Do you know the New Mexico state motto? To save you from Googling, the motto is “It grows as it goes.” When hearing this for the first time I had to suppress a chuckle (sorry New Mexicans), but upon learning where it came from it left an impression on me. This motto references the dynamic progress of the state’s past, present, future and ultimately its legacy.
The tendency of business in our “age of acceleration”, borrowing from Friedman, seems to only be about the now, A-Z rounds of funding, and customer retention sans profitability. Wildwood on the other hand is focused on forever. Our company’s roots were planted by our partners over 20 years ago and today we continue to grow a successful portfolio of projects organically. Counterintuitive as “organic” might be in today’s bigger, faster culture, we’re okay with it because we can be intentional about the legacy we’re leaving.
We separate ourselves by being ourselves and at Wildwood that means a strategic approach to restoration, taking a client first approach, and intensely focusing on our legacy. Isn’t a legacy something that writes itself? Yes, but when you work in the field of perpetuity it’s extremely important to start in the right direction. Perpetuity sounds like a bold statement for a relatively young company, but it’s a requirement of our work and each Wildwood restoration project ends up with a conservation easement protecting it forever. Our mitigation banks, permittee-responsible mitigation sites, and conservation banks are all protected in perpetuity by conservation easements, which means from day one we have to think about legacy.
Why legacy? Why organic growth? Outside of the cliched answers for a company that specializes in natural resources, because organic growth only comes on the back of proven success. Each of us at Wildwood believe the work we do to marry economics with ecology truly makes a difference and will dynamically change the landscape. Steadfast, organic growth allows us to stay focused on writing tomorrow’s legacy today. Obviously, we are proud of our projects and believe in marketing to showcase our work (ie. this newsletters), but at the end of the day Wildwood enjoys to grow as we go.