Episode Transcript
[00:00:03] Speaker A: What's up, my friends? Welcome to another episode of A Brit and a Yank Talk Business. I'm Stuart amadon with page 50 marketing and media, and with me is Tom Chaldicott with Knox Thomas over in the great uk. Tom, how are you, my friend?
[00:00:16] Speaker B: Good, Stuart. It is warm in here and supposedly we're having a heat wave, but I want to call it summer.
[00:00:22] Speaker A: Yeah, it was 40 degrees last time. Is it still hot like that? It's like 40.
[00:00:27] Speaker B: It hit 34 yesterday. And there is a. There's a national shortage of fans, of desk fans.
[00:00:33] Speaker A: Oh, wow. This is terrible.
So we just can't cope, our American listeners. 40 degrees is like 104 degrees for us. So it's not. Tom's right. It's very hot over there. Tom, I'm excited about the stuff that we're talking about today.
So we created this podcast to be able to help people learn how to build businesses and think through how to do it in a. In a Christian way.
And we started season one. Season one went well. We keep getting feedback about it, and we're super pleased with all that feedback. We want to keep building and helping folks to establish themselves and. And just take the initiative to build a business, maybe if they haven't done so yet, learn how to do so according to the Bible and be faithful in that. Today we're going to talk about local community.
Now, this was one of your ideas, Tom. So, like, frame this for me. What made local community important to you?
[00:01:26] Speaker B: So, a few years back, I remember chatting with a pastor in our church and this idea that often, I think, particularly in the middle class, certainly speaking kind of from my experience, there's a lot of people who are kind of rootless, particularly those who end up going to university.
My parents or I grew up in the Lake District, which is in the Northwest, and most of the people who live up there are not from there. So they've moved there because they like the scenery. They're probably into some sort of outdoor pursuit of some description, and it means that they don't particularly have routes.
So, you know, you add to that going to university and you go to university just kind of anywhere and typically base the choice of your university not necessarily on kind of education, but on something else ridiculous. Like what sports they do and you.
[00:02:23] Speaker A: And are they good at those sports? Yeah, we have that problem in America.
[00:02:26] Speaker B: We have that problem and is the terrain correct for that sport?
So you end up rootless fairly quickly.
And, you know, I often look around and I'm quite jealous of kind of the farmers that I know who have. Who have. Who have lived wherever they live, and they've been there for generations upon generations upon generations.
But, like, our default, I think, of our generation at large is to be like, no, that's ridiculous. You guys are, like, tied to a place. And like, no, we should be free and autonomous, and we should be free to do all these things.
But kind of part of the fruit of that is the Chaldicotts us. We've moved house an awful lot over the past kind of seven years now. There's a few reasons for that, but moving a house for us is a really easy thing to do because we've become rootless.
So I want to try and undo that.
So part of it is thinking, how do I undo the kind of rootlessness that I feel? I'm acutely aware of that our generation is kind of. Or part of our generation has been cursed with? But also, how do we, in our laying down of roots, become a blessing to local community? Like, how do we engage with them? How do we further God's kingdom by kind of engaging with our neighbor in our local towns?
What does that look like when thinking about businesses? What does that look like when thinking about employees and how we engage potentially with the local council?
So I've got thoughts on that, and there are things that we've kind of either actively or unintentionally done to try and put some of those routes down and force them in.
But I think it's interesting chatting about this with you, Stuart, because have you always been where you are and you talk about your family or your grandparents living quite close by or relatively. For kind of the size of the U.S.
so, yeah, it'd be interesting, kind of getting your thoughts on the inverse side of that.
[00:04:18] Speaker A: Well, so I haven't always been where I am, though, and my dedication to what I would call biblical localism is relatively new, like probably within the last five years. So just. Just to give you some context, so I. I was the guy who went to university at a. At a school that was just close to me. Not really, but it was still 30 minutes away. And I moved there. And when I moved there, I had no intention of returning to my hometown. So I'm. I'm not from where I live now. I'm from a very small town, pretty much the middle of nowhere in the woods of north Louisiana. I sent a map pen to a buddy of mine of some of the land that my mother grew up on at one point, and his response was, where on earth are You.
Because there's just nothing. I'm from the country, woods, bumpkin space. I went to college, and with that went my identity. Now I live in this town. I am here now. I met my wife, we got married early, we finished school, and then we moved to South Louisiana, which is a drastically different culture. It's about three hours south of North Louisiana. So completely different region, completely different culture.
And I looked around and I was like, oh, I think I like it here.
