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Join Willie Walker, Walker and Dunlop's Chairman and CEO, as we bring you fresh perspectives about leadership, business, the economy, and commercial real estate. Willie hosts a diverse network of leaders as they share wisdom that cuts across industry lines. His guests are experts in their fields, from leading economists and CEOs to Harvard and Yale professors and everything in between. Our one goal is simple, providing you with unique insights, unparalleled data, and real time market analyses. Leadership isn't about titles. It's about clarity under pressure, values in motion, and the courage to grow through uncertainty. In this special edition of the Walker Webcast, we bring you a CEO masterclass. You'll hear directly from 12 extraordinary executives, leaders of global institutions, trailblazing entrepreneurs, and visionary builders of culture, capital and community. Each brings their own story, their own strategy, and their own definition of what it means to lead in today's world. From resilience to reinvention, from risk taking to relationship building, from these are lessons forged at the top. Welcome to the CEO Masterclass. John Hope Bryant is a renowned entrepreneur, author and philanthropist, widely recognized as one of the nation's most influential advocates for financial literacy and economic empowerment. He is the founder, chairman and CEO of Operation Hope, a nonprofit dedicated to expanding economic opportunity and and underserved communities. You are such an inspiration in so many different ways. Your speech at the Global Dignity Day in Norway in 2011, where Reverend Desmond Tutu is sitting in the front row. To anyone who has some time after potentially listening to this discussion, I would strongly suggest you go listen to that speech because it is truly something else. But there are two true gifts you have, John. One is you're an amazing storyteller. And the second is that you remember a lot of facts. When did you realize that you were smart? First of all, I'm honored to be with you. And what you didn't say, well, the biggest credential I've got here is that you and I are new friends. You're stuck with me for life, which I feel sorry for you. And to underscore the fact that we're not human beings having a spiritual experience, but spiritual beings having a human experience. And that energy matters, relationship capital matters almost more than everything other than culture. I met you through Sean Horowitz, another sweet, amazing, brilliant soul. And I met Sean through Clayton Wyatt, who's a genius. He is. Indeed he is. And that trajectory was tied to a business of mine that we're now growing. But it's all because we really liked and respected each other, not just because the numbers worked. And that was more relationship than transaction. And I feel like I've known you forever because you have this authenticity about you. I told you when we talked earlier that you're just normal and it's very abnormal to be so successful and to be normal. And I just want to underscore and commend you. You were raised well. Parents did a really good job with you. I respect. I'm seeing them, I'm seeing them after we're done with this today. And so I will. Actually they both said they were going to watch today but I will relay that to them. It's very kind of you to say that. And so no, I just, I'm just, just being accurate. I mean they, they, they did a. They did a really good job. And, and you know, success amplifies who you are. You grew this company from 50 million to 5 billion and one of the Fortune 500's fastest growing companies consistently now publicly traded and Outside success and 3x the revenue, et cetera, et cetera and still kept your integrity about you still a nice guy and success and failure. Money and power amplifies your jerkdom or your nicest. If you're a jerk, money and power makes you a really powerful wealthy jerk. If you're a nice person, it just makes you an incredibly nice and warm wealthy individual who does more for the world. You're the latter. My mom told me. I don't think I've ever said this on publicly before. My wife knows, a couple of my friends know it. My mom told me when I was in elementary school I passed some kind of a test that said I had a genius IQ and this is common California. So they didn't keep good records. And luckily for me, the records fell away, the memory fell away. So I didn't keep it in my conscience. I just knew that I had to hustle every day because I never trust fund or a hookup or I didn't know Willie yet or Sean yet or Tony Resver yet or whatever. So I just had to hustle. That was my hustle hustle and that became my moniker is get up early, work late, forget lunch. And you know, an entrepreneur works 18 hours they keep from getting a job. So I, I gotta give you two ears and one mouth. So you listen twice as much as you talk. So I've always just been really curious like Quincy Jones, how'd you get so smart? I'm just nosy as hell is what I asked him. I'm really nosy. But I think the key Willie is my mother told me she loved me every day of my life. There's nothing more powerful than your mother telling you that you are loved. And so I've said this quote at operation over the years is the difference between being broke and being poor. Being broke is economic, but being poor is a disabling frame of mind, a depressed condition of your spirit. And you must vow