207 - TZL - Burke Pemberton

Randy Wilburn [49:18] Which sounds like Stok does not do things the old way. And so as we wind this up, how bullish are you about the future? From your lens from Stok in terms of the work that you're doing, the people that you're working with, and the opportunities that are in front of you, how bullish are you on the future in the design space?

Burke Pemberton [49:40] Oh, I’m so bullish and I'm so optimistic. The demand for the type of work that we do is so pressing, and it doesn't matter. I went and saw a really great speaker. I'm not going to promote him because I don't really love his message, but he's an environmentalist but he sort of has this mindset like, it's not as bad as everybody says it is, which I don't necessarily subscribe to that mindset. But I think what we're starting to see is that whether you're on the conservative side of things, or on the liberal side of things are everywhere in between, everybody agrees that we need to reduce our carbon impact. We don't agree with how we need to do that, but everybody agrees and so that is starting to gel. And really, the kind of questions we're asking ourselves are is real estate our boundary? Like, do we want to stay just in the real estate realm, or do we want to focus on broader social sustainability and governance stuff, when there's so much untapped within the built environment from a carbon and sustainability standpoint? Because people are coming to us and they're saying, hey, you look at our supply chain and we're like, you make a phone, we're building consultants. But that's when you're in the sustainability sector, it starts to bleed out into all types of operations, all types of sectors and verticals and business models. And so I think our biggest challenge right now is to focus and to specialize and sort of hedgehog to use a good to great, Jim Collins quote, “do one thing and do it well.” And so I think the challenge is to say, do we go after shiny objects, if so, which ones and so the way to do that is with strategy, and that's where the rubber hits the road and that's where it becomes a lot of fun. And so, the rocket ships taking off for us and it's just a question of where we're going to go at this point. So I would say on a scale of one to 10 of bullishness, I'm 11. Randy Wilburn [52:05] Okay, I like that. Technically, that would be off the charts but I like that. This has been great, Burke. This conversation has gone over an hour now. We've had a lot to share, and we just scratched the surface. We probably will have to have you back at some point in time. [BP – I’d love to]. And certainly anybody that's listening to this podcast, if you're not familiar with Stok, you need to get familiar with them. Their website is stok.com. Burke, if people want to reach out to you, what's the best way for them to connect with you.

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