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My father opened this bakery in nineteen eighty-six with one oven, a borrowed mixer and a sign he painted himself. He was here at three every morning. I know, because I was here too, sitting on a flour sack, eating the broken rolls. Forty years later, the oven is bigger. The sign is still his. People ask what's changed. Honestly? Not much. We still make the dough the night before. We still shape every loaf by hand. And we still know most of you by your order before you reach the counter. What has changed is the people. Kids who came in strollers now bring their own kids in strollers. That's the part I didn't see coming. You don't build a bakery. You build a morning that a whole town shares. So, thank you. For forty years of mornings. Hollis and Pine. Same corner. Same bread.

I grew up on a dairy farm in western Wisconsin. Two hundred acres, ninety cows, and one shoebox. The shoebox was our accounting system. Every receipt, every feed bill, every check from the co-op went in there. And every April, my mom would sit at the kitchen table until midnight trying to make it all add up. I used to think that was just what farming looked like. Then I went to college, learned to code, and got a job building software for big companies. Beautiful tools. Dashboards for everything. And I kept thinking about that shoebox. Nobody was building this for her. The tools that existed assumed you had an office, an accountant and a free afternoon. Farmers have none of those. So I stopped waiting for someone else to do it. I moved back home, set up a desk in the old milking parlour, and started building Ledgerlark. Snap a photo of a receipt from the cab of your truck. It sorts itself. At the end of the month, you see what came in, what went out, and what's left. My mom was our first customer. She was also our harshest critic. If she couldn't use a feature with gloves on, it didn't ship. Today, a few thousand farms use Ledgerlark. Our office is still a barn. And the shoebox? It's on my desk. Empty. I keep it there to remember who we're building for.

Most people never think about the bridge they drive across every morning. That's exactly how we like it. At Strandmoor Civil, we design and deliver the things a city depends on and never notices. Bridges. Water mains. Flood walls. The quiet infrastructure under everything. For thirty-five years, we've worked with towns and counties to plan projects that last. We start with the ground itself: soil, water, weather, traffic, growth. Then we design for the city you'll be in fifty years, not the one you're in today. Our teams stay with a project from the first survey to the final inspection. One partner. One set of drawings. No hand-offs, no surprises. Because the true test of our work doesn't come on opening day. It comes in a hundred years, when someone drives across that bridge without a second thought. Strandmoor Civil. We build what holds.

We're not the biggest outdoor shop in town. We're not trying to be. We're the people who'll tell you which boots to skip. Who'll check the forecast with you before you leave. Who'll fix the zip on a ten-year-old tent instead of selling you a new one. We believe the best gear is the gear you already own. Lantern Row Outfitters. When you're ready to go, we're the ones who'll be out there with you.

Let's be honest. Warehouse work isn't glamorous. It's early starts and late finishes. It's lifting, scanning, loading and doing it right the first time, because somewhere a family is waiting on that box. At Pellwick Logistics, we don't pretend otherwise. What we do is make it worth your while. Steady hours you can plan your life around. Pay that goes up as your skills do. Paid training if you want your forklift ticket, your commercial licence, or a shot at running a shift. And people who've got your back when the trucks are late and the dock is full. Nobody here started at the top. Our site manager in Dayton began on nights, pulling orders. So did two of our regional leads. If you're looking for a job, we've got plenty. If you're looking for somewhere to grow, even better. Pellwick Logistics. Find your shift at pellwick careers dot com.

Every sheet of paper we make started as a tree. We don't let ourselves forget that. Greyfinch Paper has been making paper in the same river valley for sixty years. The forest around our mill isn't scenery. It's our raw material, our neighbour and, for a lot of our people, the place they grew up. So once a year, we sit down and ask ourselves an honest question. Did we take care of it? This year, we set ourselves three goals. The first was to plant more than we harvested. We did. For every tree we used, our forestry crews and local volunteers planted two. The second was to clean up the water we return to the river. We did that too. A new filtration system came online in the spring, and the water leaving our mill now runs cleaner than the stretch above it. The third goal was to cut the energy we buy from outside by a quarter. We missed that one. The new boiler arrived late, and we'll be honest: we underestimated the work. It's running now, and we're on track for next year. But we said we'd tell you where we fall short, so we are. But we'd like to think that sixty years from now, someone will stand on the riverbank behind our mill and see more trees, not fewer. That's what we owe the forest. Greyfinch Paper.