never ever, ever to be poor again. And so I've been homeless, as you know. I was homeless. I lived in my jeep for six months. The jeep that was, payments weren't made on so they were chasing the Jeep. I lived in that for six months. I, I failed repeatedly. From 18, from age 10 to 18, 20 years old. I've had lots of failure. But success is going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm. I take no for vitamins. I think it's not so much about being smart, it's about being resilient. There's a lot of smart people out here, there's a lot of people who are very learned, but they don't have good common sense. They don't maybe have high confidence but low self esteem. And that's probably the most dangerous person in the world. Beyond the person with no hope willing is a person with power, money, position, confidence. Confidence means you have competence and low self esteem and fear and insecurity. Now I'm not going to name a name, but watching this and get an image of a few people I just mentioned, a few people who describe for whom what I just described describe and this fact you don't need to say, don't either describe anybody to say a name, it just sort of jumps out at you. And I think in that way the world's dangerous and you got to handle people like their emotional hand grenades because you, you walk in every situation that can implode or explode or possibly blossom with potential if you can nurture their fundamental goodness. I think I'm resilient. I think I see the glasses half full, not half empty. I never give up and I see possibilities in everybody and I try to nurture those possibilities. Deborah Caffara is chairman and CEO of Ventas, one of the nation's leading REITs in healthcare and senior living. Recognized as one of the most powerful women in business, Deborah brings resilience, strategy and grit to the table. So you're one of only two women on that list of the hundred top CEOs that the Harvard Business Review published. And you've talked a lot about females in business, the lack of female CEOs but you've also talked about that middle period of female Careers beginning part you're coming out of college, it's men and women and employers basically are hiring both. Later on in life you get to your level and you are going head to head with every single male. And in the corporate world as it relates to board appointments and all the incredible things that you do both inside and outside of work. But you talk about that middle period and how difficult that is for women. And I think about your career and being having moved up in the legal profession and then all of a sudden making that transfer over to the corporate world right in the middle of those middle years. Talk for a moment about how challenging that was. And if you were to give advice to a talented woman who is in those middle years today with those challenges between work demands and home demands, what would you advise them to think about? Well, that's a quite a question. First of all, in terms of CEOs, even in in the S&P 500, there are still only 5% women CEOs overall. So that is really important to understand the context after, after all these years. And some of that is this attrition that we see mostly in the middle parts with young children, not exclusively. And what I would suggest. I've made a lot of sacrifices for my career and I consider them just choices. We all make choices in life, whether we're men or women. And at its foundation, you really need to know who you are and what you want. And not everyone wants the same thing. I never sought balance. I sought achievement, excellence, learning, broadening, having new experiences. And that's not for everyone. I think we all need to make those choices, that we need to unflinchingly understand ourselves and not what our spouse wants for us, our parents, what we thought we wanted for ourselves, but who we truly are. And when you can really assess that, the rest really falls into place because you can then make decisions with confidence and organize your life accordingly. And so that's the advice that I would give. And be willing to take some risks, be willing to do kind of an upside down side analysis to say, hey, if I want this thing and I'm going to go for it, if I fail, then where will I be? Will I still be better off? Can I recover just like you would in a deal? And that can help you make good career decisions. Bill Ferguson is Chairman and CEO of Ferguson Partners, an executive search and leadership advisory firm and author of Living beyond you'd Dreams. After decades advising top leaders, Bill distills what matters most. Humility, integrity and generosity as non negotiables. And Great leadership. A quote from you is, leadership is all about humility, integrity, and generosity. Why those three nouns? And say, you know, once again, that's just been my experience over the 40 years I've been in the business, Willie. But, you know, humility is so important in leadership. And you know this, you're a CEO and, and you personify all of these characteristics, but somebody who's humble and doesn't take themselves too, too seriously and thinks, you know, to question other people, solicit their opinions, whatever, is so important. Because if you become somebody who's too ego driven, you start doing things on your own without other people's input, and you suffer the consequences. Integrity is, is, is what it's all about. You know, any strong