How Sustainable Commercial Real Estate Saves Money and the Planet | Carolyn Pistone

Carolyn Pistone (00:00)
Well, and you know, I went home to my husband then and said, Let’s try this. And he he was fully on board. And then, you know, the next couple of years I laid awake all night going, How am I gonna pay these people? How am I gonna pay myself? But we built it in a couple of years, we built it into a seven-figure business, which is a rare and precious thing for a woman-owned business. Mm-hmm. Less than three percent of the women-owned businesses in the country everhit that milestone.

Meghan Escobar (02:03)
Hello everyone, welcome back to *Real Estate Pros Podcast*. I am your host, Meghan Escobar. And today I have the absolute pleasure of sitting down with an incredible young woman who is doing really great things. And in fact, I’m gonna lead with this. When I asked her, you know, about her business and what she was doing, she said she’s saving the planet using her real estate license. And through our conversation, I discovered that she actually is. And I’m so
excited to have her on the show. It’s quite a different perspective than our normal guest. So I truly believe that our audience will walk away with some great insight here on the way that Carolyn Pistone has built her business. And so welcome to the show, Carolyn. Thank you for taking the time to be here.

Carolyn Pistone (02:55)
Well, thank you. Thank you so much. Today is my birthday and today is my Medicare day. And I am so thrilled that you introduced me as a young woman. So thank you so much.

Meghan Escobar (03:12)
That was my intuition. I didn’t I don’t know where that came from. That was total intuition. Well, first and foremost, happy birthday, Carolyn. I wish I had a noisemaker where I could like throw some you know, I don’t know, drums up there, but we’ll just clap it up for you. Happy birthday. And thank you for taking the day of your birth your birthday and being here with me. And you know what? You just reminded me it’s my dad’s birthday. And he’s passed over, but it’s his birthday today. So they there are some incredible people born on this day. So thank you for being here.

Carolyn Pistone (03:47)
You, me, your dad, and Barack Obama.

Meghan Escobar (03:51)
Okay.

Carolyn Pistone (03:53)
Yeah.

Meghan Escobar (03:55)
So those out there that might not be familiar, Carolyn, with your name or your worlds, give us a thirty-thousand-foot view of what your focus is these days with Clear Blue Commercial and what markets you’re operating in.

Carolyn Pistone (04:14)
Well, Clear Blue Commercial, we’re a full-service real estate services firm. We do some brokerage, we do mostly large-scale property management for big corporations and government entities. And we have really dedicated ourselves to not just greening every property we touch, but really looking at the properties we manage, because properties do
not exist in a vacuum. They exist on a piece of land, in a community, in a municipality, in a place that has resources, in a place that has industry. Frequently, the tenants in our buildings, they’re mostly office buildings. We have some retail and industrial, but mostly office. They all have businesses. And they’re all performing something in the community. And so the way people get to and from the building, what happens inside the building, how we support those tenants in their businesses is a huge part of the global perspective of what we do. And we have, as I mentioned to you before, we are a certified green business, a certified woman-owned business, a certified small business. And a B Corp. And that means we’re committed to using our business as a force for good. And through the course of that, during the drought here in California, I’m located in right now, I’m standing in Sonoma County, California, and we do business all over the state, primarily in the San Francisco Bay Area, and because of the government work, we do a lot of work in Sacramento, which is the capital. Within about a half a mile of where I’m standing right now, we have personally saved over 36 million gallons of water in a drought-stricken area. And that’s and that’s growing just by aking some small changes. We have saved our—we have diverted about three and a half million pounds of carbon from our atmosphere through solar arrays, solar-powered EV charging stations, LED conversions, some of these kinds of things.
And we have saved our clients over just under $2 million in energy savings, in energy costs alone. And a huge portion of that is as a subcontractor for division of the state of California. So, if you were a taxpayer in the state of California, you’re welcome.

