In The Thick of It

You better get on with a program of

how you are wired, what you do well,

what you really feel passionate about.

You better be on that.

So the gift is what is it you can do well?

And the calling is, what is that thing in your heart?

This is where I'm going to apply it.

Welcome to In the Thick of It.

I'm your host, Scott Hollrah.

On today's episode, Dr.

John Morgan gives us a glimpse into what it's

like to found and run a global nonprofit.

This discussion reminded me of the anecdote.

Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day.

Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.

John tells the inspiring story of a leader

in Kenya who, after attending one of Dr.

Morgan's training courses, transformed his life

and started multiple successful businesses. Dr.

Morgan emphasizes the importance of property

ownership, creating value, and buying into

one's calling as keys to success.

We also discuss similarities between running a

nonprofit and running a for profit business,

highlighting the need for competent and passionate

individuals on one's team.

Welcome back to In the Thick of It.

John, welcome to the podcast. Thank you, Scott.

Great to be here.

Great to have a tour of your place.

This is a cool joint.

Well, thank you very much.

Let's just start off with some basics.

Tell people where do you live, what do

you do, and how'd you get into it?

Yeah, I live here in the Dallas-Fort Worth area.

I'm up just north, the flower mound in the

Argyle area and been living here almost two years.

I'm an old dog.

So many years ago, when I was a young buck,

I went to seminary here in the Dallas area.

So I was used to kind of the Dallas life a

little bit, then went out west, where I really am from.

I worked in pastoral ministry for 30 years.

I was a lead pastor for most of that time.

And in the course of that process, I had the privilege

of doing a lot of mission work around the world.

And the same theme, the same problem kept popping up

over and over in every context where I would go.

And that problem was the problem of poverty.

And every time I would come away from

one of those environments, whether it was in

Asia or Africa or Latin America or Haiti,

just really bothering me that particularly there weren't

Christian models that was actually solving the problem.

Lots of charity going on, and there

are appropriate times and places for charity,

but charity does not solve poverty.

In fact, where charity gets overused as an attempt

to solve poverty, it actually makes it worse because

it creates a whole culture of dependence.

So all my life I've been a

student of not only Christian theology, but

also economics and organizational leadership.

And I just man, this thing was just bugging

me because I knew there was a deeper methodology

to actually solve the poverty, because poverty has been

solved millions of times in individual cases over history.

In fact, most people, if you knew your family

history, you could trace generations back far enough, you

would find a generation that lived in poverty.

It only takes my family about

three generations back to find it.

And there was a process at one generation in which

they said, we got to get out of poverty.

We got to work this thing out.

And they did.

So the essential process is the same.

It has always been the same.

And the AHA moment for me was when it

dawned on me that the core principles for solving

poverty and creating prosperity and I came to them

mostly through economic research, are actually in the Bible.

So for me to get that integration in my life, I

realized, okay, I'm committed to the idea of sound economics.

That's inspiring to me.

But to know that that's rooted in the

Bible too, which I believe God's given us

principles there and it's all integrated truth, that

was like, whoa, the big moment for me.

So I knew that God was calling me into a

broader field and world of work beyond just one local

church to really serving the church in the world.

So about six years ago, I founded this organization

that I now lead called People Prosper International.

Started a succession process for the leadership in my

church that took a couple of years and completed

that and then went into this full time.

So now we're working at multiple places

around the world and we teach what

we call biblical economic empowerment and leadership.

And it's been pretty phenomenal to see how people

take to it and what they do with it. That's awesome.

Yeah, well, so thanks for that intro.

What you describe to me kind of sounds like the mantra

of give a man a fish, he'll eat for a day,

teach a man a fish, he'll teach for a lifetime.

Is that kind of a good corollary to what you all do?

Absolutely.

That's absolutely what we do.

And then a number of times when we do what

we do around the world, the people will actually come

up to us and they know that saying and they'll

say, thank you for teaching me how to fish.

That's awesome.

Now, when we met online via Zoom a couple of

weeks ago, just getting to know one other, you told

me a story about one person in particular who I

think his words to you were something like, why has

nobody ever told us this before?

That story was just incredibly powerful.

Would you maybe share a little bit more

about that man and what's happened as a

result of what you guys have helped him?

Well, one of the places where we have

one of the biggest footprints is in Kenya.

So we've been working there and I've

been teaching these training courses since 2010.

And so we have a number of people in that

part of Africa now that are doing some great stuff.

Man, it's inspiring.

But kind of my main contact guy there, he's a

guy named Shim Okello, and part of a great family.

In fact, a lot of people in our family

have just been totally transformed by this training.

So Shim was the secretary General for the Southern

Baptist in Kenya and they have 4000 churches.

So Shim's a high level leader.

Shim is very literate in Bible, he's very

literate in theology, he's literate in Christian leadership.

Really good guy, smart guy.

And after the first day of him sitting in our training,

yeah, at the end of it, and I felt like I

could tell he was mad because that's what he said.

How come nobody's ever told us this?

Because I began that day.

It was a room full of some pretty

high level leaders that he had gathered.

I told them, I said, I'm going to tell you

the secret of why there are funds that I can

use to come over here and train you, but there's

not funds behind you to come over and train me.

So I'm going to teach you the secret of that.

I said, and I'm going to give

you something more powerful than money.

I'm going to teach you the secret

of how to create your own money.

And I don't mean you print funny

money, I mean how you make money.

And so I had him at that point.

And then by the end of the

day, that was one of his responses.

One of the principles that we talk

about is that it is absolutely critical

that you buy and own property legally.

Because if you don't, the poor around

the world, they live on property.

They use property at almost all poor work.

So they have some kind of an income stream.

Usually it's not enough, but still they

have some kind of income coming in.

But they never own property legally.

And what that means is they do not have

a place where money can go and it gets

stored and that value is retained and can grow.

So people in the west, we just take it for granted.

