Exploring Life & Business with Tara, Josh, Sydni and Sophie Joseph

Today we’d like to introduce you to Tara, Josh, Sydni and Sophie Joseph.

Alright, so thank you so much for sharing your story and insight with our readers. To kick things off, can you tell us a bit about how you got started?
Tara: Josh and I have been together since the eighth grade and we’ve been best friends all the way through. When we got married, I was in the fashion design space and in the retail space, and Josh worked in real estate.

I wanted to be a mom at a very young age – I wanted to be a stay-at-home mom and do things that were more philanthropic in nature. So, Josh continued his career in real estate, moving his way up through companies, and became a partner in past companies, while I stayed home with our daughters, Sydni and Sophie, and ran fundraising for our school district and the Parent Teacher Organization (PTO), among other foundations.

Josh owns a real estate company called Frontline Real Estate Partners. That company helped him catapult into the cannabis space with a company called Grassroots. When we knew that he was going to exit his company, Josh and I decided that we wanted to try a new endeavor in the music space, something that neither of us had ever known about.

We wanted to do something that we would be business partners in, and we wanted something that was going to be a legacy project, along with our daughters, and for them to be involved at the same time.

We put our toe in the water, surrounded ourselves with incredibly smart people in the music space, and decided to open a publishing company down in Nashville. With our daughters being our two partners in this business, we realized what we were good at was helping to facilitate and drive other businesses.

That kind of branched us out into many different sectors – We went from music publishing back into the cannabis space to real estate and also working closely on investment opportunities.

We created The Joseph Family Foundation, which Sophie, our youngest daughter runs because our passion, as a family, is about giving back to the world. We also joined in partnership with a fashion designer, Tyler Minor, who is an incredible stylist to many different musicians, to form a brand known as American Paint in doing so joining forces with Jennifer Wayne; we have a store in Nashville where people can customize their own hats. It’s really experiential, it’s about going to create one-of-a-kind hats with a personalized fashion designer that you can then take home, and it becomes a piece of art that you’ll be able to wear forever.

My daughters and I also created the Amulet Society, which is focused on bringing women together and empowering women. It’s a networking group, for women, about women. We want women to have a safe space to come together, to feel like they have a sisterhood, and also have the ability to stand up for each other. We established this network through either baseline get-togethers or philanthropic events with different themes, where women meet other women that they’ve never met before and get them out of their comfort zone.

We’re also fostering a mentorship program for young girls that are coming out of college that want to be able to meet others in different industries and learn about different industries that they never even knew they had an interest in; it’s really an exciting process!

Josh: Tara and I just celebrated our 25th wedding anniversary, and we’ve been together for well over 30 years. We’re blessed to have a storybook romance and two beautiful daughters that we’re extraordinarily proud of as parents and as partners. Together, we’re looking to build what we characterize as chapter 2.0 of our lives.

Professionally, I’ve been in commercial real estate since coming out of college and have had the good fortune of being able to oversee commercial real estate transactions in over 40 states, with repeat business in many of those states. As Tara mentioned, that helped facilitate a couple of former partners and myself to get into the cannabis business back in 2014.

We built a rather significantly sized cannabis company called Grassroots Cannabis, and subsequently, we had a successful exit in July of 2020.

From that point, we created a family office holding company called Big Plan Holdings, which is headquartered, and based physically in Nashville, Tennessee, but we are doing business around the country, as well as overseas, with a rather significant project in the Middle East right now, which we’re very excited about.

Today, under Big Plan Holdings, there are various verticals that we’ve created, including The Joseph Family Foundation, alongside deploying our own capital in various industries such as real estate, cannabis, CBD, fashion, music, entertainment, and hospitality at very high levels. We’ve surrounded ourselves with sophisticated folks, those that have been in those industries for many years.

Additionally, we are in the process of undertaking two significant bar/restaurant projects in downtown Nashville with probably a third one on the way, all with anticipated openings in 2023.

Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
Tara: Josh and I have a podcast that gives an in-depth look into our lives and what we’re looking to accomplish in the future. We are using ‘The Big Plan’ Podcast to bring people that are in our life, whether professionally or personally together to help us tell our story.

This includes discussing the ups, the downs, the failures, and the successes so people have something to relate to as opposed to different types of podcasts which are usually about one unique thing. We want our audience to not only relate to us but to learn about the times the road wasn’t smooth and where we succeeded and failed in navigating those precarious stretches.

Sydni: There are far more pros than cons throughout this incredible process of building up Big Plan Holdings with our family.

The creation of BPH in 2020, like everything else in the world, came with natural organic hiccups amid the global pandemic of COVID-19. It took a bit of a toll and a hit on all of us, including the projects we were trying to accomplish and the new ones we were trying to fire up. COVID-19 ultimately kept us from forming valuable relationships in the spaces that we were newly trying to tap into. This made operations a little more challenging, with the inability to connect with people in person and the inability to really travel, especially because our home base for the first half of 2020 was still in Chicago and not yet Nashville.

Like every other business, we’re still seeing the ripple effects of the global pandemic as it relates to the state of the economy, allocation of disposable income, and cash flow that people and/or institutions might have as it relates to where they want to put their money for investment opportunities, and us being an incubator or a vehicle to provide unique investment opportunities to people.

Personally, it can also be a challenge working as a family. It’s a blessing, but it does make it hard to separate family time from work time. With all four of us actively and intimately involved with different parts of the business, we struggle a little bit more to know when to turn off the work talk and just spend some time as a family.

Josh: Tara and I got married and had our daughters at a young age. Tara and I gave up a great deal of our 20s to really level up and become adults and parents. And looking back on that, it certainly was a big challenge.