Meghan Escobar (07:59)
And on behalf of the people, I will say thank you. I love that. You know, Carolyn, one thing that really caught my attention in our discovery conversation, if you will, was another statement that you had said that there was a lot of power behind it and a lot of conviction behind it. You said one of the biggest things that you guys struggle with is convincing clients that there is a win-win situation for everyone. And that is not an easy thing to do, especially in this climate that the world that we live in, and you know, so many people think, well, it’s too good to be true, or you know, that the scarcity mindset or whatever it is that you know what’s behind it. Can you talk to us a little bit about that?

Carolyn Pistone (08:57)
Well, I I’m very frustrating to all the wonderful marketing people that have tried to help me over the years because the first thing they do is they come in with their checklist and they’re like, Well, who’s your competition? Like, nobody else is me. I have no competition. Because I really believe that collaboration is the new competition. If I do something that’s good for the planet, well, it’s good for everybody. If I do something that’s good for the community, it’s good for everybody. And on my way into my office this morning, I had to swing by one of the properties that I manage because the property next door has a water leak that’s spilling into a shared parking lot. And I I’ve been by it a couple of times to try to address that. And as I’m calling the city and I’m trying to get something going, and I’m calling that landlord, they’re like, What you don’t even manage this building? Why? And it’s like, well, it’s all of our water. And so, yes, I’m concerned that this property owner is going to have a ridiculously huge bill because there are big penalties for wasting water right now in our state. But really, the reason there are big penalties for wasting water in our state is that water is so precious. So to have it spraying out into the parking lot is an issue. Right. And it’s an issue that’s worth my time to pay attention to, whether somebody’s paying me to pay attention to it or not.

Meghan Escobar (11:15)
That speaks a lot about your character because whether or not it’s part of your income potential, whatever the case may be, it’s like, okay, how do we fix this issue? And like you said, water is not necessarily anybody’s possession, but everybody’s concern.

Carolyn Pistone (11:34)
Exactly. Exactly. You know, but the other thing is one of the reasons the way I like to put it as I’m speaking now is sustainability is all about the long game. And one of the things that we have had to do with our clients and with our communities is we have to play the long game in the short term. Because we don’t know how long we’re gonna be here. None of us do. But we have to—I forget who said it, but the wise man plants a tree that he will never get to sit under the shade of. Yeah, and that’s really how I feel about what we’re doing. Then we did some turf conversions.

Meghan Escobar (12:09)
That’s a good one.

Carolyn Pistone (12:18)
As part of how we’ve saved water, where you take out the lawn and the sprinklers and you replace it with a drip system and compost and mulch and drought-tolerant planting, you not only save water, you save—you replenish the aquifer with the water that you do use. Because with sprinklers it runs everywhere. It runs all over the building, it runs down into the gutters, into the storm drains. And it doesn’t go anywhere, whereas a drip system not only waters your
drought-tolerant plants, but it sinks back down into the earth and replenishes the aquifer. So as we’re… Exactly. Exactly. And the underground aquifer where all our water really lives because anybody who has a well will tell you, you know, if you want water, you gotta dig for it.

Meghan Escobar (13:21)
Just like oil. Yeah. It is a natural resource, but if we don’t use it wisely, it could… Yeah, I got it. Well, thank you for sharing that.

Carolyn Pistone (13:32)
It’s not that I don’t care about money or profit, although secretly I don’t. Because in my mind money’s not even a real thing. It’s a totally made up thing. But I understand that we have—the reason we’re a commercial entity is that we have to pay attention to our clients’ bottom line as much as we pay attention to our own, if not more. What I’m trying to prove is that sustainability more than pays for itself, that when communities thrive, we thrive. So we try to really look—take a holistic approach to even when we’re selling and leasing buildings, we try to take a really
holistic approach to how this asset performs more than just financially. And I can tell you a little story about a turf conversion that we did. We were slowly but surely converting turf in all the properties we managed and finding ways to do that within the budget that we already had. And we finally got to the end where we had the biggest—it was the biggest building we managed with the most amount of lawn. And it was owned by a big real estate investment trust on the East Coast. And I was managing it for them. I said I really want to do a turf conversion and they’re like, well, if you can make it fit in the budget, whatever. So I went back to the and scaping company that I’ve been doing these turf conversions with. And what I discovered was that I am a terrible estimator of square footage. Because when the bid came back, it was a quarter million dollars to do this turf conversion. And I did the math, and that would pay for itself in water savings in 32 years. Wow. So I knew that was pretty much a non-starter. So I went back to the landscaping company and I said, you know, your bid is all—it’s all labor and materials. What if I can get the materials donated and what if I can get volunteer labor? Would you be willing to do the prep work and rebid this and supervise it for us? And they said, of course, yes, we’d love to be part of this. And we got—we reached out to the local high schools. We reached out to a local nonprofit that was doing water saving things for people in their homes.

