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Nick Fazli, Director of Sustainability for Sekisui House, offers a provocative look at how short-term thinking is eroding long-term value in housing and the economy, and how to reverse it.

SPEAKER_01

Hello and welcome to the Valuation Metric, a podcast about the risks, rewards, roadblocks, and revelations reshaping the way that we measure works. I'm your host, Sarah Gutterman, CEO of Green Builder Media, North America's leading media company focused on green building and sustainable living. For decades, we have relied on blunt metrics, price per square foot, first cost, short-term returns, to define value across our economy. Those metrics have shaped our financial system, what companies reward, what we build, and how we define success. While our awareness of wellness, safety, security, and independence has evolved, our metrics largely have not. And we're living with the consequences: an acute affordability crisis, escalating climate risk, growing health concerns, and basic necessities like housing and food moving further out of reach. My guest today represents a fundamentally different way of thinking. Nick Fazley is the director of sustainability for Sekasui House, a company that has spent decades designing homes around longevity, performance, resilience, and human well-being, long before those ideas entered the mainstream conversation here in the U.S. Prior to joining Sakasui House, Nick led sustainability and environmental, social, and governance, or ESG strategies, across a range of organizations, giving him a unique perspective on how values translate into long-term business value. In this conversation today, we're going to explore the difference between value and values and why that distinction matters more today than ever. We'll talk about what changes when we stop optimizing for lowest upfront cost and short-term returns, and instead design systems and valuation frameworks for long-term performance, trust, and stability. Because if we want different outcomes, we have to change the metrics that drive our decisions and determine what we reward. Hi, Nick. Welcome to the valuation metric.

SPEAKER_02

Hi, Sarah. Thank you for that kind, those kind words and uh a glaring introduction. Uh, I really appreciate the invitation to join you today. It's a pleasure to be here, and I'm grateful for the chance to share a few thoughts with you and your audience. Um, you've created a thoughtful platform around sustainability, housing, and long-term value, and it's my honor to be part of this conversation. I'm looking forward to our discussion today.

SPEAKER_01

Wonderful. It's a pleasure to have you here. You've spent much of your career leading sustainability and ESG strategies and business settings. ESG is a powerful example of what we talk about on this podcast, uh, specifically how companies connect value and values moving beyond a single bottom line focus that is based solely on profitability. So, for listeners who may be a little less familiar with ESG or they've heard about it, frankly, in a context that maybe isn't completely positive, can you explain what it is and how it offers a fundamentally different valuation lens for the economy?

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, Sarah, I'd explain ESG as a more uh complete uh way of looking at business performance. Uh it asks uh beyond quarterly earnings, how well is a company managing the environmental, social, and governance issues that shape long-term success? So that includes things like uh energy and resource efficiency and employee safety and culture, and things like supply chain integrity, product responsibility, and the overall quality of leadership and oversight. What makes ESG different is that it uh broadens the lens. Uraditional economics often ignores real cost and risks until they become expensive. So ESG tries to bring these factors into view earlier. It helps companies and investors think more clearly about resilience, trust, durability, and long-term exposure, not just the near-term profit. So to me, ESG is not about replacing financial performance, it is more about improving decision making by connecting value and values in a way that is much closer to how the real world actually works.

SPEAKER_01

From your perspective, then, what's the difference between value-based decision making and values-based decision making? And why is that so important for companies to blend the two to optimize long-term success?

SPEAKER_02

Um, I think of uh value-based decision making as asking what creates durable economic value. Okay. Now, values-based decision making asks what kind of company do we want to be while we create the value. So one is usually framed in financial terms, the other is framed in ethical, cultural, andor human terms. But the best companies understand those are not competing ideas. They reinforce each other. So when companies blend the two, they make better decisions, they're less likely to chase short-term wins to create long-term liabilities that create long-term liabilities. And frankly, they're more likely to invest in trust, quality, employee well-being, and resilience. In my experience, values without business discipline can become slogans, essentially. And value creation without values can become extractive. The real opportunity is in combining the two of them together.

SPEAKER_01

Now, critics are you that ESG frameworks and strategies and particularly reporting are overly complex and in some cases opaque. How do you respond to that concern? And can you share some examples of companies that are doing ESG very well, both in terms of transparency and outcomes?

