Green to Gold

When I started looking for summer internships, a number of people asked me if I would be doing an "environmental internship" this summer and a "business internship" next summer. To which my somewhat restrained answer was: No. To me, they’re one and the same. I’m going to graduate school to undertake this joint degree program so that I can do both, so that I can be an enviropreneur, a social enterpriser, a member of the for-benefit (rather than for-profit or not-for-profit) community. With that mindset, I embarked on a search for an internship at a company where environmental and financial returns are integrated. Not in an insincere or bleeding-heart environmentalist kind of way, but in an "if we don’t meet our environmental targets, we won’t meet our financial targets" kind of way. I found such an opportunity with Beartooth Capital.

I was introduced to Beartooth last summer, when their team delivered a presentation on real estate private equity for the program I was attending at the Property and Environment Research Center in Bozeman, Montana. Beartooth Capital Partners is a private equity real estate group that preserves ranchland in the West (primarily in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem of Montana, Idaho, Colorado, and Wyoming). They buy undervalued ranch properties and perfect access, partner with land trusts to put conservation easements on the property, and conduct habitat restoration projects to enhance conservation values. By doing so, they convert marginal properties into premier recreational ranches, improving environmental quality while generating risk-appropriate returns for their investors.

Having worked at a non-profit land trust, I was intrigued by Beartooth’s business model, skeptical of their conservation potential, and anxious to see if they could produce results. I placed them in my keep-in-touch-with-these-folks file and headed to Duke for graduate school…

In February of this year, when I was inviting panelists for the green investments session I was putting together at the Footprints Conference at Fuqua, I immediately thought of Beartooth. I invited them to participate and received a very polite "no" in response. Undaunted, I responded "well, okay then, how about an internship?" Not quite in those words. But a conversation developed, and a few weeks later I had signed on for a twelve-week internship with Beartooth, to be based in either Bozeman or Santa Barbara (my choice) doing a little bit of everything, for a start-up still trying to prove their model.

My posts this summer will chronicle my time at Beartooth, my foray into the private equity world, and my thoughts on starting business school in the fall. They will hopefully help me answer the questions: "Can you be really make money while protecting the environment?" and "Can these models be scaled?" … along with any other questions you suggest along the way…