[Music: low pulse, building] When the sun goes down, the solar panels stop. When the wind drops, the turbines slow. When a heat wave hits, every air conditioner in the city switches on at once. The question has never been whether we can make clean power. It's whether we can keep it until the moment people need it. That's the work we started eleven years ago in a rented lab with four engineers and one battery cell. Today, Tamsworth Storage systems sit beside wind farms, solar fields and city substations across three continents. They charge when power is cheap and plentiful, and they give it back when demand peaks. But this morning isn't about what we've built. It's about what comes next: bigger systems, longer life, and a grid that never has to choose between clean and reliable. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Tamsworth Investor Day.

Okay. Coffee? Got it. Cameras off for the people in the back row? Sure, we see you. Welcome to the Kettleby quarterly all-hands. Quick look back. This quarter we moved offices in Denver, welcomed forty new people across five teams, and survived the great calendar migration. Mostly. We also shipped the new scheduling engine. Two months late, yes. But it shipped, and customers are telling us it's the best thing we've built. But here's the thing. None of that happened because of a roadmap. It happened because someone in support stayed on a call an extra hour. Because an engineer flagged a problem nobody else had spotted. Because a new hire asked, 'Why do we do it this way?' and nobody had a good answer. So today, we're going to talk about where we're going next. And we're going to hear from some of the people who got us here. Let's get started.

At the Pennyroyal Reading Trust, we measure our year in a slightly unusual way. Not in dollars, or hours, or programs. In readers. A reader is a child who opens a book because they want to, not because they have to. It sounds simple. For many of the children we meet, it's the hardest step of all. This year, our volunteers sat beside children in twelve schools, four libraries and one very noisy community center. Every week, the same volunteer. The same child. The same chair. We started this year with a waiting list. We ended it with a waiting list that was half as long, thanks to a hundred and twenty new volunteers, many of them retired teachers and, for the first time, a group of high school students. Let us tell you about Marcus. When Marcus joined our program in September, he was nine and he told his volunteer, very politely, that he didn't like books. He liked football. So they read about football. Then about a boy who played football. Then a mystery that happened to have a football in it. By spring, Marcus was reading to his little sister every night. His mum told us she hears him through the bedroom wall, doing all the voices. That's a reader. None of this happens without you. Your gifts bought the books that go home in backpacks. They trained our volunteers. They kept the lights on in that noisy community center. Next year, we want to reach three more schools and clear our waiting list completely. If you've given before, thank you. If you're thinking about it, there's a child waiting for a chair beside them. The Pennyroyal Reading Trust. One child, one book, one reader at a time.

Every company has values on a poster somewhere. We wanted ours to be things you could actually check us on. So here are five things we believe at Cobbleway Mutual. One. You own this place. Cobbleway is a co-operative. There are no outside shareholders, so when we have a good year, our members share in it. Two. Plain words beat fine print. If you need a lawyer to understand your policy, we've written it wrong. Every document we send gets read by someone who isn't in insurance before it goes out. Three. A claim is a bad day, not a transaction. When you call us, it's usually because something has gone wrong. Our job is to make that day a little bit easier, starting with a real person picking up the phone. Four. We'd rather say no now than surprise you later. If something isn't covered, we'll tell you when you buy, not when you need it. Five. We live here too. Our staff are your neighbours. We coach your kids' teams and shop at the same stores. That keeps us honest. None of this is complicated. Most of it is just how you'd want a friend to treat you. But we've written it down, so you can hold us to it. Cobbleway Mutual. Owned by members. Run like it.

The first bike I ever fixed was my grandad's. It had been sitting in his shed in Galway for twenty years, under a tarp and a family of very annoyed spiders. I was fifteen, I had no idea what I was doing, and it took me the whole summer. When I finally rode it down the lane, he was standing at the gate in his slippers, laughing his head off. That bike is why Sorrel Cycles exists. For years it was just a hobby. Neighbours would leave old bikes at our gate with notes tied to the handlebars. Can you do anything with this? Usually I could. Then a woman brought me her late husband's racing bike. Rusted through, flat tyres, chain like a fossil. I spent a month on it. When she came to collect it, she put her hand on the saddle, and she cried. That's when I understood. People don't just ride bikes. They keep memories in them. So now there are nine of us, in an old creamery outside the city. We build new frames by hand, and we bring old ones back to life. Every bike that leaves the workshop has the name of the person who built it, stamped under the saddle. My grandad's bike is hanging on the wall by the door. Sorrel Cycles. Made to be ridden, and remembered.

