising event where I needed to run. So I had to be in decent shape once a year to be able to run a few miles. But that was it. Where was that? What was that called? The promise race. Oh, the promise race. Yeah. Oh, okay. So promise 686. So recently I've returned to working out. So that's, that's start super early. Go with a group of guys, a lot of accountability in that. And then come in, in theory, ready to go. I

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like that.

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Gosh, if I don't, I don't have a little time for me to kind of initiate the day. If I feel like I'm starting behind and that is, that is like one of the few me things. Yeah. I love that. So I got to roll it back, though, because we are on the way on the other side of kids in many respects. We are down to three in the house. So let me kind of go back five, 10 years when it was waking up with all those kids. I was not working out. So that pattern was not in my life whatsoever. Most days, it just meant this rush of activity around the little kitchen bar thing, right? So it's like people are doing laps and you're just watching it go down and you're doing everything to set people up to not forget things. But we had to teach our kids tons of independence early on because the age range for us today is 10, excuse me, 11. I've got two 11-year-olds up to 26 now. So when the bulk of my kids joined my family, we went from five to 10 kids all at once. The two little guys were two. And man, I got to tell you, and some of them will listen to this conversation. They know this to be true. We miss some kids here and there. You know, the ones who could really take care of themselves. We're like, good job. Because it was just utter chaos all the time. Five to 10 kids? Yeah, that was a big jump. That's a big, that's a big double. One to two is a huge jump. Yeah.

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I'm sure everybody out there is saying, what?

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I'm oftentimes like a conversation killer when people bring up their kids. And, you know, we'll be in a setting. Oh, yeah, we got four kids. It's so hard. And it's, what about you? And I'm like, I don't want to rain in the parade. Like, four kids is really, really hard. Because three kids today that we have still at home, really hard. But yeah, the 10-kid thing was insane. And we laugh a lot now that we're still recovering from it. from a window in our lives where there was just no chance to catch up, no chance to process. It was just go, go, go. Roller skates. Big needs. Kids who joined our family later in their lives and experienced a lot. Yeah. Big needs. We'll get into all that. So I like to say the reason I started doing this, started doing interviews is I love transferring knowledge. And I find that when I talk to people,

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when I get their whole story start to finish, What are the pivotal points? What are some things you did that you wish you didn't do? What are books you read? What are mentors you had? What are all those type of things? So

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like getting that and then sharing it with the world. So let's go all the way back. Take me all the way back where you're born and raised. Let's talk about Andy as a kid. We're in the Atlanta area right now. So I'm an Atlanta native. Native. There you go. Okay. Piedmont Hospital on Peachtree Road in the In the heart of things in Atlanta is where it all started. I'm one of four kids, so three sisters, two older, one younger. Okay, two older and younger. Got it. And amazing parents. Parents moved out of Atlanta now and live up in North Georgia, so they retired away from all the activity. Yeah. What did your folks do? My dad's a lawyer. He hasn't practiced now for a bit, but I think in his case, once a lawyer, always a lawyer. What kind of law? A lot of real estate banking. So I worked for just a big Atlanta law firm for a lot of years. Was a managing partner in that. So there was a leadership piece of it for him that I think really didn't mean a lot to me at the time, but what I was learning about life from him, a lot of it came around the idea of how you engage people and take them in a direction Yeah. different location was always changing to like a firm party and it was always outdoors. It was always, you know, July and we would go to the middle of, of nowhere. It seemed and celebrate with this group of lawyers there every year. And we were connected to their families. And, um, my, my parents are, are, Faith is a huge deal to them. And so that was a piece actually of his law firm. And so before it seemed like it was maybe talked about as much as it is commonly now, where people are talking about how do they bring their faith into their work in a way that's really vibrant and helpful. I

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feel

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like my dad was doing that even at that point in time. So I grew up with amazing parents. My mom is the forever theologian. She breaks everything down into pieces as a systematic thinker. And she can talk. Biblically, she knows the Bible incredibly well. So I grew up in a setting where faith was something that was really thought about and talked about. This kind of word we don't use as much now, worldview.

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There was a

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worldview there. We were processing a lot. So a lot of thinking. in my upbringing, not feeling, feeling loved, but a lot of thinking. Yeah. That's awesome. Really, really cool. All right. Relationship with siblings. Yeah. So I'm the only boy, as I said, so I'm the guy who challenged my older sister, uh, in the sense that she's, she's the oldest and she's a go getter. She's amazing. Um, and then I, I'd come along and have, um, my own sort of go-getter thing as the only boy in the family. So I was the golden boy from their perspective. I enjoyed that, although I didn't love hearing about it all the time. When I turned 16, I got this old Jeep that I don't know how cool it was, but I knew how cool I felt. And one of the first comments I remember from my sister was her saying, you know, I wanted to get a Jeep. Yeah. But mom and dad said that would never happen because I'm a girl. I was like, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. So there were advantages, I guess, to being the only boy in the crew. All that, yeah. Yeah, I had a privileged upbringing in many respects, great education. Sports? Sports, lots of sports. Okay. Loved sports. What'd you excel at? None of them. None of them. I was the most sporadic batter in baseball. I was the guy who could hit a line drive every tenth time and then strike out and would bat fourth or fifth through my little league days. I used to have this dream as a kid where it was... I don't think I had any recurring dreams or maybe I didn't. I don't remember them. But there was one dream where I was... falling, so it's like in some sort of black void, right? So you're falling through darkness. Yeah. It's not a good thing. This is a nightmare. Not an adventure. And as I fell, I was swinging and striking out over and over and over again. I was a head case in baseball. Wow. That was not a good sport for me. I retired. Strike him out. So football was the main thing that I did. Yeah. I love football because somewhere along the way, I learned that Being utterly aggressive could work for me. I'm not a horrible golfer to this day. I went with a group of friends, some guys that you know. One of them said, you know, I run a nonprofit. So they said, hey, if you get a hole-in-one in the course of these next, it was par three, next, I think it was just nine hole par three. we will kick in$10,000 to your nonprofit, which would go a long way in helping kids and what I do. I was a head case from that moment on. I mean, I'm almost whipping the ball, but that's the technicals of sports. The more intricate, the more hand-eye coordination, the more muscle memory, the worse I am. But if you say, go run into somebody, I got you. So football was all China shop. That's awesome. So somebody asked me this question about geography. I've very cool. I've never, ever, ever heard it asked. How did geography? So you're, you're from this area, but this area looked different when you were growing up. How did that shape what you do today? So I look back at mine. It was, it was, it was really cool to go through the exercise. I'm from mountainous area, coal mine kind of town.

