Why ‘Walking the Walk’ Matters at PowerPlant Partners

A lot of peo­ple might go to the beach for their 40th birth­day or take a big group trip to Las Vegas.

I flew to Ice­land and did a 24-hour Spar­tan Race. In the dead of win­ter nonethe­less. 

It’s some­thing I’ve always done. I cel­e­brate my birth­day not with a big par­ty or any­thing like that, but by push­ing myself. For exam­ple, on my 42rd birth­day I ran 42 kilo­me­ters. What hap­pens next year is anyone’s guess, but even my kids are start­ing to pick up on this.

My son turned sev­en last year and proud­ly announced that he want­ed to cel­e­brate his big day by climb­ing a moun­tain, so we all went out and climbed a local moun­tain. When my daugh­ter turned five she want­ed to do an obsta­cle course race, so we set up a Spar­tan-like race for her and her friends at the play­ground. For us, and for them, it’s a great, year­ly reminder to get out of our com­fort zones and explore the out­doors.

For exam­ple, this month I com­plet­ed an event called 29,029. In sum­ma­ry, it involved climb­ing Snow­basin Moun­tain in Utah 13 times over the course of 36 hours, which added up to the equiv­a­lent ver­ti­cal height of Mount Ever­est – 29,029 feet.

This prac­tice has even bled over into the DNA of the team at Pow­er­Plant Part­ners and the work we’re doing.

For exam­ple, we have two offices: one in Los Ange­les and one in San Fran­cis­co. This fall the whole team worked out of our North­ern Cal­i­for­nia office for a few days and one of the days after our work was done, we hiked from our office to Stin­son Beach. Over the course of 3 hours we cov­ered 8 miles, 2,000 Ver­ti­cal Feet and passed thou­sands of tall stand­ing Cal­i­for­nia Red­woods. It was a good chance for every­one to con­nect, have fun, and remem­ber just why it is we do what we do. Get­ting out­side like this is a pow­er­ful way for us all to gain a much greater appre­ci­a­tion for what we’re fight­ing for – when you run, when you bike, when you hike you get to see first­hand why it’s so impor­tant that we main­tain our plan­et and our envi­ron­ment for future gen­er­a­tions.

This isn’t a one time thing, either.

Not too long ago we held a team off­site in Zion Nation­al Park. We went deep on strat­e­gy and plan­ning, but carved out time to hike, rock climb and get in a few epic trail runs as a team.  For our part­ners’ retreat last year, instead of going to some high end resort my part­ner Mark and I com­plet­ed a three-day climb up 10,781-foot Mount Bak­er in the North­ern Cas­cades range of Wash­ing­ton State. And 3 years ago we even worked in a week­end moun­taineer­ing expe­di­tion in the Swiss Alps while trav­el­ing to Europe to meet with sev­er­al of our key investors and part­ners. 

The truth is, these expe­ri­ences in the out­doors are core to what we do as a firm and who we all are as peo­ple. And those per­son­al con­nec­tions tie direct­ly into the work we all do togeth­er to accel­er­ate the tran­si­tion to health­i­er lives and a regen­er­a­tive cli­mate.

Sure, we could be invest­ing in bet­ter-for-you CPG com­pa­nies and sup­port­ing inno­v­a­tive com­pa­nies across the health and well­ness mar­ket if we all weren’t per­son­al­ly con­nect­ed to nature and the out­doors. But the fact that we all are gives us as a firm a much greater appre­ci­a­tion of the impact and reach of the invest­ments we’re mak­ing. For us, it real­ly is per­son­al.

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