That's just normal life.

That's second nature to us.

But that's one of the commonalities

about the poor around the world.

It's been researched thoroughly and it's a huge,

huge deal helping people get into property ownership.

And so the second thing he said to me was, he

said, I never knew that you should own your property.

He goes, I've been renting my house for forever.

He's in his upper forty s and he's like, Forever?

I've rented my house.

And before that year was out, I got an email from

him that he had bought a piece of property, he had

hired a contractor to build a house for him.

And he told me, I'm going to have

my house paid off in five years. Years.

And I said five years.

My house will not be paid off in five years.

So that was his initial reaction.

You want me to tell you a little bit about

some of the things that he's put together since that?

Yeah, that'd be great.

One thing I think that's important to note, our audience

is pretty broad and diverse, and there are some that

have certainly had exposure to the church and to the

Bible, and there are others that have not.

And I think something that's worth noting for those listeners

who are a part of the church, I don't think

you're preaching a health and wealth gospel at all.

You are genuinely trying to teach people

how to pull themselves out of poverty.

Yeah, and my personal opinion is that I don't

believe in and I don't support the prosperity gospel.

I believe that that is an idea that we are

entitled to wealth because we are children of God.

So somehow we're entitled and we kind of hope it

in, we kind of wish it in, we kind of

pray it in, and then it just shows up.

I've never known anybody who built prosperity that way, although

it seems to be pretty popular in the world.

But we do believe in the principles of

prosperity, that there are the right actions that

you can do to solve poverty and to

create more income and to grow prosperity.

So yeah, that's a good clarification.

Thanks for making that.

So yeah, back to my story with Shim.

He got to work pretty quick. Starting to apply.

What we talk about and we talk about first principle is

you have to create the best value that you can.

I look at a guy like you who's an entrepreneur,

you live and you thrive in the tech world.

There was a particular part of that tech world that

you realized, I've mastered this, I know what I'm doing,

I know how to bring value to the market.

And then at one point you said to yourself, I

can create higher value if I'm running an organization, because

if I do it just on my own, I can

make a wage and I can make a good living.

But building an organization is probably going to be

my best way to create my best value.

And it has, it's been a jump.

It's been a jump for you over what you did previously.

So people who think in these

principles, that's kind of normal.

And even now when I talked to you

about current state of your organization, I could

tell that that's like a daily thought process.

Am I using my capacities?

Am I maximizing that to create

the best value that I can?

So the poor around the world don't think that way.

They don't.

It's one of the big mistakes.

When Westerners go around the world, they give charity,

they think, well, if I give them enough, they

just take it and run, they'll be great.

No, they don't.

Because they by and large,

there's a victimized mentality.

There's a mentality of passivity.

In fact, kind of a funny thing and I say this

in almost every training I do around the world and I've

never seen a crowd not laugh and agree to with it.

And that is, if the poor get a windfall

of money, what do they do with it?

Well, kind of universally they throw a party because there's

not really a thought of how would I hold on

to this and grow it into more and leverage up?

That's not the thought.

The thought is I'm never going to get out of poverty.

We might as well enjoy this week or this event.

What's going to go on now?

So there is a mindset that

is totally different that we challenge.

We challenge them at the spirit level.

We challenge them at the mental level.

So we challenge them to create the best value that

they can, to own the best property they can.

And then those that can do it to

grow the best business that they can.

Those three things create a

virtuous cycle of prosperity.

So Shim, he just man, he just kind of

got to it and he just started thinking about,

okay, where can I create value here?

Where can I create it there?

The first thing that he did is the Southern Baptist.

Right at that time when I was showing

up, the Southern Baptists were officially leaving the

American Southern Baptists were officially leaving Kenya.

They were declaring this is

a reach nation for Christianity.

Let's pour our resources into other countries

around the world that are not, quote,

reached yet by their standards.

So the Kenyans were kind of in a panic.

The Kenya Christians that were Southern Baptists, they

were in a bit of a panic. Oh no.

Because they relied a lot on their

help and their leadership and their money.

So they're all pulling out.

And shem went to the convention and said, look, you've

got a great van here that is being used.

Would you donate that to us and let me use it?

I would like to use it

and start a transportation business.

So that's the first thing he

did, start a transportation business.

They would transport mostly tourists around Kenya.

Take them on safaris, take them on missions, trips.

He started adding that to that where they would

make money on that, they would buy other vans.

He took the best of his van to the

bank and he got a loan against that van.

And he built a four

story, three across apartment building.

So that's twelve units.

And so now he's got a rental property in America.

It would be really hard to take a van

and turn that into a multi unit apartment complex.

Yeah, but in that market where you can build

cheap, cheap labor, cheap materials, it's a block building.

So it's very solid building.

Not fancy at all, but is functional.

There's a lot of people in that

market that's a great fit for them.

So now he's got that going on.

He developed some agricultural businesses.

He went, started working up

other rental property businesses.

Then he started a business as a medical clinic.

There was a neighborhood close to

his neighborhood needed medical clinic.

He opened up a medical clinic.

He now has three doctors who work for him.

He's got three block apartments behind the clinic.

He rents those out to the doctors.

His 15 year old daughters cuts

the checks for all his payroll.

Every week, his daughter is

writing checks to pay doctors.

When Shim was young, he aspired to be a doctor,

but he could not pass the tests to be approved

on the educational track in Kenya to become a doctor.

He's now writes the paychecks for doctors in Kenya.

The women who are pretty stylish about their hair,

what they get is this very elaborate braided hairdo.

They're beautiful, but it takes a ton

of work, and they're expensive to get.

So that's the kind his wife wants.

He's got a housekeeper that lives with them.

She wants that kind of a hairdo.

He's got daughters growing up.

They want that kind of a hairdo.

So he's like, you guys are killing me on hairdos here.