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How did, how those activities that we did as kids translate into like, what do I do today? And what am I interested in? Like going to explore was the

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biggest one that came out for me. Yeah. Was like, we would go in the, they're called like stripping mines where the giant steam shovels would dig massive, massive holes. And we would take a day. to get to the bottom of them. And I think of how many times we almost died, but that's a separate subject. But your family allowed for you, your parents allowed for you to go do it too, right? Right. And we explore. So like for me, one of our favorite things to do, especially when it's cold and the snakes are underground, take the kids, we put on our boots and we go out in the woods and just explore. They each bring a bag and we fill it with cool stuff. It might be, you know, you know, They brought back a little dog toy that's been chewed up for probably two decades, but they thought that was cool. They threw it in the bag. So like the exploring thing. Does anything come to mind for you, geography-wise? Yeah, life revolved around a hill. The street I was on had a very steep hill. In fact, before we moved in here, the street had been really clear. And probably the reason that it made sense for a developer to come in and build the lots was because of a tornado that came. Would have been... early to maybe early eighties, late seventies. And so this steep hill was, was it, I mean, Every day involved the trek to Charlie's house at the bottom of the street and the trek back. And there was all sorts of plotting and planning about how do you take on the hill, the back and the forth. When you're coming back up, do you kind of go like this up the hill? On the way down, you just fly. Somewhere when I was around 13, my dad and I went and found this old motorcycle that my aunt had owned. She gave it to us. We cleaned it up and cranked it up. We managed to crack the carburetor so it would You'd crank it and you'd ride for a while and it would drip gas onto the engine head area. And eventually there'd be a backfire and you'd catch on fire and you'd stop and jump all people out. All that happened on the hill. Multiple big wheel injuries. One other little motorcycle thing that somebody would crank up and the accelerator would lock and I almost died on that hill. Everything was about that hill. So what does that have to do with present day cars? I have absolutely no idea. I'm trying to think of it as I go. That's great. I think for me, the quest thing, the expedition thing, the danger thing... Those were all parts of growing up. It was like our little Mount Everest right outside. It was just a hill with 10 houses on it. That's it. How are you going

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to navigate it today? Every day is probably different.

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One

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day it could be slippery. One day it could be rainy. That's cool. It's just

SPEAKER_01: 13:00

a neat question. I think a lot about... the landscape of my childhood and the things you kind of referenced it even that you got to do in terms of expeditions. I'm in this business now of trying to restore and establish families for kids who don't have them. So I'm thinking a lot about what is it that kids need to really thrive. And that sense of expedition, of journey, of bravery, that's a big deal. I thought... falsely early on that children who came through foster care, because that's really the finest part of our work is to help kids stay out of foster care. Okay. Or keep them strong in the families while they're being fostered. Right. But I thought the adversity of those experiences would actually create grit in kids. And ironically, the opposite, is the case where you don't have firm attachment, then the adversity that comes in life actually breaks you down rather than builds you up. So if you do have a strong attachment to a parent, presumably a mom

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or dad,

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you can take on that adversity and it makes you stronger anyway. So I think a lot about how to, how to help kids develop that grit, but also how do you, how do you do that in the context of adventures of journeys? Because so much of what we want for our kids is that they grow up, they'd be brave enough to live independently, to go out. But anyway, that's a, that's fast. So like wild at heart type of stuff. Yeah, I think so. That's really cool. Grit. Okay. And that's, we'll come back on that. I want to,

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I want to recircle there. So, all right. So I've got a good feel for Growing up and then we got promised six 86, but we got one more jump in the middle. So let's come into like high school college. Let's talk about,

SPEAKER_01: 15:03

let's start off. Where'd you go? Where'd you go to high school? Uh, so there's a school in Atlanta, Westminster. Okay. Westminster. Uh, any idea what you want to do in your life when you went to high school? Absolutely nothing. See, moral of the story. I love that. I want to shine a light on that. Now it's like, oh my goodness, like if you don't know what you want to be in high school. Nothing, nothing. It was like that in college, but now it's like high school. You got to know exactly what school you want to get into when you're a freshman so you could start. We got a friend who told us, don't send your kids to college if they don't know exactly what they want to do. We'll support you. We're not, we didn't play it that way. Yeah. Right.

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Right. A little different. So, all right. What kind of student? Guess I'm pretty good student.

SPEAKER_01: 15:45

Pretty, pretty good student. You know, kind of the B plus C, some A's type student. Yeah. I wanted to think I was smart. Yeah. Actually, I was thinking about it the other day when my sisters were really smart. There was a particular test I took. I don't know if it was like an IQ test or what it was. It was actually pre-high school, but it goes back to, um, late elementary school where they had this course called, I think they called it challenge at my public elementary school. And you could go be part of challenge or if you didn't quite qualify, you didn't make challenge. And my sisters had made challenge. They were the academic elite in our very small elementary school. And I didn't make it. And then come like fourth grade, I retook the test and I made it. And I remember kind of for the first time in my life, Because my parents actually pointed it out that I had done better on that little test than my sisters. But they were so smart. And as a point of comparison, I was like, oh, well, maybe I'm kind of smart. Like, you know, I could do challenge, you know, or whatever that time. So I was always going into my high school years in college. I love ideas. I love critical thinking. I love problem solving. And I love that then. My parents probably would listen to this and be like, did you? But I really did. So I wasn't a wonderful student. I probably wasn't disciplined enough to memorize everything. But if you want me to think about it, I love thinking about it. Interesting. Okay. So still playing sports? Played sports all the way through. Played into college. Played football. Tore my knee up and retired from that. Where was college? The college was Washington and Lee University up in Lexington, Virginia. Yeah, cool. One of my sons, my youngest, is 11, as I mentioned. He said to me literally yesterday, he's like, Dad, I just realized that Washington and Lee football wasn't very good. He'd been thinking that I was at Notre Dame or University of Georgia. I'm a college football player. I was like, yeah, we weren't that good. He's like, can anybody make the team? I was like, no. So age 11 is when he found out his dad wasn't a hero.

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Oh, but a hero in many other ways. So I would, I'm guessing you were in, so in college, were you saying one day I'm going to have a huge family, 10 kids,

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right? I mean, that's not, yeah. But some people do desire that. They're like, they come from a giant family and they know right out of the gate what they're going to do. So

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that wasn't you. All right. Go to college, come out, come back to Georgia.

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There was a graduate school in there. So I went to seminary outside Boston. Okay. I lived up in Gloucester on the North Shore. Yeah. A friend from there. Oh, my God. No. Did I know what I wanted to do when I went to graduate school to seminary? The answer is still no. I really went thinking, okay, well, I'm going to pray about this and God surely will show me what this is going to mean. But I know this is the next step. And I can remember actually being so troubled around what I was supposed to do with my life early, really in college. It was having to pick a major was like a milestone.

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Yeah.

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You know, if you don't do this right, your whole future is blown. That's right. Silly, but it felt that way. Yeah. And I remember the summer after my freshman year, spending the whole summer looking after this. Like, I will go and meet with so-and-so. I'll talk to someone. Had this whole plan for how I was going to discern what my major would be. And I got to the end of the summer, and I was actually working for a local church as kind of like an assistant in their youth ministry

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program. Mm-hmm.

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And we were on a mission trip in Nashville, Tennessee. And it was like any of those mission-type service projects. You just sweat it out. Yeah, yeah. And at night, we'd have a different activity. The particular night, they were sending us to some sort of worship service. And we didn't know anything about it. I still don't know anything about it. And again, I'm supposed to be somewhat of a leader in this thing.

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Sure.