We’ve had many challenges over the years to build what we’re building, from a family unit standpoint, making sure that we were the best parents that we possibly could, providing for our girls in many different respects. I’m not necessarily talking about the financial side of things, even though that was obviously critical and important, but also just being good, solid parents and trying to create and help mold our daughters into the excellent human beings that they’ve turned into.

Tara and I are very proud when we look in the mirror that we have really done this on our own, and with just a lot of hard work, dedication, and loyalty to one another and support for one another.

Tara: One challenge at the moment is that Josh is very business minded, and he’s now learning that he does have creativity! He never had used that part of his brain before because on the real estate side and the investment side you think one way, but then when you bring this creativity back into it, you can think in a totally different way. I, on the other hand, had only used a creative mind and was never really using my business sense.

The challenge there is how we can take two of our developing wheelhouses, along with both of our daughters. They are strong in the technical space but they’re also creative and they have great business minds. We’re able to take all of that and make it work as a solid whole-family business.

It’s an interesting journey to see how that comes together. There’s been ups and downs along the way as we learn and progress, but it’s all about finding our footing and keep moving forward.

Appreciate you sharing that. What should we know about Big Plan Holdings and The Joseph Family Foundation?
Tara: The foundation of Big Plan Holdings is centered around being able to facilitate, give back, and watch others grow. That is at the forefront and that baseline trickles down into all the different things that we do.

When we tackle investments, we help others get started on their businesses. Our publishing company is in essence, a giveback type of business because we’re helping facilitate artists and writers to watch them grow and thrive.

A big part of Big Plan Holdings is moreover The Joseph Family Foundation, which we’re extremely invested in because we want to give back.

Sophie: The Joseph Family Foundation is a big part of BPH and a big part of who we are as a family.

Through the foundation, we’re able to facilitate change in areas that need different types of support, whether it be monetary, hands-on support, or open lines of communication between different community members that have never met before.

The Foundation has four different focus areas – Those are living aid, education aid, health and wellness aid, and aid for underrepresented groups. And yes, often, these areas overlap. We embrace overlap – Also overlap of entertainment and philanthropy to help share different stories, amplify different causes, voices, and resources for a wide variety of communities.

On October 23rd, we hosted our 2nd Annual Kiss Brest Cancer Goodbye Benefit Gala at the Country Music Hall of Fame to raise money for the Susan G. Komen Foundation. In January, we are going to host a casino night to raise awareness and funds for those displaced by climate change. There is a lot in our pipeline!

Josh: The BPH brand is something that we’re very proud of. We moved from Chicago to Nashville, to a new city and a new market. Nashville, historically, has always been a very old school; a very localized, centralized place.

Yet, Nashville has continued to boom and grow over the last several years. You have a lot of transplants coming in. One of the consistent things that we hear from a lot of the folks that we have relationships with, both professionally and personally, is that a lot of people have come and gone in Nashville. They’ll float into the city for six months or a year and then they’ll just disappear.

We’ve taken a different approach – We have planted a flag in Nashville. It’s the headquarters for Big Plan Holdings, which certainly is the brand that we have established and created and one we’re looking to continue to grow.

On a macro level, we have served and continue to serve and look to be an incubator for different investment opportunities and business opportunities.

We’ve been very fortunate to have a wonderful investor following coming out of my real estate and cannabis careers. And that has continued to grow alongside older relationships, which continue to exist. We have fostered many new relationships in the last few years including real estate, cannabis, CBD (both plant-touching and non-plant-touching opportunities), fashion, hospitality, food and beverage, and entertainment.

We have a publishing company called Edgehill Music Publishing that is three years old and continuing to grow with a wonderful team.

We are ultimately serial entrepreneurs and are always looking at different business ventures and different investment opportunities. We deploy our own capital to a great deal of these, as well as investing and acquiring investors who come along with us. We put together a safe space for their investments.

We’re also very proud of BPH Legacy Partners, which is focused on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) for women and minorities who want to get involved in the cannabis and CBD industries. We’ve created a partnership with two former NFL players, Jordan Reed and Dominique Easley, along with a couple of other folks. We have a couple of wins under our belt, and we’re expecting a couple more in the near term.

Big Plan Holdings is a phenomenal platform and a wonderful brand that we’re creating, we have created, we’re continuing to build and create. But at the end of all of this, if we can leave a legacy, for Tara and I, for Sydni and Sophie, and allow for Sydni and Sophie to continue making wonderful changes that they have already made to the world, that’s what Tara and I are most excited about.

BPH is about creating for our girls, first and foremost, and then for anyone else that we can possibly touch as well. We want to help young adults and entrepreneurs and be mentors along the way.

What was your favorite childhood memory?
Tara: My favorite childhood memory was probably modeling. I ran for Miss Teen USA and became a finalist for Illinois. I didn’t go any further than that, I had to drop out of the pageant, but I loved the experience of it.

Josh: My favorite memories would include playing football with a bunch of the young guys around the neighborhood that I grew up in when the winter months would start creeping into Chicago. We’d always have a great time with that.

Another favorite childhood memory was when Tara and I started dating in high school and all the time that we were able to spend together in our teenage years.

Sophie: My favorite memory was the day that I was able to adopt my rescue horse, Lola, because she is basically my entire life outside of the Foundation. It will continue to be a favorite memory as I create different moments with her.

Sydni: It’s going to sound corny, but it’s honestly when my sister was born. That was my favorite day of my life, to this day. She was born when I was three. Even though I was very young, I still remember it as clearly as I can. It completely shifted and changed my life from three years old on. I feel like it gave me a very good purpose in this world to be a big sister. I’m very grateful for that.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.bigplanholdings.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bigplanholdings/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/bigplanholdings
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/Big_Plan_H
• Other: https://shows.acast.com/thebigplan

Image Credits
London Chavez Kristin Holliday Ford Fairchild Katie Larson Sara Kauss