And we lived in a couple of different towns for several years because we were renters, we weren't making a lot of money, and so we just kind of bounced from place to place to place. But I would say our roots did not get planted until we planted a church.
That's whenever we started saying things like, no, we're committing to this particular place, these particular people. That was 12 years ago. 12 or 13 years ago by this point. So I think this coming September, it will be 13 years.
And what's interesting about that is how quickly the Lord gave us access. Now, we moved to a small town. It's not a big town. There's 16,000 people here. In terms of American towns, that would be considered a small town here.
And when we moved there, it was interesting how quickly the Lord gave us access to influential people in our community and helped us to become some of the influential people in our community, for better or for worse.
Sometimes it's not necessarily, you're not famous, you're infamous. So that will be the case with me and with our church and a few of the specific instances that I'm talking about.
But we are known, and that is a huge deal to us. And then when we started our business, which the business was started about 10 years ago.
Yeah, about 10 years ago is when we started our company, page 50.
That gave us even more access to the local community and influential people in the community.
And I'm convinced that this is how we can affect the most change. So to give a reference to Doug Wilson's father, Jim Wilson, he moved to Moscow, Idaho, very intentionally.
He moved there because they wanted to move to a small town because they recognized that they could influence small towns more effectively.
And he also wanted to move to an area that had a college, like a university present, because he thought through the college and through being a gospel witness to the students at the college, he could be then a witness to the world because the people go to school and then they leave and they go other places. So he looked on a map and he found a place where there was two colleges Relatively close together in a small town. And he said, we're moving there.
And because his family. So this is Jim Wilson. He's dead now, but because he went on mission and established this culture of mission and culture of biblical localism for his family, they're now four generations deep in this little town.
And I think they said they're almost to the tipping point to where something like 30 to 40% of the local kids that live in their town go to their private Christian school, which is a huge deal. Right.
Their church, between all their network of churches, I think they have somewhere between 2 and 4,000 people total, which is a big deal in a small town. That's a large amount of the local population.
It's not just hypothetical. It's not just if I move to a town and give myself to that town, I might win influence over time.
It is actually a thing that happens.
Now, I will contrast that with what happens specifically in America politics at a national level.
I am not going to influence the national election. I am not going to influence Congress or the Senate as far as policy and lawmaking goes. I am not going to influence the decision of the Supreme Court.
But I can influence, and I do through text messages, through emails, through posting online, through interacting with people directly, our local politics. I can text my representative, I can text my mayor and say, hey, here's things that are going on. I think this is important and it does something. I'm not saying he always agrees with me, and I'm not saying I always move the needle, but that's a degree of influence that I have that I want to invest in and continue to invest in. I think what happens to us specifically in the states, is that we get distracted by the national issues, of which we will have no ability to affect change. But that becomes the raging thing on the front of our mind, and we can't do anything about it. We can't change anything about it. Instead, we have opportunity here to actually affect change.
And for some reason, the vast majority of people don't.
[00:10:23] Speaker B: Yep. So how did you build a relationship with those people?
[00:10:27] Speaker A: You know, honestly, I started a business.
So when I was a pastor, it was much harder for me to get access to those people. Because when you're a pastor, you talk to them and folks kind of drop the shutters and they put you in a specific category. Oh, this man just talks about faith. He doesn't talk about real life because we have that. Nancy Pearcey talks about this, the upper and the lower story distinction in her book called Total Truth.
But we have separated faith from life in the west, in America, maybe, I'm sure in England as well.
And as a result of that, they hear that you're a religious person and they're just like, okay, well, you talk about Jesus, but nothing real. When I started a business, I was able to get past that and say, no, I talk about real things. Also. Also, faith is real too. And the way that I run my business is because of what I believe is real.
But that really gave us a lot more access to councils, to the mayor, to influential people.
It really gained us a lot more access. And very quickly, very, very quickly.
[00:11:32] Speaker B: And what are those? I don't know if you've got kind of touchpoint examples or there are things that you've particularly done going.
I know that if I do X, it's going to build a relationship with Y and therefore I'm going to. My roots effectively are going to be more entrenched in this, in my locale.
[00:11:51] Speaker A: So I, I'm trying to think of what some easy examples of this would be. I try to be very active in the public space right now, that doesn't mean necessarily that I, I go to all the public events because I just, I just don't. I have kids, I spend time with my kids in the evening, but I do interact with elected officials, either publicly or privately. I do interact with influential people, either publicly or privately.