SPEAKER_02

You know, I think that criticism is fair to a point, uh, because ESG can become too technical, too fragmented, and too full of jargon. But I also think uh that it's not the answer. The answer is not to dismiss ESG altogether. I think the answer is to do it better. So good ESG reporting should be understandable, it should be decision useful, and tied to what is actually material to the business. It should explain where the company has risk, where it has opportunity, what it is measuring, how it's progressing, and frankly, while where it still has work to do. Okay, it's not complete. The companies doing this well, in my opinion, are usually the ones that avoid the what I call the green gloss. They focus on clarity, they define the metrics clearly, connect disclosure to strategy, and are honest about progress and gaps, specifically gaps, because there's going to be. And to me, the strongest examples are the companies that don't just publish a report. They actually embed sustainability into operations, right? Capital, planning, production, design, and governance. These are all different components that make your business successful. So that is when transparency starts to produce outcomes, not just paperwork.

SPEAKER_01

Imagine for a minute, Nick, that I'm the CEO of a company and I'm skeptical about sustainability in a business uh perspective and ESG. So make the business case for me. Why is ESG not just defensible, but a winning business strategy? And how do I do it?

SPEAKER_02

This is a situation I run into quite often, actually. So if I were to talk to a skeptical CEO, I usually start here and said ESG is really about running a smarter, more durable business. So it helps you identify inefficiency, right? It's regulatory exposure, supply chain risk, workforce issues, things like reputational vulnerability and changing customer expectations before those things become expensive. That's what ESG is about. So it's as if at its best, you can say ESG is not charity and it's not a side program, right? It is discipline, risk management, and strategic value creation. Companies who see it that way will be able to leverage it best. As for the backlash, I think ESG became politically charged because the term turned into a proxy of much broader cultural and political debates, right? And in some cases, the language around it became abstract or moralizing, which made it easier to caricature, right? So I think the way forward is to get back to plain language and practical outcomes, things like lower energy costs, safer workplaces, stronger governance, more resilient products, things like better long-term performance. These are things when we talk that way, the conversation becomes much more grounded and much harder to dismiss.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, it seems that right now a lot of executives and board members, um, and even elected political officials, when you talk about these same concepts in using words like risk reduction, enhanced brand reputation, um, optimized sales performance, uh, resiliency, uh, those terms are resonating and they're not as politically charged. Uh, and you know, they have a pathway forward. So beyond what you just said, you know, can of talk a little bit more about that uh in terms of how we can move the conversation from uh something that is very polarized back to these fundamentals.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, I mean, I assume you mean by things like looking at housing costs, energy costs, or long-term financial stability, things like that. So I think for individuals and communities, to be honest, ESC shows up in a very practical way, right? Um affects our whether the air inside a home is healthier, right? It affects whether the energy bills uh are manageable, whether they are or not. Uh whether neighborhoods are more resilient to heat or outages, whether workers are treated fairly. And these are concepts that uh, you know, allows us to be working in an area when in an environment where safer and more durable, right, in where we live. So when ESG is done well, it's not abstract at all. It changes the lived experience, right? Affordability is going to be a real important part of that. Uh, too often we focus only on the first cost and ignore the total cost of living, obviously. A better built, more efficient, healthier home, in my opinion, costs may cost more upfront. But if it lowers your utility bills, reduces the maintenance, improves comfort, performs better during disruptions, then that creates a real financial stability over time. So sustainability is not just about things like environment, it's also about lowering avoidable long-term costs for people, which kind of goes to your answer of where the value of this storyline is when we talk about ESG as a strategy.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, I love how you've tied ESG to real-world outcomes for people and communities. And then you've also talked about how ESG's strategies impact affordability. Um, I want to tie that back to uh Green Builder Media's cognition smart data, which clearly shows the younger generations in particular are expecting companies to play a meaningful role in addressing climate change and social challenges. From what you've seen, how do expectations differ across generations? And what are people really asking companies to do differently, again, from your perspective?

SPEAKER_02

So, Sarah, younger generations tend to be more explicit about what they expect from companies. Uh, they want more than just a polished statement. Uh, what they want is they want evidence that a company is taking real responsibility for things like climate, human impact, transparency, and fairness. Okay. Older generations like myself, you know, with the white beard and the glasses, we tend to express it differently. We think that the concern is broader than people sometimes assume, right? Most people, in that case, regardless of age, want companies to be competent. They want them to be accountable and aligned with real world needs. So in housing, the disconnect is, in my opinion, pretty dramatic. Uh the market still tends to reward what is easiest to count on day one, which is price per square foot, right? Visible finishes and upfront cost. But the homeowners, their experience value, they experience value very differently over time. They care about comfort, quiet, things like indoor air quality, lower electricity bills, gas bills, water bills, durability. Uh, you know, they want the lights to stay on when power goes off in the grid. Uh, they want healthy materials in their home so the kids don't have problems breathing, right? Going to sleep at night with sleep apnea. These are things that uh the home continues to perform, in their opinion, need needed to perform well the year after they bought it. So it's not starting in a one and done. So the gap is that many of the things people actually live with every day are still uh undervalued because they don't show up clearly in additional housing metrics.

