S1 E19 - The Power of Intentional Development

Welcome to the Broke to Woke podcast. Our mission for this podcast is to help each and every person out there in the world not only become a force for good, but also uncover those micro magical mental moments that help you become an absolute cerebral pyromaniac. In the last episode, you were kind of discussing about Gandhi. You mentioned India and turning this whole country around. But at one point, if I recall, you wanted to create orphanages in Africa.

Yeah.

Can we go back to that dream? Like, where did that happen? Where is this occurring? Give me some information on that.

So the inspiration for getting into business at all was to be able to have enough money to build my own orphanages and move to Africa. And so I started in Nashville in 2009, building this company, trying to get to that point again, trying to get to buying an apartment complex before I turn 26 so I can leave. So I've got this constant pressure on myself in the middle of this recession to get it right really quick, because you have to go by 26, like, you got to be ready to go. So I didn't have enough money on my journey to be able to build my own orphanage. But what I could do, because, again, you don't have to have, like, billions of dollars to make an impact, was for every house that I sell, I will sponsor an orphan in the name of the home buyer for a year. I'd be able to give them, yeah, food, clothes, water, education. And I worked with a group called Horizon Initiative to be able to do that, and it was awesome. And so we were, you know, sponsoring hundreds of kids throughout our journey. And I got invited to actually go to Kenya and see the orphanage itself. And so I. And I brought my best friend with me. I remember complaining to my friend that I don't have any real skills. I can't, you know, pull a tooth that's, you know, infectious or change any eyeballs. I only had skills in flipping houses, so I was like, what am I going to do, flip a mud hut? I have no useful skills. And so he's like, just go anyway. And so I went and I got to tour this orphanage, and it was absolutely beautiful. And I got really judgy inside. I was like, there are heaps of garbage, starving children, a ton of need right outside these gates. And you guys are spending this amount of money on the landscaping? How dare you? You could help more people if you stop wasting money. So I thought, okay. And I was a big supporter of this organization, and I would spend time with these kids. And I did an exercise where I had Them, like, draw their future and do all this fun stuff, some crafts and stuff. And what I found out was every kid that was there had been sexually abused in some way, had really horrific things happen to their parents, aids, all kind of things. But when these kids would draw their future, they drew these amazing futures, these beautiful futures. And this little girl, she's like five years old, drew herself as the president of Kenya, holding hands with a nice husband, living in this really nice little shack. It was so cute. And she had a dream of a better future. And I ended up finding out, like, her story. And it was horrible. What I learned was because these kids were in this beautiful environment, it affected what they thought was possible for their life. And I took that with me for the rest of my life. And you'll see how it pops up in my journey later. So I'm at this orphanage. It was really cool. They had a cow farm, chicken farm, vegetable garden, and they would, you know, teach the kids real skills, feed the kids healthy food, sell the rest in the marketplace and be able to cover overhead. Okay. I thought that was really cool.

Yeah.

It wasn't a bunch of pastors or anything like that. It was just businessmen. And they had seen things they can't unsee. So I loved that. So we went and we were going to drove eight hours to go look at the second potential orphanage site.

Okay.

And we get there and I help them do the land deal.

This is in the same country. Okay.

About eight hours away. A really rough road.

Yeah. I was like, wow.

It was so overwhelming too. One of the things that I realized on that eight hour journey was there was just slums after slums after slums after slums and things that we could never fathom living in. And there's millions of people living in these places. And it was so overwhelming. He felt. I felt for the first time in my little, you know, I'm gonna change the world. I was like, this is impossible to fix. It's too much. I started having these scary thoughts and again, feeling insecure. What do I really have to offer? But I get to this next location, and I helped him do the land deal, and then I helped him create the site plan on, okay, where do the kids live? And then I helped him do a market study to say, should we do a chicken farm or a tilapia farm? How do we not flood the market and destroy all the jobs, but be able to create enough revenue to cover the overhead? And then I helped him create the architectural plans, which was reinventing a family model versus warehousing children. And I realized that God had been giving me this journey that gave me all the skills to really be able to make a difference versus just a one time thing, which is still hugely impactful. But I had no idea I would use my real estate skills.

Yeah, over there.