A lot of that can happen digitally. Like we've launched a local media platform to specifically carry news and events through a biblical worldview that's happening in our local space. And that's been very effective at so far. Either getting people to really agree with us hardcore or making them very angry with us. There doesn't really seem to be a middle road, but that's been very effective too. Like digital strategy works very, very well in this particular space.
Trying to think about local issues, local people, local politics.
[00:12:56] Speaker B: And I suppose a lot of the examples you've just given, they fit well with your business service. You know, you're in media and marketing, therefore getting involved in local news is easy. Makes sense there.
[00:13:11] Speaker A: Yeah, right. We know how to build websites, so we built one real fast. We know how to create content, so we create some real fast. Like it's.
I think so. I. Yeah, that's a great point. I would not say, therefore everybody needs to go and create a local media outlet in their small town. Although if you've got the capacity to do it, then do it.
But I would say more so focus on being hyper faithful with what you have. Right. Now, on a local level.
Do you know what I mean?
So, for example, the Lord gives you an opportunity to have a conversation with somebody, take it and ask the Lord, how can I be faithful with this conversation? I just want to walk out of this conversation faithful. What is it that I need to do? What do I need to say and how do I need to do it?
[00:14:01] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, some of the things that we do. So at the moment we. We only got a premises or we're renting at the moment.
We've kind of outgrown the space. We're currently, I don't know, at the point of having negotiations with a property that we found, but building relationships with the owner of this space here. And this, it's a. It's a serviced office, but I'd rather rent a serviced office from someone who lives in Longridge and that is like a small company than some multinational faceless thing, which is totally not. Well, isn't an. Isn't necessarily an option. Right. In this town, but very close to this town. It's. It's certainly an option, something that we could do and the same with. I don't know. I prefer having face to face conversations with people anyway, for a multitude of reasons. But one, you can build relationships with them and it's an opportunity to build relationships locally. So, like, there's an insurance broker that exists on the next street over, so we engage with him to find our next kind of insurance policy.
[00:15:01] Speaker A: Yeah, Work locally. Absolutely.
[00:15:04] Speaker B: Yeah. And one of the fun things that's happening, in fact, this weekend we've got a local agricultural show and Knox Thomas are a sponsor. Now, there was a strategic reason for doing that, but it wasn't so much to engage with the local community, it was to engage with a particular business, actually. But I think that relationship's kind of changed, so that opportunity is kind of gone. But like, it is an opportunity for people in Longridge, where we live in the town, to become more familiar with our business and our business name.
[00:15:38] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:15:40] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:15:41] Speaker A: So I think what you have there is just the opportunity to establish relationships in a positive way.
And I tell this to people all the time, man. Like, just being nice goes a long way, you know, just like being a. Being a kind person who cares about other people, you know, like the Bible tells us to do, to love our neighbors. Well, goes very, very far.
And you can just do that and be genuine with people. Like, there's even opportunities, I would say, if you don't have, maybe you have like a local equivalent of a chamber of commerce or something where you are and that that might be a fun thing to work through. We worked through ours for a period of time. We don't anymore.
But there's still business related things that we're working on for the future. Like we want to teach business workshops because I care about my town and there's business opportunity in this town if people would just take it, you know, like, and to the degree that new businesses start and revenue goes up, life quality increases for everyone.
And so I'd love to teach business workshops. I'd love to teach people how to use AI tools, I'd love to teach people how to get, get something going off the ground, how to bootstrap a small business and grow it. Like there's opportunity here for that and you could do something similar in your area.
[00:17:00] Speaker B: Yeah, well, I mean I was asking you about this the other day.
Like the area that we live, we, I don't know how we stumbled across it. So we do quite a lot of work with kind of food and beverage manufacturers and the head of HR for one of these large companies lives in our town, even though there's no, there's no food and beverage production near here.
So I, you know, my question to you is how do I make an excuse to kind of cold outreach to people a bit like that? Your suggestion being start a business network. So yeah, I think it's totally, that's something I want to, I want to look into. Done a bit of a Google search to see if there's kind of anything existing already. And like if we get this, this office kind of the next up on the high street, that'd be a great place to kind of start doing that and, and have those conversations that you're, you're highlighting in that.
I don't know, Mo. I think the UK is in a worse, significantly worse position than the us like we don't know how to use AI and it's hilarious.
People aren't actually kind of working hard. So like for us to be like thought leaders in some of these spaces is really not difficult for us to do. And, and the people that we know that we could introduce and we could go, you know, let's run a workshop talking about whatever it might be.
There's totally loads of opportunity. The question kind of partly is is there going to be an appetite on the other end with the businesses that exist here? So I mean that's something that I want to look at and see if we can push.