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And I'm just troubled because I know I'm going back to college in a couple of

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weeks

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and I still don't know what my major will be, much less what that might mean down

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the

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road. Wow. And this guy comes up to me, never met him, probably my age now, probably 40 something year old and says, Hey, excuse me. Yeah. And he says, you know, I can see you're really troubled. And I'm like, Can you? Is it that obvious? Wow. He said, you know, I just had a message that's kind of hard to share with you. And he said, you know, I want you to picture a boxer. And I'm like, a boxer? Which way are we going? Canine? Human. Human boxer. Yeah. And he said, you know, boxers don't actually know what punches they're going to throw each round. Right.

UNKNOWN: 21:03

Right.

SPEAKER_01: 21:04

Really, it's a punch and go. It's a one at a time. You set up the next punch or the next combination. I just want you to know, I just want you to be encouraged that your only responsibility is just to figure out the next punch. Don't figure out the second, the third, the fourth, the fifth round. Figure out the whole fight. Just one punch at a time. He said, punch and go. Got it? And I said, yeah. And he walked off. I don't know who he is. You never saw him before? No, no, I've never seen him. Never saw him since? No, no. And, you know, it was just one of those times where you go, okay, clearly, clearly. That's incredible. There was something there for me in that moment. And I took that to heart. And now I've got some of my kids are in that college window. A couple of different occasions I've gone back to that moment and said, hey, guys, let's just figure out the next step. So for me, that step became to be an English major, which was really random. And then going on to seminary, I just knew that was the next step. That was the next punch. And when I went there, I really wanted to study where faith and public life or politics or even policy is. where they hit, where they intersect. And sometimes they do hit, of course. And that was what I knew I wanted to learn about. I didn't know what I would do with that. But interestingly, in that summer after freshman year of college, that was the other thing that I took away from my trip to Nashville. One was punch and go, and two was I want to do something with faith and politics. So I went after them, took classes as I could to the degree that you can control that sort of thing in seminary, studied people like William Wilberforce, and just made sure that I understood the historical relationship between those two. And this would have been late 90s, so you're coming out of kind of a religious right push. There's the push of the 80s, the moral majority. There's the push of the 90s, where ultimately you're kind of saying some of the pushing that had happened in my lifetime, while there were some things that Christians might say were good, there was also some abuses in how that played out. And there was a lot of hurt caused it. And you could even argue there was some of those things set the church on the whole back from the witness it would have in the world. Because it became highly politicized, certain churches did at least. And so when I was... When I was studying all those things, I was just eating it up, never guessing it would have any bearing on exactly what I would do later. Sure. So spoiler alert, what I do is I really connect the church on the whole, individual churches around the nation, to government. The government is responsible, as they should be, for identifying when children need to come out of homes. And so in a sense, they have access to the needs of children through social workers. But they don't have the means to meet those needs. The only people who can meet those needs are families. And churches have families. All these families who are motivated. This is a Christian endeavor. You know, got James 127, the pure religion. I was caring for widows and orphans in their need. We don't use the word orphans in the U.S. foster care system, but biblically that matches up. So I would have never guessed that I would end up with so many years later, a career that actually is in a way church and state.

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Doing

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just that. Oh, my goodness. So where you started talking about politics, where did that come from in your life? Where did that come from? I had been told in my high school years that I was a leader. We all tell everybody they're a leader. But I believed it for some reason. I was like, I'm a leader. I'm special. That's great. I'm not sure whether that was or is the case. But that was something that was– kind of stuck on me from an early age. Yeah. No, I was that kid who grew super early. So like seventh, eighth grade, I was almost as tall as I am now. I'm kind of average height person. It meant I was a dominant force in like JV football because I was bigger than everybody. Right. My days were numbered. That's cool. As far as being a dominant force. But I grew early in, I don't know if it was in part because like literally I was I stood out. And so people would frequently come to me, teachers, coaches. There was an expectation that I would be a leader. And I'm grateful for that. I'm grateful that people called me to having a voice, to understanding the example of my life in an early age. So I think... If you stand at a sort of naive spot as an 18-year-old and go, I'm a leader, what do I do? In my mind, do you run for office or do you become a pastor? I mean, that's probably the dichotomy. As simple as it was to me, that's probably what I was thinking. Absolutely. Now... Obviously, there are a few more ways to be a leader than that. But that's probably where that idea started to kind of ruminate in me. Yeah. And I think maybe developed out of there. I'll be curious, what did you see politics as that early? Because you just struck a chord with me. I'm thinking of, I took this politics class in college. And what I thought I was taking, like what I thought of politics... Versus fast forward three decades now and like what politics really is and how it shapes and plays a role in society and our life

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and

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our kids' lives and our school and our choices and all these other things. Do you recall a memory where you were like, oh, I'm getting into this subject because it's going to do this for me? Or do you think you had a pretty good feel of what politics is? I think I was building off of of history classes, that they're statesmen. Yeah. This is this noble approach to living. I don't think I had much of a clear idea, including the fact that the political hunger in our nation, at least in the last decade or so, has been for people who voice positions at extremes, and that moderate outlooks aren't really exciting enough to hold the attention of listeners. Yep. So I... I think I saw sort of a modern... persuasive, not moderate on particular issues, but just more as a temperament. Yeah. Moderation. And, you know, I've kind of like you, I've kind of watched things. I'm like, yeah, you know, it's radically different. What about you? Give me your thought on that. I, you know, when I remember the course in college that I took, it was this night class, not even knowing what it was. I took it just because like I had to take like three more core classes to graduate. And the only thing that fit my schedule was that class. That's, that's how I saw it. Certainly. I mean, they got to teach, they have to teach what they have to teach. Right. So I get that. And I respect that, but it's not at all like, what is politics? in life like how does it work in life I would say the biggest difference for me was like not having an application like we didn't talk about how each side viewed the world I couldn't tell you in college like what is a Republican

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yeah

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what is a Democrat what do they really believe not just like I can't stand the phrase like one side wants to keep all your money one side wants to give it away like All right, got it. But the real brass tacks, like what makes us different? Why are you going to vote for Clinton? Why are you going to vote for Bush? Like why? What do you believe? I don't feel– I know at the time that wasn't even on my radar. I don't even want to know what gets taught in school. So we're not even going to break– We won't even talk about that. I'm imagining, and yeah, we shouldn't go there. I could guess. I could sort of guess, but yeah, interesting. All right, so was

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that major, was it called politics of

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life? In seminary? No, you had to pick kind of a traditional major. So the closest I could find to that was ethics. Okay, ethics. So yeah, master's was in theology, but inside of theology was ethics. So I like another thing that I highlighted. I think it's fascinating is you said you don't go into seminary. You don't have to study like being a pastor. I thought you only studied that. So you can go to seminary and come out and not have a pastor. That's wild. So my wife also went to that same seminary. So we haven't talked about Martha yet. Did you know each other? We did. So we started dating in our freshman year in college. Okay. And dated all the way through into this adventure of figuring out where to go next. Yeah. We got to have together. And she wanted to go into counseling. And she actually is a counselor. Yeah. That's her work and specializes in marriage counseling. Actually, a sex therapist, too, is some of her work. And she is an incredible person. woman and super, super driven has a lot of agency. Like if she wants to get it done, she is going to find a way to make it happen. So she went to, to, to be a Christian counselor. There are a lot of people there in the seminary space who really just hyper-interested in theology. Some of them are really more, I'd say, arguably interested in sort of the history of philosophy, but come at it from a Christian perspective. There are a lot of people who want to go and teach, which we skipped a part of my life. I was a teacher for 10 years. And that wasn't what I thought I was going to do with it, but it certainly set me up. So out of school, that's what you did. So you had your certificate, you went to teach, and that was here at Low College, you tell the story. That's where I know bits and pieces, but