We don't make furniture quickly. We choose the timber ourselves. We let it rest for a year before we touch it. We cut every joint by hand, because a machine can't feel where the grain wants to go. We finish it with oil, so it ages the way wood should. It takes longer. It costs a little more. But one day, your grandchildren will argue over who gets the table. Thorne and Lyle. Furniture, made slowly.

Here's something they don't always tell you in school. You don't need a four-year degree to build a good life. You need a trade. And you need somebody willing to teach it to you. At Pruitt Brothers Construction, we've been building homes, schools and churches across north Georgia for three generations. And every year, we take on a new class of apprentices. You get paid from day one. You learn framing, concrete, finish carpentry and how to read a set of plans. You work beside crew leads who've done this thirty years and still love it. Stick with it, and in four years you'll have your certification, real skills, and no student debt. Some of our apprentices go on to run crews for us. A few have started their own outfits. We're proud of every one. My granddaddy started this company with a pickup and a toolbox. He'd be proud of that too. Applications open in March. Come build something.

Out here, water isn't a resource. It's the whole story. Our family has farmed this stretch of the Murray for four generations. We've seen floods, and we've seen years when the river barely moved. Five years ago, we made a promise. Grow the same food with a lot less water. So we got to work. We swapped the old flood channels for drip lines, paddock by paddock. We put soil sensors in the ground so we only water when the roots actually need it. And we built two big catchment dams to hold the rain when it finally comes. It hasn't been easy, and it hasn't been cheap. But our oranges and almonds now reach the market using far less water than when we started. We're not done. Next year, the solar pumps go in. Because the land's been good to us. It's our job to be good to it back. Gidgee Creek Farms. Every drop counted.

It's two in the morning. Your offices are dark. Your team is asleep. And somewhere, someone is trying the door. Not the front door. The digital one. A forgotten password. An old laptop nobody updated. An email that looks exactly like it came from your finance team. At Vantlow Security, we watch those doors, every hour of every day. Our analysts sit in two operations centers, twelve time zones apart, so there's always someone awake and paying attention. We monitor your systems, test your defences before anyone else can, and train your people to spot the email that doesn't look quite right. When something does happen, we don't send you a report and wish you luck. We pick up the phone, we lock things down, and we stay with you until it's handled. But here's what our clients tell us they value most. Most days, nothing happens. No breach. No ransom note. No awkward call to your customers. Just a quiet morning, and a short summary in your inbox explaining what we caught overnight and why you never noticed. That's the job. Not drama. Not alarms. Quiet. We work with law firms, manufacturers, schools and clinics, organizations big enough to be a target and busy enough not to want to think about it. So you don't have to. Vantlow Security. Quiet is the goal.

Every Sunday of my childhood smelled the same. Garlic in olive oil at nine in the morning. Tomatoes by ten. And my grandmother, Rosaline, standing over a pot the size of a bathtub. Nobody was allowed to touch it. You could stir once, with the wooden spoon, if you'd been very good. She never wrote the recipe down. When she got older, I followed her around the kitchen with a notebook, trying to catch every pinch and every 'a little more of this'. It took me two years to get it right. Then friends started asking for jars. Then their friends. Now Rosaline's Kitchen sauce is on shelves in four states, made in small batches, with the same tomatoes, the same slow simmer, and nothing she wouldn't have used. She'd hate that I put her name on a label. She'd love that you're eating it on a Sunday. Rosaline's Kitchen. Pull up a chair.

We could tell you about our features. Everybody's got features. So here's what we've got instead. When you call Pebblestack, a person answers. Not a menu. Not a chatbot that thinks you said 'billing' when you said 'help'. A person, who knows our software, and actually wants to fix your problem. It's not a revolutionary idea. Apparently it's a rare one. Pebblestack. Software with someone on the other end.