SPEAKER_01

So that's a nice dovetail into my next question, which is uh specifically about housing. Here in the US, we've historically measured housing value using price per square foot and first cost, or we have at least since the SNL crisis in the 80s when Wall Street came into housing and uh kind of implemented this price per square foot metric at scale because it fit into spreadsheets and it was easy to compare uh homes based on what they cost today and how big they are basically. Um, however, Sekasui House approaches housing from a very different angle. Sekasui House is a Japanese-based company uh with a different ethos and ethic, let's say, um, that is uh very Asian and is different from the US. And specifically, Sekasui House integrates values like longevity, harmony with nature, human well-being uh and other um uh Japanese philosophies into how value is created in the homes and the communities that you're designing and building here in the US. So, with that in mind, where do you see the biggest disconnect today between what the US market measures and what homeowners actually value over time and really what we should be measuring?

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, so I think the conversation is around how to remove sustainability from being treated as a feature to being more a fun foundational principle in our business everyday life. And I'm fortunate that uh I've you know been given this opportunity to work with a great company like Sekusui, who has uh this type of ethos in their core DNA. So we're not really trying to build it, we're trying to implement it in that sense, which is very refreshing, to be honest with you, working in with an American company uh or a company in the US. Um so what needs to change in our metrics to support that shift? That's really the question I want to try to respond to. We move uh sustainability from what I call feature to foundation, when we stop treating it like an optional add-on and start treating it as it's part of the basic definition of what we call quality, right? So a high-performing home shouldn't be seen, and this is the kind of homes that we try to build in Secret Suite House, as a premium novelty. It should simply be what a well-designed home is, correct? Now that means designing the home as a system from the beginning. So the enclosure, the mechanicals, the energy, indoor air quality, water, materials, resilience, these are all working together as a system. They're not individual features, which typically the US building builders try to market these to their customers. The metrics have to change as well to support this type of shift. We can't just measure first cost as a square footage, for example, and cosmetic upgrades, the value they bring to the conversation in a model hunt, for example. We need metrics that better capture operating costs, they capture comfort, health, they capture durability, carbon performance, and resilience over the life of the home. Because if you measure the wrong things, essentially, you in you're incentivizing the wrong outcomes, correct? One feeds into the other. So something that happens too often in the building industry, and we really want to change that. I know we've talked about being disruptive, we'll get to that, but that's that's really the core principle behind that reason why.

SPEAKER_01

So there are other production builders, um, some who are your competitors, some are who are your peers and colleagues, that would say we can't think about homes as integrated systems where net zero energy, high-performance envelopes, clean energy, healthy indoor environments, and resilience are built in from the beginning because it's too expensive. And we just can't afford to do that, which of course our answer is well, actually, you really can't afford not to do that anymore because that's what homeowners want and expect. It's where codes and regulations are heading. But what would you say to them from a pure execution standpoint and help them understand that that old way of thinking is really defunct and it's not applicable anymore? How would you get them to understand uh the importance uh and the urgency of uh of this transformation?

SPEAKER_02

I think it's it starts with uh, you know, the dialogue starts with our customers, understanding what they want, right? So if you if you're designing for decades instead of the next resale cycle, that's really the point. You make very different decisions. Uh you think more carefully about materials, things that age gracefully. Uh, you think about assemblies that stays durable, right? Systems that can be maintained or upgraded intelligently, and construction quality that prevents failure rather than just hiding it cosmetically, which happens quite often with the builders nowadays. Customers see through that. You know, this is also a shift in the conversation from appearance to stewardship, right? So you don't want to talk about, hey man, this is a great-looking home, but rather I'm proud to have this, you know, be a part of this home. It's my it's my it's it's my uh legacy, right? This home is part of me. A home is not just a transaction anymore in that situation, right? Then it becomes a long-lived asset that shapes your daily life. So when you design with that mindset, and that's what I tell the about the builders if they're looking at advice, you naturally prioritize craftsmanship, longevity, adaptability, and a deepened relationship between the home and the people who live in it. And that ultimately resonates with your customers and they'll buy your homes. Simple.