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where was that? What school would you

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teach? There's a school not far from where we are, Wesleyan School. I had been in the high school in Atlanta, and I had a football coach who was an incredible mentor to me. He came to my wedding, stayed involved, plugged in my life, somebody who just was a very constant voice In my life, we would do things even were jumped around, but even in high school years where we did a lot of goal setting and he would follow up on those goals. I remember my senior year, we had set goals, you know, September and he pulled those things out in May and we kind of graded ourselves. I don't know my goals, but he was just a really extraordinary life giving person. Mentor, but coach, not just football coach, but

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life coach. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 32:31

Anyway, as I was graduating from seminary, I had still no idea what I wanted to do. I called, you know, you look for wise counsel, you call certain people. So he was top of the list, you know, next to my parents. Hey, Mark, tell me, tell me about schools in Charleston, South Carolina. Why Charleston? Because Charleston's beautiful. Because I had been married for, you know, a couple of years at that point. We got married shortly after college. And Martha and her family had always gone to the Charleston area for vacations as kids. And we're like, hey, you know, look, if I can have a calling to do something, why can't it be in an awesome spot? I'm not sure Charleston's too awesome to sit in the summer, but most times a year would be great. So I'm talking to my buddy Mark and he says, I don't really know a whole lot about schools in Charleston, but I've, I've since left where, where, where you were for high school, but I'm at Wesleyan now and, uh, would love for you to come just check it out. And I had no money. I had missed multiple again from Atlanta. I'm in Massachusetts. I've missed multiple weddings and friends and key life moments. Cause I just, I don't have two nickels. And he says the key words, he says, the school will pay for you to fly down here. Oh, we'll interview and teach a class. And I'm like, Gosh, you know, all I got to do is teach a class and I get to free trip home. So we booked the flights and I was bought, you know, I came home on Wesleyan's dime. And what I remember about the day teaching there was a conversation with one particular student. He was a junior in high school. And I asked him kind of why Wesleyan, what do you love about this place? And he conveyed that the teachers were heavily invested in his life, that some of his teachers were some of his best friends. And what my buddy Mark, who's connecting me into this, had done in my life seemed to be relatively normal in my life. Something I'd done in my seminary years and college years, I'd been a Young Life leader. And I think Young Life's a pretty great ministry. And so the idea of being relational,

SPEAKER_00: 34:40

You

SPEAKER_01: 34:40

can connect it in a way, even in a setting that allowed for me to love and care for kids, walk with them through growing up, which is tough. That was super appealing. And so my thought wasn't, oh, I want to be a teacher. My thought was, all right, I'll do this for a few years. This is a good place to land. Yeah. Really, that's how I got down there. I remember I taught a class that day. I just remember the responses of some of the kids. Yeah. And I remember thinking, I'm not sure I'm going to be a very good teacher. The eyes said it all. What was the class? It was an Old Testament class. And there's part of the Bible that talks about the Day of Atonement. Yeah. Which is a pretty... big deal where in the Old Testament it was a big deal in its own right. But it speaks to what happens in the New Testament. It's one of those crazy moments where the Old Testament is prophetically sharing about something that actually happens when Christ shows up so many years later. It's incredible. And so I'm very passionate about this. I hadn't actually studied it in great detail, but having studied in preparation for this class, I'm fired up. But it was like last period of the day on a Friday. Oh! I remember thinking, I am throwing my best here. Before the Christmas break. Yeah, exactly. I guess it was good enough. Somehow I got the job and it was a great place to develop professionally. Wonderful leaders. Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 36:25

Wow. And you, you

SPEAKER_01: 36:26

continue to grow and evolve and yeah, more classes or how did it all work? So, yeah, so I taught, but I quickly found that, um, I, I love coaching coach football. coached soccer. They also had a chapel program. So I helped lead the chapel band, not with a guitar up front, but helped the student-led worship service. So I love those things. I did teach two or three classes, but more and more taught less and got to be a bigger part of the administration there. So I was the admissions director and responsible for marketing. And I got to be a fundraising guy so that was the development director cool that's cool it was alarming to me at first it took me a minute to get it sure uh but i was in those jobs kind of differently the admissions thing you know there's literally giving tours you're walking around a place pointing out learning watching people's reactions what what moves people what do they care about do the things that i care about about this place actually line up with what they care

SPEAKER_00: 37:29

about yeah

SPEAKER_01: 37:30

uh i remember for the first time kind of dealing with marketing, which is a huge part of running a nonprofit now is understanding our voice and how to position that. And I remember one of the early sort of marketing analyst moments was understanding that people pursue independent schools, private schools, at least at that point, most often for safety. That actually, and there are lots of other reasons they care about it, but the number one driver is Across the country at that point was safety, which begs the question, how do you communicate safety as the admissions director or if you're any sort of school leader? Interestingly to me, the way you communicate safety is cleanliness. The cleaner the place, the studies showed, the more people felt like it was a safe place. Which, of course, may or may not be connected. Yeah. I remember just kind of soaking that in and just having a, not to diminish an incredible school and an incredible mission, but for the first time in my life to have a product. Yeah. And say, you know, what's my product? How do I learn to convey this well and draw people into it that may be passionate about things differently than me? Just my spin on it wasn't enough. Yeah. I had to figure out what their spin was. Yeah. Do you think that's relevant today? Safety? It's got to be one or two. It's still there. I just looked it up. I don't think so. I don't know. You know, it's interesting because just yesterday I

SPEAKER_00: 39:05

had a meeting with a client

SPEAKER_01: 39:09

for my marketing company, for

SPEAKER_00: 39:10

Killer Shark Marketing. And one of the things we're looking to do with them, so there are a couple– former delta delta delta rangers one's a cia guy

