At Tugboat Institute® Summit 2023, where we celebrated our ten year anniversary, CEO Dave Whorton shared a talk entitled On Time. Dave first set the context of human activity in the broad span of life on our planet; as a species, we have been around for an extremely short time. Then he zeroed in on the timeframe of business, since it truly came to exist. In the past couple centuries, as the pace of change and progress have accelerated, the timeframe of the Evergreen® company stands out as unique.

For a company with outside investors and owners, such as public companies and Venture Capital and Private Equity backed companies, try as they might, they cannot escape a short term mindset, as they must, over and over, ‘make the quarter.’ An Evergreen company, by contrast, can grow slowly, and therefore adhere to much longer timeframes. This long term mindset allows for the compounding not just of capital, but also culture, customer base, and more. Seen through this lens, time stands out as a primary strategic advantage of the Evergreen company.