I'm just going to take a guess that

as entrepreneurial as he is, he saw a

market opportunity and he started a salon. Yeah.

And here's a dude that

doesn't know anything about salons.

And he goes and opens up the salon.

And the main gal there, she's not only

a hairstylist, but she's also a teacher.

So he's got a hair salon school.

Beauty school. One and only. Yeah.

I've got a picture of he and

I in with some of the hairstylists.

Then out front, over the front, it says Blessed Salon.

It's kind of cute the way they named

their businesses in some of those places. But yeah.

Blessed salon indeed. It was a great thing.

He's making money off it.

Then he takes me to another place around

the corner where he's opened up a butchery,

and they call it a butchery.

It's a meat market.

It's basically where you buy beef.

So they rent out a little storefront about the

size of this room that we're recording in.

And on one, the wall, it's

not a big room for reference.

Yeah, no, it's not big.

And there's a glass plate window between them and

the street, and there's a big hook from the

ceiling, and there's whatever size beef, either half a

beef or a quarter of beef.

So they will usually buy a quarter beef, and

that's what they can sell within the amount of

time that the temperature of that room.

It's good.

So he just keeps seeing these

opportunities and building these things out.

He's now gotten pretty sophisticated

with his rental properties.

And when I was with him two months ago in may.

They have just opened the door on a hospital.

He has gone into business with a doctor and several

other people that are there, like their board and their

directors, they've all put their life savings into it.

And their business model is so attractive that they've

got some Western money coming in as venture capital

behind them and they've launched this again.

You know, when Shim tells a story, he's like, when

I was a kid, my dad was so disappointed that

I couldn't get the grades to go into medical school.

Now he's an owner in a hospital.

Yeah, that's pretty incredible. Yeah.

He's still a leader of a lot of ministries, but now he's

at a point where back in 2010, I said, you know what?

Here's my vision.

That within one generation, your children would never even

think that they need to go raise money from

the west because they know how to create everything

that they need here in Kenya.

That's coming true in his life. That's amazing. Yeah.

One of the things that strikes me as you tell the

story is you're not just pulling him out of poverty.

And I think it would have been a win.

I think it would have been a

success had he bought his home.

And even if that was the end of the

story, I think that would be a huge success.

But not only has he done that and

created prosperity for himself, it sounds as if

he's almost created his own economy.

And he's got people that he employs

and the businesses that he has started

up need things from other businesses.

And so he's created this just flywheel of

commerce between him and other that's just that

seems so critical to making this all work.

There's this whole ecosystem around him because he's

so well known, because of all of his

ministry and leadership of a variety of things.

He has a brother named Jared who became a

member of Parliament during the same stretch of time.

So in the same stretch of time, his brother

Jared was asking the same question how do I

create the best value I can with my life?

And I counseled with him early on because

he was really wrestling with the idea of

could God call a Christian into public service?

And I'm like, he better, he better, or we're

going to lose these countries, including our own.

And so I said, if you feel

that calling, I'd strongly urge you.

So now he's right in the middle of the

inner circle of the prime minister now in Kenya.

But because of that, they are just so

well known around the country and everybody's clamoring

for Shim to come teach them.

He's gone over to Uganda, a neighboring

country, and they went nuts over it.

I was with him across the border

in Tanzania, just south of Kenya.

And when I do trainings now, I have sessions where I do

some of it, but I have him do some of it.

So he gets up and he's speaking

in Swahili, and then there's a Tanzanian

man speaking their local tribal dialect.

And I've already trained some, and both

these guys know what we're talking about.

And I'm sitting over behind them and I'm watching these

two guys, and these guys are like a comedy show.

I'm like, These guys ought to hit the road.

They've got the crowd rolling, it's in a little

mud hut village church, and they're just rolling, screaming

with laughter, all the stories that they're telling.

But I'm like, These guys ought to hit the road, man.

This stuff is money, what these guys are doing.

But they believe it, they live it.

They're totally excited about this idea.

And I love the word

empowerment because it's what happens.

The power of the real truth.

When it gets inside somebody, you're never the same.

I'm going to paraphrase, but you kind of put out

the question, where can I create the highest value?

And I think it's really cool to see

you saw an opportunity for you to create

your highest value by setting up this organization.

And now not only have you helped Shem create

this prosperity for himself and his family and for

all these others, but now he's actually multiplying that

and creating the most value by not just running

these organizations, but by taking that out to others.

And I just think that's so cool to see

people paying that forward and living that out. Yeah.

So I know that kind of the target of your podcast.

Business owners, leaders, people that have a vision of

what they're wanting to do with their life.

And I'm such a believer that everybody has a

purpose in life, that everybody's got a design that's

been given to them by the Creator that you

are what you are for a reason.

Like, I spent a lot of my life I spent

a lot of my life ashamed of what I am. I'm weird, man.

I'm a very high visionary.

I'm a very high introvert.

I'm very high into thought leadership

and this thing of economics.

I'm always reading attacks on economics, and people

are like, you're out of your gourd, man.

But I always live with this

sense of what's wrong with me?

And the answer is, there's

really nothing wrong with you.

You just got to keep asking that question,

how do I create the best value I

can with the way God has designed me?

And the season of pastoring for me was good

in a lot of ways, and God let us

lead for some good results in some people's lives.

But by far, if you think of your perfect fit as

like on a bullseye of a target, this is much more

closer to the sweet spot on that target for me.

And I think you can pick that up

by how motivated I am for it.

Let's maybe talk about that for a minute.

I know me and kind of the

entrepreneurial journey that I've been on.

I couldn't have just jumped right into doing this.

When I was 22 and graduated college, I always

felt this kind of pull to start something, but

I needed to get experience in order to be

able to do this and to do it well.

At least I hope I'm doing it well.

But could you maybe talk about like when you

look back, yes, you're in the sweet spot now.

You're in that bullseye.

