In October 2004, Brandon hosted a bonfire that almost burned a house down. That’s the night we met. I grew up in the country. I love a bonfire. I went. I was dating someone else at the time, so when Brandon started calling afterward, I didn’t answer. We ran into each other again months later, and that time it stuck.
What I didn’t know yet was how much we already had in common before we’d ever had a real conversation.
Brandon was a sick kid. His baby book says pneumonia three times before he turned one. He was still learning to walk while other kids his age were learning the alphabet.
He joined the Marines partly to prove to himself that he could. He also believed serving his country, putting himself on the line for other people, was one of the truest ways to make the world better.
About three and a half years in, he got mixed up with the wrong people. He was offered a way out ... give up the names of the others involved. He wouldn’t do it. He lost his veteran benefits over a choice most people wouldn’t have had the nerve to make.
From there he took an internship in the music industry, believing music could change people the way art and culture do. The longer he was inside it, the more disillusioned he got. What actually moved him, it turned out, was the volunteer work he’d started doing at church.
We met because his church was the same type as my church, where I was also actively involved.
Our type of church had a habit: if you showed any sign of being a leader, you were assumed to be a church planter (someone who starts new churches in new areas). It seemed like the minute people knew we were serious about our relationship, they already surmised ... we’d be doing ministry and planting a church together.
Sometime in our first year of marriage, we drove from Chicago to a conference outside Baltimore called Reform. This conference was put on partly by people in our denomination and partly by outsiders they’d invited in. We were newlyweds with no money. We slept in a tent. It rained.
We had no idea that conference would end up shaping the rest of our lives.
One of the people we met there was a man named Tri Robinson. He talked about an idea that’s stayed with us and has come up over and over again the last 20 years: most nonprofits set up downstream, along the river of poverty, pulling people out of the water. Feeding them. Housing them. It’s necessary work. Yet, almost nobody goes upstream to ask why people keep ending up in the water in the first place ... leadership, education, healthcare, environmental stewardship, the things that prevent poverty instead of just responding to it.
I’d grown up on nature documentaries wanting to save something. Brandon had just spent years trying to prove he could put his life on the line for people. Neither of us had language for it yet, but we were both already looking for the same thing.
We looked at each other and thought, “Obviously. Why isn’t everyone going upstream and trying to fix the river of poverty at its source?”
We’ve come back to that idea in every version of what we’ve built since.
Yes, at one point, we tried to be church planters. We didn’t fail as much as we learned there’s a whole wide world of making a difference that counts as “doing and being church” without the religious necessity of walls and pews.
With the coffee shop, we couldn’t promise every farmer would get paid a specific amount, but we could do our part ... and fair pay ripples into a family’s health, their kids’ education, and the whole shape of their life.
Now in financial services, this river analogy continues to drive us.
Most of the financial advice you’ve ever gotten is downstream. It shows up after the emergency, not before it. A budgeting rule you get handed once you’re already broke. A loan you scramble for once the roof is already leaking.
Along the way, we’ve picked up some financial wisdom that pulls us upstream. Bank On Yourself exists so we have liquidity built up before the emergency shows up, not after. Profit First exists so our business never gets close enough to missing payroll to need rescuing in the first place. Neither one is glamorous. Nobody throws a parade for the rescuing that didn’t need to happen, the same way nobody throws a party for the food pantry that never needed to open.
Anyone who really understands how the river moves ends up choosing what to do with that knowledge. Some learn to exploit the current and get wealthy off the same flow that leaves everyone else stuck. Others spend their lives swimming upstream and trying to fix it where it’s broken.
For at least the last forty years, money in this country has flowed toward the wealthy at the expense of everyone else. The current is being exploited.
Brandon and I have always chosen to swim upstream. We don’t pretend to have invented something new. Many have come before us, and many more will come after. We call our version “Counterflow.” Join us. Work against the current, on purpose, and fix what’s broken upstream.
Where in your own financial life are you doing downstream rescue work, when you could be building upstream instead?
