Faith, Family, and the Long Game in the Land Business

By Drew Haney · Founder, Rooster Capital · May 2, 2026

I get asked about the faith piece. Here’s the honest version — where it shows up in how I run the business, where it doesn’t, and what I tell operators who ask.

Why I bring this up at all

I’m not interested in selling anyone on faith. I am interested in being honest about what actually keeps me steady through the messier parts of running a business that touches millions of dollars in transactions a year. For me, faith is part of the answer. It’s not the whole answer. It’s not optional for me to leave out either.

Where faith shows up in my business

1. Decision quality under pressure. When a deal goes sideways or a partner has bad news, I notice that I make better decisions when I’m grounded vs reactive. Prayer / scripture / time alone helps me get grounded.
2. Long-term orientation. The things I most want to build — a strong family, a business my kids would be proud of, work that contributes — are 30-year projects. Faith reframes the time horizon away from quarterly thinking.
3. Honest dealings. I want to be the kind of partner my operators describe to other operators as “he does what he says.” That’s an internal commitment, not a marketing position.
4. Equanimity through wins and losses. Land has wild months. Faith helps me not over-celebrate the wins or over-mourn the losses.

Where faith doesn’t do the work

• Doesn’t replace underwriting
• Doesn’t replace systems
• Doesn’t replace operator pipeline
• Doesn’t replace the math

Operators sometimes assume that faith-driven entrepreneurship means trusting the universe and skipping the hard work. The opposite, in my experience. Faith makes me MORE willing to do the unglamorous work because I’m not chasing external validation as the primary reward.

What I tell operators who ask

Don’t adopt faith because it would be useful to your business. That’s instrumentalizing something that needs to be sincere to function. If faith is real for you, let it inform how you run your business — how you treat partners, how you handle losses, how you communicate when things are hard. If it’s not for you, that’s fine; build whatever framework keeps you grounded.

The operators I’ve seen blow up over the years usually had a values gap somewhere. They’d shortcut the math, or burn a partner, or chase a shiny object instead of working their pipeline. Faith gives me one anchor against those drifts. Other things might do it for you.

The version that’s most useful to share publicly

I don’t bring God into operator deal calls or pitch decks. The values inform how I work; they’re not the surface. The operators I work with come from every conceivable background, and the partnership works because the underlying business math is sound and the communication is honest — not because we share theology.

This blog post might be the most explicit I’ll be in public about it. The rest of the time, you’ll see the values in how the deals get done.