A hundred and twelve years ago, a group of farmers and mill owners in the upper Midwest pooled their money and laid a single line of track. They weren't trying to build an empire. They were trying to get their grain to market before it spoiled. That line became the Calderwick Freight Rail Company. Since then, we've hauled through two world wars, a depression, more winters than anyone wants to remember, and every kind of economic weather you can name. We've learned a few things along the way. We've learned that the cheapest mile is the one you maintain before it breaks. That customers remember the week you were late long after they forget the years you were on time. And that a railroad is never really built. You keep building it. So what does that mean for the next ten years? It means investing where the freight is going. We'll extend our network to two new inland ports, linking farms and factories directly to the coast. It means modernising what we already own: new signalling along the whole main line, upgraded yards, and a locomotive fleet that runs further on less fuel. And it means people. Over the next decade, many of our most experienced crews will retire. We intend to train their replacements properly, alongside them, before they go. None of this will happen in a single quarter. Railroads don't work that way, and neither do we. But we believe that steady, disciplined investment in steel, in rails and in people will carry this company through its next hundred years, as surely as it carried us through the last. The farmers who laid that first line understood something important. Build it well. Run it honestly. And be patient. Welcome to Calderwick Investor Day.

Okay, Bramblecote. Let's talk about this year. We started it with a game that didn't have an ending, a boss fight nobody could beat, and a build that crashed every time somebody opened the inventory. We had one coffee machine for sixty people. It broke in February. We don't talk about February. We playtested the forest level forty-one times. Somebody counted. Somebody also cried. It might have been the same person. And then, on the fourteenth of March, we pressed the button. Lanternfall went live. We watched the first players come in on the big screen in the kitchen. Ten. Then a hundred. Then more than we'd planned for. The servers held. Mostly. By the weekend, people were posting fan art of the moth merchant. Somebody made a song about the ferryman. Somebody else got married in the game, which we did not design for, but we support. Since then, we've shipped four updates, fixed more bugs than we'd like to admit, and grown from sixty people to eighty-five. But this isn't really a video about numbers. It's about the artists who redrew the ferryman six times because he 'didn't feel sad enough'. The testers who found the bug in the final week. The producers who protected everybody's weekends, as best they could. We made something people love. Together. So thank you. Now go and get some cake. There's a new coffee machine, too.

This year at Tillman Creek Animal Rescue, three hundred and twelve dogs and cats went home with new families. Every one of them had a warm bed, a full bowl and a volunteer who knew their name while they waited. You made that happen. Your gifts, your weekends, your old blankets. So from all of us here, and from the very loud beagle in kennel four: thank you.

Three years ago, I was exactly where you are now. Final year. Too many deadlines. And no real idea what an engineering job actually looked like. Six weeks after I joined Fellgate Engineering, I was standing on a riverbank in Yorkshire, in a hard hat that didn't fit, helping to survey the site for a new footbridge. That's the first thing you should know about our graduate programme. You'll be trusted with real work, from the start. Over two years, you'll rotate through three teams. Maybe bridges and structures. Maybe flood defence. Maybe rail. You'll find out what you love by actually doing it. Every graduate gets a mentor, who is not your manager, so you can ask the questions you'd rather not ask your manager. We'll support you through chartership, with study time built into your working week. And you won't be on your own. Our graduate intake is small enough that you'll know everyone, and close enough that you'll probably end up going on holiday with half of them. The footbridge opened last spring. I took my mum to see it. She asked which bit I did. I pointed at the whole thing. I may have been exaggerating slightly. But only slightly. Applications for next September's programme are open now. Come and build something you can point at. Fellgate Engineering. Your career starts on site.

My father fished these waters. So did his father, and his before him. Out here, on the west coast of Ireland, the sea doesn't care how long your family's been at it. It gives when it wants to, and it takes when it wants to. Twenty years ago, it was giving less every year. The boats were going out further and coming back lighter. Young lads were leaving for Dublin, for London, for anywhere with a steadier wage. You could feel the harbour getting quieter. So forty families sat down in the back room of a pub in Inishcarrow and did something fishermen are famously bad at. We agreed. We formed a co-operative. We'd share boats, share the costs, and share the catch. And we'd keep an honest ledger. Not just of money, but of the sea itself. Every haul gets recorded. What we caught, where and how much. Every year, we sit down with marine scientists from the university and go through it line by line. When the numbers told us a stock was struggling, we stopped fishing it. A whole season, sometimes two. We didn't like it. Some winters, it was hard going. There were arguments in that back room you could hear down the pier. But the stocks came back. Slowly, then properly. Today, our boats bring in less than they could, and more than they used to. Our buyers know exactly where every box was caught and by whom. And for the first time in a long while, there are young faces on the boats again, including my own daughter. We still keep the ledger. Every haul, every year. Because the sea doesn't owe us anything. But if we look after it, it'll look after the people who come after us. Inishcarrow Seafood Co-operative. Fished with care, for the long haul.

