Rob Parker: Trilith President - Town Builders of the 21st Century and the New Walkable City

Austin Tunnell

We talk about it as a community where we want everybody to feel loved, served, inspired, and connected. That's kind of the purpose. The built environment together with great programming and activities in it caused people to live longer, better, happier lives. The results are so positive financially and otherwise, and certainly on the human scale.

Austin Tunnell

Today I got to speak with Rob Parker who is the president of Trillith, a really well known walkable community outside of Atlanta, Georgia. It's actually next to Trillith Studios where they film The Avengers and some of those other Marvel movies. Rob is the president of Trillith and a really remarkable guy, lots of experience in business and philanthropy. Um, and I'm excited to share just such a practical conversation of someone who's actually done this, who's, who's built helped build a town from scratch. Um, and I look forward to sharing this all with you. I'll read his bio really quickly. Rob Parker is a transformational organizational leader with 35 years of experience on a local, national, and international He has a strong track record of success in multiple disciplines, including innovative town building, commercial and retail development, music entertainment, nonprofit leadership, marketing and branding and capital development. As president of town at Trillith, Rob leads a team of designers, architects, planners, and builders creating a 235 acre master planned residential and mixed use development located in South Metro Atlanta, adjacent to Trillith studios. Rob previously served as CEO of Southern Ground, leading both the business and philanthropic efforts of the three time Grammy winning multi -platinum artist, Zach Brown and Zach Brown Band, as well as Kiwanis International Boys and Girls Club and Ronald McDonald House Charities. My name's Austin, and this is the Building Culture Podcast. I'd like to take a moment to thank our sponsors of the podcast. Sierra Pacific Windows, who when they reached out to me recently, I was glad to say yes, because we at Building Culture use their windows on about 90 % of our projects. The whole team loves them and really thankful to have them sponsoring the podcast. I also want to thank One Source Windows, who if you are in the state of Oklahoma, it doesn't just matter about the window manufacturer.

Austin Tunnell

but also about the distributor and the installer and the people you're working with. And we've used one source windows who sells Sierra Pacific and several other great lines for also about 90 % of our projects. All right, onto the podcast. Well, Rob, it is really good to have you on the podcast today. Well, thank you, Austin. Trilled to be here. I'm glad we made it work out even though we had some technical difficulties. Before we get into it and you know, even some of the deeper things and the why behind what you're doing and all that I would love for you to tell you know, the audience or anyone listening What is Trillith? And and you know, you can even be specific like what actually is it? So we're building a remarkable town for creatives artists storytellers and makers We talk about it as a community where we want everybody to Loved, served, inspired and connected. That's kind of the purpose of what we set out to do. We are connected to the largest studio operation, film and television studio operation in North America, Trillis Studios. And we're directly adjacent, have shared ownership interests. And really it's a company town, originally designed as a company town for the film industry. If you can imagine Hollywood having been master planned, which it wasn't, it really was the Wild West when that happened. and because of that, it's a very scattered kind of, Burbank and Hollywood and, know, et cetera. So this is a master plan community for that. think it started out as a company town idea and grow into so much more when we discovered new urbanism, when we discovered this idea that there's a, we believe there's a better way to live in a community. quite frankly, the way we used to live before the automobile came into our lives. And it's kind of a look back to a different time when neighborhoods were and had stores and you knew everybody there. So, um, yeah, it's been a really interesting experiment. If I actually experiment is not the right word because we're actually an authentic town with about 1200 people living here right now are expected to grow to about 5 ,000. Uh, the, the big why is that we believe that, uh, it, yeah, that people live better lives. They'll tell better stories and firmly believe that we can influence

Austin Tunnell

in a positive way if we can influence the culture makers that make film and television. So that's what we set out to do. It's really, really cool. yeah, you started jumping into the wider and I'm really curious to dive into more of that because you have an interesting background in business and philanthropy and entertainment, you know, and working with Zach Brown band and all that. I'm curious to hear. Clearly you're pretty mission minded, right? It's not just, hey, looking at where the dollar signs are, where can I make the most money? It's, you're clearly trying to accomplish something. So how did building a town play into that? Yeah, so did start out in the nonprofit space 20 years with Boys and Girls Slubs early on and then Kiwanis International and Rodham and Dollar House Charities. Through that process found out that, you know, from a mission, a driven standpoint that people can do great in business by setting out to do good. And I ended up working with Zach Brown on originally his idea of a camp for kids with autism, ADD, ADHD. He had set that goal before he made it big and he'd been funding it out of every dollar, know, out of a portion of every dollar that he made. So he set out from the beginning to do So I helped him for about three years, supported the work that he was doing from a philanthropic standpoint, fell forward. He and I connected really well. He had some need for somebody to help lead the business side. So I fell into music entertainment, taking our teams on the road, about a hundred people every week on a Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday touring. And then our studio Uh, and then a number of different businesses that Zach had that all were pointed towards his philanthropy. so restaurants and metalworks and leather and furniture and amazing them at 14 different companies all built around Zach Brown and the, and the Southern ground. So it really kind of inspired me, uh, in, in the for -profit space to again, set out, if you set out to do good, if you've got a legacy interest, if you've got something that, that you want to do, that's,

Austin Tunnell

more than profits. By the way, I should stop and say without profits, there is no ability to do this without, without profit, but there's no margin. You can't do mission. So you got to make money to be able to do it. so along the way, connected with film and television, and, our chief visionary for Trillith and, the rest is history had deep dive into the town building place making space. How many years ago was that when Trillith really got off the ground and were you part of it from the very beginning? said you mentioned a visionary behind it. Yeah. So Triller Studios began, Dan Cathy from Chick -fil -A was the primary driver and an investor to bring what was then Pinewood Studios out of London and began to create Pinewood Atlanta Studios. And that was in 2012, 2013. So we were just celebrating our 10 year anniversary. And that three years later, the town began and that's when I joined in 2016. And it was a weak field when we started and it's a town right now. So I would say again, based on new urbanist principles, walkability, sustainability, deep sense of community. And again, a look back to the way we used to live. know, you, when were you introduced to that concept and how does it contrast to how you grew For example, how you grew up and also how you lived throughout most of your life. What kind of neighborhood were you living in and then what caught you about the ideas? I'd love that you've asked that question because I've been doing this for eight years and I don't think anybody's ever asked me that. It's to go all the way back. But I grew up with five brothers and sisters. So there was the eight of us at home all the time. It was a traditional neighborhood. we wrote our bikes. came near you. hear the old stories. this is the sixties and seventies. So we came home after dark, you know, headed out on our bicycles in the morning and came home when the, when the street lights came on kind of, existence. So I grew up with that for years was not connected to that. Didn't have that experience, traditional suburban neighborhoods, which we were always directed to. I wasn't a city guy. So, without, mean, if you're not in the