CEO, capable CEO, integrity is going to be the backbone of who they are. Gray is not a good color. I don't care if you're raising capital from LPs or you're in the public markets. It's just, you know, it's just that that's a, that's a full stop for sure. And then lastly, you know, generosity is important, Willie. It's an acknowledgement that, you know, you've reached a certain point in your professional career and you recognize there are other people out there who could benefit from what you could do. And so when I'm interviewing people and, you know, kind of understanding their backgrounds and what's important to them, you know, if they're involved meaningfully in a philanthropic or, you know, one or two exercises, it makes a big difference to me because leadership is all about acknowledging that everybody's not on the same plane and on the same page. And for somebody to be willing to spend some time out of a very busy life to give back is extraordinary. Jenny Rometti served as Chairman, President and CEO of IBM, the first woman to lead the company in over 100 years. Her approach to leading with respect, delivering hard truths with care, and creating what she calls a velvet hammer is a masterclass in itself, good or bad. Today, I think it's a shame that you don't get some really valuable coaching because people are afraid. But you can only give it when there's been a safety sort of circle built around it. For someone to talk to you like that. You mentioned velvet hammer. How can someone create a velvet hammer? It's a real skill. It's being able to give hard information, but in a coaching, consultative way. It's being able to take hard decisions and not be sort of thrown out to the dogs after making the hard decision. As you think about Your skill of having a velvet hammer. What are the key attributes to being successful at having a velvet hammer? 90% of people who get power do something bad with it, meaning they become more aggressive. They become. They may lie, they're combative, defensive. 90% of people that get power. And in my view, we all have power. My mom had power when she had nothing else. That it's about convincing you that you have power, like sort of as an individual, which is why I kind of talk about the power of me, we, other people, us kind of society, these three realms. It grows over time and it can be done with respect, which is going to get to this point that you're asking me about a velvet hammer. It can be done with respect, it can unite people, and it can be about making progress, not perfection. And so this idea of a velvet hammer came when a client actually said it to me and it crystallized something I did. And it's the idea that can you give people bad news, but in a way that they can actually not just hear it, but they'll want to take action on it. And so you say, well, what do you have to do in order to be able to do it? I think there's like something. I came to learn that it's a fundamental first step. Before you can do it. And I think this is important for your firm, your clients. You gotta be in service of something. And it's kind of one of these first principles I learned being in service of something means I am actually here to help you achieve your goal. And then as a result, I'll achieve mine. If you believe that about me, you will listen to what you will probably accept about what I'm going to tell you. In assuming I deliver it with respect, you are actually going to listen and be willing to, to sort of act on it because you realize it's coming from a place that I want to be in service of you. Priscilla omoDovar is the CEO of Fannie Mae and the first woman to lead the organization. With a background in law, housing and mission driven investing, she brings unique insight into public private leadership. Her story reveals how sharing credit and staying true to one's principles can have a profound impact across various sectors. There's a quote that you, that I've heard you say, which is, it's much easier to get things done if you don't worry about who gets credit. Which is a great quote, except it's sort of the antithesis of what I found when I ran the D.C. water Authority and dealt with politicians from D.C. maryland, Virginia, and all around where it seemed like the only thing that people were cared about was who got credit for something. So for a moment, given that you've been in the private sector as well as in the public sector, do you think that you can you actually act in the public sector by that quote of it's easier to get things done if you don't worry about who gets credit for it. I learned that in the public sector. Really? Yes. That certainly isn't what I've seen in the public sector. It seems like all they care about is who gets credit. Well, so if I may. So one, I learned many things in the public sector, but I was very new. I didn't know anything about government. I mean, I was at one case all those years. I get get, you know, one New York state housing agency and there was this major deal that we were going to do and we were going to bring the governor to go to the gra. The ribbon cutting. And we didn't call anyone, we just went to the ribbon cutting. I get back to the office and the state assemblyman called me and said, what do you mean you're. And you know, he had a personnel and said, you, you're supposed to call the state assemblyman, the senator, the mayor, and naive me said why would I do that? They had nothing