Mm-hmm. We—in order to graduate high school in California, you have to have a certain number of hours of community service. And so, we made sure we had like the whole soccer team of one school and the whole wrestling team of another school came out and got their community service that day. So initially, the whole project was supposed to cost a quarter million dollars. It was supposed to take six to eight weeks. We also got three bands that came and played, and we got people to—there’s a massage school across the street. They brought their chairs over and were giving people massages. And we live in a real agricultural area and we make a lot of—there’s a lot of food production. So people donated baked goods and all kinds of things, so we were able to feed people. And we did the whole thing in six hours. Wow. And for a total cost of just under $70,000, which was significantly less than the landscaping bill that year. And because my husband and I both came out of the entertainment industry, we were naturally there with three cameras and we did—we made a whole video and you have a time-lapse where you can see the lawn coming out and the and the turf coming in and

Meghan Escobar (18:19)
Project.

Carolyn Pistone (18:40)
So then, a great day was had by all. It was a great party. And that month, I—as I sent in the report and I sent in all the invoices, and all of a sudden, I’m getting calls from the accounting department of this client saying, why is there a massage school on the landscaping budget? And who is the Bad Apple String Band? And I explained to them that we had done, and then I was able to send them the video. And they not only got it and liked it so much, they ended up showing that video at their annual shareholders’ meeting. So, we took what was a line item that was losing money on somebody’s spreadsheet and we turned it into this feel-good opportunity that investors all over the country could feel good about. Wow. That one project saves one point three million gallons of water a year. And we did it eleven years ago.

Meghan Escobar (19:41)
Wow. That’s incredible. And still just figuring out ways to continue to save the planet. And you know, I know you’ve been in the game for quite a while. This this Clear Blue Commercial launched back in 2014 based on what you shared with me, but you also have, you know, previous entrepreneur history. And so there’s—every time that I get an opportunity to sit with any operator. I always like to ask, when was there a moment that things got real for you? Or
when was there a moment that you feel you had to pivot really fast? And I think this is important information to share because it’s not always gonna go. And you did share some story like in that backstory, but was there a specific moment that sits with you where you look back and you’re like, wow, I overcame that.

Carolyn Pistone (20:40)
Well, first of all, I like to say if you lose enough jobs, you get a great resume, and mine is particularly impressive. And I and anytime I was out of a job, instead I would just make myself a new business card and go, I’m a consultant now. Because it was better than saying you were unemployed. And I did get and I learned a lot from that and I got some jobs. I had been a consultant for one of the big three global commercial real estate firms. And they actually hired me to open an office here in here in Petaluma, where my office is now. And it was during the
downturn, which is a lovely euphemistic way of saying everybody was desperate, everybody was losing their homes, everybody was losing their businesses, everybody was going bankrupt. And they had me come in and open an office there to manage a group of properties that were all deed in lieu of foreclosure. And so we did this over time and over two years we had—we took over more and more properties. I built a great team. We did a great job. We saved a number of the tenants’ businesses while we were also trying to rescue these facilities. And all of the properties that we managed leased up, stabilized, and then were purchased by owner-users. And then the company I had been working for called me up and said, Thank you very much. We’re going to close your office. And I said, Great, where am I going? And they
said, be sure and let us know. And so I went home to my husband to explain to him that I had lost my job yet again. And then we came—I came in the next day prepared to lay everybody off and, you know, let them know what was happening and do the things you have to do to close an office. And my staff was very upset. They all went off to lunch together. I was sure that they had gone off to lunch together to basically stick pins in their Carolyn doll. And they came back after lunch and they all came into my office and they said, We love working here, we love working for you, we love working together. And if you decide to do your own thing, we will stay with you.