Austin Tunnell

In the U S you're either way out in the country, rural, or you're in this in between interstitial area that quite frankly doesn't work. I'd love to dive a little deeper into that from a culture standpoint, if you want to. we, I lived in the suburbs, and had, having never experienced walkability, sense of community, the connectivity. So, this really was my introduction. we got a chance to go to Rosemary beach, Alice beach, and kind of see what it looked like from a destination standpoint. And then visited some other towns that were walkable. and then historically went back to, older neighborhoods, to kind of create, guess the challenge awesome that I didn't tell you the challenge we were given was if you could build a town, any town from scratch, how would you build it? And so we jumped on the road and went and looked at how are people living really, really well looked at blue zones. How do people live long lives? What causes people to thrive and flourish? could you, could, could you, could the built environment together with great programming and activities in it cause people to live longer, better, happier lives and all of that kind of research and reading. And once we were into it, we were deep. and the result I think is something pretty special. Yeah. It's like taking the red pill. remember, I grew up in the suburbs of Houston. and, It was very similar to, well, that middle area you're talking about where there's just, unless my parents could drive me somewhere, there was just nothing I could do. Although I grew up before the suburbs were completely surrounded. It was kind of like the ideal suburbs still where it was a neighborhood kind of far out from Houston and I'd ride my bike for 10 miles. But by the time I left high school, there was nothing left. There was no land left. There was no bayou left. There was just endless sprawl. And you touched culture again, even that kind of void of culture and what I would just kind of describe as sprawl. Can you talk about that? Like, what do you mean by it's really hard to have culture when we build in that way versus in this different way that we are talking about, kind of the old way you could say. Let me just do a quick dive into the suburbs. you, for anybody who's read Suburban Nation and that you haven't, I'd encourage

Austin Tunnell

It talks a lot about this idea that we created this place that uses a significant amount of resources, that each one of us lives on an acre or an acre and half or five acres, et cetera. Our roads and our infrastructure are all used to support us in a way that has us very spread out. We also built in the suburbs with zoning that separated all of our uses. And so you work in one place, you live in another, you go to the grocery store in one spot, you go to the gym. think the average person in the suburbs drives about 70 trips a week where they go to different places. Somebody in a walkable village or town where you walk to the majority of your uses and they're all connected, we'll do about seven trips a week. So those numbers are. are stunning when you think about how the car has become like, you know, we, we all know we shouldn't wait too much time in our cars, there's a, there's a disconnectedness then, from our, during our lives, during our day, with the people around us, I could probably hit you a few that were my favorites too. think the garage door opener is disaster because it allowed us to not even have to interact with our neighbors, pull in our driveway, air conditioning, quite frankly, sent us all inside. we used to sit on the front porch and we used to interact. used to have the windows open and interact more with each other. And of course, when you walk to the corner store, when you walk to the, and shopped, in your own neighborhood, you were much more connected. Yeah, absolutely. It can be, it's pretty devastating. Like you said, on resources, on people, and there's this ideal of the suburb or idea of the suburb that's not actually real. Maybe there are a few out there that do still function pretty well. But one of my friends likes to say, know, sprawl, the more you add to it, the worse it gets. Well, for sure.

Austin Tunnell

Well, when you're driving to your job and you're, then you're going back home to a different environment, you rarely get involved in the community. you're, you're, you're especially if you have a significant community, you're not going to be involved in your church and your, your community activities and all those kinds of things. If you're not, not part of that community, you asked about culture though. what they, what it does is you just don't have the ability to create the kind of culture that we're experiencing at Trillith Just, excuse me, just on Sunday, we had a block party and we had 300 residents out in the street with music and engaging with each other. And I would say that's the organized kind of activities that are happening regularly. But the really cool thing is the bicycles that are laying in front lawns and in the park and toys all over and what we call a free range kids. Our kids are just. out there. there's probably an illusion of safety, but there's a lot of security that happens when you live close together, when you know your neighbors, when everybody's an aunt and uncle watching out for you. I remember I had a chance to work with Colin Powell when I was at Boys and Girls Clubs of America. He was on our board and he wrote a book about his life and he talked about the Auntie Net, which was before the internet, there was the Auntie Net and those were that all had his aunts in the neighborhood. And he said, if you mess up, said, the onto net was faster than the internet because before you got home, mom knew, what you did up to. So it's that kind of, know we can't look back and say the fifties and sixties were not fabulous for everybody. Right. So there's a lot of challenge when you think that way. if you, if you dive deep, but there were some really, really good about how we lived, connected lives. Gosh, I got to experience a similar thing. lived for four years in Carlton landing. I know when I was building and I didn't have kids at the time. I've got a four year old and a six week old now. But I experienced the same thing with just free range kids. We called them the same thing. They're just out in packs everywhere. And it was so, you know, it's like we were once again married, don't have kids, but it was still, I don't know. It was cool to see. And you're so right. If they got in trouble, That circle got around real quick. Okay. Who was wearing what?

Austin Tunnell

Sadly, it's almost nostalgic, right? We're looking back at something that used to be, we're experiencing it here and it can be created. The built environment really makes that happen. How narrow the streets are, how close the houses are together, how close to the street the porches are. You can have private courtyards between homes, but you can have homes that are 10 or 12 seat apart, but are up on the street and connected in a way really connects you. We walk to the mailbox to get our mail. We joke about it's a five minute walk to the mailbox and a 45 minute journey because along the way you talk to everybody that you see. We say if you're going to work out, you better put on headphones and not make eye contact because it's that kind of engagement and the built environment can help support that. I love that because in the sprawl situation, which the vast majority of Americans are kind stuck in, they don't even have an option outside of it, but it's all about the destination. You know, it's, I'm going to do this. And then you get in your car and you go do that. You consume that thing, you go to the gym or whatever, and you miss out on all the life that happens in between those, you know, single specific moments. And I think that's where so much of the richness is that we have lost in American culture. There's no doubt about that. You're already there when you're living in a walkable environment. Yeah. You know, it's interesting because during COVID, and this might sound like an interesting place that I'm going here, but during COVID, you had a lot of pushback all of sudden against this idea of 15 minute cities where people started thinking. And I understand why, because you had a lot of stuff going on during COVID and people, know, tyrannical governments trying to control people and all that. But somehow 15 minute cities, this idea that actually means something to me, very much like what you're talking about, freedom in choice and community gets attached to this idea of control and not having freedom. it's, you're trying to take away my car. And I've even written some posts recently where people, you know, talking about, I'm not calling it 15 minute cities even, but just talking about building in a more walkable way. And it's suddenly about so that you can control everyone so that you can