to do with it. And did I get schooled. And he said to me, until this day, he's passing his deceased. Now till this day I have learned if you want to get done anything, especially in government, you must share credit. Because we actually, Sean Donovan and I would talk about this. He had a very strong principle. I had a very strong principle. He were like, wait a second, they have different constituencies. The two of us could do things. Everybody gets credit. So I learned that lesson in government. Now, what's that expression? Success has a lot of fathers, right? Whatever. But yes, to the contrary, I have learned in government. I learned, first of all, policy is key. To really have big impact and big solutions, you need good policy. But sharing credit and give everyone credit and you get a lot of things done. Another person that you and I happen to both know quite well is Jamie Dimon. You got the opportunity to work with Jamie for a number of years. What, what did you learn from Jamie while you were at jpm? From either a leadership or a credit management standpoint. Wow. So an amazing leader. So what I learned a lot from him. First I've learned from him. He treats everyone the same. So what you see is that is who he is. So that's Something I really valued in him. Jamie's the one hired me. And it was amazing how he just. I still remember our interview. He said things that only Jamie Dimon could say. He's like, okay. So he asked me all these, like, questions. He's like, okay. Works hard, grew up in Brooklyn, renter, Like, he just went the Columbia Ivy League partner. Like, he just calculated all this in his head so he could see talent. He stretches people. But what I really, really learned from him is risk management. I didn't know that. That if you run any business for Jamie Dimon, you do not realize he's making you into risk manager. And it's end to end. It's all stripes of risk. The place is naturally paranoid like it is, you know, when you're at the top, you have to be paranoid. And he constantly reminded us that you could always be better, more efficient, better, and always do the right thing. So he'd always say this quote. He would call people and say, would you sell this product to your mother? And he genuinely mean it. So I just think he's just an incredible leader. It's amazing what he's done with JP Morgan and, by the way, amazing leaders there, all under his tute. Alan Fleischman is The founder and CEO of Laurel Strategies, trusted by Fortune 100 CEOs, head of state, and world leaders. He explains why the most effective advisors lead with care, put push with purpose, and protect what matters most. Reputation, values, and people. Why do people work with you, not Laurel? You. Wow, you asked great questions. I don't know the answer, except I would say I'm all in. I'm surrounded by people who are all in. We don't make promises we don't deliver. I think our rate of Success return is 99.9%. We envision together we will be there to both preemptive, be proactive, to be responsive and reactive in ways that I think isn't normal. It isn't the usual way. We're very quick. We don't believe good is good enough. But I would say I care and I get connected to the people in a way that they know that I understand them. I will push them in ways in which they are uncomfortable sometimes. But I also will protect. I mean, the caring aspect of this goes very far. You know, that worry, a warrior, is not just much worse to me, I really do. We advance, but we also do care. We protect and we believe reputation matters nowadays. It always has. But nowadays, there's so many opportunities to really bring down people too quickly in ways you don't really have the chance to defend yourself. So we do a lot of work to really kind of create that. That really authentic DNA of an organization and someone's reputation so people really know who they are so that they can withstand the bad times. And there always are challenging times, but also to advance in good times. And we're there there as well. So I think it's because we care. And I care. Mark Gansey is the CEO of Digital Bridge, a global leader in digital infrastructure that spans data centers, towers, and fiber. Mark's journey from a rooftop lease to a global platform is a lesson in visionary thinking, bold bets, and staying customer focused at scale. Go back to 94, Mark. And when you were looking at an office tower and saw that one third of the income came from the actual tower on the top of the building and not the rents inside of the building, and how that got you headed down the path to spending an entire career focused on infrastructure and technology infrastructure. Well, first of all, thank you, Willie. And the long and exciting introduction to my life. Well, look, the story starts like every. I think good entrepreneur things in life happen accidentally. And at that time, I'd come out of Wharton, I was working for a real estate developer, and we were focused on buying distressed real estate from the Resolution Trust Corp. So I've just dated myself officially, but as a part of buying some of those, as you remember, in those days, you had to buy pools of assets you couldn't cherry pick. You'd go in and you'd select which block of properties you wanted to buy. And there was a Mid Atlantic portfolio of assets we had looked at. And you are correct, one of them was an office tower. That was the PSFS tower in Philadelphia. It's one of