[00:18:30] Speaker A: Yeah. And I think the way that you could start really is, is Just is not necessarily by saying, I need to start a network.
I mean, what if you just had a lunch, right? Like, I think sometimes whenever people are trying to think of how do I. How do I gain influence in my community, in my local town? I think sometimes we make it more complicated than it is just to go back to the thing that I said before.
Going and being nice to people really goes a very long way. And so you could just. You're about to have a new building, you could do a ribbon cutting, invite every other business owner in town, invite all the people on the high street around you, give them lunch, and I don't know, maybe y' all can't day drink. I don't know what the rules are in England, you know, wine and cheese at our grand opening for lunchtime. You know, come hang out and we'll have a great time.
And that's going to do a lot. And in those conversations, you know, you're a capable conversationalist in those conversations, I think that you can turn around and say, oh, I see a need and an interest.
And I think we can fill that need.
I think we can facilitate this to go a little bit deeper and build more relationships and more positive community. But I think also, excuse me.
I think the biggest thing for people just to remember to do is if you're looking to really get entrenched where you are first off, praise God, because very few are looking to do that. Most people, they want to rage about the things that they have no control over and the things that they do control, have control and influence over, they abdicate from.
And I think that's because on a local level, your name is much more closely attached to what you do and say, and everybody knows who you are.
And so it's much more scary to put skin in the game on a local level than it is on a national level or an international level.
But if you just strive to be faithful with every moment that the Lord has given you, he's going to give you more opportunities to do that. He will bless that. So just look around and say, what do I have? How can I be faithful with it? How can I steward it well and then see what comes next? It's not complicated.
[00:20:48] Speaker B: No, I mean, it's, it's seeing those opportunities, though, is. Isn't it? Like, I think your, your examples of being distracted by kind of national news. National politics is a hot topic at the moment in the uk.
Like the other week, Prime Minister resigned, you know, we're, we're yet to have it kind of confirmed who's going to replace that, it's probably going to be worse.
And there's a whole load of other things going on as well. So, like, it's very easy to be distracted by that, but the, the, the kind of. The benefit there is that people are distracted by it. So it means that you totally have the opportunity to jump in where there's potentially a bit of a vacuum to make a move.
[00:21:30] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:21:32] Speaker B: Yeah. So it makes that exciting.
But how you stop yourself being distracted or how you kind of alleviate yourself from the distraction of kind of national media and spot the opportunities. Like, the local council meeting is in my calendar every. I think. I can't remember if it's monthly or fortnightly, but it's in my calendar every. However long it is, or whenever, whatever the frequency, I've never been.
But there's totally the opportunity there to kind of do that, see what that looks like and build relationships with people. And I mean, I was kind of. I chatted with some other people about this and they were kind of like, you know, you have. If you're going to go, you need to tell them you're going to go, because otherwise they think you'll go with, like, just being disgruntled. So if the expectation is that people turn up and they're just disgruntled. If you turn up and you're not disgruntled, well, suddenly you're a lot more interesting, you know?
[00:22:23] Speaker A: Yeah. And maybe even they're happy to have you. Yeah.
[00:22:26] Speaker B: Yeah.
So, yeah, spotting stuff like that. But I like the idea. You know, I'm just thinking about, say we get this office.
Yeah. We just pick a random day. We have two hours mid afternoon. We make some flyers and just leaflet every business in the town.
And if some people turn up, awesome.
[00:22:45] Speaker A: Yeah. And talk about it on the Internet and the local communities. If you have forums or groups or anything like that, promote it there too. Like, there's just. There's great opportunity. I think.
I really do believe that one of the big mechanisms that the Lord has given us is business.
I go back to Andrew Krapichet's quote all the time. Business is serving other people at scale.
And if we can build institutions and businesses that remember that and aggressively work to execute it, I think that we'll have great opportunity in front of us. But we just.
I think that we have, you know, to go back to Nancy Pearcey's quote, we have this distinction, this false distinction between the upper story and the lower story, between faith and real life.
And We've got to get rid of that.
Our faith works itself out in every single thing that we do.
And let's build businesses, institutions that reflect that and are a blessing to our immediate community around us and that'll provide us more inroads and more influence. And we have only gained influence in our community over the last 10 years.
I can go to meetings, I get invited to meetings and I go to meetings with local elected officials who wouldn't necessarily be seen in public with me because that would get them in trouble. But when they're in a pinch, they know that I'll help them and they know that we know what to do and how to help them. And that means a lot.
That's, that's a, that's a big lever to be able to pull and the Lord's given us that. So I want to steward it.