Austin Tunnell

take away people's cars so that you can, whatever. Have you, do you experience that? Do you hear that? And also how do you respond to that? How do you think about that? And why, why do you think it's clearly not that in some ways I'm asking what's the conservative, you know, the kind of conservative values that actually, support this kind of way of building and living. Yeah. So I gotta tell you, I have not heard it in the way that you just described. In fact, I would tell you that pandemic doubled and tripled the size of our town because people were searching for a safe place. We talked about it, you remember COVID well, and you think about the progression. We started out by going home and being by ourselves and it was just us and our family. That was the tight circle that we lived in and it's the only safe ones. And then you ventured out and you got a little bigger circle. And it was the two or three friends that you trusted and that you might be connected, might be willing to go to their house. And our circles got, you know, maybe a little bit bigger over time, but it took quite a while. And people didn't want to get in elevators. They didn't want to touch things that other people had touched. They didn't want to connect at that level. And we saw what happened in New York. It's not big cities. Atlanta was no different. People came fleeing quite frankly, towards something that felt more, it felt safer, more connected. and a size that made sense. again, I don't know that it was any safer to live in our town, but I, I tell you, people were there. we were there for a long periods of time. There were a little bit of, you know, we had a little bit where you just wish people would go somewhere because we were all on top of each other. but it's, it was remarkable in, I go being part of a community that that's like that. would say it's the freedom question because I've not heard that before. would say it couldn't be more different. The idea that you have are free from your car. By the way, you can go get in your car and go anywhere you want to. Not everything happens in our town. I'm you still, we still go to the city for to watch the Braves play and we still go to a show at the Fox theater. We go out to a nice restaurant, but Saturday night we didn't have

Austin Tunnell

because we could walk to the steakhouse, we could walk to sushi, we could walk to the Mexican restaurant right in town and walk home. and it was, it's a real freedom when you're not tied to your car, during that same time period, coworking and working at home, working distance, you know, virtually, it allowed people to stay. we had people who didn't get in their cars for two or three weeks at a time. And it was a freedom from that and not I don't want you to, or I want to control your life. So I found it very, very different. And I will hit the second part. You talked about the, that conservative set of values that quite frankly have influenced our founder in particular, who's a person of faith and for whom that faith and his family values were a big part of his vision for what we were doing, created an environment where people could live together and closely and love each other. We use words like love. and serve, and connected because that's the kind of environment that we, those are the things that we value. We want to be a caring community. We really want to know what's going on in people's lives. So I just reject this theory that, you know, that we can't love each other, care for each other. I'll tell you one other quick thing. was, as we became very politically kind of divided as a nation and have continued, I remember that old expression that, you know, all politics are local. Ultimately, all politics are local. So you got to get involved locally if you're going to change politics. Well, love is local too. So this idea that if we're going to change things, I can't change things in walking. I can change things in my neighborhood and in the people that I hang out with. So we've kind of identified this thousand acres as our place to love and serve people. That's a long answer to your question, but it's It goes at the heart of our why. I'd like to take a moment to thank the sponsors of our podcast for Sierra Pacific windows. We use their windows on the majority of our builds at Building Culture. one of our go -to products is their H3 casement window. We love casements because they open sideways, they open all the way, they kind of have this classic window feel. And I really like that you don't have that horizontal bar when looking from the exterior.

Austin Tunnell

And to get really nerdy on you, we really love their 5 .8's putty profile on the window, which kind of feels updated, but still a very classic detail. Also, Sierra Pacific windows. If you are in the state of Oklahoma, Sierra Pacific has a showroom in Tulsa and Oklahoma City. And we actually purchase our Sierra Pacific windows through Because it doesn't just matter the window manufacturer, it matters who you're buying your window from, who's putting that order together, who's installing it, who's warranting it. And we work with both of these people at Build and Culture, and I was very happy to say yes when they asked to sponsor the podcast. All right, back to the show. It's great. And yeah, I'm not even trying to say, oh, it is a conservative value. It's more that it's kind of an apolitical thing is what I mean. 100%. Where it's about... people across the political aisle, whatever, it doesn't matter, want these same things. They want their kids to be able to run around freely. They want to be able to live in community. And I think many people, at least not everyone, wants to be able to live without their car all the time. Like you're saying, you can still get in the car and go somewhere. And that will probably always be a part of things because a car is a really great tool. But a tool is something you choose to use. If you're forced to use it to do anything at You know, that that's more like a form of slavery than it is, than it is a tool to assist you live a better, a better life. Let me circle back and make a clarifying comment here. I said conservative values in the same sentence. And let me clarify what I mean by that. This, this is a community that welcomes everybody no matter where they are on any spectrum and diversity inclusion at any, anything you want to talk about in that way. And it is remarkably diverse in all those ways. There's no gates. on the community and everybody is welcome. And, you know, we're a part of the film industry, which has, you know, a very culture, you know, from California, from, from the coast, from New York, from London, from Austin, we've got all different kinds of people on the political spectrum. I will say in the eight years I've been here, politics hasn't been a part of the conversation. It's about a community. It's about people. It's a people centered world that we're kind

Austin Tunnell

creating together. And while it always, I'm sure, seeps into conversations at some point, it's not been at the core of our conversations. Yeah, that's so great. That was one of the things that I experienced living in Carleton Landing, which is a similar town, you could say, the same principles and stuff, is that I used to have this idea that community was, I don't know, having a bunch of best friends, having a big dinner and the planned dinner in the park every week or something like that. And it's like, that can be part of it, but that's really not what community is. It's actually all these loose connections and loose touches where, like you're saying, you go to the mailbox and you get to chat for who knows how many people and it doesn't matter. You you can have opposite beliefs about things, but because like when you're inviting someone in your home, that's a pretty personal thing and you might want to share a lot of values, you know, whatever those values but when you actually live in a real, what I would say community, where neighborly interactions are easy, there's low friction. It's amazing how many people that you can loosely be connected to in a really enriching way. Or at least it really enriched me. I feel like I knew more people while living in Carlton Land in like any other time, except like since college. It's interesting that you say that and you mentioned college. So college, the university setting is one where we learn about walkability. and what a community is like when everything has been walking distance, unless you're in a huge university. But generally, the student center, the quad, the main area where everybody hangs out, wherever you get your mail, wherever you go and eat, that's a walkable town. And then we leave that and unless we go to a walkable city or a walkable town, we don't experience it again. And so it's very much that same connectivity. And you remember college, it was very casual connections. and you never know. fact, that's how we end up oftentimes meeting a mate there is because there are these collisions that happen all the time, these positive collisions. and that happens, that happens in community that way. It does. And to, continue a little bit more on the culture aspect, you know, you, you said specifically, you know, a lifestyle for creatives, and also talked about, it's not just, you gotta get the hardware, right? The place, the building.