SPEAKER_01: 39:22

like cool cool government stuff yeah and they got together and they started this neat business where they're they're doing tours for fifth and eighth graders okay so their whole business is fifth and eighth grade tours to places like dc new york georgia like said the savannah area and it's fascinating because we're we're in the process now reworking all their language and to hear you say that about safety what we're going to convey see their brand is off we're going to take that brand change it to safety first so i'm blown away like that you're saying this because what the new messaging is going to look like it's not done yet we're just getting started but we have kept our great country safe. Our leadership here has kept this great country safe or children are safe with us when they come to New York for this trip. Yeah. Right. Cause it's the same guys. There are a handful of them. They're all former, really cool government kind of, you know, neat stuff, neat, different clearances and stuff like that. So the focus is safety and you just said it, how important it is in schools. So, I love hearing it. We assume certain things are automatics amongst our listeners. And they're not. They have to be reinforced and even stated directly to make people feel comfort. Because ultimately, I think my wife and I talk about this a lot. And she sees this in counseling. And she'll kind of talk categorically about types of situations she sees in counseling. And ultimately, people have two things going. They've got to survive and they've got to connect. Right. Those are the fundamental survival and connection. And when it comes to what I'm drawn to in presentations about a nonprofit or arguably if you're presenting even about trips to Savannah, you're going to talk about the connection, the fun, the fellowship, the learning, and sort of the transfer of knowledge. But you can't assume people know survival. is occurring. You actually have to speak into the basics so that then they can move from survival into really the heart of connection. I think a lot about that. That's cool. And you're a parent as well. You've got kids that have gone on trips, about to go on trips. A parent who just barely survived. And so there was a survival mode for the better part of 10 years for our family where it hindered connection because there was such a need to... to make it a day-to-day from an energy perspective, the types of needs our kids had. When our kids joined our home academically, I mentioned we had five and then five joined. Of those five, the two boys in the middle of that group who were doing great now at that time, they were at kindergarten and first grade in math and reading levels, but they were in seventh or sixth and seventh grades. And so the... The idea of how do we get these kids up to speed academically was the most overwhelming thing because we recognize that we have the short window. And the farther you fall behind is the older you get. The more students start to believe they're incapable. And that's when bad things really start to happen because they can't actually be in a school setting and develop not only skills but confidence to stay in. Yeah, there's a lot of survival in those days. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 42:55

A couple weeks ago, I had a guy on who's a lawyer.

SPEAKER_01: 42:58

You probably heard of the Fyre Festival, the biggest festival that never happened. He's the lawyer that was in the documentary, the

SPEAKER_00: 43:06

Netflix

SPEAKER_01: 43:06

documentary. And it was real interesting what he said about what you just talked about, struggling in school. So he was dyslexic. So the title of his episode is Dyslexia is My Superpower. And he feared going to school in that he was going to get called on. to read because he was non, he wasn't diagnosed yet. Yeah. He wasn't diagnosed. So they, they just said, Oh, he's just got some kind of, he just doesn't like reading and it kept getting pounded into him, but he knew he was incapable of doing it. And it transfers all the way over to being this big, successful lawyer. He's almost, he's 59 at the time. Um, and they wheeled a whiteboard into the room. There were 15 prominent lawyers at a, at a, at a, along whatever boardroom and somebody wheeled a whiteboarding because they had to figure out a problem and he said his palms started sweating when the whiteboard came in he's 59 and accomplished

SPEAKER_00: 44:04

so it's like it's interesting to hear you say that like it's it is it's But there's hope in that. That's more a story of hope.

SPEAKER_01: 44:12

Like you find it, you recognize it, you diagnose it, you work with it. And then as he said, Stacy Miller's name is, then you go, you live your life Learning to live around it. And that's fine that he can't do math or whatever the subject is. You get somebody to help with that or you get somebody to hire somebody to do that. Yeah. Right. So there's like great hope in it. But the first phase of that, the finding it, the diagnosing it, that was where... where it's the younger you are, probably the harder it is on you. And so with, with some of those who joined some of our kids who joined our family later in those years, um, coming to terms with the gaps that had occurred in their lives due to just the, the setting they were raised. Yeah. Uh, it was super, super hard. I guess you're sort of, I'm thinking of, um, one, one son, uh, who is really, he is such a great motivated leader now.

SPEAKER_00: 45:19

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 45:20

And he's super intentional and he's super focused on actually working out and he's got a job that he's very loyal to and doing a great job.

SPEAKER_00: 45:29

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 45:30

When I met him at age 12, the first thing I was told even about him, come to think of it, before I shook his hand, was that he is the kind of kid who, if you leave him in the kitchen, and he's eating a bowl of cereal and you come back and you see there's milk all over the floor and you look him in the eye and say, hey, will you clean up that milk? And he'll say, I didn't do it. So you know, you know that he's the only person who's been in that room and he was eating cereal with milk. But that's going to be his reaction. And what we found to be the case was that Not just with him, but with all the kids who joined our family after going through some really hard stuff. There was this window where they couldn't see, identify, much less be helped in diagnosing where they had needs because there was such a defensive barrier to lie and to cover because they were so afraid of being found out. Oh. And lying was the default, not actually because it even made sense. It wasn't plotted. It wasn't, this lie will allow for me to get sick. It wasn't like that. And we could take it as people who had raised our children in a setting up to that point in a small church school where everything was super disciplined. We could take it as a heart issue, but it really wasn't so much a heart issue as... Just fear of what if. Sure. Kind of there's this guy in the whiteboard. Yeah. What if I'm found out?

SPEAKER_00: 47:05

Right.

SPEAKER_01: 47:06

And so trying to create an environment where our kids felt loved enough, 10 kids total, where they feel loved enough that they can attach enough to us so there's a sense of safety.

SPEAKER_00: 47:18

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 47:18

We move from surviving to the sense of potentially thriving.

SPEAKER_00: 47:21

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 47:23

That was a lot. It was a whole lot. And it took, it took longer than we would have wanted. How did you learn that concept of like surviving to thriving and going over that? I'll call it like an invisible line. Did you have help with that? Is that, did you read that? Where did that come from? It's really cool. Survived. I think we've read it. So I mentioned my wife with her counseling background.

SPEAKER_00: 47:46

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 47:46

I think that was something that she brought to the table and it really explained a lot of what we had seen more. retroactively. We're fans of counseling, period. We really believe that, depending on your age, talking things through can be really remarkable, especially with a third party. Not even clinical counseling per se, although I think that's fascinating and wonderful

SPEAKER_00: 48:11

and

SPEAKER_01: 48:11

helpful, and we've done some of that. Just the baseline of having that third party to help you walk through it is a big deal. One of the things we've talked a lot about in marriage counseling is that a lot of the things that we bump into with each other actually come back to the same idea. Here we are in our 40s. We've been married for 24 years. But when one of us feels threatened, which is a kind of weird thing for me to say as a guy, right? I think maybe there's a man card, but I actually think women are playing it the same way where we actually need to have a sense of felt safety to be open vulnerable not in some ways even to be fun to be free and sharing and sure who we are yeah so we i've seen this play out in lots and lots of relationships yeah even in a corporate space if people don't feel um at a simple level just safe

SPEAKER_00: 49:04

yeah

SPEAKER_01: 49:05

they'd be physically threatened uh but more a sense of like there's there's a

SPEAKER_00: 49:12

Emotional.

SPEAKER_01: 49:13

There's emotional health and the dynamic of relating back and forth. If they don't have that sense of felt safety, not only are they going to stink, they're not going to perform well, but we're never going to find out the truth of what's going on if there is a problem in their role because they're going to feel instantly threatened in some way and then they're going to close up and build a wall. So I guess I've seen that play out in lots

SPEAKER_00: 49:34

of areas. Yeah,

SPEAKER_01: 49:35

yeah. It's not something that I would have... It's not a word I would have used about myself that I needed to feel safe. It was always assumed in me, but I wasn't conscious enough of what was there to be able to put a word on until somebody, a counselor, brought it in and said that.