But what were some of the things that led up

to you being at a point where you could go

do this and live in your sweet spot?

Yeah, gosh.

Some of it was formal education.

I did have to have the theology formally,

so I knew what I was talking about.

I did a PhD in organizational leadership, and what

I researched in that process really has been important

to me to get my thinking right.

My father was a pastor, and from early on, when I

was a kid, he would be taking me traipsing around the

world with him and some of these missions environments.

So even as a kid, being in the poverty

situations would mess me up for quite a while.

I could just remember thinking about it,

thinking about it, thinking about it.

So it's an accumulation of a lot of this stuff.

And then going into these mission settings,

I slowly started getting the opportunity to

start training some of this.

At first I would go and they would want me

to train on something else, leadership or Bible or whatever.

But I say, hey, how about this?

You think you'd be interested in this?

And so slowly I started getting a little bit of

an audience and I just kept seeing a bigger response.

Bigger response, bigger response.

So I definitely had to grow into it.

Some of them formal experiences, some

of them just informal experiences.

This is not going to sound real great, but

as great as pastoring was, I got to the

point where I was sick of it.

That's a very unholy thing to say.

I just said it.

We're all about honesty here.

We get to work with a lot of ministries and I

have got to kind of peek behind the curtain and I

would imagine that it's probably exhausting a lot of the time.

Well, particularly for my temperament.

I don't really have a great temperament for it.

So I heard a quote one time from Napoleon.

I'm probably going to get this story wrong, but

Napoleon was captured by the French and they had

him in a prison on an island somewhere.

I proposed to my wife on that island,

so you kind of know the story.

So he escaped.

When he was asked, why would you risk death?

He said, I was so miserable, the worst

thing that could happen is I would die.

Meaning I'd rather die than stay in this misery.

And when I took the entrepreneurial

risk of starting a nonprofit organization.

The thought that just kept plaguing my mind was

I'm taking my wife and I financially off a

cliff and we're going to go into poverty trying

to help other people get out of poverty.

So I could think about night after night and I had

to keep bringing myself back to no, you got a plan.

But honestly, I got to the point I was

so miserable that almost any alternative would be better.

But I knew the alternative I really wanted.

And so I guess I'm a slow learner because the worst

that could happen is I was going to die or go

into poverty myself and I was willing to take that chance.

So it was obviously a very planned

and I trust, well executed transition out

of your pastoral ministry into doing this.

But I got to believe that there was a spark,

there was a moment where it was just crystal clear

to you what it was that you needed to do.

Does that resonate at all?

And if so, can you kind of talk

to us about what that AHA moment was?

Yeah, I would say there were two of them.

One of them, when I was wrestling with the

ideas and I came to it economically, that these

are the three principles that I believed.

They are the bedrock.

There's a lot of other things, there's a lot

of practices, but these were the bedrock principles.

You get those and you do those halfway decent.

It's almost impossible to not solve poverty.

Then when I was going back through biblical studies and

really looking at the Bible economically, the first principle pops

up in the first chapter of the Bible.

The second and the third principles pop up in the

first book of the Bible in very big ways.

So I was like, Whoa, I'm onto something here.

And then the second one was that training that

I did in 2010 in Kenya that Shim and

a group of leaders were in it.

So that actually took place long before

you were doing this full time?

Oh, yeah, I was already tasting and seeing and I

had to get some of it out, that training.

There were a number of guys from my church,

they were businessmen and they were with me.

And we were in a room that was hot

and muggy and trained in 8 hours that day.

And I was out of my mind just

with mental clarity, with motivation, sweating like a

dog and loving every second of it.

I remember walking out of there and those guys from

my church looking at me like, who are you?

The switch got flipped.

Who are you?

Can I give another historical it's not about me.

So in my doctoral research, I was

researching a number of transformational leaders.

So one of them was Dr.

Martin Luther King Jr.

He's pastoring in an Alabama town.

And there are racial issues that are going. On.

So they've all got to go meet one night

at one of the local African American churches.

They want everybody to come and rally.

It may have been over the Rosa Parks incident, but

anyway, the community knew we have got to have some

kind of official response from the African American community, and

the church was the rally point for all that.

So they meet at this one big church, and they tell Dr.

King that he's going to go on stage and he's

only got a brief time to get his thoughts together.

And he gets up at that event that is packed with

people from all these churches and most of his churches there,

and he is out of his mind with clarity.

He's out of his mind with passion.

He's out of his mind framing up what

this is and what we've got to do.

And they said that his people from his

church were saying, who is this guy?

And I guess the point being, when you're living in

your true calling or your truest calling, it's undeniable.

So to the listeners that are thinking about,

hey, I'm thinking about making a move in

career, maybe I'm thinking about taking the entrepreneurial

jump or whatever, there's you.

But then there is the you on fire. Yeah.

I can think about when I think about the best

days that I've had in my work life, it's the

days that I felt like I was adding value by

helping people understand and catch a vision for the things

that I know and know well.

Hearing somebody talk about a problem and being able

to go, okay, here's how we can solve it.

We do ABCD, and they walk away

going, yeah, that makes perfect sense. Let's do it.

I can remember one meeting in particular just walking on

air as I walked out to the parking lot because

I knew I was in my sweet spot because I

knew I'd hit a home run in helping that organization.

So back to one of your earlier

statements or questions you were saying.

Yeah, what were those things that kind of

prepared you to get where you were?

And I see a similar theme between you,

and I think it would be similar.

And there were clearly times in my life when

I felt like, I'm ignorant on this topic, and

I don't want to be ignorant on this topic.

I want to know it well enough that

I'm conversing it, and I know how to

function in this field of study or whatever.

So there were times I just said, I've

got to get my theological education there's.

Other times I was like, no, now it's time for me

to get education and leadership, and now it's time for me

to get deeper in economics, really get my head around it,

because I just keep hitting this over and over as it's

such a strong interest that I got to learn this stuff.