SPEAKER_01

Let's shift gears a little bit and talk about resilience, which seems to be top of mind for everyone, uh, whether those are business executives or builders or developers or homeowners or certainly insurers and lenders. Uh, I talk a lot about resilience in the context of homes, but I'd love your broader perspective. How should we be thinking about resilience at a systems level within our economy, our infrastructure, our communities? And what are we missing when resilience is excluded from financial and investment strategies?

SPEAKER_02

No, I I like the way you frame that. I think resilience does have to be understood as a system property, uh, not just a product feature, right? Uh at home level, what that means is uh comfort and safety during extreme weather or grid disruption, right? But more broadly, it also means how your infrastructure holds up. We've had a number of conversations around that with other builders in your uh sessions that you hold. How supply chains recover from that, those types of disruptions, how communities absorb shocks, right, based on their resilience and coming back. And how ultimately financial systems price risk before it becomes a crisis, right? That to me is also very important. So when resilience is excluded from this investment strategy, what we're doing is we're creating a false picture of value. We underprice fragility and reward overreward short-term efficiencies that may fail under stress. So the that eventually shows up, in my opinion, as an uninsured losses, stranded assets, service disruptions, and impacts your health, and ultimately the cost goes back to the public, right? It's a public cost. So, in other words, we still pay for the risk, we just pay for it bad. Right. So instead of thinking it through, we're paying to it in a reactive way. So building resilience into planning and capital allocation is not, in my opinion, not a luxury. It is one of the clearest ways to protect the long-term value, which is our home and our assets that we build.

SPEAKER_01

As you know, we are working with the insurance sector to uh try to get them to change their actuarial equations and the way that they calculate risk for homes and communities and the built environment. Are you finding in your work at Sakasui House that the insurers, the lenders, the different stakeholders in this conversation are open to that fundamental transformation, or are many of them still functioning in the same old modus operandi that has gotten us here?

SPEAKER_02

I think there's a level of complacency and then there's a level of urgency, to be honest. So the complacency is let's keep it the way it is, things will turn around. The urgency is we have an opportunity, things are changing, you know, whether it's through crisis or through uh man-made crisis or nature-made crisis, we we need to respond to that. So let's come up with better ways. So they see an opportunity there. So, but I think we need to communicate, start by communicating sustainability in Yeshina language that is grounded, practical, and relevant to people's actual lives. It starts there, right? Too often I think the messaging is either too technical or too ideological, right? And this goes for our supply chain, working with uh insurance companies, real estate brokers, etc. Most people are not looking for a manifesto, right? That's how it comes across sometimes. They want to understand what the issue is, why it matters, where the trade-offs are, and what better performance looks like, frankly. So the messaging has to become more concrete, right, in my opinion. Talk about healthier homes, lower bills, things that resonate with the average person, fewer failures, you know, and for our folks who help us sell our homes and are part of the supply chain, talk about having building stronger supply chains, essentially, right? Better risk management. Insurance companies love that term. Um, more durable products, right, with our suppliers, and better long-term returns, which the customers benefit from. And just as important, in my opinion, to be honest, uh, is about complexity. You know, be honest about that. So not um go around overclaiming things, right? That this is just everything's gonna get fixed because we throw sustainability at it. Trust is built when people feel they are hearing something real, not something packaged, right? So, and once the conversation gets back to the fundamentals and outcomes, and a lot of the political heat starts to fall away. And I think that's when you get the this broader cooperation and collaboration between the supply chains making an impact.

SPEAKER_01

That's uh it's such an astute comment because all of these topics, sustainability, ESG, make sense on so many levels, yet a lot of the pushback seems to be rooted in ineffective or misaligned messaging. And when we can communicate these ideas uh in a common language using words and execution strategies that align regardless of political inclination or um, you know, any kind, anything that would divide us, it it provides a way, a pathway to gain traction and build trust and move past that divisiveness. Nick, if we are successful in shifting away from these short-term metrics, uh, what would look different in our economy, in housing, in the way that people experience stability and opportunity?