Austin Tunnell

Right. But then you also talk about the program. And I kind of think of that as like the keeper of the vision a little bit. Yes. Where you kind of do need, I think, I don't know. I'm also asking this in my experience, like you really do need a keeper of the vision. I remember when Grant, the kind of the founder of Carleton Landing, he moved his family out there and lived out there and really was central to that beginning to flourish. And he was able to move out later. But, you know, that was really critical, I think. How have you thought about culture from a programming perspective. And you know, how long have you lived out there? assuming it was you and your wife and kids have they moved out? You know, what kind of, do you think about that? Trilith. So the original vision casting was from, from Dan, our chief visionary. And then my job was to execute on that vision. And it was a small team when we started out. and as our I would say that you got to have to cast a vision and we cast a vision in my, in my case, I come, I also have a coaching background. and so coaches have to kind of cast the vision, on a regular basis and leaders do a vision leaks, right? So every Monday morning I've got our teams together and we're, going back to the why and why we're doing this and the higher purpose. And then we're executing on those things, for, this is a, area. Our chief visionary does not live in the town, but lives in that area, um, just a few miles away. Uh, we moved in early on, uh, with my family and my 92 year old mom, uh, who was struggling at the time, early stages of dementia. And I have to tell you, couldn't have been a more beautiful place for her to be. She would, she would in her most lucid moments described this as the best time of her life, even with dad gone and her having that sadness. Um, because she was loved and cared for and she could walk safely and she would go to the mailbox. Uh, sadly she'd go to the mailbox eight or 10 times a day and not remembered that she'd already been, it didn't matter. Uh, she was greeted warmly and cared for and she was, called her the honorary mayor. Uh, to your question about vision though. So the vision keepers then there had to be more. There had to be not just the original vision, uh, and me executing it, but we needed

Austin Tunnell

cast the vision and then we need vision keepers. so we've now, I would say there are probably both employees, contractors and residents who serve in a variety of roles, volunteer or staff that have caught the vision, who know what we're trying to do and help us recast it all the time. One of the concerns that town builders who have started something that is special with a mission of purpose, should be concerned about, and it's a real concern is that what happens when you turn that town over to an HOA as an example, for a group of people who were, how do you get the ideals of the founder to stick? That it's a challenge. There are many tell you that neighborhoods, traditional neighborhoods where the developer turns it over to the HOA within five years, all semblance of what originally was anticipated is, is been replaced with individuals fighting with each other for power over the neighborhood or their individual rights. And it goes from a large ideal to something much different towards individual needs. And I can answer some of those questions about what we're doing, but the reality is you got to share the vision. It can't just be one person's vision and you've got to have You got to, you got to cast it and then you got to other people that care it in their heart to keep it forward. Yeah. And what are some of those examples, you know, even specifically if you can of what you are doing, you and your team are doing, what you're doing, what the community is doing. Yeah. We were very fortunate that because we also created the town center with restaurants, retail and commercial, we chose to own those spaces so that we could control and quite influence and control what happens in those. who our retailers are, who our restaurateurs are, primarily owners. We wanted people that were in their stores, in their restaurants. So main street operators, not chains. We didn't want just a manager, assistant manager from a corporate headquarters in a store or a restaurant. So part of it was who is there by owning it. we also, we're collecting rent.

Austin Tunnell

And we're paying bills and we have a team of people that run the town center who quite frankly are now on the payroll and can be carriers of the vision. So we literally have a staff of people. And so the community now is at least the town center is self -supporting. The H away we have maintained ownership and control of, and we don't have to turn it over to the residents until we sell the last lot. by law here in Georgia. And so we're hanging onto that lot for awhile. but not for anything other than we want, we really want this thing, to stick. and then we have volunteer positions and that may be a little bit, even, better. have a residence advisory committee. We have a group that established themselves. called, they called themselves belong, and belong at Trilith and they put on, some of the events and activities. I just think if you don't share it, if you don't allow other people to join in, if it doesn't become their shared vision, then it won't, it won't last. Yeah. I would assume in part of the, being good at communicating the vision in some ways, people are a bit self -selecting when they, when they move there, right? Because they're looking for what you're talking about. but we don't, we do say It's not for everybody. If you don't want, and literally, if you don't want somebody playing frisbee on the grass right outside your window, which is a shared common space because our public spaces are all pretty shared and our individual lots are small, then this is probably isn't a community for you. If you want to be able to, you know, to go about your day and not have to talk to people and not engage, this is probably not, this is probably not for you. If you do want that, yeah, this is it. I would say one other thing when people arrive, they usually have one of three reactions either. This is the place they've been looking for their whole life. You know, they just couldn't be happier and they engage right away. There's some that get here and say, there is no way that I would live that close to my neighbor. this is, you know, this is, this is not for me. And then there's this group in the middle that isn't sure. There's lived apart as live separated. I've lived on an acre or two acres or five acres.

Austin Tunnell

aren't really sure what it's going to be like to be this close to other people. And it's those folks that we see come back on the weekends. They're walking on Saturday and Sunday. They're checking it out. One spouse or the other likes the idea. One isn't sure. And it's a long sales process for us with those people. But ultimately when they do come in, it's because they've been convinced that there's a better way to live. I share one other When, when my mom was there with us, we were there about a year. Ultimately, it was very hard to develop a community that you're living in. And I was too accessible and too close to everybody knew my name and thought I sold their house to them. Thought I built their house and if their roof was leaking, was, it was, it was my issue. So we did, we lived there for about a In that time, Austin, we had more friends. We were in more people's homes and they were in our homes that anytime in our life, we counted about 40 people that were couples that had been in our house or we'd been in theirs. We knew their kids' names and I couldn't count on one hand those neighbors in the suburban neighborhoods that I had lived in for 30 years prior. I couldn't name more than a half a dozen people. So it is very different way to live. Yeah, I don't think you're the only one that town founder who moved into their own community and had the exact same experience. love them. I love them. I got to tell you, I got to circle back and say it wasn't really them. It was me. I could not sign off. I could not just say, wait, call me back on Monday. I wanted to solve their problems. And so I was, I've been pretty deep into it. Nobody came and knocked on our door. It wasn't that it was a me never being off the clock, I think. Shifting gears just a little bit, you mentioned at the beginning, sustainability and health, it's on your website and stuff. And obviously sustainability is a very popular term now. It almost means nothing from just a word because everyone's talking about sustainability. And when you're building sprawl, all that sustainability is forced into this one little metric, value, energy efficiency. And in my personal

Austin Tunnell

when you're building in such a resource intensive way, you know, like endless sprawl is, it doesn't really matter how energy efficient your house is. It's not a sustainable practice. How do you think about sustainability and also human health as well? Because you don't have, I don't know, you don't have very many builders and stuff talking about human health. Yes, I would say for us, we were pretty committed to thriving and flourishing idea. And one of the other ways that that vision actually stays in place and helps us think about this is we formed the Trillis Foundation. And so we've got a group of people whose sole job it is, is to help us figure out how to help people live a healthier lives. It's all built on a foundation of health and wellness, because you cannot be thrive or flourish unless you're physically in good condition. And so the very, one of the very first buildings we built was a fitness and wellness center. in conjunction with the local hospital. And this is a world -class 60 ,000 square foot, you know, a serious commitment to that. And then the green space, we set aside 50 % of our land for green space, about 15 miles of paths that wind through not just the woods, but also through the neighborhoods, these pedestrian corridors. 19 parks, either people are either on either face a park or within a block of a park. So all of that commitment to green has been, has been great. We've got about 50 acres that are wetlands connected to us for what we would call some of the term I'd never heard forest bathing, you know, this idea that you literally could go out and just be in the woods and be grounded. Uh, but then it carried over into our practices and I'll ask you where we're one of our largest, all geothermal communities. So we use the earth to heat and cool our homes. Remarkably efficient, but also very quiet. They don't make any noise. There's no outdoor units. So geothermal. We went ahead and built our homes with the idea that we wanted them to be better in a hundred years, that a hundred years from now those homes would be still be standing, which meant the materials that we made them out of were