SPEAKER_00: 49:58

That's fascinating. I like the concept that when you were eight or nine, however you acted or reacted... you're doing the same thing today. You just

SPEAKER_01: 50:13

substituted different people at different phases throughout your life. So I just went through this with, I can't with accounts or with my one-on-one and he, he walked me through this and we're actually reading a great book on it. Um, but talks about like he had me unpack it. It was very difficult. Imagine you as an eight or nine year old, what did you do when your toys were taken? When, when somebody took your toy, What'd you do when this, and we all have such different reactions to that. If you were a single child, an only child dependent, like I had an older brother and we had different friends. We didn't have a lot of overlapping friends. So I was solo more times than not. Like there's so much that goes into it, but we unpacked the whole thing and it's exactly right. What did I do? I threw my little fits and I pounded my fist on the ground until I got it. And I learned something that ended up working. It's not a positive, but it worked. And it's pound your fist as hard as you can and as long as you can until somebody gives in. And once they give in, then

SPEAKER_00: 51:25

it's over. And you create that negative. It's a negative. It's not a good thing. And you learn,

SPEAKER_01: 51:31

oh, wait, if I just pound my fists. Sometimes literally, sometimes figuratively. If I just throw that tantrum and the response is yes, they give in, I just got to throw it. Yeah. Yeah. And it's unbelievable now. 38 years later, literally 38 years later, I have that same exact reaction. It's crazy. But there's good

SPEAKER_00: 51:55

news.

UNKNOWN: 51:55

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 51:55

right it's neat just knowing it and now like again how to live around it and live with

SPEAKER_01: 52:02

it and yeah you know character defects sometimes we can i'm saying it's also tactical wild you found something that worked and you stuck with it i we listen to a lot of podcasts and with my wife and her work in in counseling i find myself listening to what she's listening to and yeah she's done extensive learning in and around addiction. And one of the things that really caught my attention was a moment where a counselor was conveying to an addict her great understanding of his addictive behavior based upon his life, that she understood why he was running to that substance. And it made entirely all the sense in the world. Because that was something to actually fix the pain this person was feeling in their lives. And who doesn't seek out a fix? Was it the right fix? No, it was a horrific fix and almost killed this guy. But there was this sense of acknowledgement that really what we're doing is we're finding ways to fix the problems we have. And they can be super healthy or they can be so detrimental that we may not survive them.

UNKNOWN: 53:18

Right.

SPEAKER_01: 53:18

Hole in the soul. Yeah. Hole in the soul.

SPEAKER_00: 53:21

And we hug. I like hugging a cactus to the world. We're hugging a cactus. But to us, it's like this is the greatest thing. This has given me the fulfillment. I thought it was alcohol, drugs, whatever. Yeah. So good. Feels so good. It's the right thing. The world's going, why would you possibly hug a cactus? Don't you see this is ruining your life? Right. Yeah. That's, that's, that's neat. Okay. Um, all right, let's, so let's continue on. So we've got, you, you come out of school, you take a job at Wesleyan, you go, you're, you're in marketing,

SPEAKER_01: 53:57

but you're in fundraising. You mentioned fundraising. Okay. What is that like at a school like Wesleyan? What did you do? What's a day in the life? Calling donors? Are you like cold calling? So, you know, schools are interesting because they typically, private schools rather, are funded through tuition plus there's giving. The giving can come through endowment or it can come through annual funds or various types. So your basic math in the school business is fantastic. what percentage was which. These schools with massive endowments, I mean, maybe 30% of the cost of education is actually coming via endowment or some type of giving, and so you can keep your tuition costs lower. That's not what most of them do. Most of them keep pricing up their tuition and doing things that are extra extraordinary and raise the cost of education. So the goal was to go out and raise an additional... million dollars or so per year. And you split the list and you're going to people who are stakeholders in the school environment. All very obvious. But in my mind now, I recognize how distinct it is to be in a setting where the the child of the donor is indirectly a beneficiary, or you could say directly a beneficiary, to have a legal meaning with the IRS, but their child will benefit from the new gym along with thousands of other kids if they give to that building campaign. And then leading that later into fundraise in a setting where the beneficiary is a child who's not part of your family. There's no inherent kickback or a gift, that's a very different thing. I have to convey a picture of a child you don't know probably, more often than not, versus the child who's in your household who will benefit from our services. Big difference. Fundraising in a school setting is difficult because it's tedious and you're also dealing with people who are giving towards something that is going to impact their child and their sense of how is the state of affairs in the school. That's a conversation you've got to be open to having with them. But it's a lot easier to get their attention in many respects. It's so easy. They're there. So I liked it. Fundraising is, I think there are two different types of fundraisers. There are those who are sort of guns for hire who can really come in and you tell them the mission and they're just good people. They can sell it.

SPEAKER_00: 56:30

They can do it.

SPEAKER_01: 56:31

And then there's people who are sort of specific to the mission of that thing. They're

SPEAKER_00: 56:36

an

SPEAKER_01: 56:36

organizational leader.

SPEAKER_00: 56:37

Yeah, yeah. And

SPEAKER_01: 56:38

they're all about that thing, and they know fundraising is a piece of that. And one's not better than the other, actually. But for me, I had always been in a position where I had such a belief by my experience in the place, first with the school and then with Promise 686, that fundraising was just something you do on the side. Cause you're wanting to build awareness of the quality of what you're delivering.

SPEAKER_00: 57:03

Yeah. Yeah. Interesting.

SPEAKER_01: 57:05

Makes a lot of sense. All right. I want to try to, I want to try to focus into the day and if you know the minute or the hour, that's good too. But if you, but if you, we got to look at

SPEAKER_00: 57:15

it as like, maybe it was just over a month. I want to find the moment where you went from, I'm going to be a worker. which is a great thing. Nothing wrong with that. I'm going to be a worker too. I'm going to, I'm now over the line and doing my own gig. What happened there? Like that's so much risk. There's so much risk in that. What did it look like? Did you read a book? Did somebody tell you, Andy, you got to go and open a, a nonprofit? Like what did it,

SPEAKER_01: 57:48

how do you, how do you get there? You're not born to, you know, founding and director of, of this great nonprofit. So what did it, what did the decision look like? For me, the moment that comes to mind is the moment I identified what my fear was of pursuing the nonprofit. So in my case, identified the fear. Okay. In my case, that moment amounted to context. I'd been at Wesleyan for 10 years, really loved it. Wanted to be ahead of school.