the tallest buildings in Philadelphia, but it was built in the 60s and kind of, you know, part of a package of loans that we had to acquire. And there was this huge tower on top. And I really didn't fully understand what it was, but I did know it was producing, you know, like $700,000 a year of income in a 20% occupied office tower that looked good rent. So we spent some time diligencing it, and I said, well, naturally, I've got to go find somebody that understands antenna leases. And ended up meeting my partners, Alex and Jeff Ginsburg, who'd both attended Wharton. That's how I'd gotten to them. They were out actually building something at that time called cellular networks. And so it was the only one I could find for my Wharton cohort list that was actually involved in something tangential to antenna leases. So found these two guys, I met them, I said, look, I've got a bunch of these antenna leases. What do I know? I'm a real estate guy. I know nothing about telecommunications or cellular antennas. And they explained it to me and they explained what was happening at that point in time in 1994, which was, you know, the FCC was getting ready to auction off these things called digital PCs licenses. And so this was really the migration, the first migration, Willie, from 1G to 2G. And naturally, as the real estate guy in the room, I said, well, okay, this one rooftop's really valuable. How many other rooftops are going to be valuable? And they said, well, funny you should say that. There's going to be 50,000 new towers built to do this new technology called digital PCs. And I was like, wow, that sounds like a real estate business. That doesn't sound like a technology business. So I stayed in touch with them. We ended up writing a businessman called Apex Site Management. Alex and Jeff are still with me today, 31 years later. We're still partners. They're, they're both, you know, one of them runs one of our portfolio companies, the other is my chief administrative officer. And we've had an amazing three decade run in trying to find ways, really, very simply put, how can you weaponize that intersection between real estate and telecommunications, right? Everything that I've done in my career has been that intersection. And trying to figure out how to translate between the real estate industry, which talks one language, and the telecommunications industry, that talks another language. And oh, by the way, telecommunications morphed into the Internet, into ISPs, into cloud computing, private cloud. I like you said, all the logos that we deal with, all the tenants that we deal with around the world are much like what you do at Walker and Dunlop. It's the same thing. I'm in the tenant service business, right? I wake up every day and I know I've got to serve my tenants better than anyone else does on the planet. And we've just chosen to take this format, which is serving customers all around the world with ultimately their digital real estate needs, right? Whether it's a cell tower where I've got to go find the land, I got to build the tower, whether it's a fiber route where I've got to go dig a ditch and I gotta. What do you gotta do when you build a fiber? You need easements. Well, what's an easement? Easements, Real estate, right? It's not that hard. You're building a Data center you go to, you know, Loudoun county in Virginia, you gotta buy land, you gotta deal with the zoning board, you gotta get power, you gotta get all the things that you deal with every day at your firm. We deal with it digitally. Stephen DeFrantis leads Cortlandt, one of the most innovative multifamily real estate firms in the country. He explains how rigorous talent selection and psychological insight creates the kind of empowering culture that scales with integrity. Talk about two pieces of the equation, if you will, Steven, as it relates to what it is to be on the team at Cortland. The first is way you select talent. You go through a talent selection process that is, I would put forth more rigorous and more focused than many companies that I interact with on a consistent basis. And then the second piece is once they get in, you've created a culture at Cortland that is very unique. What is it other than, to be honest, your fantastic leadership that's allowed for the Portland culture to build to be what it is? Sure. Luckily, I'm not solely depending on my fantastic leadership. The, you know, and the recruiting side, you know, we began early in this cycle building a process around, you know, testing the applicants that we were hiring, personality profiling, intellect testing, to really try to build a team of really high performing individuals. You know, as, you know, Willie, from your business, you've done a great job with this. You know, high quality individuals tend to want to, you know, it tends to grow on itself. So once you start with a small nucleus of really high quality people, they attract higher quality people who want to work with them. And then, But a lot of it also isn't just about, you know, intellect. It's just, you know, there's a lot of great people who maybe, you know, want something different out of their career than, you know, a different set of people. So it's, it's about getting, starting with process, you know, through testing and psycho, you know, we use an industrial psychologist to do all this work, you know, so part of it's the intellect testing that's sort of the more