Austin Tunnell

Now we spray foam, the ceilings, the walls, everything we did that our value that you talk about, but we use a third party testing company to come in and test every single home before it's sold. And so there's a remarkable commitment to that. Solar smart home technologies. When you combine all of that, and by the way, build smaller footprint homes so they heat and cool easier and also supports our other idea, which is that less is more and we should be more focused experiences and relationships than in accumulating things. And so we built smaller footprint, very efficient homes. And all of those to me play really well together towards, towards sustainability. The last part then is the activity, the enrichment activities that happen that are more than just social, that literally get at emotional and mental health, as you know, is a major concern. And in our industry, the film industry in particular, who, where people are away from their families for long periods of time on location shooting. They can be really traumatic. So I don't know if that's fully answers your question, but we're committed to it from the ground up. and, and we're seeing the benefit of it. That's great. I personally love geothermal as well. We've done that on all our homes and the quiet thing is just as great as the, as the energy efficiency of it. It really is. We, yeah, we say if you, Without all those units outside, you can hear your neighbors arguing. I mean, you can hear the kid, blank. Good stuff. Yeah. The other thing I like about even smaller footprints too is bigger is just not always better. Not just not accumulating things, but you can actually have a more curated, higher quality, not just higher quality, but more curated space in a sense. It's like, rather than a wall of paintings from Target, you know, you couple really nice paintings, that you bought from, I don't know, when you were traveling here and it has a story that goes along with it. You can't fill the, it's really difficult to fill a 5 ,000 square foot house with with meaningful things because you don't interact with them enough. You are correct. We did do tiny homes with micro homes and we've got a hundred of those that we're building that are 500 square feet and we have one of smallest 375. We do tree houses, what we call canopy homes. So we've got some

Austin Tunnell

a different style as well. And the smaller footprint really does create for a, for a different kind of living. Actually, that's a good question. What's kind of the biggest and smallest kind of range of houses you guys have? Yeah. 375 seat. then we have one, we have one little section that is our enclave. Um, that is got its first 10 ,000 square foot home, but the majority of our homes are in the, I'm going to say 1800, 3000 square foot range, 3000 is a big house in our community. Now you and guys have a school, right? We have an amazing school. How did that come to be and was that a really critical element you think to Trillith success? Yeah. Can you talk about the school? Sure. So we were very fortunate that we've got great public schools here in our area. that it's always a critical factor when you're developing to make sure that you've got a strong education system. But for us, we also knew that there were going to be parents who were going to want a different type of education, smaller, more focused, and quite frankly, maybe mirrored what we were doing in the community and that they could walk to school. So you created that walkability, that one less trip. So we were challenged Again, without a school to say if you were going to do a school, what would you do? We were very blessed to have, to have one of our residents who had four young kids who as his professional responsibility was a Harvard trained progressive school consultant. So he was literally with his doctorate in, in education was teaching others about self -directed learning and progressive models. And we said to Dr. Thigpen, if you could have any school for your kids, what would you want? And he knew immediately what it was. And it's called an Acton Academy, A -C -T -O -N out of, out of Austin. And I jumped on a plane and went to Austin and met Jess, the founder. And it was exactly as Tyler described and we brought it back. started and Tyler became the headmaster.

Austin Tunnell

Uh, and his four kids, uh, were our first four kids to sign up. signed up, think 12 or 15 kids that first year, have 150 students now. Uh, and, uh, it is a remarkable self -directed learning. Uh, we don't have teachers, we have guides. Uh, we don't have students. are heroes on a hero journey. Uh, and they learn that they're on a journey. Um, and they learn how to learn, um, more than they learn things. And they spend most of their time on what we call quests, which is literally that practical application of the knowledge that they're that the things that they're learning. Um, and ultimately that lead to more traditional internships, but it is, I've heard it described as kind of Montessori for K for K to 12. Um, and, uh, I have grandchildren that have been through the program and yeah, they definitely learn. how to learn and are lifetime learners. I tell you one other thing, teachers, which are guides, are not allowed to answer questions. Adults are not allowed to answer questions. You can only ask other questions that would point someone in the direction. So if a student asks a question, you have to give them a question back. Where do you think you might find that answer? Or who in your life might be able to point you towards that answer? Fascinating. We could have a whole podcast just on that because I have a lot of questions. I'm not going to ask them, but I'm going to look it up. All you asked me was, we have a school? And you can see how fast. Wow. That is cool. That is really interesting. You said it's K through 12 too, you said. Yes, it is. I think the challenge though, is that by the time they're about 15 years old, they have tested and covered all of what you would in a typical public school setting. And so we have to find things for them to do because they're 15 years old. And so it's a deeper experience. We could graduate them a bunch of 15 year olds, but, uh, uh, so we have a hard time. Quite frankly, keep building the high school because they go on so fast, but, uh, no, it's, it's remarkable. That's, that's really interesting. Um, cool.

Austin Tunnell

If you've been enjoying the Building Culture podcast and are listening on Apple or Spotify, could you pause for just a moment and leave a five star review? My goal is to get to a hundred reviews. And if you do take a screenshot and email it to playbook at building culture .com playbook, P L A Y B O O K at building culture .com. And when we hit a hundred, I'll randomly pick five winners and send them a building culture hat that looks just like I appreciate it and back to the show. Well, OK, I got the next question. Sure. And this one might be, you know, answer whatever you can and not. Whenever anyone thinks about development and starting a town, finance and how you finance it becomes a really, really, really, really big deal. you said you built the town center and you held on to that and you were able to start programs like a school and things like that. How did you finance it? know you had a kind of a primary back or was this a raise where you went out and raised a bunch of money or is it a group of passionate investors that, yeah, I'll just kind of leave it open ended there. Yeah, I mean, it's always the core issue, right? And I would say this is a legacy play. So to be fair, I would say it happened faster than most. I believe this town could have happened you know, at a slower pace with the same approach, in a more traditional development way. But for us, we did have the advantage of someone who was able to risk, put his own capital at risk to get it started. and was patient, it's patient capital. and I just had, I just helped host a group of town builders here and that a lot of questions were around If you've got to go to very, very traditional institutional funding sources who have IRR requirements that you want to return and an exit that has to happen in five years or seven years, and you've got to get your money back and have a certain return. This is that this is not what you want to do. This isn't the place for that. With that said, by being, by having some patient capital and by only doing those things that we felt we needed to do, putting in the infrastructure.

