The Power Of Taking Time Off For Business Success, with Judi Paré

Dan Sullivan: Hi, this is Dan Sullivan. I'd like to welcome you to the Multiplier Mindset Podcast.
 
I've got a really great story from Judi Paré that really, really relates to a lot of what we encourage in The Strategic Coach Program, and that is putting yourself in a Free Zone. Judi talks about having a family business that developed into a much bigger company. Building homes, of course, in Canada, the United States and other countries is such a big thing now because there's such a shortage of homes, especially affordable homes. And I'm so pleased with the enthusiasm that Judi shows in this interview. And I'd just like to start off how we approach things here at Strategic Coach and then use Judi as an example. The term entrepreneurism, and that's all we coach is entrepreneurs, people who, for the most part, started their own company, grew their own company. But the term entrepreneurism goes back to, I think, the year 1804. And it was a French economist by the name of Jean Baptiste Say. And he defined what an entrepreneur was. And I find that this has been a very lasting definition. He says, an entrepreneur is someone who takes resources from a lower level of productivity and takes it to a higher level of productivity.
 
So, I'm gonna sort of define what Strategic Coach is. We're a program that takes a resource called an entrepreneur from a lower level of productivity to a higher level of productivity. So we're not taking stuff to a higher level, we're taking entrepreneurs themselves. Since entrepreneurs are the ones who transform other resources, we're the program that transforms the entrepreneurs. But the wonderful thing that I like about Judi's story is the way in which she's freed herself up. And this is the key. In order to grow your company, you have to free up the entrepreneur. So one of our main concepts very early in Strategic Coach is Who Not How. And that is when you have a big goal as an entrepreneur, what you do is you say, well, this is a great goal. You get everybody in your company engaged in it, in the goal, but you're not the one who achieves the goal. You give direction to other people's capabilities.
 
And she talks about bringing in a CEO who actually interfaces between her and the rest of the team. And more and more, I have a sense in watching Judi's that in the three-year period, she's more and more focused just on what Judi's great at. And I get the sense that Judi's a great salesperson. I think she can make a very, very compelling offer to investors and to everybody involved in communities and developing home. She's very, very compelling that she'll be the person to go do this in the best possible way. And what the big thing here is that I find most entrepreneurs who are really stuck, they're looking at what they do in the same way if they were working for a corporation, they just have a job. But in Judi's case, she's giving herself a role. She's the visionary. You can see that she's the visionary.
 
And the biggest project she had ever done was 300 homes. And then all of a sudden, she took on a project that was 600 homes. Well, that's a big visionary, you know, that you can see that, but you could see that she's tripled the size of her company. So she has the capability to do that. She was doing 300 with a much smaller company. She can do 600 now with a multiplied company. Okay.
 
One thing she said that just totally pleased me and told me that Judi's already in the Free Zone as far as Strategic Coach is concerned, is that she took on this huge project, she was under enormous pressure, and her response to that was to take three days. And I just find that a wonderful way of thinking about things. I just find it wonderful because what the Free Days did gave her a sense of perspective again, brought her back just to her role. She's got a big team now. All she has to do is be clear and excited and committed, and that will communicate it to her team. And that's what's going to build the 600 homes. So wonderful, wonderful story. And I'm so grateful for Judi sharing this with us.
 
Judi Paré: Well, my name's Judi Paré, raised in the Hamilton area, Hamilton, Ontario, and I have been there for most of my life in that area. Recently moved to Pickering for one of the projects that I was on. I'm a real estate developer. So we build homes focused specifically on affordable housing and working with government programs and getting as many affordable homes into our communities as possible. Wherever we can, we build tiny units as well. so that people can get into the market from a resale perspective and buy smaller units at more affordable prices and also for rentals. We have seven projects right now and of five of them, we're building about 600 homes with 40% of them being affordable homes.
 
And I've been with Strategic Coach, let's say about a year and a half. It started with actually a mentor of mine. I was already owning a couple of income properties. I was finishing up a job. I was an instructional designer. I used to be just an independent contractor in education and would go work for some of the banks and whatnot. And one of my colleagues and bosses, let's say after the end of a contract, I said, I don't know what I'm going to do next. And she said, why don't you go do real estate? Like you're so good at that. Go do real estate. So I looked into it and decided to become a real estate coach because as an educator and someone who's done instructional design and education for many years, it was well in line with what my skill set was.
 
