Joshua Hamby – Madison Capital Group

Joshua Hamby spent nearly a decade believing he was going to spend his life fighting cancer. From the time he was 14, the path seemed clear: medical school, oncology, a career devoted to the hardest disease in the room. Then one of his best friends was diagnosed with cancer in high school. He passed away while Hamby was in college.

“If you can’t be happy doing anything else, then this is what you have to do,” the physician he interned with told him after the loss reshaped everything. “But I would encourage you to do anything else.”

Hamby then changed his major to political science. He thought about law school until a retired attorney he worked for gave him the most direct advice of his young life: don’t. It had been the man’s greatest regret, and he made sure Hamby knew it. What followed was a stretch of uncertainty — bartending, no clear direction, a nagging sense that the roadmap had disappeared. He was watching his now-wife build her own career and didn’t want her to see him adrift. So, he cast a wide net. He landed in project management, spent five years running other people’s jobs across the country, and slowly discovered that building things — real, physical, complicated things — gave him the same intellectual charge that the idea of practicing medicine once had. The pivot into commercial real estate development wasn’t elegant, but it was real.

Today, Hamby serves as executive managing director for Madison Commercial, the retail and mixed-use development arm of Madison Capital Group Holdings, a vertically integrated real estate investment firm headquartered in Charlotte, N.C. Founded in 2009 by Ryan Hanks, Madison Capital’s portfolio spans multifamily, self-storage, and commercial sectors through a family of companies — Go Store It Self-Storage, Madison Communities, Madison Commercial, BenCo Construction, and Madison Capital Markets Group — all structured to collaborate and create value across asset classes. Hamby joined the firm in January 2026 and immediately took on a scope of work most executives would divide across several roles.

A decade of deals

Before Madison, Hamby built a career defined by complexity and scale. He held director-level positions at Schaffer Construction and Woodhaven Development Group, eventually returning to Hutton as vice president of real estate before moving to Madison. Over the course of his career, he has been involved in more than $1 billion in projects spanning over 40 states, with a specialization in net lease retail development and early-stage work — site selection, underwriting, entitlements, and feasibility analysis.

His approach to that work reflects a philosophy he has carried since his earliest development roles. Hamby doesn’t believe in being the smartest person in the room. He believes in assembling the people who are.

“I don’t build these projects. I build the team that builds them. and we’re facilitating an infinitely scalable development platform using best-in-the-country consultants for each body of work.”

That means the best civil engineers, architects, and attorneys, a dedicated general contractor set up specifically for Fresh Stop and Links growth, and a project management team he describes as best in class. At Madison, he also draws on the firm’s fully integrated structure — marketing, development, capital, and construction all sitting under the same parent company — a structural advantage that tightens coordination across every phase of a deal.

Building Fresh Stop from the ground up

Hamby’s most immediate focus at Madison is the development of Fresh Stop, a premium convenience and fuel retail concept built around a straightforward idea: that convenience and quality should point in the same direction. Fresh Stop is designed to be the stop that makes a separate grocery run optional — whole ingredients, made-to-order preparation, and a grab-and-go format that puts a real meal within reach without the detour. Roughly 30 percent of all food offerings will be prepared fresh on-site daily, covering breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

Within that model sits an idea Hamby hopes to bring to fruition as the concept matures — a rotating selection of cost-plus priced items, with sourcing and margins disclosed directly to the customer. Novel in a sector not known for that kind of openness, it is a vision he holds carefully: a focused, meaningful addition to the food program when the time is right, not a wholesale reinvention of how convenience retail operates.

Access to those offerings, when realized, would be tied to Fresh Stop’s loyalty program — a membership structure Hamby envisions expanding well beyond a single brand. The long-term architecture connects the entire Madison family of companies into a single rewards ecosystem: a Links Car Wash membership earning a discount on a Madison Communities apartment, a Fresh Stop coffee purchase unlocking a complimentary wash, a loyalty point accumulated at the pump redeemable across the portfolio. It is the kind of cross-brand integration that larger retail platforms have pursued for years, applied here to an ecosystem Madison is building — and owns — from the ground up.

For Hamby, the brand promise underneath it all comes down to something straightforward. “We’re trying to meet the consumer where they are,” he says, “leaning into the identity of the Fresh Stop brand — a reliable place for prepared foods with goal-oriented macros, clean ingredients, all at an affordable price.”

The company currently operates 37 Fresh Stop locations, all of which were acquired as existing locations. The ground-up chapter begins this year, with construction launching in Central Florida in 2026 — covering both the eastern and western sides of the state — and a grand opening targeted for late 2027. From there, the plan is to move immediately into the Carolinas, starting in Charlotte, then grow the network north along I-95 and I-75 to eventually connect the two pipelines. Once the new ground-up stores are open, the acquired locations will be rebranded to draw a clear distinction between what Hamby describes as a premium and a standard tier within the portfolio.

“Fresh Stop is the working name, but we may ultimately launch the brand under a different flag that suits the identity of the concept,” Hamby explains.

Alongside Fresh Stop, he is also helping accelerate Links Car Wash’s expansion as well as bolstering the mixed-use and credit retail development efforts within Madison.

The culture behind the work

Hamby’s leadership philosophy didn’t emerge from a management textbook. It grew out of a life shaped by contrast — a rural childhood raised by hard-working parents emerging from tough circumstances, followed by an unexpected and prestigious boarding school experience that forced him out of his shell and into rooms filled with radically different types of people than those he knew in the first chapter of his life. He became president of his college fraternity in Charleston. He learned, over time, that leadership wasn’t about outpacing the people around him.

He speaks at universities and high schools, engages with finance clubs, and treats mentorship as a practice, not a gesture. He has watched people discover capabilities they didn’t know they had, and he calls it the most rewarding part of his work.

“The most rewarding part of leadership is seeing people realize they’re more capable than they thought,” he says.

Inside Madison, that conviction shapes how he runs his programs. He describes his core skill as workplace organization — getting more out of the same group of people than others might expect — powered by high empathy for individual strengths and a deliberate effort to match people with the work that suits them. He doesn’t require superstars. He requires something harder to find.

“I value reliability more than anything,” he says. “The consistency someone brings to their work every day is worth more than raw talent. When I know what a person will give me, I can build real structure around them, set the right expectations, and give them room to do their best work without burning out.”
For Hamby, the shift from aspiring oncologist to real estate executive isn’t a story of detour. It’s a story of finding, through setback and redirection, work that demands everything he has to offer. The Fresh Stop expansion won’t save lives the way oncology might have. But if his instincts hold, it will give communities across the Southeast a place to eat well, spend honestly, and come back tomorrow.