So had you not formally become educated in technology,

you were not going to be able to be

conversant and to be competent in doing the kind

of things that you're doing now.

And there was probably at some point you just

were like, I need to learn this stuff.

It's my stuff that I got to

get some expertise in this stuff.

Unless you are fortunate to have very deep pockets

and you can be an investor as opposed to

an operator, you've really got to know it. Yeah.

But even then, as an investor, you

better become conversant in strategy and finance

because you know how it is.

You can put your money in one thing

or you put your money in another thing.

You've got to make those discretionary decisions.

It takes some background.

It takes a field of knowledge to

be able to do that well. Right? Absolutely.

Yeah, absolutely.

You're the first person from a nonprofit

that we've had as a guest. Okay.

I noticed that you guys serve quite

a few nonprofits on your wall.

Yeah, we do.

Our customer base is very broad, but years ago,

nonprofit was 60% to 65% of our total business.

And over the years, just because of some offerings we've

come out with, it's shifted a little bit more.

But nonprofit is regularly 35% to 45% of

our business over the last two, three years.

So lots of work in that space, from your view?

I'm sure that there's a lot of things that are

similar in starting a nonprofit and starting a for profit.

You need systems, you need to know who

your target market is and things like that.

What are the things you think are different in

starting a nonprofit versus starting a for profit?

Nothing.

I didn't think there was any difference

between business and running a church.

When I was leading a church, I felt like I

do everything that my friends in business do everything.

We market, we position ourselves in the market.

We have HR issues, we have accounting issues,

we have products that we put out.

We have services that we put out.

We hire, we fire, we have lawsuits that we deal with.

We buy property, we invest.

Well, there was not one thing that my business friends did

who were successful that we did not have to do all

the only difference is we also had to preach a good

sermon on Sunday and they get to sit back and enjoy.

Yeah.

And had to have spiritual integrity and genuineness.

So honestly, my answer is it's the same

thing if you're going to run an organization

that is dependent on financial success.

And every nonprofit is every nonprofit has

to have money because we pay for

the same things that every business does.

We pay for personnel, we pay

for facilities, we pay for travel.

We have to pay for everything that

are part of our cost structure. Right.

So maybe I'm just jaded.

Maybe I don't get it, but I don't see any difference.

It's a great perspective.

We know the tactical distances.

There's no owners, there's no equity in a nonprofit.

We're not building up equity

that anybody personally owns.

That's the difference.

So we don't have a profit and loss

statement at the end of the year.

We have a statement of financial activity and we hope we have

a little bit left over at the end of the year.

And we do try to build up some savings.

And in our organization we're trying to move

into where we have an endowment and we

eventually would have some money in some investment.

But yeah, I don't really see any difference.

What were the first few things that you did

as you were getting your business off the ground

that you would attribute early success to?

We knew what we were talking about.

It was transformational for the end user.

Just think of our nonprofit in

terms of a business model.

We have a string of customers.

The front end of the string is our donors

and then there's several other along the way.

But then there's the final learner

and how it's transformational for them.

But we can't do any of it if we

don't have the first customer, which is a donor.

Every donor wants to make a difference with their gift.

They want to change people's lives.

They want to feel some excitement about, look, everybody

wants to do something cool with their life.

And this is one method you can

do something cool with your life.

So I think early on it was

making the case with our potential donors.

Just imagine how powerful this can be and then trying

to share stories and the pictures and just tell about

it and bring them into that with us so that

we had some running funds to make it happen.

I think it was that one.

I think getting to a business model pretty quickly.

We kept asking the question, where's the bottleneck

in terms of delivering, where's the bottleneck?

And the bottleneck is me or somebody else on

our staff feeling like we're going to run around

the world and personally do all the training.

That ain't going to work.

Because we have a vision to train a million

people or to empower a million people by 2030.

How are you tracking against that?

We count the number of people have been in our training.

And we have people that do training

for us to give us their counts.

So we tally that.

So we realize we have to become the trainers of

trainers and we have to move towards training national people.

Like we have trained Kenyans,

we have trained Tanzanians.

So today I got a report from

some Tanzanians that I trained in May.

And they got so fired up they started

a new organization called People Prosper Tanzania.

And they've got a whole strategy of how they're trying to

train a thousand by the end of this year and then

to move out much broader as the years go by in

Tanzania, but trying to find that bottleneck and saying you got

to make this thing explode beyond you.

So it's kind of like the Christian

Evangelism explosion model, the discipleship model.

You train trainers.

You train trainers and you get into the multiplication.

So and then when we do hire or add somebody

to our team, trying to pick the most capable people,

high character and high capability, just to me that's huge.

And as you're adding people to your team, are you

looking for people that are in a particular geography or

are you looking at people anywhere and everywhere?

Now that we're in kind of this zoom virtual world, we're

pretty virtual if the person is the right kind of person

for us right now, what I'm trying to add are major

department heads and they're the kind of people that don't need

a lot of direction, they just need an outcome.

So in my PhD research, my topic of research was

human capability because I went into it with the question

that I went into my doctoral program was why can

some people lead at this level and others can lead

at this level, others can lead at this level and

others can lead at this level?

What's the difference?

I think I found the answer and

it's virtually not what anybody is saying.

It's not more training, it's not just somebody

just born and they automatically do it.

Although there is a lot of inborn part of

it, but different people have different levels of mental

capability to do leadership work and it is measurable.

So the level of capability that I need somebody to

have for the kind of jobs I'm trying to fill

now, if they're at that level, they could live virtually

anywhere in the world and do their job and we

can stay in communication with them.

So the answer is it'd be nice

to have them around here some.

But honestly, I found advantages by having them in

other cities because they can help work that market

and build other networks for what we're doing.

So if I understood you correctly, you said

you can quantify a person's leadership capabilities.

It can be quantified. Interesting.

