207 - TZL - Burke Pemberton

still a long way away from getting to that place of global acceptance of understanding that we only have one Earth and we've got to treat it well. And we've got to do things the right way today, make the investment today for tomorrow, but you guys are kind of at the forefront of that investment that is taking place for those people that actually get it. And some of it has become because of regulatory purposes, but then other people that are just like, we just want to do the right thing. Burke Pemberton [9:01] I think that one of Stok’s market differentiators is that we are real estate finance people first. And we've always been able to put the financial value in terms that decision makers in real estate organizations can hear about how investment in sustainability is going to make their investment a more viable one and that's been a differentiator for a long time. But what we're seeing now is the capital markets are starting to wake up to the fact that having good sustainability business practices, and good risk mitigation is just good business practices, and you can see it in the companies that are doing it. They're outpacing the S&P 500 They're outpacing the market. How many times have you talked to your financial advisor and they send you that annual thing that says past performance is not an indicator of future success. It's like that great disclaimer, right? But the sustainability risk reporting is an indicator of future success from a financial standpoint. These businesses and investors are waking up to that fact and so we're really seeing a shift in the market. Randy Wilburn [10:11] It kind of lines up with the mission, vision and values that Stok operates from. On your website, it says that Stok is led by core values. The values that guide every decision we make and actions we take on behalf of our partners and clients. And you have a number of things on here that you mentioned, autonomy, equity, grit, sincerity, and stewardship. These are not words that are normally been shared or emanate from a typical design firm website. And so, I would be curious to know, because it seems like this all came organically. I would be curious to know how you developed these core values and was it founder led, or was it just as you kept adding people, everybody brought something to the table, that you said, this looks good, let's add this to the mix of what we're doing as a company.

Burke Pemberton [11:12] The core values themselves were developed with a small founder group, some of our, what we call our active members, some of the principles in the firm in the early days when we sort of decided to take a nonconventional business path. We all felt pretty strongly that conventional organizational structures and

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