SVN Advisor Insights would like to present Bob Greenlee.
Bob Greenlee
Managing Director
I’m Bob Greenlee. I am the managing director of the Easton office. The work that I’ve done over the years has really led us to asset management, a focus on asset management. A combination of asset management, evaluation, economic consulting, and all of that is leading today to evaluating investments in environmentally and socially responsible investment areas.
There’s a framework for that that has been developing over the years, ESG investing. ESG is an acronym for environment society and governance. Started in 2005 in a study called “Who Cares Wins,” and as we’re moving forward this ESG investing concept seems to have arrived by many measures in 2018. It’s not a concept people unnecessarily familiar with it’s not rolling off your tongue necessarily, but in the world of venture capital, private equity, asset management, and investment banking this is part of the return structure for the investments that people are considering. You consider the return on equity and the return on investment, and there’s also ESG score associated with many investments. We look at the ESG a little differently. We’re looking at ESG as the actual investment category. It is an investment in the environment. It is an investment in society or governance or community. Those are the categories so it can still have a score. You can look at how a company or a piece of real estate might relate to the ESG metric, but by and large we’re going in a different direction with that.
This is a world that is that SVN is deeply involved in has been for many, many years at the highest levels. We can now take what we do, maybe on an ad-hoc basis, and view it through the lens of this ESG investing world. The studies are suggesting that 2018 was the year that ESG investing kind of came of age. We’re now ready to move forward with it as a discipline. It hits our sweet spot in many respects. It hits our core covenants in many respects and seems to be a very natural organic way to grow the practice, particularly in this Easton office, and we have the opportunity to apply this framework this discipline to the entire SVN community.
Bob Greenlee | Managing Director
443.390.2600
Bob.greenlee@svn.com