So I applied for a company that did coaching around real estate and I coached for them for several years. And during that time, I learned that my passion for real estate, because I was coaching for a real estate company, my passion for real estate really allowed me to build a portfolio. So during that time, I built a portfolio. I have three kids that all work in my company. One's a realtor, one's in construction management. The other is a graphic designer, marketing type individual as well. So it just kind of came to us as a family and we, we started off with, you know, one townhouse and then a second townhouse and oh, let's go flip this one and let's go do that one. And it just kind of happened organically and we kind of grew into it. One of my biggest challenges that I was having was, you know, my sister works for me. I work with my brother-in-law on a project. I've got my three kids involved. And we had six employees when I started at Strategic Coach. It was me, my executive assistant, my three kids, and my sister. And that was it. So it was pretty much a family business, except for my EA.
 
When I started Coach, I was trying to figure out how to grow the business, be the leader in the business and separate that mom and employee role. And what I learned about myself was that I needed somebody in between me. I needed to have a COO or a controller or somebody that's the head of this department or that department. So we grew our team three times. So we've got 18 employees in the last year. We're up to 18 employees, not including myself. You know, and with that growth came exponential growth in projects and whatnot.
 
And so I think the biggest advice to me was really the Who Not How model and reading that book and understanding Unique Ability as well of our team and putting them in the right roles. Because we had teammates or employees doing things that they just didn't really want to do, but they were doing because they wanted to help me because it was a family business. And during the last year and a half, my son decided that he wanted to go out on his own and do something else.
 
So It was an interesting journey, but Coach really helped me with restructuring and reorganizing how my business looks. And now it looks different than it did a year ago. It looks way different. That came, I think, from the lessons I learned and a lot from, you know, my monthly check-ins with my, you know, I'm going to call her my coach. She's not really my coach, she's my Program Advisor, but I feel like she's my coach. And I checked in with her on a monthly basis and really helped me sort of check myself or redefine what my goals were and keep me on track to what my goals were. So that was really important. She played a really important role in helping me separate business from family. And I needed a coach to do that for me. And so she helped me with that a lot.
 
I think the biggest thing that I learned was Free Days and taking that time for myself to regroup. Like a month ago, actually, I was feeling extremely overwhelmed because we had some significant growth. I took on another project that was adding about $20 million value in our company. And we were going from building 300 homes to building 600 homes overnight just by taking on this project. So it was extremely overwhelming. And when I started feeling that overwhelming feeling, I booked time off. I just said, I need to take some time off here. I need to breathe and just go away. And so I think that was one of the biggest things because I have a good team that can run the operation without me for a week. So I took the time to just, you know, take some Free Days and take care of my mental health, take care of me and rest.
 
That was the biggest thing was to rest so that I can come back a little bit more energetic. That week was really good for me because I did a lot of thinking about some of the strategic things I had to do in the company and it made a big difference. Here I am, I'm back at it. So for me, I think it was the Free Days and dealing with that. And it's so important just taking that time to recharge and to do something different and to step away from your business because when you come back, you're just so much more productive. No, you must take a day off. If you don't take the time off, you're going to burn out. That's the most important lesson that you have to learn is in the very beginning, I was working all the time. You know, I got myself that Free Day phone. I put my out of office on and I got back yesterday, but my out of office is still on because, you know, I needed an extra day just to catch myself up.
 
So I set those expectations for our clients and whatnot, but I'm not back until tomorrow. So even though I've been back since yesterday, and somebody asked me yesterday, did you see my email? And I said, oh, no, no, I'm not checking email. And I'm not. I literally came off of a flight on Monday. Tuesday, I took to sort of do some business things. It's month and that had to be taken care of. Tomorrow, I'm actually going to get to the emails because part of it is I come to the understanding that I'm not saving babies. Like lives are not going to end if I don't answer that email, particularly because I've already set expectations and said that I'm not here and I'm not answering emails. I think that's part of it was setting boundaries and sticking to them. And it's a lot easier now that I have a separate phone for my Free Days.
 
So you have to set those boundaries for yourself as well, right? You have to say, I'm not going to do that. This is my free time. I asked my assistant, can you please check email for anything that's important? Flag it for me. And if the house is burning down, let me know. But if there's nothing on fire, I don't need to know. I'll take care of it when I get home. To be perfectly honest, it made me throw up. I got off of a plane and mentally I was like, oh my gosh, I'm going to be sick. And I did. I physically threw up. And part of that was just my body's reaction to the fear of what's in the email. What do you have to deal with? And, you know, I got that out of my system and I still didn't open the email. I'll do it tomorrow. I just had other things going on. Tomorrow I will look at it because that's when people are expecting me to respond. And my out of office was, it was pretty cute and it was pretty clear that, hey, I'm gone. I'm off on an Italian escape, you know, buon giorno, but I'll see you later. You know, arrivederci.
 