Can you talk a little bit more about that?

We can quantify what's called

their complexity of information processing.

It's a mental process.

It's not intelligence, it's not IQ, it's the

ability to solve problems at a higher level.

And is there like a test you put somebody

through for this or is it a conversational assessment?

Yes, it's both of those.

There's several firms. They do it.

I could do it with more practice.

I know how it's done.

To really be good at it, you need to have

about 100 to 300 of them under your belt.

I'm not going to invest the time to do that.

So I hire a because that's not your

highest return on that's not where you're going

to create the most value, right?

So I use a firm out

of North Carolina called People Fit.

They've been doing it for years.

This model of leadership and management

is used broadly in Europe.

There's quite a few firms in Canada that use it.

It's not very well known in the US.

It was brought into the administrative and leadership side

of the US Army about 30 years ago.

Totally transformed after Vietnam.

The US army was totally debilitated in bad morale.

Guys are doing drugs,

they're insubordinated to officers.

US army was a mess after Vietnam.

This was one of the groups that came

in and they began working with the Pentagon

and they totally reworked their systems of how

they recruited and promoted up the chain.

And they had a very clear picture for a

four star general what kind of a mental capability

they have to have and how do you measure

that added each of the ranks going down.

So what I'm saying is that there's a number of

firms that they do this, I use that firm.

So if I'm evaluating a candidate, they'll test

them and tell me where they are.

I know where I generally need

them to be able to function. Very interesting.

Are there other organizations out there

that do what you do?

There are other organizations that

do different kinds of empowerment.

Probably the most typical, and they would call it

empowerment and sustainability is they go in and they

teach to a particular kind of small business.

So they might teach them how you run a chicken

business or how you run a motorcycle transportation business or

how you run a fish farm or how you run

a sewing business and they train them particular to that

business and there's benefit in that, there's value in that.

But what they don't do, they don't go to

the root they don't go to the root spirit

and the core thinking that has to be changed.

What we have found is our specialty is that route.

If you do that route then if one of those

people come out of it thinking hey, I think I

want to do the chicken business, then if they can

hook up with one of those people that teach them

chicken business and maybe even helping them get their seed

stock to make that happen, that's a great combo.

But what we have found is a lot of people, once

they get through that, they don't need somebody coming in and

giving them a micro loan or giving them a starter business

and coaching them how to do that starter business.

They have enough of a new spirit and they have enough of

a new picture that they start getting the sense that you and

I have had at times in our life where we said I'm

ignorant in this topic and that does not feel good.

I want to become conversant or a good or

expert in this topic because that's the kind of

value I'm going to want to create.

So it may not be sophisticated, it may be

somebody thinking, I want to learn how to weld.

You know what?

In a lot of places around the world, if you're a

pretty good welder, you can make a pretty decent living.

And so a lot of times it's not real

sophisticated, but it's just a clear path on how

do I go create it and elevate my life.

It's very interesting going back to kind

of the multiplication of training the trainers

who are going to train the trainers.

When you're in country, in these impoverished

nations, does the audience resonate more with

their own people teaching them than they

do the Westerner coming in from overseas?

They are attracted first more to the Westerner

because we're kind of seen as experts and

celebrities and it's a little bit of a

badge of honor, but they're the attraction.

But when it comes to telling stories of how it's

really worked in somebody's lives, they would much rather hear

that from their fellow Kenyan or Ugandan or whatever, telling

the story of how they went through it.

And the thing I love about Shim, he's a comedian man.

He'll have him rolling in the aisles

talking know how this came about.

And he tells one story about he got this idea

close to a university that there was a piece of

property that was very cheap and he could build.

In eastern Africa, there's a mud hut that's very common

and it's usually round and you put like a thatch

roof on it and a lot of people live in

it, so he can build them for about $400.

So he bought this little piece of land that he knew he

could put up four or five of these mud huts close to

a university, and then he's going to put a rent sign out

and he's planning to rent it to university students.

And he's thinking, I'm thinking I could rent them

for 800 Kenya shillings a month, which is not

very much, but he thought, that's what I can

get and that'll fit my model here.

So he puts it out for rent.

He's out there on a weekend, he has

a group of students come to him.

They look at it and they're wanting to rent.

They ask him, how much is rent?

And he goes, well, how much do you think would be fair?

So they all said, well, give us a minute.

So they all gather together and they go under a

shade tree and they all talk with each other and

then they all come back and they said, we think

1500 Kenyans a month would be fair.

And he goes, he let them set the price.

That works out well.

He sticks his hand out.

Well, the audience is hearing him

tell and they just scream.

They think it's the funniest thing.

So, yeah, to hear one of their people

describe the process and what they went through

and what they're doing now, they love that.

So it's a combo.

They're like hearing a certain part of it from

me or one of our other team, but we

have a lot of places that they're only hearing

it from their people, so, yeah, it's both. That's great.

So you're a few years into this.

Is there anything you would go back and do

different if you were starting it over again?

Yeah, but we learned it by doing it right,

so it's not like I could have known, but

I realized that, man, there's limitations to my time

and my energy and my mental focus.

So I cannot be traveling

nonstop around the world teaching.

I have to be strategic in my best use of time.

So we are leveraging to train trainers.

We're leveraging to create master classes online.

We're doing more work on creating printed

materials that go behind the trainers.

So trying to be more of the puppet master than

the puppet out there trying to make it happen.

Delegation was something that I had to learn, and I

have to be reminded of how important that is.

I tend to want to take control and

sounds like I'm not the only one.

No, it's that control freak thing, man.

It's hard to let it go, man.

It is hard, but after you kill yourself,

you realize this is not going to work.

I'm not going to reach my goals

doing it this way, that's for sure.

What are the parts of your running

this organization that you enjoy the most?

And then maybe on the flip side, what

are the things you enjoy the least?

I love the thought leadership.