Austin Tunnell

managing and quite frankly, shaping the design and the amenities and then bringing on partners to do as an example, the hotel, our multifamily, our office building, our fitness and wellness center. So appropriately, you know, leveraging other people's money and giving them an opportunity to do well themselves. And quite frankly, not having a, again, you're our primary funder, the primary investor who had to have a return by a certain date. this is a generational play. All those things play together. The interesting thing about it, it was that while the intent was never to make money and make a bunch of money and have a big return, just by doing the right things, right. we're, our homes are selling it three times to local market. Our commercial is rented at 30 % higher than everything around us. Every, all of our homes were either pre -sold. I have very few specs, either pre -sold or just right away our apartments are full, et cetera. So I would say there is a formula here for, again, with the right patient capital, being able to make the right investments upfront. that make people fall in love with the place. And. probably the only, the only heartbreak for us is that it's not very attainable these days. It started out, uh, that you, that, that, uh, much more attainable than this. Now when people fall in love and supply is low, uh, and then the pandemic happened and prices went, you know, up 30, 40%. Uh, it's, it's hard to, uh, hard to, hard to make it attainable, but, um, yeah. from a financing standpoint, we're, we're limited, I would say by the same things that everybody else is right now, our next phase of multifamily. There's no institutional funding. Nobody's interested in doing that. they're our office building, our second office building is, you know, that pad is sitting waiting for it. Now, when I did say, we still use traditional funding, for institutional funding.

Austin Tunnell

What we had the advantage of was to have being patient equity. And so to be able to, to, come with our 15 or 20 % that we needed to then leverage, leverage the other. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. What about even a construction of single family houses? You know, did you partner with the builder? Do you have a builder's guild or the, or are you riding on the developer writing, you know, guaranteeing construction loans or is that kind of all, you know, separate third party? Yeah, we create and sell lots to builders, builders build homes. We help sell those through a sales center and a relationship with a broker and with Berkshire halfway home services, developer services. And, but we don't build homes. We miss out on that part of the profit chain, but we also don't have to build homes. And so we have a builder skilled six builders who do a really nice job for us and build, build, build great houses. That's the other thing when I was living there and they thought I built their house. I'm like, well, I really didn't, but, we do have really, really tight controls on architecture, and design and our builders have seen the return on investment. they're, they're very, very, willing to allow us to have that level of control. have a primary town urbanist, a gentleman named Lou Oliver, who's just a remarkable, designer. Um, and, uh, town urbanist and we've got 320 homes that have been built and, we'd probably, other than a few custom homes where we got allowed other architects to come in, we'd maintain the architecture on probably 300 of them. So. Amazing. You know, if you were to do this, uh, trill with 2 .0, um, is there anything you would do differently? You know, a nice way of saying what are some of the biggest mistakes you've made? Or just things you've learned, go, man, I would approach that differently. I would do that differently that you're able to talk about. Yeah. You know, it's, it's interesting cause we just went through this exercise as we did open town hall at the national town builders association. when we hosted them here and you've got town builders who are walking your town, looking at everything where each transformer was placed and you know, et cetera. And so we did this session called, wish I'd have thought of that. Well, so they can give us their worst therapy

Austin Tunnell

And remarkably, there were not, and I feel like really protected and blessed in this, that there were not major mistakes. Our apartments were because of the space that we had and the number that we were trying to do. And we wanted to hide our cars in the middle. So we used liner buildings, but we didn't double load the corridors because we just didn't have enough room. And it's a very inefficient way to do When you have interior quarter and you've only got to do the exterior of two apartments instead of one. So I would double load the corridors and on the multifamily. We would have. Gosh, it's so interesting to think about. You need the town center to sell houses, but you need houses and people to warrant having a town center. And so it was an interesting dynamic where the houses came first, about a hundred or so of them. And then the town followed behind it. The multifamily over ground floor retail has worked out fabulously. I would caution people. never put owners over ground floor retail. So we have three stories above ground floor retail, but you don't want to sell condo product. And we did not do that by learning from others. because if you're an owner, if you're a renter, you move. If you don't like the smell coming up from the restaurant below you or the noise, if you're an owner, you fight. and so we, so that was one that we avoided, making that mistake. And, and then we wrestled a lot with how soon to do things like our swimming pool, which is a very expensive investment. And we chose to do it earlier rather than later. And we know it's sold a whole lot of homes. so I, I wish I'm, I'm really glad I can't come up with more examples for you, but I really feel like, by the way, this is not me. This is a smart group of people gathered together, making really good decisions. and,

Austin Tunnell

and learning from others, from other mistakes that were made. Other mistakes that others have made that we learned from is that Celebration Florida, know, Disney's foray into this a number of years ago, they put the retail in the, community, deep in the community. So you had to go, if you were from the outside, you had to drive through the community. So you didn't know it was there and they couldn't support it. You got to put your retail right out front and let all the people around There's many, anybody who wants to come to your restaurants and your movie theater and et cetera, you don't keep that for just your residence. And so we put that right on the street. But there's been good learnings from other, from other folks. That's good. Have you had to support any, you know, the development team had to support any of those early local businesses, you know, perhaps their revenue rent sharing rather than just, you know, it's 5 ,000 bucks a month or whatever to really get them in earlier than it would might sustainable for them. Yeah. If you have non -credit clients, people who are either out for the first time and really don't have that one, you've got to probably put out a little more TI than you normally would because they're not bringing as much. They have to bring money or they're just not bought in at the same way. But so a little bit more help on the front end. I think we have engaged significantly because culture matters to us. We not only got involved in their business and making sure they had everything they need to be successful, but we also engaged in their service, their customer service, whether we wanted all of our retailers to have name tags for their people, was at least their first name on it. We wanted them to greet people in a certain way. The Chick -fil -A culture is huge influence on us. And so our people say my pleasure and we refresh your drink. We don't refill it. We keep things clean. Uh, we, it's, go the second mile from what was called second mile service. And so I think that was very supportive of our retailers. Percentage rent became an issue for a couple of our folks who, you know, they were struggling. And so, especially during the pandemic. And then we had a writers and an actor strike that we went through this last year where the film industry, the 4 ,000 people that work across the street were no, we're not in town. So, um,