SPEAKER_02

So, Sarah, if we really shifted away from short-term metrics, I think we would start building a much more durable economy. Uh, one that then could reward quality, resilience, stewardship, and uh really long-term productivity instead of just speed and extraction, which is what we're operating or the industry has been operating on for hundreds of years. Uh, capital would then flow differently, right? So companies would invest more in workforce development, hopefully, and infrastructure. Uh, product durability becomes uh attractive, it's not a four-letter word. Uh, risk reduction and become uh becomes something of a you know value add that comes in. Those things would be more visibly connected to create that value then, right? Come to for from a value creation perspective. In housing, uh, this concept would be transformative if we can do it, right? We would place much more emphasis on lifetime performance, uh, operation, operating uh affordability, indoor health and resilience and neighborhood quality. These become the narratives instead of cost and um other trendy words that typically are not negative into our industry. And to wrap it up for people that would translate into that this would really translate to greater stability for most people because things they rely on every day, like homes, utilities, transportation, local infrastructure, they all would be designed with a longer horizon in mind as a result.

SPEAKER_01

Nick, what role does AI, digitization, and enabling technologies play in this transformation?

SPEAKER_02

I think uh to be honest with you, AI is is uh somewhat a double-edged sword. So to some uh people it it seems like uh it's a tool that uh will replace uh what we traditionally use labor or thought process. To others, it's just you know the next best thing since sliced bread. They could uh streamline their workflows, they could uh AI could help them with their uh business activities, allows the small builders to do a lot of different things that they don't really have the resources to do. So AI is just a tool in my mind. It's just like a hammer or a screwdriver. If you use it right, it could be very productive. And if you don't, uh it's another item that sits in the chess box and it's useless, right? So it doesn't really do anything. So uh if if you look at it from that perspective, I think it's rather benign. Uh but again, this is one man's opinion. So I'm not going to assume everybody thinks the same way. There are people who think it's it's the end of humanity, there are others who think it's just gonna be the you know, the best thing, like I said, since sliced bread. So I happen to fall somewhere in between. It's like any other technology, you have to be able to use it well. And I think the housing industry has shown they have the propensity to find creative ways to use it. And uh from what I've seen in the conferences and talking to different people, it's been a useful tool for them. So I look forward to growing in our business. Agreed.

SPEAKER_01

All right, Nick, I've got two final questions that I ask all of my podcast guests. First, when you hear the phrase value per square foot, what does that mean to you?

SPEAKER_02

So, Sarah, that's a that's a great question. Uh I think value per square foot is actually a very useful idea, right? Why? I think because it starts to move the conversation in a much better direction. Uh, for a long time, the housing market has been overly focused on cost per square foot, which is really a short-term metric. We've gotten throughout this podcast talked about the value of owning a home over time, and that's really, you know, looking at the overall system that way. So it tells you something about the upfront price, if you just look at square price per square foot, but not really enough about how the home actually performs or what it delivers to the owner over time, right? So when I hear value per square foot, frankly, I see it as an important step forward. It may not be uh something that captures everything on its own, but it does bring uh, you know, it start the process of disrupting an old narrative. And I think it opens the door to a much richer one and uh as a consequence. Because a square foot is not just a unit of space, it's a unit of lived experience. I can tell you it can deliver comfort, health, durability, things like lower operating costs, resilience, better indoor air quality, and overall quality of life. So to me, value per square foot is much better framing than cost per square foot when you look at the um unit of space that way, as opposed to just, you know, some some metric. The real opportunity is to keep expanding that idea. So we are not um asking what each square foot costs to build, but what each square foot is worth over the life of the home.

SPEAKER_01

I love how you've articulated that. So let me uh ask a follow-up question that is not my final question, but I'm just dying to know. So you are director of sustainability and one of the world's most respected builders. Can we do it? Can we change the valuation metric here in the US at least from price per square foot to value per square foot?

