Sustainable Business Practices and Ethics with Shelby Parsons

**SPEAKER_2** (0:03)
The Bliss Business Podcast, the show about empathy, connection, and consciousness in business. Today's episode is brought to you by Zero Company, your paid search, social media, and programmatic ad experts.

**Stephen Sakach** (0:17)
Welcome back to the show, everyone. I'm Stephen Sakach here with my co-host Tullio Siragusa, and our special guest today who we'll introduce in a second.
So a recent global study found that 64% of consumers now rank sustainability as a top three consideration when they make purchasing decisions, even in the middle of economic uncertainty. And at the same time, surveys show that more than 80% of workers prefer to work for companies whose values match their own, and that take environmental and social responsibility seriously. So customers and employees are watching not just what have what companies sell, but how they operate. And today we are exploring what it looks like to run a values driven, sustainably minded business in a highly regulated complex industry. Tullio, introduce our special guest today.

**Tullio Siragusa** (1:13)
Absolutely. Today our guest is Shelby Parsons. She's the COO of Premier Inspection Services. Shelby is an MBA educated business and architecture professional who started working with her dad at the age of 13, and has been building businesses with him ever since. She now co-owns a building inspection firm and architecture practice and a residential real estate investment business, bringing a grounded entrepreneurial perspective shaped by years of hands-on experience. At Premier Inspection Services, Shelby focuses on safe construction of educational and municipal buildings, with a strong commitment to creating a better and more sustainable future for the communities they serve. Shelby, welcome to The Bliss Business Podcast.

**Shelby Parsons** (2:05)
Thank you. Yeah, thank you for having me. It's an honor. Looking forward to talking about our business and what we're doing to build for our future. And it's just been great just talking to you guys about ethics and how they are intertwined with our businesses. Looking forward to it.

**Stephen Sakach** (2:22)
So Shelby, a lot of sustainability conversations get framed around marketing campaigns or surface level initiatives. In your work, sustainability and ethics show up in building codes and long-term safety and decisions that affect the communities for decades. I was going to say, when you think about sustainable business practices and ethics, what does that really mean to you in that context? And maybe how has it shaped the way you run your businesses?

**Shelby Parsons** (2:58)
That's a good question. I think sustainability can get really overcomplicated, personally.
It's, you know, I think it's something that we had talked about before. It's like we think about sustainability in decades, not so much quarters. I mean, it's been great to be so young in this field because, you know, I tell people, like, I'm not going anywhere. I mean, you know, whatever we say today better be true in 20, 30 years, whatever, in 10 years, because I'm still going to have to stand by the decisions we make today. So, you know, that's been a huge plus to everything we do. But I think, like you said, we do have a lot of oversight as well, and that's been amazing as well. I just think it's our responsibility, especially in the line of work we're in for inspections specifically, we're dealing with a lot of students, a lot of educational projects. So, when it comes to education, we think about the big picture with who our real client is. So, usually it's going to be a student, it's going to be the K through 14 that we have, because we do community colleges as well. So it's going to be whoever is utilizing the buildings. So that's, you know, that always kind of comes back to why we're doing what we do.

**Stephen Sakach** (4:18)
Yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense. That's that shift of thinking about of your client. It's not just, okay, here's the agency that's paying us or something. It's, no, it's the children, the child going to the school, right? It's that in person that you got to think of. It really makes you a little bit more empathetic in your process.

**Shelby Parsons** (4:42)
Yeah.

**Tullio Siragusa** (4:42)
Yeah. And you're in a tough industry in terms of sometimes having reputation of cutting corners. I mean, you operate in a space, you've got regulation inspections, contractors, public institutions you're serving, all interacting at once. And in those environments, cutting corners can be tempting and sometimes hard to spot. From your experience, where do you see ethical risks show up most when most often in construction and in real estate? And what have you intentionally done, for example, to differentiate how you protect people and maintain trust in those environments, even with your subcontractors? How do you manage that in such a way to maintain those ethical standards?