Austin Tunnell

We've, uh, we've had one retailer, uh, that hasn't made it out of 30, uh, in the four years that we've been doing that. It's pretty good, pretty remarkable. Uh, and that one was, uh, uh, yeah, somebody who chose, chose to do something different. So anyway, we feel, we feel, uh, like, I guess my advice would be is that you are going to have, if you're going to have, uh, either first timers or a mainstream retail, you're going to have to be flexible and you're going to have to work with them, support them. But it sounds like you really made an effort to kind of stay away from the big corporate franchises as well because culture. Not even a Chick -fil here. tell you part of how you, you know, at all in how you present things for us early on, we knew we didn't have enough rooftops to support a regional or national chain. and we knew that they would not be interested. So we just flipped the script and said, they're not allowed here. and so, It has turned out to be a pretty good play for us. We've really enjoyed having these owner operators, in those, in those establishments. It makes such a difference because once again, I have not been to Trillith, but at least Trillith feels like Trillith and not Oklahoma city or Dallas or, you know, Nevada or whatever it is, you know, that's one of the sad parts about the increasing corporate, business kind of takeover of, the United States, which is really precipitated by sprawl, is that it's really just every town looks the same, you know, and people don't get the opportunity to express their own culture, their own identity, their own creativity. So I really, I really love and appreciate that. Okay, one more kind of technical question. I'm curious on entitlements, you know, how long did that take? How difficult was process, how did the city treat it when you came to them? Have they seen something like this? I knew Serenby is, you know, well, it's not quite the same in terms of density, but a lot of people refer to Serenby as one of the early ones in Georgia, at least. Yeah, Serenby is a great model of one that has turned out. It's an amazing, you know, it's taken a lot longer, you know, 25 year process. Austin Tunnell (01:00:59.522) But Steve Nygren and his team over there have done a really, really good job because it is more second homes than, than, than primary residents. They have, they've had trouble with the commercial, which is a lot of these either vacation areas or destinations are hard to support that kind of thing. so I'll, we have huge respect for Serenby and what they're doing. And many of our builders build also have built at Serenby. and I'm totally blanking on the question that you asked. entitlements, entitlements and city paperwork, right? And yeah. So we're part of the city of Fayetteville. and there are two large cities in our County Fayetteville and Peachtree city and Peachtree city is a planned community from the, you know, the sixties, that was remarkable in its time. golf cart paths, about a hundred miles of golf cart paths that connects five villages, a really interesting model, but not is certainly rideable by golf cart, but not walkable. and so Fayetteville was, was, we needed to annex into Fayetteville to get sewer. we got our water from the County and once we were in, Fayetteville, the conversation was, you know, clearly the kind of building that we wanted to do is not even legal. I said, can in most places, do what we're doing zoning. keeps you from being able to do that. And so we were able to, with a very cooperative and very progressive, city council and mayor and city manager, craft a development agreement, and get, planned community development, a PCD zoning where we were able to write the zoning that we wanted, write the, the entitlements in, in the development agreement and very, very very clear about the new urbanist principles that and how wide we wanted our streets to be in our alleys and the heights of our homes and all those things. Many of which again, distance from our school to the first bar restaurant, you know, wasn't the right distance, all those kinds of things. And again, a very receptive, progressive city that supported it, that we saw early success with. Our entitlements Austin Tunnell (01:03:24.59) 750 single family homes, a mix of townhome product and single family, 600 multifamily, and they were directly adjacent to the single family. So this is not a separate area. This is directly adjacent. And 300 hotel rooms and originally about 200 ,000 square feet of commercial and retail and which they allowed us to come back and ask for more. Now it's 500 ,000 square half a million square feet. And even within that in our city, and as in most cities, you can't build a tiny home. The smallest footprint home you can build in our city and county is a thousand square feet. they were able to let us do that. They allowed us to do accessory dwelling units, ADUs, so you could put a guest house and you could rent it to a starving artist. So we have those. And then the tree houses, which were unique. I would say we were blessed with a, again, a progressive city, a development team that was very genuine in our desire and passion about what we were doing. a chief visionary who had spent his life in the area and was known, which really, really helped. And then I think probably just got lucky a few times, where we just, really, we were challenged in building separation, fire, some of the things that zoning kind of has laid out. And we were able to work through all of those things along the way. Sounds like a pretty positive experience overall. We're trying to get a, well, I know lots of people are trying to not as difficult things through and having a much harder Yeah. it's all legal. Everything you're doing basically is illegal. It is. engineering departments and the utility departments and the fire departments and the water department, you know, they don't like what you're doing. So trying to legalize that is, you know, one of the efforts we work with a lot of groups. I'm also on the board of directors nationally for the Congress for New Urbanism, NCBA, which I had mentioned. Austin Tunnell (01:05:39.918) Strong Towns is a great organization that's working to try to help in this urban guild incremental development of ULI. What's so cool about it, I think is, know, it's when you create the example, like, you know, you and your team have done it Trillith, that's what ultimately moves the needle. Cause you can talk to people about all these things about why ADU, why all this stuff, why, but if people can't see it, you know, and they've never seen anything like it, it's really hard because you're just playing word games. But generally when people see it, experience it, they get it. Not everyone, but a lot. Most do. And those two are resistant, the small percentage will never like it. And we're okay with that too. So do you think what you guys are doing is repeatable? Do you think it's kind of picking up steam for other developers, architects, builders that are thinking about, know, even something like Trillith or even on a much smaller scale, maybe it's a couple acres in an infill. you think this is a lot of the principles you're using is repeatable? Well, interesting. There's a group called Urban3 that does kind of analysis of the value per acre created by dense, by dense building. And the numbers are astronomical about the value per acre that's created by four, three to four story town center in the traditional way, the value that street has versus a Walmart, a strip mall, anything like that. And it's, it's a factor of eight to 10 times just the commercial side of it. And then on the residential side, our value per acre is off the chain. And so of course we're putting six or seven houses on an acre of land, but that the value created there. Um, we had them do the study. mentioned them because it's when you see, they present it graphically. And when you see in our County, uh, graphically where the value per acre is and on our 235 acres in the town or Trillis, uh, especially with charts and graphs, it's off the charts. Uh, and so there are spikes and, Austin Tunnell (01:07:59.948) small spikes in our two town centers outside of, of Trillith and then one, a spike that's, you know, hundred times what it is around us. So my point is I, there's enough value created. The question becomes the value. Who did you create the value with and for, and our people who live here have seen an increase in value. That's dramatic. retailers are successful. It's lifting the whole area around us. Our, us as developers have poured most of what we've collected right back in because we could. And so it's accelerated that growth. would say it would be hard to do it on the, at the pace that we're doing it without, you know, a significant influx of capital, but the results are so positive. financially and otherwise, and certainly on the human scale, that I don't know why people wouldn't. And that's our goal is that not that we would do more of these, but that this would be a model that could be replicated. Yeah. And speaking of that, kind of as we wrap up here, how can people learn more about the