From One Building to the Whole Company: Scaling Sustainability to the Boardroom with Marianna Palmour

The Green Impact Report Quick take: LEED used to be the strategy. Now it's one of maybe 20 tools. Marianna Palmour went from reviewing LEED projects to building a corporate ESG program from scratch at a 5,000-person firm, and she explains why your biggest clients' Scope 3 targets are about to become your problem. 🎓 Meet Your Fellow Sustainability Champion Marianna Palmour leads corporate sustainability at Salas O'Brien, an engineering and technical services firm with more than 5,000 people. She grew up on Lookout Mountain in northwest Georgia, studied architecture at Georgia Tech, and got into green building early. She took the LEED exam straight out of school and served as vice president and past president of USGBC's Emerging Green Builders. From there she worked at Sustainable Options and then Epstein Group, where she was a LEED third-party reviewer and built out a portfolio and ESG service line. She went back to Georgia Tech for an MBA in entrepreneurship, which made her a "double Jacket." While there she was a fellow with the Ray C. Anderson Center for Sustainability, focused on inclusive design. When Salas O'Brien acquired Epstein Group, she was asked to build the ESG program from the ground up. 🌱 Breaking Ground on Better Building In this episode, Marianna Palmour shows how sustainability moves from the building to the boardroom: 💡 Key Insight #1: Double materiality beats copying the competition The Challenge: Companies often set sustainability goals by looking at what peers are doing, or by asking only the people at the top. The Solution: Run a materiality assessment that asks every stakeholder: communities, investors, the board, clients and suppliers. Then look at it in both directions ("double materiality"): how sustainability issues affect the business, and how the business affects the environment. ROI: The strategy fits your own values, your regulatory exposure (Local Law 97 in New York, California's ESG disclosure rules) and the people you actually answer to. You don't spend money chasing someone else's priorities. 💡 Key Insight #2: Your clients' Scope 3 is now your compliance problem The Challenge: Smaller firms and service providers assume EU rules and emissions reporting only apply to big multinationals. The Solution: Get ready now. Big global clients have to report Scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions, so they're pushing supplier codes of conduct and emissions reporting down the supply chain. That includes consultants. Marianna's simple test: Sco