straightforward part. And then part of it is the profile, you know, the personality. And making sure that we're getting folks with the right personality to meet the job that they're going to do. And it doesn't mean the right personality profile to work here or not work here. More typically it's, you know, the person that's going to be in interior design probably has a different set of personality profile than the person who's going to be in accounting and Reporting, you know, so a lot of that is just about, you know, so much of it's about putting people in the right seat on the bus. But though a lot of effort around, you know, the front end of, you know, considering talent before bringing them in and then a lot of focus on supporting our talent once they're here. Richard Baker is the governor, executive chairman and CEO of HBC, the parent of Saks Fifth Avenue and Hudson's Bay Company. His leadership draws from a more than 350 year legacy and shows why culture isn't just a competitive advantage, it's a company soul, the right philosophy and the right culture. Great companies have culture, great companies have DNA. And the culture and DNA of Hudson's Bay was very similar to my family and to my history. And the Hudson Bay Company was a company built by adventurers, people who had the courage to get in a very small boat and go from Scotland or England or Europe at the time and go across the world in a little wood bow to the Hudson's Bay and do it. Sign up for a two year assignment to trade beaver pelts with the First Nation's people. And what did that entail? And that kind of risk taking, courageous DNA has been living inside of Hudson's Bay and reproducing and existing for 352 years. And that DNA is how we run our business today. We are thoughtful adventurers who take understandable, quantifiable risks and we maneuver and we do things no one else in the world does. I mean, you know, whether it was going to Germany to buy the largest department store chain in Germany, or selling off our Zeller's business to Target or buying Saks Fifth Avenue. We have a very adventurous entrepreneurial spirit at HBC, which comes from our 352 years of history. The only way to function is to create a culture at your company or to nourish an existing culture or to replace a bad culture. We've done it all because we bought and assimilated a lot of companies. And the only way to be successful large organization is to have a culture where people understand the big plan. And we see often bad things that happen in bad culture companies. And it's not surprising. It's from, I mean I can tell the culture of a company. I can call the CEO of any company and tell you in 10 minutes before I even meet or talk to the CEO what the culture of the company is. If his assistant is nasty or short or acts a particular way. You know, that's the way the boss is. And if that's the way the boss is. It's all the way down the organization. And if you call the assistant and she doesn't know who you are, but treats you very nicely and is courteous and hospitable, then you know the DNA of that company. And it's all about, it's all about culture and being a leader to drive the culture. And there's no other way of doing it. It's impossible to run these big businesses without having the right, you know, the right philosophy and the right culture. Steve Case is co founder of AOL and CEO of Revolution. He helped connect millions to the Internet and now champions overlooked entrepreneurs across the United States. He shares how to stay focused during explosive growth and what it takes to scale without losing your center. As your market cap went from 70 million to 160 billion, how do you stay disciplined to not chase the temptations in the sense that you had so much currency to be able to go basically expand anywhere you wanted to? I'm sure you had offers to go vertically, integrate into cable companies, to go into PC manufacturing. I mean all the various ancillary services and goods that you had to Interface with @aol. How did you keep the discipline on your kind of core business during that explosive growth? Well, we did do a lot of acquisitions. We did recognize we had a valuable currency. We made, I think it was 30 different acquisitions from were more niche product like MapQuest, one of the first mapping software companies from a larger company like Netscape, created one of the first worldwide web browsers. Then later obviously merging with Time Warner, which was the really big merge, back to the biggest merger ever. So we definitely used our currency and recognized there was some value to that currency. But we tried to your point also make sure there's a strong focus on the core business, on the main business. So we kind of organized the company with aol, that core business at the center and manage some of these acquisitions off a little bit more on the side. But it was challenging for sure. When we went public, as I mentioned, we had less than 200,000 customers. Also had less than 200 employees. And then seven, eight years later was 10,000 employees. So it really became, you know, after that slow decade, suddenly things were quite different. And I had to change obviously a lot of things. I was, I was doing delegate even more because I just had so much going on, particularly not just in the United States, but at that point we started expanding around the world. So it's very, very challenging, period. But I'd say some