I love the directional leadership of the organization.

I love the strategic thinking.

What strategy is going to work best?

I love the mass communication stuff, whether it's online

or speaking to a large audience or through writing.

So love the visionary part of it, the communication

part of it, the thought leadership part of it.

That's what flows my boat. Okay.

What are those parts that you're like, man?

I think I need to delegate this.

Anything that's management or administration or maintenance of ongoing

systems, what do you think has been if you

could point to two or three keys to your

success, what would those things be?

Yeah, I mean, first of all, as a man

of faith, none of it would be possible.

I wouldn't be who I was if it wasn't for the

Lord and his grace and leading me in my life.

So I believe that's definitely the first

in terms of any human action.

I do think you have to be on your calling.

I've lived it where I wasn't 100% on it

close, but it just wasn't the full fit.

And I think you've got to be on your passion.

You've got to be on your calling.

You've got to be using your gifts.

The Bible has a phrase that I really like,

and it says the gifts and the calling of

God are irrevocable, meaning that God made you the

way you are and nobody's changing it.

I often say that the great theologian B. B.

King said it this way you is what you is.

You ain't changing it.

You are not changing it.

So you better get on with the program

of how you are wired, what you do

well, what you really feel passionate about.

You better be on that.

So the gift is what is it you can do well?

And the calling is, what is that thing in your heart?

This is where I'm going to apply it. I love business.

I love business people, and I love the business arena.

It's just not my calling.

But for those that it is their calling, it is

one of the most noble things you can do.

I mean, it is such a blessing in so many

ways economically to our world and creating jobs and creating

all these fantastic things that make our lives better.

It's the engine of prosperity for a culture.

So you find that area that you say, that's the area.

I'm passionate to take what I'm good at and go do it.

So to me, that's number one.

I value competence highly, so I think you

have to know what you're talking about.

So if you have to go learn something to be good

at your field I'm a strong believer in constant learning, so

I always have a stack of books that I'm working through

because I don't want to be ignorant of those things.

I want to keep on that curve.

The people that you choose to

be on your team, just huge.

I mean, it is huge.

They have to be people of integrity.

They have to be people of the competence

level in the level that you put them.

That's massive.

So I would say whenever I can make a good

move on those stuff, it just makes a big difference.

You mentioned books.

What's in your stack right now?

What are you reading?

I always have some kind of

wonky economic book going on.

There's one called Human Action.

That's one of the classic economic books by a

guy named Ludwig von Meises, and he's part of

what's called the Austrian School of Economics.

Part of it is so hard to read, it's like brain damage.

But then when you get to the next page where he just hits

it out of the park, man, I'm like, it was worth it.

He said that so awesome.

And he totally destroys the current economic thinking

in our country, which is driving me nuts.

But anyway, reading that one great management book

on systems called The Four Disciplines of Execution.

Have you heard that?

I have heard of it, man, and

I've read a lot of management stuff.

That one is good, man.

It is really good.

And then there's another one that I'm

working with a guy here locally on.

He's working me through some strategy on

it called the Blue Ocean Strategy.

Are you familiar with that?

I'm familiar with that one, yeah.

So I'm working through that one.

I've got a strategy session with this guy who's

kind of like a coach in that tomorrow, man,

that's giving me, like, a whole new world of

clarity for where we need to go next.

Are you the kind of person that can juggle

multiple books at one time and stay with it?

I'm a one track person. I couldn't jump around.

I got to start and finish

before I pick something else up.

If there are different categories, I can I can

have a business book going and an economics one

going and a ministry like one going.

So one of the mystery ones I've got going is

called Poverty No More, and it's a nonprofit organization.

Their leader wrote the book about their strategy

of how they're solving poverty in villages.

They've got some great thinking in that book.

I use a counselor, so my counselor recommended a

book written by a guy named Van Vonderen, and

it was about spiritual abuse in the church and

just kind of talking through how shame is used

as a form of spiritual abuse in the church.

So my counselor recommended I get that.

So I've been reading through that one, and some really cool

lights have been going on in my brain on that one.

So I'm weird. I'm wonky.

I'm just kind of reading across several things.

Good for you.

Looking back over the last few years, is there something

that has not worked out quite like you hoped?

Everything.

Nothing has worked out like my wife says, man, one of

the curses of being a visionary the way you are is

that everything is such a disappointment to you when you finally

get to the big day or the big moment of whatever

you're doing, which is there's a lot of truth in that.

Give me an example of that. Gosh.

Everything, I mean, I saw it

in pastoral ministry all the time.

Any event, any keep initiative that we

were trying to they just never lived

up to my dreams and the expectations.

You didn't get as many people there as you expected?

You didn't raise as much as you hoped. Yeah.

This community that we lived in, we built this

gorgeous new ministry campus in a community that just

didn't have that kind of stuff in their churches.

I thought, man, this is going to double the size

of our church, and we got about a 15% jump.

And I was like, after all that.

But yeah, the same thing.

In this work, my vision always exceeds my realities.

My wife says, I feel sorry for you, man.

You're just never quite happy.

I don't feel like I'm an unhappy person, but I

do feel like, do you beat up on yourself?

A little bit.

But I still am energized by chasing the vision.

Well, most of us are our own worst critics.

So you're in good company. Yeah. How about you?

I mean, do you struggle with that?

Not as much as I used to. Okay.

Little by little, I've learned to control what

I can control, and I certainly still have

disappointments and frustrations, but I've learned to move

on from them quicker than I used to.

So what would you say is

the best thing you've done here?

Hire good people. Yeah.

It's hard to get around that one, isn't it?

There really is no substitute.

You said this earlier, there's only so

much you can do on your own.

You have to have good people.

And one of my biggest fears when I made my first

hire, the first fear was, okay, can I afford to pay

them and feed my own family at the same time? Right.

And once I got over that mental hurdle, the next

one was, is this person going to care as much

as I do about the success of the customer?

