Blind faith: When the business plan is answering a call from God

Posted On April 9, 2019

Marquis Forge is the CEO of Eleven86 Water, but he says that’s just a title. It’s God, he says, who runs the company, and God who started it in the first place.

Forge, our guest in a recent episode of “What’s Working With Cam Marston,” is a former walk-on football player at the University Alabama who had worked in the automotive industry for two decades. But he’d made a promise to always remember where he came from, the small town of Autaugaville just northwest of Montgomery.

And God, he says, showed him the way to keep that promise. He didn’t know anything about bottled water, but was led to people who showed him Autaugaville’s secret – a trapped aquifer that could produce some of the purest artesian water you’ll find.

From there, Forge says, he came in contact with one person after another who helped him turn this knowledge into a profitable business – from acquiring the property to tapping and bottling the water to learning the industry and landing a distributor who has the water stocked in stores around the state. And it was all God’s doing, he says.

“Being obedient to what God is telling me to do, I jumped off the mountain without a parachute, and kept all the faith in His hands,” said Forge, whose company has been in business for just a year. “The Lord has this already planned out. All I had to do is follow instructions.”

Forge, who wasn’t the first to try to tap and sell Autaugaville’s artesian water, shares with us how he and his company are making it work where others have failed. He tells us what it is that makes Eleven86 water special, and the difference between artesian water, spring water, purified water and alkaline water. And he shares why, for a small community in central Alabama where economic opportunities are limited, the company’s success is about more than the bottom line.

“It’s not about money, it’s about revitalization,” he said. “This is about making a community proud.”

Join us for a refreshing discussion about water and the difference it’s making in Autaugaville.