SPEAKER_02

Sarah, I think we can. I hope so, I hope we can, because that's that's really one of my big pet peeves. Uh however, we have to do it in a way that uh the the industry comes to you, right? So to me, it's more like, like I said, you cannot create a manifesto around these things because if you have this transformative idea, uh people have to gravitate to it, right? And this is includes a very established industry that has never changed over 100 years. So to me, the conversation should be how we can bring these two together, like the discussion around value and values, how we said they are complementary. I think the cost per square foot is not going to go away. But what's gonna matter is because we want to sell homes, we're builders, and our audience is demanding that level of scrutiny around what is the value of this home to me over time, they're bound to look at it from that perspective, and we better have a good answer for that, right? So I wouldn't abandon the upfront metric that the industry has lived and breathed for hundreds of years, but I would say we need to, it's time that we wake up and complement it with something that really our customers are asking, and that is the value per square foot concept.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, I agree entirely. I think that um this has to be an and proposition. Uh, we're not asking anyone to sacrifice profitability uh or business success or business growth for uh, you know, to incorporate these other elements, it actually um becomes a very complementary uh pro and and um valuable process for everyone, where when we lay out that value proposition for everyone along the value chain, whether it's builders, developers, homeowners, home buyers, uh lenders, insurers, appraisers, utilities, municipalities, everybody benefits with this shift. Um, and I know that we've talked with a lot of the production builders and the leading builders of America, that group that that consists of a lot of the uh highest volume production builders that say, well, look, we can't ignore entry costs because if people can't afford to get into homes, then it doesn't really matter because we're lowering operating costs as they can't own the home in the first place. But I think that, you know, my counter to that is that if we do this the right way, uh, even at the entry level, those, let's say, first-time buyers can access down payment assistance and creative mortgages that actually unlocks buying power. If you're a first-time home buyer and you're getting a mortgage that includes energy efficiency, electrification, resiliency, solar plus storage upgrades into the home in a way where it doesn't come out of the builder's profits or pocket and it gets incorporated into a mortgage where that monthly mortgage payment isn't increasing on a monthly basis, but actually staying the same. Yeah, you're getting lower operating costs, lower utility bills, uh, lower insurance premiums, uh, better durability. Um, all of a sudden you're unlocking $50,000 in upfront buying power. Think about how much more of a home you can get with an additional $50,000 or $80,000 or whatever the number is. So it really becomes this very virtuous cycle and a valuable, a valuable proposition for everybody. So here's my last question. Oh, sorry, go ahead.

SPEAKER_02

No, no, I was gonna say I totally agree with you. I think that is the challenge that uh I'm I'm taking on from my perspective is we we can always talk about sustainability for the very expensive homes. It's it's a luxury item, right? You can you can build a very nice, you know, two million dollar house that has all of the features we talked about, indoor air quality, resilience, better this, better that material. But it really shouldn't be the domain of the affluence, right? So it should, it should be the principle is really, as you correctly stated, um resonates and should resonate with the average home buyer. It is more of a mindset. Like you said, the uh demographic is very important because that's what you know, that demographic wants to buy their home that way. And it's not a question of can I afford it? It's like I don't want to buy a house if it's not that, right? I'd rather rent so than that buy a crappy piece of property that you know I know it's just gonna fall apart on me or not have any of these resilience features or other sustainability uh features we talked about. So to me, it's it's not a luxury item. It's like I said, it's we want to make it into a core package, part of your everyday experience, the the your first home that you buy, essentially.

SPEAKER_01

Absolutely. Well, and of course, there's the argument that um it's those families and individuals that are at those entry-level home uh price points that actually need energy efficiency, uh lower operating costs, lower insurance premiums the most. They need those things more so than uh the folks that are able to buy those $2 million homes. Um, my final question to you is what is one specific thing that our listeners, whether they're business leaders, building professionals, consumers, uh, one thing that they can do today that would fundamentally change how they think about values?

SPEAKER_02

Um I would say, Sarah, I would encourage listeners to ask one better question before making any decision. And that's just not just what does it cost today, but uh what value does it create or destroy over time? Okay, this is what should be asked. That one shift changes everything. Uh if business leaders and uh builders and consumers consistently ask that question, then they will start seeing energy, durability, resilience, health, things like maintenance and and trust very differently, right? It moves the conversation from uh first cost towards total value. And once you begin to think that way, I think a lot of decisions that seem expensive start to look really wise, right? And a lot of decisions that seem cheap start to look very costly. So uh Sarah, with that, I want to thank you. I've really enjoyed this conversation. I appreciate the opportunity to share these thoughts with you and your audience. Uh, these topics that matter deeply to me, as you know, and I'm grateful for the work that you're doing to create space for conversations like this one. And thanks again for having me.

SPEAKER_01

Well, Nick, thank you. I truly appreciate your perspective on how we need to rethink value. Because if you've taught us, you know, one thing today, it's really that um realigning our metrics shouldn't be scary. It's really about um, you know, creating more value, health, resilience, stability, and trust so that we can unlock a very different future. So, to our listeners, if this conversation has challenged you or inspired you or made you rethink the metrics that you rely on, please share it and join us for the next episode. Thank you for listening to the valuation metric. Again, thank you for being here, Nick. It's always a pleasure to have a conversation with you. Thanks for your leadership at Psychosui House. And until next time, I'm Sarah Gutterman reminding you that when we measure what matters, we create things that truly are meaningful and that last.

SPEAKER_00

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