[00:24:43] Speaker B: Well, I mean, I don't know what your thoughts are as well.
Just something that just jumped into my mind. Like I was at a one day conference yesterday for machinery safety consultants or not, well, people in machinery safety and I didn't know who was going to be there. I ended up turning up a little bit late, just kind of rushing into the middle and sitting down. And then halfway through the day, you know, there's a break and like some guys from a competing business who I've met before, we get on really well, they come over and say hello and like there's suddenly a load of people in the room who I actually know. And like there's this other guy who runs a machinery safety podcast who comes over, he's like, oh, it's, it's Tom, isn't it? I'm like, I, I'm pretty sure I recognize you. And you know, he knows who I am before I'm really sure of who he is. Who he is.
And we've only been in this space for like three years.
[00:25:38] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:25:39] Speaker B: So just, you know, the opportunity to kind of take that and apply a similar model to a more local environment, like the gains that could be built in a relatively short time are totally there.
I mean, I'm quite enjoying this conversation in that. It's just provoking me.
Yeah.
[00:25:59] Speaker A: I would say don't forsake digital media on a local level, but be aware.
[00:26:10] Speaker B: You help me with that.
[00:26:13] Speaker A: Well, fair, fair point.
But one of the problems is I think that people, whenever you go to digital media, you can very easily get pulled away from local. The algorithm pulls you away to things that are just there to keep you on platform longer. But to use and wield it missionally like. And I, I think that biblical localism is a wonderful thing. I think that we can ex, we can take dominion where we are, duh first, before we try and make all our nations Christian nations. Like, how about you have a Christian neighborhood first? You know, like, can Hoa just be Christian?
Can your dinner table be Christian? Let's just start right there first.
And if we can remember to not get pulled away by the algorithm into this national scene, but rather to wield the tool for. Towards local, towards. This is me trying to build an exact dominion over my local area, over these local people.
I found digital to be very effective to do that. Very, very effective. But you have to do it intentionally.
[00:27:31] Speaker B: Because what I'm hearing right now is, Tom, go back on Twitter, which, no,
[00:27:35] Speaker A: I don't think so.
So I think this is a platform situation. Okay. And I think Twitter pulls hard on an international, national level. Like, pulls very, very hard. Like probably about as hard as TikTok pulls.
So in other words, when you put content on Twitter, the algorithm feeds it to everyone. Okay.
When you put content on TikTok, the algorithm feeds it to everyone inside of TikTok. And it's just, it's a view based platform. Okay, It's a globalism platform. Maybe think about it that way. But there are platforms I've found that lend themselves more towards localism, one of them being like a Facebook.
I find that Facebook platforms, you can work in such a way that you are operating with local people. So what I do, I run LinkedIn for my business network. I run X for my national network, which I haven't touched X in months because I'm just so tired of it. But we'll talk about that another episode.
And then I run Facebook for my local network and I deploy each one differently.
I'm doing different things inside of different spaces.
And the local media platform that we're launching, since it's local launches on Facebook and it's had tons of success because it's not getting sucked into the national space, it's staying hyperlocal. So there's ways to do this, there's ways to do it. And you can also create content streams, subscription based, owned media content streams. We talked about this before that just focus on local news and events. That's a great way and an easy way for a lot of people who have those tools to kind of turn those things on.
And it works out very well.
I would say the challenge to everybody who's listening to this episode right now and they're trying to figure out how to get started.
I would say what's the names of your local council members?
And I can just about guarantee you that everyone listening to this episode doesn't know.
But they can name their prime minister, they can name the president, they can name some Supreme Court justices. Right. They can probably name a few celebrity senators or House of Commons, House of Lords. I don't know what you guys call those people.
They could probably name those.
A few of them.
But when we get local, we lose it. And I would say, as a challenge, let's change that. Let's flip that.
So there you go.
[00:30:01] Speaker B: I like that.
[00:30:03] Speaker A: Okay, great. Well, I guess that's it. How to infiltrate local community.
Start.
Start.
Do something, you know, and just be faithful with what the Lord has given you and he'll. He'll bless you with more. Guys, thank y' all so much for listening to another episode of A Brit and a Yank Talk Business.
We are launching A Brit and a Yank Talk Business online web presence soon.
And one day I'll tell you the address that you can go and find all of our podcast episodes and all the fun information that you can connect to. In the meantime, you can find us anywhere that you listen to podcasts or on YouTube. We appreciate you listening to this, and if you ever have any questions, reach out to one of us, ask us. We'd love to do an episode on a later time. Thank you all so much for listening and we'll see you next time.