Meghan Escobar (23:23)
Wow. I just got full body chills. So thank you for sharing that. I was so sure that when you were like, they went to stick pins in my doll. I’m like, this is going left. My gosh, poor Carolyn. And lo and behold, what a lesson that is, right? Like for you to sit there and have this belief like they all hate me and they’re all gonna curse me and to know that they actually just support you.

Carolyn Pistone (23:54)
Well, and you know, I went home to my husband then and said, Let’s try this. And he was fully on board. And then, you know, the next couple of years I laid awake all night going, How am I gonna pay these people? How am I gonna pay myself? But we built it in a couple of years, we built it into a seven-figure business, which is a rare and precious thing for a woman-owned business. Mm-hmm. Less than three percent of the women-owned businesses in the country ever hit that milestone and we’ve been able to stay, stay steady ever since. And we’ve built a great team. We’ve built some great careers for people and we we’re just really blessed to have been able to do this and be able to do some of the projects that we’ve been able to do that have the impact that we really want to have in the world.

Meghan Escobar (24:48)
Yeah. And thank you for sharing that moment. I, you know, wasn’t trying to bring you back to revisit any pain, but it’s actually a beautiful ending. So and I and I think it’s important to share those moments because it is truly what separates folks who are here to just put their toes in and get their foot wet versus those who are willing to stand at the end of the ocean and ground themselves into what it is that they truly believe in. So thank you. Let me ask you this. What are you focused on next? What’s the next real big goal for Carolyn and Clear Blue Commercial?

Carolyn Pistone (25:35)
Well, we’re definitely ready, ready to scale. We’re at a comfortable level. We could sustain what we’re doing indefinitely. But we’re really looking at what is the next what is the next big challenge facing the planet, facing the country, facing our clients, and what can we do? And one of the things that we have just done, and I’ll happily send you a video link, is we have just installed the first of its kind on the West Coast completely self-contained EV charging stations that are solar-powered, and we did this at a property where we had already put in a solar installation that was offsetting 25% of the energy usage in that building. We’d done a complete LED conversion. And we really wanted to provide EV charging stations for the tenants. But there were challenges with couple of things. We didn’t want to just plug it, plug these into the building, which is how it’s done. So ultimately you’re plugging your car back into the grid, which means and typically people who buy electric cars have a certain amount of ecological mindset. And in some parts of the country, if you plug your car into your house, you may be okay, you’re not putting gasoline in your car, but you’re powering your car from coal or natural gas. Or even oil, depending on where that that particular grid is getting its energy. Right. These were
completely self-contained. And so and we actually changed horses in midstream. We had started the project and the construction alone involves trenching and hooking up to another electrical panel in the building, blah blah. And you have to wait for permitting and you know nobody’s big on permitting right now. And it was dragging on and on. And in the middle of the project, the person who—the company that we had bought—purchased these charging stations from said, actually, I just learned about a new product in our industry that is all-American-made, on the East Coast. And this could be perfect and they’re solar-powered. So it and the thing that’s wonderful about this is first of all it doesn’t require a permit because it’s not a construction project. You’re just buying a product. It comes to—it comes already made, you bolt it to the parking lot, you can move it if you need to, you’re putting it on private property and each one hooks up to four cars.

Meghan Escobar (28:55)
And it’s powered by the Almighty Sun.

Carolyn Pistone (28:58)
By the sun. So the energy is free forever. It’s just out there. And the technology, I can geek out about the technology. The panels follow the sun and so it generates forty percent more energy than a fixed panel. And all of the energy, there’s no battery associated with it. So all of the energy goes straight into the tank.

Meghan Escobar (29:09)
Yeah.

Carolyn Pistone (29:28)
Which is a better use of solar energy than let’s store it up and use it at night. Yeah.

Meghan Escobar (29:35)
Right, right.