Over there. And what I found out later was just because we had tied up this site a year later, we didn't even touch it yet. The team went back and found that this was the most, you know, originally impoverished area around. Like the parents were selling their kids for $25 or two year old little boys and girls for $25 into sex trafficking, knowing what was gonna happen to them. But without it, the whole family would die.

That level of desperation was in this area, which is why we picked it. And we came back and there's this like thriving economy. Like what the heck is going on? What? Like if this was the perimeter of our land, all these businesses moved in and we're like, what the freak found out? Because the rumor on the street was that the Americans are investing in this spot. There must be. It's kind of like gold in them hills. There must be something there we don't see. And so the community moved all their businesses in and it became one of the wealthiest areas. They no longer had to sell their kids. And it just caught a really good fire. And what that taught me was the power of real estate development. If you really want to solve human trafficking at its root, or poverty related issues or some of the worst atrocities in mankind, it's through the creation of opportunity. And you can create opportunity by creating hype through investment in an area we hadn't even broken ground. And so I asked myself, that's too cool. Whoa. The thing that I really care about, I can solve through my gift.

That had to fire you.

And I didn't even. I never cared about real estate. I'm gonna confess it now. I've never given a crap. I still don't really. It's not even my. It's not the thing. The thing is human trafficking, the thing is ending world issues. This happens to be my vehicle to get there. But I was sneak attacked by God to learn all the stuff that I thought was just a means to an end. I thought it would just make me the money I needed. But I have the skill set now to shift areas and help solve these problems at their roots. So it was the biggest game changer for me in my thinking. So instead of just doing a house, here, here, here, here, here, here, here. Because it was a good Deal. I asked myself, how can I practice taking hopeless places and making them economically self sustainable in my own backyard? How can I practice that? And so I got in to these new projects with a completely different, different attitude, right? I didn't even care anymore. I mean, of course you had to be profitable to keep going. But it was never about that because it wasn't about making the money to then go make a difference. It's how do I make a difference and make enough money to keep going.

Correct.

How do I practice and learn transformation and mindful revitalization to where it's creating opportunity? Not just the change, it's also creating opportunity. And so I started buying up the areas that the banks wouldn't even lend on. Like, nobody would touch them. They would tell me, brittany, nobody's ever gonna live there. I think that's illegal. But they did it anyway. This is the south, people, they don't always care. So they would say, no one will ever buy that spot. And so I had to find really creative ways to get the funding for my projects. But I started buying up these neighborhoods and then one day decided to order signs that say Aerial Development Group and put a sign in the yard. We had like 60 lots in one neighborhood called Salem Town.

Okay.

And because the signs came in in one day, we just put them all up. Wasn't a big deal. A journalist happened to be driving through the neighborhood and was like, oh my gosh, this is going to be the next frontier. Wrote a story about it. And then the area went gangbusters.

We'd specifically targeted. We'd work with the police to understand where the worst, like, crime was, what was the worst of the worst of the worst crime. And we would buy those houses or the completely abandoned houses. It was never like the sweet little old lady's house that like wants to stay in the neighborhood. That was not it. Because I understood if you can not make this one spot, the crime neighborhood, if you can make it a safe place and you clean, literally just clean up trash. Like, my team, doesn't matter what they make per hour, would go pick up trash off the street. Then you shift the environment, you shift the thinking, and people start to raise their standards. And so we started completely transitioning neighborhoods. And when that press went out, it was amazing. And what I realized is people are sheep most of the time. This sounds evil, but it's not. It's. They just people want to know that somebody else is doing it first. To have the faith enough to invest in a spot, it's crazy. So that that began my journey in revitalizing areas and having a totally different view in how to create jobs and more economic sustainability than just flipping a house.

That is magnificent. That really is. That's amazing because you're talking about this.

Transformation that you didn't even think was going to be happening. And so you go over here, Africa. Well, I don't have any skills. Nope, you do. In fact, you have all the skills that you need. And then you take that same idea and implementation and thought process and bring it back over to Nashville, Tennessee, and start implementing and figuring out a way to create that same shift and impact here.

And it's always, how do you create a hand up? Not a handout, Because I think handouts destroy human dignity.

Yeah.

And so how can you make places that may not be able to afford things, be able to afford things? By bringing in the education, the resources, the opportunity. Just like that area. Same people lived there in Africa, but they just had new opportunity, they had new education, they had new access. Because people, if they want it, will pull themselves up. If you reward them for not pulling themselves up, they're never gonna do it.