And we've been incredibly fortunate that we found

like minded people that truly care, that pour

themselves into our projects and really are there

to see our customers succeed.

So it's like, no matter what business

you're in, you're in the people business.

No doubt you can't get away from it.

No doubt we can't get away from it.

One of my colleagues that works with us

in our organization, he worked for six months

as, like, the corporate trainer and the executive

trainer within a large auto dealership group.

And within the period of time of this,

just intentionally saying, let's develop our people better,

they totally transformed their customer base and their

per ticket item just by elevating their people.

It's like before, they thought,

we're in the car business.

No, you're not in the car business.

And before, they were just rotating people

through, but they got intentional about it.

So what a true thing.

So what would be a mistake you made along the way?

And here you're like, oh, man, I

wish I had that one back. I whiffed.

I whiffed on that one, thinking that you can

take on more than you really can, and not

just in the sense of delegation, but as an

organization, can we actually take on this additional initiative

and be successful with it?

And I think that even with good people, you have

to be very sober minded about how much you can

be good at in a given amount of time.

And there are things that I would either go

back and not do, or I would have resourced

them differently to make them more successful.

Because you overstretched.

Lack of focus leads to lack of results.

And not so much from an overstretched, but just

not having the capacity to do this thing well.

That's the beauty of that.

Four disciplines of execution, they've got a really

cool process of making you laser in, and

I've been plagued by that too, because across.

My life, I've kind of been a jack

of all trades and master of none.

So I kind of felt like, well, I can do everything.

Well, then you try to do everything.

It does not work.

It doesn't.

That's for sure. Yeah.

Well, speaking of people, are there any people that you would

like to thank for helping you get to this point?

Yeah, got a great wife.

I got a great family.

I was blessed with great parents.

And then along the way, I've been blessed to

be able to be in some good educational environments,

so some good profs and mentors along the way.

Several people that just kind of, like, have taken me

under their wings in terms of just mentorship several older

men that just kind of like I think men need

men to teach them how to be men, and I

think there's a women's corollary to that.

I don't know, because I'm not a woman, but I feel

that way as a guy, and so I've had the blessing

of that in my life, and I think that gives me

more courage and even a sense of, well, if I fail,

we'll pick ourselves back up and go again.

It's not the end of the world.

So, yeah, I feel blessed by those

kinds of people in my life. How about you?

I echo.

My wife is absolutely incredible.

My wife is very risk averse.

And when I came home from a business trip one

day and told her that I wanted to start my

own thing, she said, you want to do what?

And it took a year of prayer and seeking wise counsel.

And I'll never forget the night that

we got our kids to bed.

And she said, hey, I want to talk to you. Okay.

She said, Want you to do this.

And she's just been incredibly supportive

all the way through my father.

Sounds like your father was

very influential in your life.

And I'm very much in the same boat.

My parents loved me.

Well, they gave me every opportunity.

They were examples of integrity, and I had the good

fortune of getting to watch my dad run businesses.

Oh, that's cool.

And in fact, we're in the same business, and so he's opened

a lot of doors for me getting this thing off the ground

and would not be here if it weren't for my dad.

Like you.

You talked about having other men

and mentors in your life.

I've had a number of mentors, both formal and informal.

There's a man named Jim Woodward who

works with an organization called Convene that

does business coaching and runs peer groups

for business leaders, business owners.

Jim has been a huge force in our success.

There are people in the industry marcus Wagner,

Mike Yeager, Craig Decker, Brian Terrell, and the

list just goes on and on of people

that have just given me their time.

I mean, that's just one of the things that

I'm just so incredibly humbled by is that I've

got to stay up till 02:00 in the morning

talking to people about things that they've learned.

And really that's kind of the genesis for

this podcast, is wanting to pay forward and

help other entrepreneurs learn from what I've learned

and what people like you've learned.

Yeah, when you really start counting up all the

influences, you realize, I didn't get here by myself.

You know what I mean? Without a doubt.

I had to work hard and I had to do certain things.

But yeah, what a testimony to a lot

of people investing in your life and in

my life, and it's the way it works.

And that list goes on and on and on and

on, and if we had more time, I could fill

up hours of recording, so we'll leave that there.

Well, if somebody came to you and said, hey,

I'm thinking about starting an organization, I'm thinking about

starting a nonprofit, what advice would you give them?

Well, I think I would talk them through

explaining to me what their model is and

what is it you're trying to do?

How are you going to go about

trying to put your donor base together?

How are you going to communicate to your donors?

How are you going to deliver your program?

Every nonprofit has two very big sides.

You have your fundraising side and

you have your program delivery side.

So I try to talk them through both sides

of that to be sure that it sounded like

they have thought it out pretty well.

And just to be sure there's nothing glaring that, look,

you're going to have to pay attention to this and

be sure you get this part of it right.

And then if it felt like they had enough

that just didn't look like any major holes, I

probably would encourage them pull the trigger.

You're going to learn most of what you're going to need

to know by doing it amen in the training we do

around the world, we say that over and over.

That what most people don't understand, is the real

education begins when you actually try to do something.

And yeah, you may go back on some of

the technical things you learn in school, but the

reality is I learned preaching by preaching.

I learned leading by leading.

I learned fundraising by fundraising and getting other people in

my life that know how to do it, too.

But you get desperate and you start getting them

into your life when you realize, I'm not cutting

it here, what do I got to learn?

So, yeah, pull the trigger and man, just be a sponge.

Learn everything you can.

I love the podcast format, too, for the exact same

reason you're using it to say, look gives me a

great way to pick the best out of what other

people are thinking and doing and share with each other.

That was Dr.

John Morgan, founder and president

of People Prosper International.

to learn more, visit peopleprosper.org.

If you or a founder you

know would like to be a guest on In the

Thick of It, email us at intro@founderstory.us.