SPEAKER_00: 58:21

I

SPEAKER_01: 58:21

had considered leaving to find that opportunity. I had actually applied for some jobs and some doors. One had actually opened. And I was meeting with the board chair of Promise 686. Now, Promise existed before I got there. While I was on the founding board, I helped start it in 2008, 2009. Up until 2013, I was simply a board member. And I had watched us do really one thing well. We had, as an organization, given grants to families so that they could adopt. And the basics of that have never changed at Promise. We've certified barriers that keep kids out of families, and we just attack them. And now, as we've grown and shifted, we attack actually through tech. We're using more technology to help mobilize people than we are just strict grant dollars, but we still do that as well. Anyway, so... promise was doing one thing one simple thing and i went to the board chair and asked him to be a reference for a head of school position for me because you know i had my employer be a reference and all those typical the character reference someone who had seen me in a volunteer capacity okay so since i've been on the board with uh tim who's still the chair of our prom 686 board I said, tell me, would you do this? He said, sure, you know, and he called, they spoke with whoever and he said nice things. And he called me back and he said, you know, I said all the right things, but I just want to tell you, I really do think you should look at running Promise. And I knew that was a possibility. And Promise wasn't something in my mind that was worthy of being run. It was too simple. The vision at that time was to be a grant making organization to families in and around really Metro and Metro Atlanta. So, okay. Hyperlocal. Hyperlocal. A couple people were involved? We had one staff member. Oh. Actually, that's not true. We had two staff members. Okay. I got you. So we, we had, we, we weren't anything like who we are now. And, um, I sat down with a mentor. I mentioned one, one Mark before another one, Jeff, who's been a mentor now of mine for 20 years. And for 15 years of that, we probably met every week or two. Wow. Just go deep, especially anything career wise. He was somebody I'd run things by and process them with me. And so he's been, he's been a faithful nurturer of my soul. And so I sat down with Jeff and I said, Jeff, So this is the moment you're asking for. I said, Jeff, I've got five job opportunities. I can stay where I am. Maybe I get to be an assistant head in this great school. Maybe something opens up. That could be super cool. Sure. That'd be fun. Second, I can go to this school over here, be an assistant head, and that door looks like it may open up to be a head of school, but in a different environment. That could be really

SPEAKER_00: 1:01:20

good.

SPEAKER_01: 1:01:20

Third, I can be a head of school in this small school. Yeah. And I'm pretty young, so to be ahead of school probably would have been a big chunk in a lot of people's eyes at that moment. And then I said, and fourth, there's this opportunity to run Promise 686. And I explained that to him. And I closed by saying, you know, the first three opportunities, I think, could all be pretty good. Yeah. But, you know, I'm just, there's no way I'm going to run Promise. And he's like, let me stop you there. Let me just tell you what I heard. you kind of were dull and to the point, one, two, three options. And then with number four is promise. You lit up and you told me a totally different narrative of the future to be and a vision you had for where it could go. But then you wrapped it up by saying, there's no way. I think there's something to the passion in your voice. What's that all about? And I knew instantly what it was all about. I knew what the fear was. And I, Tried to dodge it, kind of skip eye contact as long as I could. Yeah. That kind of thing. Wow. And I said, money? I said, you know, I've been in a school setting where the bulk of the money comes through tuition. There's a way to understand cashflow. There's a way to grow toward the future. I understand that business. We're talking about a nonprofit that hardly has a staff that has really no budget whatsoever. The whole thing is working off of about$100,000 a year. I said, that scares me to death. He asked a simple question. He said, Andy, do you think God owns the cattle on a thousand hills? And I knew the first, and I was kind of mad at him in the moment for asking, does God have all the wealth? You know, does he have all the resources was the message there. And that was a frustrating question, but it was what I needed to hear because there was a choice in response to the fear. I could either choose faith and say, if this is something God wants me to do, I will say yes wholeheartedly, not knowing how it's going to come together. Or will, will fear be the thing that kind of thwarts me from even walking down this road to clarify whether it's the adventure for me. Hey, I had to own that. I sat on it for a couple of days and I, I called the school that made me an offer, a great school. Hey, I, I'm going to do this other thing. And the guy was really nice about it. And then a couple of weeks later, I told the school where I was. And I remember I sat down at a leadership team meeting and the head of school said, Andy, why don't you explain to everybody what you're going to do? And I couldn't for the life of me explain what I was going to do because I didn't know what I was going to do. It had not been defined. We had not crafted the language to explain what was on the heart of the board and what was on my heart. And so I just felt stupid. I remember feeling really dumb. And that was a whole nother realm of fear. I was like, man, am I going to, am I really doing this? This is dumb. So I, you know, I left that, I had to kind of contract the end of the summers with the school. And I finished that job, you know, June 30th. And, you know, promised we might've had 30 grand in the bank and now three employees. And it, it just was, and we prayed and we, We knocked on doors, and we told people what we were about, and people have been generous and in partnership with us. And I've been there 11 years now. 11 years? Yes. Those two or three employees are now 40 employees, and Metro Atlanta is now 41 states.

SPEAKER_00: 1:04:59

Oh, my goodness. About 10

SPEAKER_01: 1:05:00

churches that we were serving to get them really plugged into foster care is now 2,100 churches. And what was simple as giving grants and money is a software platform that has about 60,000 users on it around the country who are really making a difference in the lives of kids who come into foster care. The blessing, somewhat naive, A bit faithful, yes, has been to go on a really crazy journey, and it's been hard. It's been really hard at times. It takes that faith choice in that moment with my mentor is still a choice, right? You know it from your life, and you're listening. Every day, there's a moment where you get to choose. Is it faith or fear? What am I going with? And I've chosen fear many times. Yeah, absolutely. Man, to the degree that I've chosen faith, it's been remarkably rewarding.

SPEAKER_00: 1:05:52

That's what a story. Oh my gosh. So faith and fear. Well, okay. A couple more questions. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 1:06:00

What would you say to the young Andy, 15 to 18 years old, somewhere in there, if you can go back, what advice would you give? Uh, be bolder. Yeah. Confident.

SPEAKER_00: 1:06:14

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 1:06:14

Yeah. Trophy goes, the one who believes the most, like get out there, stay confident, take bigger swings.

SPEAKER_00: 1:06:21

Don't

SPEAKER_01: 1:06:22

fear failure so much. You don't have to have it all locked up and understood, which I know my story probably sounds like there are lots of moments where I didn't have it understood. But the amount of fretting over not knowing, just get out there and speak up. That's my thing with my kids, sons and daughters, seven boys, three girls. Yeah. you know what, just, just speak up. You know, the, probably the best thing I learned in football and all those years of playing, it was the idea of the full speed mistake, you know, and the coach would say, Hey, you know, when you come to the sideline, if you went full speed, I'm not going to yell at you. It's, it's the, it's the being paralyzed

SPEAKER_00: 1:07:02

indecisive.

SPEAKER_01: 1:07:03

That's the thing that you're going to, you're going to hear from me. Yeah. If you go full speed, Hey, that's, that's all I can.

SPEAKER_00: 1:07:09

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 1:07:09

So you, when you talk faith, faith and fear, and you can, You can choose either. Was your fear money, but really it was safety and security.

SPEAKER_00: 1:07:23

Was it the thing that money gave? Go like, cause that's typically what it is for me.

SPEAKER_01: 1:07:29

It's like, oh my gosh, we can lose the business or lose this. And what you're really saying, what I'm really saying is, oh, Then the revenue

SPEAKER_00: 1:07:39

stream, we wouldn't have revenue. But when I impact that, then we wouldn't have profit. Then we wouldn't have a

SPEAKER_01: 1:07:45

salary. So how am I going to make a living? How am I going to pay for a house? How am I going to pay for my kid's school? And at the end of the day, the elevator approach is I keep going down. Why, why, why, why, why?

SPEAKER_00: 1:07:55

It's

SPEAKER_01: 1:07:56

really what I think I'm going to miss out on is security.

SPEAKER_00: 1:08:03

Mm-hmm.

