Young Christian men: start building businesses now. Start the exact ones these firms are buying (they already did your market research for you). They only buy what a town can't live without:
- HVAC
- Plumbing
- Electrical
- Welding and fab
- Small engine repair
- Excavation
- Meat processing
- Honest bookkeeping
And everything they buy gets worse before it dies completely. Slower service, junk parts, higher prices. A solid, independent man with his name on the truck and a solid church behind him will eat their lunch.
Three rules to keep your town from being next.
1. Build it to keep it. If you're building to cash out someday, it's already theirs. Put your plans in writing, with papers that keep the business in the family and out of their hands.
2. Raise up your replacement. Sons in the shop at twelve. Real work, real wages, taught that the business is an inheritance and not just dad's job. JOANN didn't die at the bank. It died at the dinner table a generation earlier.
3. Stick together. One shop is a business. Twelve shops that hire each other, bank together, and train each other's sons are an economy. PE firms can buy a company. They can't buy a town that won't sell.
Over the next 10-15 years we'll all get to watch as these firms tear down the old world. This is your window to build. Start a shop at 25, and you will own your town's infrastructure at 40 - just when the husk of the competition finally falls over.
Build the businesses that will power your local community for the next hundred years.
1/ - GREAT HOUSES RESOURCE THREAD
The topic and idea of what some have called "Great Houses" has been of personal interest for a while now. I wanted to pull together a thread of my favorite resources that might be helpful for others who are interested in what it means to build, maintain, or even to participate in legacy institutions and families. This will be a thread I'll likely add to in the future with resources as I find them.
We live in a great country, at a great time, with a great God. For love of all that is good, we have a duty to remember what made it great, prune what made her poor, multiply its virtues and blessings, and wisely preserve and share its fruits with its rightful heirs.
There is much that could be said, but hopefully this can be a small starter that can offer a positive vision of what a faithful christian ambition can look like in legacy Christian households and institutions for the glory of God and the good of God's people to a thousand generations.
SHORT THREAD🧵
4/ BOOKS TO LOOK INTO - PART 1
These are four contemporary works that are great starters for those who wanting to find a place to start with generational households. One key to any great endeavor is to continually be clarifying what it is that you are aiming for and these give you many of the categories to help frame work, wealth, and family in a more classic vein which has in many aspects been completely abandoned.
This is a never ending endeavor, but these are four that I have read, that I would recommend to start:
- The Household and the War for the Cosmos by C.R Wiley
- Man of the House by C.R Wiley
- In the House of Tom Bombadil by C.R Wiley
- Leaving a Legacy: Inheritance, Charity, & Thousand-Year Families by Johann Kurtz