process? I mean, you've listed some great organizations, which I will put in the show notes from CNU to NTBA to Strong Towns to Urban 3, know, Urban Guild. You know, do you have any recommendations for people looking to, you know, learn more about this? Is there a way to visit? Yeah, would say visit any walkable community that you can and 30A in Florida and Serenby and Trillis here in Georgia and Habersham. There's just a number of those that are worth going to see. I would say the walkable city, Jeff Speck. Make sure you read that. Anything on the 10 minute city, the 15 minute city, a lot of different things that are written about that type of approach. Suburban Nation, again, foundational to understand why the suburbs don't work and what we need to do to fix that. Not an easy read, but a really important foundational one. then Trillith .com is our website, if you want to come and see on an Austin Tunnell (01:10:20.494) and then, don't hesitate to, to come out, bring your walking shoes and come to Trillis. Are there Airbnbs or anything you can stay at or? You know, interestingly, we, we don't allow Airbnb, in our community. we do have a hotel, a remarkable hotel right in town. That's a really cool thing too, that in a walkable area that has a hotel and it's a, it's a Marriott autograph collection hotel. Very nice one. you don't have to have extra bedrooms. The four times a year when you need somebody to stay over, they're two blocks away is the hotel. So yeah, great hotel. You wouldn't believe how much I hear that because we're building some smaller infill townhouses in this on an acre, but we're fitting like 25 townhouse and all these amazing courtyards and they're going to be largely two bedroom houses just because of demographics we're going after and how many times people go, but we need that third bedroom. Okay. because my kids come and visit at Thanksgiving and Christmas. So, you it's like for two times a year. that's a really powerful thing you're talking about there. It's real. Yeah. So I just got to quote a few kind of like a quick rapid fire things. I'm curious, you know, you've been in business a very long time, obviously fairly successful or very successful. said fairly successful. But, you know, I'm curious, are you a early morning guy, worker, what's kind of your daily routine there? Yeah, I'm, I'm a five hour sleep guy, five, six hours. And so I am an early morning and a late night and it's just how I'm wired. and have not been very good about, about that kind of balance, but I just love my work. And I can honestly say there hasn't been, I don't know if there's been a day in my life that I hadn't wanted to go to my job, I've been blessed to do some really great things and love the people that I work with. So yeah, I'd say both. you have a way that you organize your days or is it really just wake up? Very clear. Mondays, I recast the vision and I meet with all my core teams on Monday and Tuesday. And so a series of, you gotta have a regular meeting rhythm to keep things moving. I've only got seven of us all together. Austin Tunnell (01:12:40.526) three of three that do development and four that run the town operationally. But we'd probably have a thousand people that work for us, you know, if we're contractors and in some way, shape or form. so it's this, so I do my meetings Monday and Tuesday. I try to create some level of separation on Wednesdays to be able to write and create and, you know, keep things fresh that way. And work again, probably less meetings on a lot more freedom that Wednesday and Thursday. And then Friday I try to be done by noon if I can. And I try to spend my weekends not fully connected to it. It's not always successful, but I work long. And there's other people that have that. work that 12, 14 hour day during the week and then try to turn it off. For us it's boating and motorcycling. our two passions. And then spend a day is definitely a day of rest for us. And then we restart again, going full speed on Monday. What about business practices that you've seen work, whether it's at Trillith or your past career. so, just to give you a couple of examples of what I mean is, I recently have learned about and we're implementing or partially implementing entrepreneurial operating system. And I know people that use giant and really believe in that to how to cultivate people. there certain tools or things or ways of running businesses that you really like or is it different for every business? Yeah, you know, it's I consulted for a few years. and I realized it's, some of my mentors and some of the leadership, although these leadership principles are timeless, they're a little bit age, you know, and, you know, built to last guys, so Jim Collins, a huge influence. John Maxwell from a leadership standpoint, huge influence. Ken Blanchard. I would say also this idea, there's a, there's a book called the Rockefeller habit and, a guy named Vern Harnish. And again, it's, it's been a few years, but the idea is that the Rockefellers did life together. Austin Tunnell (01:15:06.434) They lived in New York city, all within a couple blocks of each other. They walked to work and which was, was how they started their day. They were one of the first ones to have lunch at their office. and they, and so they eat the, ate their meal together and then they walked home. and you're talking about, you know, a hundred years ago, right? And so that has been translated into the Rockefeller habits, which is early morning. stand up meeting where you connect with your core people, connect at midday and do it socially over lunch, enjoy each other, and then do some type of check -in at the end of the day. So brief on either end. So you don't have to live and walk together in New York City to have it. So I'd say Mastering the Rockefeller Habits was one of a real influential book for me and something I probably still do. Every Monday I've got lunch with my team. And that is the one time of the week that I we're going to be at a social setting where I can find out about the families, figure out what's going on with people, but also catch up with work. so I'd say those kinds of, those kinds of habits and rhythms, that are people focused probably more, even more than, the execution and the checkbox. That's great. And last question, what's a place that you've traveled that really, really inspired you? Yeah, I would say, Seaside more than anything was the single place where I saw the kind of, and again, it's a destination, more vacation destination, but the way it was designed, the way the built environment made you feel, and was probably the most inspirational place I've been, and I've traveled a lot around the world, and there are a lot fancier, bigger things, but it was the simplicity. And the intentionality, all their materials, by the way, you can't use materials at seaside that were designed after 1945 or so. yeah, all original building materials, really cool architecture, et cetera. So I'd say seaside Florida. cool. Well, Rob, thank you very much. lot of, Austin Tunnell (01:17:24.106) Wonderful experience that you just shared. and I wish you the best of luck as you continue to build out Trillith and I very much hope to visit with my family at some point. But you are certainly welcome. All right. There's no, like I said, there's no gates to Trillith. Come on. All right. Talk to you later. Thank you. That was awesome to talk to Rob, someone who's, just been really successful actually building a town from scratch. And I can't wait to actually get out and visit For anyone interested in learning more about what he's doing and just honestly this movement of building people centered walkable neighborhoods I'll put stuff in the show notes, but just to throw out some things You know, he talked about visiting seaside, Florida or visiting Trillith itself. And if you visit seaside, there's multiple Neighborhoods 30a and Rosemary right there that you can visit and in Trillith you could go visit serenby I don't think that's too far as Also some great books that both he and I recommend and have read are Suburban Nation, Strong Towns. There's actually a book called Strong Towns. And some of these organizations, NTBA, National Town Builders Association, there's the Strong Towns organization movement. They have a actual annual gathering before Congress had the New Urbanisms gathering annually each year. So some great organizations, some great ways to learn more about this stuff, get plugged in, and frankly, to get some very practical resources. Even if you're a small, if you're an architect or you're a builder and want to learn more about this stuff and you're thinking about maybe even trying something yourself, it doesn't have to be starting a whole town, right? We at Build and Culture are working on a little bit over an acre right now in an infill setting, but it's the exact same principles, just at a much smaller scale. If you enjoyed this episode, if you enjoyed this podcast, I'd really appreciate it if you like, subscribe and share and on Apple and Spotify, leave us a five -star review. We deserve it. And thanks so much for listening and I'll catch you on the next episode.