So I feel like it's okay for me to just take a couple of days because I've managed expectations, but I needed it. I feel a lot better. And in total, I booked all of last week off and three days this week. So I've took eight days as Free Days in a row plus my weekends, but those are normal Free Days anyway. I've gotten into the habit over the last year to not work on weekends, unless it's an event that I have to travel to because I'm speaking or have a speaking engagement, but I don't work on weekends anymore. And I used to a year and a half ago. I worked every weekend. You know, before I started Strategic Coach, I was working 45 to 60 days in a row. And now I take time off.
 
You know, when Free Days were introduced, my first year I took nine holidays. I thought, I'm going to take Free Days. These are owed to me. I work really hard. I'm going to take this time. I took nine holidays, nine mini holidays, you know, like four days here, five days there, whatever. But I took nine little holidays and one of them was even longer, but I took four transatlantic holidays. I took a Southern holiday. And I grew my business 10 times in that year. Did I open my computer during that first year? Yes, I did. Towards the end, I got really good at not turning on my computer. I get so much out of being there with other entrepreneurs. I was just there just maybe a month ago and we were just talking about the overwhelm and whatever. And he just looked at me and he said, Judi, when was the last time you took a day off? And I said, well, I take my weekends off. And he goes, no, when have you taken a holiday? Oh, I took a holiday last November. Did you work during it? Yes, I did. Judi, you got to take the time off. And I was like, you know what, you're right. And I booked the flight that day.
 
And it was just a good reminder of how things would work for me. And he even identified and said, you do so much better when you clear your head. And this is because I've grown that relationship with other people in the Program and built some friendships. And, you know, am I there for friendships? No, but I'm there for other people's ideas. Some of the ideas that come out of the group sessions and the masterminding are really important to me, and it doesn't necessarily happen in the classroom. It happens at lunchtime. It happens over a coffee.
 
Honestly, I really enjoy working with my Program Advisor. She's really helped me with my goals and I like the content that I'm learning. You know, as a former educator and someone who is in instructional design and had an education company, I can appreciate the level of education that I'm getting. And that's really important to me because I think that you're never too old to learn. And I'm really, really interested more in the sort of entrepreneurial operating system and how to build my business so that it's very strategic in what I'm doing. You know, we've grown the business quite a bit in the last year. And I could say, okay, we've grown now it's quit, but I'm not ready to like, there's so much I learn every time I go. And that's why I go, because I think that I need to invest in myself. I recognize how much I learned in the last year. So I anticipate what I'll learn next year. If I did this well with the Program, then I should stick with it. I'm finding value in it. And I think that's what's really important. If I didn't find value, I wouldn't be here.
 
But I think a lot of it is just continuous growth. I think you can always improve. And it's that continuous growth mindset that you want. So yeah, that's why I'm here. I'm here because of the education I'm getting and also the support I'm getting because I really enjoy the calls that I have with my Program Advisor. She helps me a lot with a lot of tools. For example, we just did our administrative staff, we did The Activity Tracker for a week. While I was on holidays, they were not. I gave them The Activity Tracker to do, put somebody in lead of it. And they did their own Unique Ability and capabilities charts and whatnot. And so we're going to review that this week.
 
They took a little bit of time to sort of collectively do a personal inventory of what their activities are on a daily basis. And I had talked to my Program Advisor, Nicole, and said, here's what I want to do. And she said, oh, use this tool and go do this and sent me the tool and you know, we talked about it internally and my team lead sent it out to everybody and that's where we're at. So I think it's the tools, the resources, the people, the support, all of that sort of thing. But it's been really good because she is amazing. Nicole is amazing. I'm so lucky that I got her. I don't know anybody else, but I feel really grateful that she's my Program Advisor. And so long as she's mine, I'm sticking around.
 
I mean, our company needs plentitude and it comes from the mindset of abundance. You know, the definition of plentitude really is abundance. And we come from that mindset of always growing and being abundant. And we want to give back to our community. We have enough. Me as a person, I have enough. And what I learned during the year at Strategic Coach is that the Four Freedoms was really important to me. The freedom of time and money and relationship. Relationship changed my life because I made some decisions about partners, life partners, all these sorts of things that were really important to me that I needed to make. And once I had that freedom of time and money and recognized that, like, I had a choice, to be honest.
 