In college, I tried to walk two dogs while riding a bike. It did not go well. But it got me thinking. My neighbours needed walkers. Students like me needed flexible work. Nobody had an easy way to find each other. So I built one. Book a walk, see the route, get a photo of a very happy dog. Strollhound. Started with a scraped knee. Now walking dogs in nine cities.

When I was a boy, my daddy had a rule at the store. If a man came in needing three nails, you sold him three nails. Not a box. Three. You'd count them out of the bin, put them in a paper sack and charge him about a nickel. My daddy said that man would remember. And he'd be back when he needed a whole new roof. He was right. A lot of those folks are still customers. Some of their grandkids are too. We've grown since then. Bigger building, more aisles, a paint counter that'll match just about anything you bring in. But the nail bin is still there, right by the register. Because that rule was never really about nails. It's about selling people what they need, not what we'd like to sell them. Beauregard Hardware. Still counting out nails since nineteen fifty-eight.

There's a moment, about an hour into a long climb, when you stop thinking about your legs. You stop thinking about your inbox. About the noise. About anything except the next step, the next breath and the way the light is moving across the ridge. We started Cairnmoor Outdoor because of that moment. Because we wanted more people to find it. But we also started it with an uncomfortable question. What does it cost the places we love, every time we sell someone something new? The honest answer is: more than most brands like to admit. Every jacket, every tent, every pair of boots takes materials, energy and water to make. And too much of it ends up in a landfill after a season or two. So we made some decisions. We make fewer products, and we make them to last. Our jackets come with a lifetime repair promise. Tear it on a branch, send it back, and we'll fix it, however old it is. We take back worn-out gear and give it a second life. Some of it gets repaired and resold. Some of it gets taken apart and made into something new. And we're going to say something that's strange for a company that sells things. Buy less. If your old jacket still keeps you dry, keep wearing it. If your tent needs a new pole, don't buy a new tent. If you need something for one trip, borrow it, or rent it from us. We'd rather sell you one great piece of gear than five forgettable ones. Because the mountains, the rivers and the forests don't belong to us. We're just passing through. So get out there. Go further than you think you can. Find that moment on the ridge. And when you come home, leave the place a little better than you found it. Cairnmoor Outdoor. Go further. Leave less.

In our business, there's a word that matters more than any other. Tolerance. It's how far a part can be from perfect and still do its job. For a lot of the parts we make, that's about a tenth of the width of a human hair. At Halvorsen Tool and Die, precision isn't a slogan. It's a measurement. And we take every one. For forty-two years, we've machined components for aircraft, satellites, surgical equipment and the factories that build them. Our shop runs around the clock, with machinists who've spent decades learning how metal moves, heats and settles. Every part is inspected before it leaves the building. Every batch is traceable back to the bar of steel it came from. When your product can't afford to fail, neither can the pieces inside it. Halvorsen Tool and Die. Built to the thousandth.

When we started the Larkhill Food Network, it was a folding table in a church car park and two volunteers with a clipboard. This year, it looked a little different. Five neighbourhood pantries. Two mobile vans visiting the villages where the bus doesn't run. A community kitchen serving hot lunches three days a week. And more than four hundred volunteers, from teenagers doing their first bit of community service to a retired chef who has opinions about our soup. But the thing we're proudest of this year isn't the size of it. It's the way it feels. We moved our biggest pantry from a draughty hall into an old corner shop. Now people choose their own food from the shelves, the same way they would anywhere else. One mum told us that, for the first time, she could pick what her kids actually like to eat. She said it felt like shopping again. That matters. This year, we also started a cooking club, a fresh produce swap with local growers, and a small fund to help families with a utility bill when things get tight. None of it would happen without our donors, our partners and our volunteers. Thank you. Next year, we want to open a sixth pantry on the east side. If you'd like to help, by giving, volunteering or just spreading the word, we'd love to hear from you. Larkhill Food Network. Neighbours feeding neighbours.

Good with people? Good with tech? Good at staying calm when someone says their screen 'just went weird'? Halcyra Systems is hiring support specialists. We'll train you, pay you while you learn and help you earn your first technical certifications. Remote or in our Austin office, your call. No tech degree needed. Just patience, curiosity and a decent sense of humour. Apply at halcyra dot com slash careers.