Carolyn Pistone (29:36)
So and it’s been wonderful and people adopted them right away. So we installed three of them for a total of twelve hookups. And every time I drive over there, it just warms my heart that this is happening. So we really want to get this product out there while we can because you know the rebates and subsidies,

Meghan Escobar (29:56)
Yeah.

Carolyn Pistone (30:06)
Are going away. The infrastructure is desperately needed. So we wanna make sure that we can help make this happen. So that’s what we’re… But you can see, I’m really excited about it.

Meghan Escobar (30:18)
Yes, you are. And you know what? That’s what’s that’s what’s keeping your machine going, right? It’s like, okay, we’ve got a really good solution here locally. Why not put this out into the world, right? Go across the nation and beautiful stuff. I love it. And you know, a lot of our listeners, they’re either very green in their entrepreneur journey in the real estate industry and you know, just trying to figure out where they fall into place, or they’re established and they’re looking for the next way to level up. And with you being such a woman of community and
such a woman of collaborating and having the perspective of win-win, I think it’s important to share—getting into the right rooms and meeting the right people. And when it comes to building relationships, Carolyn, for you, what’s made the biggest difference?

Carolyn Pistone (31:20)
I think having a business because you wouldn’t you wouldn’t know this to talk to me and a lot of people that now know me in business would be shocked to know this but I’m actually kind of antisocial. I’m really shy.

Meghan Escobar (31:33)
Same.

Carolyn Pistone (31:35)
And, like, my husband is very gregarious and meets people and it has given me the—we’ve been married thirty years and it’s given me the opportunity to not have to, you know, do that myself so much. We’ll move into a new neighborhood and you know, within a week he knows all of our neighbors and their names and their kids’ names and what they do and he knows all of the local business owners and blah blah blah. And he told me, he said, you have to understand, these are the people, you know, if the big earthquake comes in California, these are the people that are gonna be digging us out of the rubble. We need to know them. We need to take care of each other. But by having the business. So when I first started the business, I got—I, at the advice one of my employees, I put together an advisory board. To try to figure out, I knew how to do the tasks associated with my business, but there was a whole back end of the of the business that I had to recreate all of a sudden and create systems and do all these things. And I had to grow the business in order to do that. And I didn’t know how to grow the business. So one of the
members of the advisory board just said, Look, Carolyn, you don’t have any money. You’re you don’t have an advertising budget. You can’t spend a bunch of money on advertising. The only way we’re gonna grow this business is for you to become a celebrity. And I laughed at that because I’m a Leo and I’m already a celebrity. But that was all I needed to hear. I started getting out and joining every community, you know.

Meghan Escobar (33:18)
Yeah.

Carolyn Pistone (33:27)
In addition to the Chamber of Commerce, I started going to all kinds of trade shows in sustainability and started really, really reaching out and becoming not just my brand ambassador, but in my mind, I was becoming an ambassador for the planet and an ambassador for the communities that I served. And in some ways an ambassador for humanity. I don’t think much of myself, you know. But that—but doing it for the business knowing that the business depended upon me to survive and get in those right rooms and talk to the right people and be somebody that that people think of and I—we have added so much value to our clients and in retaining their tenants and in in increasing the performance of their properties. The challenge has always been you have to work with us for a couple of years before you start to see the proof of that. So by getting out and evangelizing basically on behalf of the planet. One of the benefits of that that I have learned only recently. I had—we just took on a new contract and it’s a client that heard me speak about 10 years ago and I—he had been a neighbor of another property that I managed. Wow. And he called me out of the blue and said I’ve got these two buildings. Would you be willing to do that? I was like, of course. So yeah, you never know where it’s gonna take you. And a lot of the people that I meet, back about a dozen years ago, Sheryl Sandberg wrote the book *Lean In*. And then there were all these women’s groups that had Lean In circles, and it was a curriculum that you would do for a year. So I did this with a group of women.

Meghan Escobar (35:24)
Ten years later.

Carolyn Pistone (35:53)
There were 12 of us, and we’d meet once a month for a year and go through these exercises. Well, during the course of that year, seven of the twelve of us were in a completely different business at the end of the year. Because one of the things that we discovered is a lot of the things that we were complaining about or concerned about had to do with the fact that whatever it was we were doing was not a full enough expression of our authentic selves. Mm. And the launch of this current business happened during that time. Wow. For me.