SPEAKER_01: 1:08:05

But it's like, then one of my mentors will just hit me and go, just remember your

SPEAKER_00: 1:08:13

past. You have a history of

SPEAKER_01: 1:08:19

getting an idea. You have been successful. You've had ups and downs, but the tenure has done nothing but grow.

SPEAKER_00: 1:08:31

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 1:08:32

Yeah. Revenue and success in dollars in all those things that are just something of the earth, but that are filling that security void that you're really afraid of. Cause I'll say like, well, I'm gonna have to pull my kids out of perimeter or I'm going to have to stop doing that. Yeah. That's really what I'm saying is like, I'm just afraid I'm not going to be safe and secure. But the truth is, I don't get it from that anyway. Yeah, yeah. But it's a pitfall. That's good. So I would say to you expressing that about safety and security. Yes, I would agree. And I would say security inside as I kind of zoom in, I'm getting closer to it. Failure, fear of failure, the ramifications of failure. going out on your own and something.

SPEAKER_00: 1:09:22

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 1:09:22

I think that's very uncharted as, as it was with, with promise six, eight, six at the time, you know, to, to go from it, a secure environment where I'd had success. Um, and I didn't have a lot of financial success. I was in education. So that wasn't a big piece of it, but to go out and to, to put that to a test, um, I think, um, I think the nightmare of falling through the black tunnel and striking out, you know, like striking out was fundamentally embarrassing. And to put yourself in an environment where you can strike out, that's, that's hard. And when your strikeout becomes public, that's hard. When your other employees who would be expecting your, your role and bringing in revenue to be something that would help their families, that's big. So I think, I think the, you know, the clearest terms there would be the fear of failure.

SPEAKER_00: 1:10:16

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 1:10:17

Yeah. and all that came with that.

SPEAKER_00: 1:10:19

Yeah, that's very helpful. Very helpful. Because you were in a framework at Wesleyan. You knew your check was coming. Yeah. You knew the school wasn't

SPEAKER_01: 1:10:28

closing next week. It's been there forever, right? Like there was so much safety in and around that. Okay, very, very cool. All right, let me end on, let's end with what does the future look like for you, for Andy. And that's all things Andy. That's your role as a husband. That's your role as a father. That's your role with promise. Like you're how old? 47. 47. Me too. So what is, whatever you see it as, do you see the next five years, 10 years, like what are, where are you heading? Yeah, I think it's pretty clear to me. It is so obvious though. I'm not sure it's going to be worth listening to. So I'm just saying to invest more in people, than i do in productivity um to see my investment in people as the greatest form of productivity that i could actually have so from a work environment um promise 686 has been a labor of love where i've been intricately plugged into everything okay and yet we now have a team of leaders who are so capable not just arguably more capable yeah but evidenced in them exhibiting greater capability than me. And so my role in really being a leader of leaders is now required. I'm actually in the way if I'm not that. And that's a shift for me. And my dad is a big do-it-yourselfer. So I take on home additions and remodeling projects, those sort of things. That's super fun. But that's not actually where I am professionally. I need to not go to Home Depot. I need to invest in securing the vision in my heart in such a way that I can convey it well enough to the team that I'm with so they can go and live it and support them as they hit roadblocks along the way. So that's the professional front to me. My personal life is similar in that I've got these budding young adult kids who, you know, I've got five of my boys, for instance, are between 19 and 21, like five kids crammed right there. And they're all trying to figure out what does this look like?

SPEAKER_00: 1:12:50

Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 1:12:51

What's next? You know, up to this moment, it's been next year is next year. You just go to the next grade. Now there's choice. Investing in them as well as my daughters are kind of on either side of that. That seems clearer to me than it ever has before. And then with the two 11-year-olds, just enjoying them. People may tell you this. If you ask somebody who's had kids with like elite spacing from 26 down to 11, the beauty of it is that you know so many things that you don't want to miss out on, like those 11-year-olds. Whereas you just survived with the oldest kids With these younger ones, there's an opportunity there to be connected in a way that, frankly, I just didn't have the maturity or wherewithal to take on earlier. Yeah. Those little guys. People, people, people. What are they into? What are they into? Sports, sports, sports. What aren't they into, right? Just like you, right? Every sport. Yeah. It's in perms. Probably social media and all the other stuff, too. All the normal stuff. that's coming at me for sure.

SPEAKER_00: 1:14:04

That's incredible, man. All right. Well, leave me, leave me with something, leave me with some kind of hope, hope for the hope for the future. Give me a, give me a

SPEAKER_01: 1:14:15

nugget. Give me an Andy nugget. What do you find yourself saying to encourage people a lot, whether it's a sentence, a phrase, um, favorite quote, favorite

SPEAKER_00: 1:14:27

anything? Like what's Andy? What's got Andy written all over it?

SPEAKER_01: 1:14:31

Well, so I work in this space where everybody around me is into one or the other thing. And I'm kind of into both, but there are people who are on my team who are all about securing families for kids. Like their thing is a kid in their mind.

SPEAKER_00: 1:14:46

who's

SPEAKER_01: 1:14:47

lonely and isolated, who is in desperate need of family. And that moves them every day. From a 6-8-6 is Psalm 68-6. That's the basis for the organization. So God sets the lonely in families. That's our verse. So they're about lonely kids needing families. Then there's another group that I work with who are fired up for the greatest asset to care for kids. You looked institutionally around the United States is churches. And man, if you're someone who's a person of Christian faith and you're looking at it, you go, I desperately want to see the church step up and do their

SPEAKER_00: 1:15:23

thing.

SPEAKER_01: 1:15:24

Because man, if they can get in the game, we'll have more than enough resources for the kids who are going to continue to come into care because family breakdown will

SPEAKER_00: 1:15:30

continue.

SPEAKER_01: 1:15:32

And so what fires me up is that I see it happening. I see churches around the country

SPEAKER_00: 1:15:38

saying,

SPEAKER_01: 1:15:39

this isn't... foreign international thing that we were doing this is a here and now

SPEAKER_00: 1:15:45

right here

SPEAKER_01: 1:15:46

ready our people to do the really hard work of stepping into the mess of child welfare and i get to see that from my vantage point and even try to resource that everything that we do and i i guess the great hope is that people are responding to the harder tasks

SPEAKER_00: 1:16:05

yeah

SPEAKER_01: 1:16:05

of faith and You know, it's one thing to give and, you know, I love it when people give. We don't survive. Right. It's another to sort of transactionally give toward like a specific need. But if you can do those things and walk with people in pain. Oh, man. That's transformative. And I'm seeing folks in churches around the country step up, man up, and actually do that sort of transformative relational work. Yeah. That's good for the soul. I mean, it just feels good. Oh man, that's encouraging. You got me thinking now. So you're out there living. Would you say you're living your purpose? Yeah. You're just on fire. I

SPEAKER_00: 1:16:45

can hear it and

SPEAKER_01: 1:16:46

feel, I can feel it. It is. Well, you know, it is awesome. It's a, it's a really a dream come true. A dream that I couldn't have formulated. Right. Right. It's, it's a lot of fun for sure. And it's, and it's hard. It's grueling. Uh, and the opportunities.

SPEAKER_00: 1:17:03

Yeah. Yeah. Thanks for your time, man.