The $3 Million Mistake

On December 10th, 2010, I made one of the biggest financial mistakes of my life.

We purchased one of the most beautiful and most developable pieces of land in Ohio, with absolutely no intention of ever developing it.

Typically, when people buy property like this, they apply a simple real estate investing formula called highest and best use.

They look at the land in its current form and try to figure out how they could squeeze every last dollar out of it in the future.

For a lot of real estate developers, that’s how they make a living. They’re dreaming of houses and neighborhoods and apartments, even commercial buildings, and industrial warehouses.

About a month after we bought the property, I ran into a big real estate guy, and he couldn’t believe we weren’t going to bulldoze the farm and the 4,000 apple trees because the city already approved 230 homes down in the orchard.

That’s what he had in mind.

On paper, this was a $3 million mistake.

And we walked away from it.

On purpose.

Why?

Well, this was a unique little place. It was 200 years old, and the family we purchased it from had owned it since 1927. My wife and I both grew up walking the hills since we were four or five.

We loved it, and we were emotionally connected to it. There’s something about this place that you feel the second you get out of the car. Maybe it’s because of the views or maybe it’s because when you’re here you feel like a kid again, like you’re stepping back in time, when everything was slower, a little more charming, and more deliberate.

We couldn’t watch this place die a quick death because of a foreclosure so we decided to buy it in sort of a knee-jerk, spontaneous decision. I didn’t have time to analyze this thing on a spreadsheet or even run any type of projections.

Truth be told, we paid cash for a memory.

I was 35 years old, and I had spent the previous ten years building and scaling companies. There’s a science to that, formulas that, if you apply them, have a very high degree of success. And once the ink dried, that’s exactly who showed up at the farm. I figured I’d run this place the way I ran everything else. Set the goal and execute. Force the result.

The farm had other plans.

I believe that the highest form of intelligence is creating a life that you actually want to live. I talk about this a lot. Life should be exciting, filled with purpose and impact, and feel like an adventure, but if I can be honest with you, there are two sides to creating this type of life and I only learned this recently.

On the surface, and even instinctively, I think most people understand that they need to create the life they want to live. They equate creating to building and taking action which requires effort, motivation, and focus.

They understand that if they push harder, they will go faster.

And then, if they add people, systems, and processes, that life or that business starts to improve. It starts to scale because it’s cause and effect, it’s math.

So when we bought the farm, I assumed it would work the exact same way.

But it didn’t.

And this was frustrating for me. I learned that you have to grow things on a farm, and that’s the other side of the coin. You can’t build an apple tree, you have to plant the seed, water it, nurture it, get rid of the weeds, and then be patient. And in some years an apple tree just decides not to produce. No warning, no explanation. You did everything right, and the tree takes the year off. That’s the tree’s decision, and you can’t do anything about it.

Some things have to be built, some have to be grown, and others require both.
The wisdom is understanding the difference.

You can eliminate years of frustration if you know the difference…

In 2015 we built our house on the farm, and that’s when the place really started working on me. I wasn’t visiting the seasons anymore, I was living inside them. A wet spring doesn’t ask if you’re ready or prepared, and winter doesn’t care about your goals. Everything out here moves on a schedule that was set long before I showed up.

Somewhere around 2019, nine years after we bought this place, this realization finally landed for me. There was no lightning bolt or eureka moment. It just seemed to happen, like one day it was there, this idea simply grew on me, which, looking back, was the only way it could have happened.

I realized that you can build a lot of things, but you can’t build anything that’s alive.

Skills get built. So do income and wealth. Those things respond to force and effort, and I love that world. I still live in it. I think we were made to build.

But, on the other hand, some things are meant to be grown. People are alive, a marriage is alive, and I think health, peace, joy, and contentment have to be grown.

Most people I know have these two backwards. They grind away trying to build the things that can only grow, forcing the marriage and engineering the kids and hacking their way to peace, and then they sit around waiting on the things they could just go build. I think that’s why so many successful people feel so empty. They’re using building tools on living things, and you can work yourself to death doing that without ever getting one inch closer.

I know because I did it for years, and on paper I was winning, and the more I won, the less I felt.

And where this goes deepest for me was my faith…

I believed in God for most of my life. But belief, if I’m honest, is a builder’s word. A belief is something you construct in your head. You stack up the arguments and the evidence until the structure holds, and then you point at it and say, I believe.

I did that.

But then somewhere between the seasons, I went from believing in God to being friends with Jesus. Think about that for a second… Doesn’t this have to grow inside of you? A friendship can’t be built, it grows. It only comes one way, through time and presence, season after season. It has to be grown.

That’s why I think it had to happen here. When you watch something come up out of bare dirt that you didn’t make and couldn’t make, and you watch it a few hundred times, it gets hard to walk these hills and not sense the Grower.

God isn’t something you build a case for.
He’s someone you grow close to.

We associate creating with building, but what I’ve learned over the past few years is that it’s just as much about growing.

A company can be built, but its culture has to be grown. A marriage can be grown, but the environment has to be built.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this, and the binary doesn’t break. Anything alive, living, breathing, organic, has to be grown. Everything else can be built. Think about going to the gym. You build the program, and then you let the muscle grow.

And growing doesn’t mean we just hope. It means we optimize the conditions. We take the actions, and then we let nature and God do their thing.

So these days I try to keep the two straight. Build what can be built and grow what has to be grown.

Which brings me back to that $3 million mistake…

You’re probably wondering what we did with the land. We kept the orchard, all 4,000 trees of it. We preserved the valley and the hill, and the sunsets, and everything that made this place worth saving in the first place.

We now grow 18 varieties of apples, and we sell apple pies and homemade cider donuts and fresh cider and all the little pieces of fall that make people feel like kids again. We host concerts all summer long and weddings almost every weekend, and more than 2,000 couples have started their married lives on this hill, looking out over a view that stretches 50 or 60 miles across the horizon.

Every fall, the farm turns into Pumpkin Village, which is part festival, part family tradition, and part controlled chaos. We run seven themed weekends, everything from Pumpkin Fest to Wild Wild West Weekend to Superhero Weekend, and on our biggest days, 10,000 to 15,000 people will walk the farm’s rocky trails. Parents bring their kids, grandparents bring their grandkids, couples come back to the same spot where they got married, and families take the same picture in the same place year after year. Somehow the kids keep getting taller and the parents keep looking at the photos wondering how time is moving so fast.

A few years ago, we planted a couple acres of grapes so we could start our own little winery, because of course we did.

None of this shows up on a real estate development spreadsheet where you can calculate the value of 230 houses down to the dollar.

But how do you calculate the value of a child picking an apple for the first time?

How do you calculate a dad carrying a tired kid on his shoulders after a long day at the farm?

How do you calculate the value of a bride walking down the aisle at sunset, or a family tradition that keeps pulling people back year after year because somewhere deep down they know this place holds a piece of their story?

You can’t. Sometimes the highest and best use of a piece of land isn’t what you can extract from it, it’s what you allow it to become.

The “mistake” paid me back personally too. My three sons grew up on this land, my marriage grew here, and somewhere on these hills I went from believing to knowing. From only building to growing.

When I was a kid, there was a man here everybody called Apple Bill. His family had owned this farm since 1927. He was larger than life and one day he bent down and handed me an apple. I couldn’t have been more than five.

I thought he handed me a piece of fruit.

Turns out he handed me a lot more than that.