Meghan Escobar (36:36)
So is it safe to say that relationship building is pretty important for entrepreneurs and operators?

Carolyn Pistone (36:47)
It’s essential. But the first, most important thing is your relationship with your authentic self. Because those of those of us who have worked in corporate America, it is very easy to lose yourself. Yeah. And in order to try to fit into whatever, you know, whatever cubicle they need you to sit in. And to really understand that what you bring to your life’s work.

Meghan Escobar (36:54)
Yeah. Yeah.

Carolyn Pistone (37:17)
Is about bringing your whole self to your whole life. And one of the things that I did early on as a consultant before I had these businesses was I used to do workshops with departments and organizations. And it would all be values-based. And so we’d start out with a list of values and, you know, ask everybody to—I’d hand them out and I’d say, Okay, you’ve got 90 seconds. I want you to just pick your top five. And I was surprised at how much people would just hang back. The first question was always, you know, do we have to put our name on these? And I’m like, Well, no, this isn’t going on your permanent record. And, you know, genocide and pedophilia and pollution are not on this list. There’s no bad answer.

Meghan Escobar (38:10)
Ha ha ha.

Carolyn Pistone (38:13)
And the next question was always every time was always, do you mean our values at work or do you mean our values in our real life?

Meghan Escobar (38:24)
As if they shouldn’t be the same.

Carolyn Pistone (38:28)
Exactly. Your values are your values. And if your values are different in your work than they are in your real life, then you are working in the wrong place.

Meghan Escobar (38:38)
And you’re disconnected from your authentic self.

Carolyn Pistone (38:41)
Yes. And that really it got it got me going. I was at a conference for I think it was called World-Changing Women. So I was at this conference and we were in a roundtable discussion about our businesses. And you know, I said, three years ago, I was three months past my very last dollar, both personally and in the business. And I was actually, you know, finding coins in the under the couch cushions in order to put gas in the car to get to a client presentation to get a job. It was really a challenging time. And then three years later, I’m running a seven-figure business and we’re all thriving. And they said, Yay. They said, to what do you attribute your success? And I
said, never wavering from my mission, vision, and values. And they were like, Okay, good. And I go, but to be fair, I also attribute being 90 days past my very last dollar to the very same thing. There is there is a lot of compromise and a lot of struggle.

Meghan Escobar (40:02)
Yeah.

Carolyn Pistone (40:08)
In being true to yourself. These—your values are most important when they’re most difficult to live by.

Meghan Escobar (40:17)
You heard that, folks. Write it down. That’s a gem. Thank you for sharing. And you know, before we wrap up here, Carolyn, if somebody wanted to connect with you and learn more about what you’re doing and maybe potentially helping you expand or just wanting to learn more about the values that you carry, what would be the best way for them to
reach you is that through social media or email, telephone number.

Carolyn Pistone (40:46)
well, there’s a couple of things. I’ve become a speaker and an author. So I have a website that’s just for that. I have two bestselling books. I have a third one coming out in January, I think, 14, 2027. And that’s at CarolynPistone.com. But also go to ClearBlueCommercial.com. And you can email me anytime and then we have all, you know, we have all the social media stuff. So I’m easy to find. If you want to email me, please email me at [email protected].

Meghan Escobar (41:31)
Perfect. Thank you. Thank you so much for being here. I really enjoyed your time and the conversation that we’ve had here. And I truly believe our audience will gain some true value from this. And we need more people in this space who are building their businesses under their true authentic self and doing things the right way. And so again, thank you so much for being here, Carolyn. We really appreciated having you on the show.

Carolyn Pistone (41:59)
You bet. Thank you, Meghan. This has been like having a nice massage.

Meghan Escobar (42:02)
I love that. And for those of you that are tuning in, if you got any value from this, please be sure to hit like and subscribe. We’ve got more conversations coming in with operators like Carolyn Pistone here, who are out here building real businesses with real people in real time. We will see you on the next episode.