would say we didn't really have the discipline in terms of using our currency because we made a number of acquisitions. But we believe that was really essential to make sure we broaden our portfolio of businesses, broaden our platform. So it wasn't just the AOL business, but we had a wide variety of other businesses as well. Mark Lipschultz is the co founder and co CEO of Blue Owl Capital, one of the fastest growing alternative asset managers in the world. He reveals how constructive dialogue, cultural inclusion and respect for risk are central to building enduring organizations. Mark One of the four ethos of Blue Owl is constructive dialogue. And when I read that I thought about Ray Galio and I thought about the quote unquote constructive dialogue that Ray tries to put into his firm. And I'm just curious, given having a leadership team that is so wildly talented as you have at Blue L, there would be an assumption from an outsider that they're these super successful, super talented senior management team that sort of says we're going there and let's go do it. And so having constructive dialogue is part of one of your ethos is I thought very interesting and important to understand how do you, at a firm that is run by people who are wildly successful and have very strong opinions on things, make sure that that constructive dialogue happens on a day to day basis. So like anything in culture it is about reinforcement and sort of walking the walk. And again like everything we do, I'm far from asserting we've got this sorted or perfected and that would be my answer on any subject. Sort of everything's a work in progress. But the thing for I guess us is at the end of the day back to being a risk management oriented organization, risk protective, that tends to actually also fit with the culture. You're saying, listen, if you have a concern, express it right. This, this isn't about one person's brilliant insight. It's actually about saying how can we bring all the brain power. We have an incredible team here. We are so fortunate since inception, you know, I don't, I'm sure there's an exception every rule. I can't think of anyone that we have lost that went to a competitor. And I think that speaks to kind of cultural and, and kind of non. I think it's a good place to work but I think it speaks to this culture of inclusion and dialogue and really valuing individuals opinions. Bobby Turner is a pioneering social impact investor and the driving force behind Turner Impact Capital. Bobby shows us that doing good and doing well is more than a mantra. It's a business Model a legacy and the reason to smile through the hard work. But how do you gain leverage from here? How do you. How do you really tackle these issues that you so clearly define and outline beyond talking to groups like this? Well, number one is, is we needed to prove out the thesis. So we wanted to start small. We wanted to prove to investors that you could do well and do good consistently. And we have, across all three of our verticals, are all profitable, both financially and they're all incredibly impactful socially. My biggest challenge I have in life is I hate raising money. It's the worst part of my job, and I'm the only one who does it. So I am going to scale. I just have to find the right strategic partner in the next year or two that has distribution because we can deploy the capital. I just can't call upon another consultant or I cannot call upon another head of real estate at a public pension fund and try to convince them that doing good and doing well aren't mutually exclusive because they're not compensated to take risk. So now we have a great track record. Now we need to find the right permanent capital source of distribution. But more importantly, I think that, again, I go back to, am I afraid of competition? I'm not afraid of competition. We need to educate as many people as possible that doing good and doing well is, first of all, it's a great business model, it's a great legacy. But, boy, it really feels awfully good. I mean, I look around the room and I'm smiling because I keep going back to Daryl here because we've been in the battlefields together for 25 years, and all of a sudden it seems to be Depeche Mode. Not the band that I listen to, you know, growing up. But it's very fashionable now to say you're a social impact investor. But it's really full of a bunch of liars and charlatans out there who are proclaiming to be truly responsible to the betterment of society. And they're not. And I worry about that because they will make mistakes. They will not understand how to identify, quantify, and mitigate the risks. There will be arrogance. There will be mistakes, and it will set the movement back a long way. But I am optimistic because, again, I think these challenges are so daunting. But it's the daunting challenges that will create the generational investment opportunities to create great wealth and make great change both financially and socially. Leadership takes many forms. It can be bold or quiet, calculated or intuitive. But the best leaders share one thing. In common. They never stop growing. They across these voices, we've seen that real leadership is about integrity, curiosity, courage and care. It's about building something bigger than yourself and bringing others with you. This has been the CEO Masterclass. Thanks for joining us for this special edition of the Walker Webcast. It.