And that's that. Hand out.

Yeah.

Right. And so you can't just say, hey, you haven't done anything. Here you go.

Right.

But if you give people a reason, a cause, a mission, something to strive for. I love what you said about the standards being raised. Because when you start raising standards, as Tony Robbins says, that is a phenomenal way to have the quickest shift and the biggest growth in your own life is you just say, I will not stand for this anymore. This is where standard is.

Right, Right. And if. Have you ever walked in, like, a junky bathroom in a gas station and there's just toilet paper everywhere? Gross stuff. If you drop the toilet paper on the floor, you're just kind of like, I don't really even want to pick it up. But if you go in a really fancy hotel and you drop something, you pick it up because the floors are shiny, everything's nice. Humans adapt to their environment very quickly. And so if you can clean up the environment, physically, even clean it, we've gone and done work to, like, these little old ladies who can't afford to maintain the front of their house. We'll rebuild it for them. We'll actually do work for people who want to stay in the community but can't keep up with it. Just to raise the standard of the community. It's amazing. And then people just think different. And it was that little girl that taught me that it doesn't matter if you lived in a garbage heap or raped all the time. Your parents die in front of you. Doesn't matter what your. Even your background, you can shift based on your new environment. It's crazy.

Yeah.

So resetting the standard can create opportunity because it creates faith that there's change happening and you should get on board.

Incredible. Yeah. And that, that's. We're talking sheer power at this point. So when you're doing this, you're probably.

I mean, my guess, my estimation is people are probably taking notice at this point and they're starting to try to figure out how to do it with. With you, maybe.

Yeah. I mean, it's its own thing. And there's a good. There's a right way to do it, there's a wrong way to do it. And that's why I say mindfully revitalizing the urban core. And there's a lot of not great developers out there. You actually asked me earlier about gentrification. I'm going to bring it up because there's a good way to do it and there's a bad way to do it. There's a way to invest in a community that raises the standard, that helps create opportunity, that makes areas safer, that says that these kind of behaviors are not acceptable. So you step up, step up. Here's more opportunity than just drug dealing. There's more education than everything you had to have known. This is America that I'm talking about. So it's really important to master plan and understand the effect that your approach in a neighborhood is gonna have.

Yeah, the master plan, that's a big piece of it.

It's a big deal. You can't just flop in and flop out. Like, you gotta understand your effect on the community. You have a lot of power. And so I speak and I teach a lot because I want developers to understand that you're shifting communities. And even if you're not shifting something, if you're building something from scratch, you're affecting environments that affect mindsets that affect futures. So be intentional. Don't cheap out, don't cut corners. Care so much about the way in which you bring something to life, because you are going to affect the future. And what we're doing now is we're actually doing still really ballsy projects that people would say are idiotic sometimes, but they're case studies for the way in which to design in intentionality. So we're building the first truly green neighborhood. We built the first health and wellness development in Nashville, Tennessee, was number four in the nation for highest rating of obesity related deaths. One out of every five people at the time when I started this development were dying of obesity related diseases. One out of every five, that is. You want to save lives.

Yes.

Get your health together. And so we created environments that really promote an active lifestyle. They don't shame people, they give you the access. Most health is about access. So there's ways to influence and make the world a better place in the way in which you approach your project. You may not be a real estate developer, but what is your product? What is your company? What is the effect of your operations?

What are your standards?

Yes.

Yeah.

How can I be just so more intentional to be able to create the change that I want to see in the world? You have that power.

Back to Gandhi. I love that. Thank you so much for sharing that. That's incredible. Again, listeners, viewers, people who are here.

I'm over here just soaking this in. I really hope you are as well, because that is what this podcast is for. Going from broke to woke, understanding all the mental hurdles that can hold us back. And that is one of them right there. Standards. Raise your standards with whatever project it is that you're focused on and your life can absolutely turn out for the better. Thank you for sharing that episode with us.

Thank you for listening to the Broke to Woke podcast. You can learn more at geforcemastermind.com or by following us on Instagram @gforcemastermind. Like the broke to Woke podcast. Click the link in our description to join a mastermind with other force for good entrepreneurs just like you who are taking their life and their businesses to the next level.