Before Coach went on for this year, I was actually deciding whether I was going to close down my business. And so one of the reasons I joined is to sort of figure out what I wanted to do in my business. When I started exploring the freedom of purpose, I made the decision that although our company is affluent enough, you know, I was doing well enough, I decided to restructure and reorganize my entire company and bring in investors. So we have a real estate income trust now, and we have investors that come in and that can join our company and join in creating affordable housing across our country. For me, it was all about that freedom of purpose and giving back and doing better things in our community with the skill sets that we have. Like we have these capabilities and we're able to do a change and we're able to contribute to our communities and society and whatnot. And we do have a huge housing crisis in Canada.
 
So I think recognizing that I could fulfill part of my purpose by offering affordable housing and restructuring a bit of my business. I wouldn't have learned that without the support and without the framework, you know, and I think it's really important. And I, you know, back to us, like we do affordable housing because we can. And I think that it's important that people know that we can. Anybody can and anybody can get involved in that. And we wanted to make housing affordable for people. We also wanted to make investing affordable for people. So we're doing something that nobody else does. It was important to me and I searched every exempt market dealer that I could find. It was important to me that we allowed families to invest and allowed their kids to invest with only $500.
 
And so I think we're the first real estate income trust that allows kids to get involved and allows them to have social impact and do that sort of thing. And we spent a lot of time this year researching that and getting on board with the right exit market dealer that will support us in our goals, creating affordable housing, but also making affordable investing for families that can contribute back to society. So, yeah, I mean, that's just that mindset of abundance and that freedom of fulfilling your purpose. And that's what we wanted to do. I was homeless years ago with three kids and I would like to make an impact in that way because there are some people in my life that made changes for me and I just like to give back.
 
Part of the thing is people want to live where they work and people want to buy homes where they work. I think one of the most important things, if people want to get ahead, in real estate, for example, they need to invest where returns are best. So you are in a better position renting in the city that you work and buying in a city you can afford. So you buy that property somewhere else and you lease that out and you tenant it and you let somebody else build that wealth for you while you go rent somewhere else because the GTA is very difficult. It's difficult to get into the housing market. So is the greater Vancouver area. And anywhere GTA to the greater Horseshoe area, like in Hamilton, is very difficult to get into housing. Right now in Hamilton alone, there are up to 8,000 people that are waiting for suitable housing. That's people that are homeless, that are out there on the streets that can't get into affordable housing. And we've got this thing called the hidden homelessness, which is people who are staying home because they can't afford to have a home. They can't afford to go rent or they're one event away, one life event away.
 
And I call it the three Ds. It's divorce, displacement, and death. So if you're going through a loss of a job, a divorce, or death, you have a 60% more likeliness of being homeless in one of those situations. And whoever is taking the children with them in a divorce has a greater probability of homelessness because the affordability is unbelievable. And we have so many people living below the poverty line, below 75% of the poverty line. So you've got the poverty line here, 75% lower. There's people that are living below that. And if we don't do something about that, and even if they're micro units or smaller units or whatnot, if we don't do something about the affordable housing initiatives and give people safe, clean, affordable places to live, we're going to find more people out on the streets.
 
And it's it's a sad time right now, to be honest. And, you know, people need to get involved. And, you know, not all of us can do it. by ourselves, but we can do it collectively. So that's what's really important. And that's one of our messages. We build wealth with purpose, we help people do good things, but have a good purpose and a good outcome, so that we can, you know, solve some of the homelessness issues that we have. And, you know, we're not a shelter, like there's certain levels of housing I guess like a gradient on the housing scale where you've got people that are in shelters and community service housing, and then you've got affordable housing and market housing or below market housing and affordable housing. But it is difficult. And in the GTA, it's near impossible.
 
And, you know, it brings me back to when I was younger, when I lived in Toronto and I was younger, you know, I thought I was making a decent wage. It was a whopping $4 an hour. But, you know, I look back at that time, and I had to have a roommate, you know, so I had a roommate, I had two roommates when I was in college, and we shared a one bedroom basement apartment, you know, and we had bunk beds in it, we shared it, and that's how we lived. You know, for me, that seemed normal. And nowadays, people don't want to share housing. And I think it's you know, parents need to help their kids and, you know, we need to help each other. And if you partner with somebody and go buy a house somewhere else or partner with somebody and go rent a place somewhere else, even if you're just roommates, you're more likely to get it and it gets you ahead. But if it were me and I'm in your shoes, I'm going to go buy somewhere else and rent where I work because it's the only way you're going to get ahead.
 
Find us at Plentitude Inc. So Plentitude, P-L-E-N-T-I-T-U-D-E-I-N-C. So plentitudeinc.com. They can find us there. You know, just Google me and Plentitude and you'll find us. We're out there and we're doing lots of really cool things around affordable housing and making a difference in communities. So I'm hoping that other people will join us in this initiative.