EPISODE 041 | The Framework of Renovations Both in Business and in Life

With another summer come and gone, we’ve been dealing with some significant changes in the LaPointe household. 

For those of you who don’t know, over the past summer, we went through the process of gutting and completely renovating our 75-year-old home. 

The process of going through this reno has been eye-opening and really challenged and shifted my perspective as a business owner, and now I can’t wait to share these revelations with you.

BY THE TIME YOU FINISH LISTENING, YOU’LL DISCOVER: 

• How nothing ever goes according to plan (and why that’s a good thing!)
• Why looking at your business through a microscope is essential.
• Why my reno contractor may be the missing piece to running your business more efficiently. 
• The lesson I had to learn the hard way about what it really takes to work in the online space (and what to never take for granted).
• The secret to coping with the chaos and dancing in the rain. 

If this episode has resonated with you in any way, I’d love it if you’d leave a review and share your biggest takeaways. Or DM me on Instagram @OTsGoneRogue and let's connect!

Transcript

Melissa LaPointe [00:00:06]:
You're listening to the OTs Gone Roque podcast, where we inspire therapists to think outside the box and do things differently. I'm your host, Melissa Lapointe. My passion is in helping OT entrepreneurs have a bigger impact on the world while building a life they love and doing transformative work that lights them up. On each episode of the show, I'm gonna share tools and tricks to help you flex your entrepreneurial muscles and grow your business from the inside out. I wanna see more OTs step up as visionary leaders, change makers, and influential CEOs. So let's get started. Hey, everyone. And welcome back to another episode of the OT's Gone Rogue Podcast.

Melissa LaPointe [00:01:01]:
Wherever you are in the world, I hope this finds you doing well. And for those of us in the northern hemisphere, Now, Now some of you may have noticed that we didn't publish an episode during the last week of August. My office manager was away that week on holidays. My program assistant was in the process of moving into her very first home, and I was going through a pretty big transition myself. So along with my family, we were moving back into our house after a summer of essentially being away. We had taken on some pretty big house renovations, in our 75 year old home. So if you've ever gutted an older home now we were not doing the renovations ourselves, but as I'll talk about here in a moment, we were still quite involved, and we did the demolition ourselves. Yeah.

Melissa LaPointe [00:02:05]:
There was just still I was a little bit more we were more involved than I had anticipated. And then moving back in, that's been something else, especially since the renovations weren't finished when we moved back in. So we moved back into a reno site, and so that's always fun. So we did have some episodes that were prerecorded for the podcast, so we could have published them. But in all honesty, I needed a breather and some time to clear my head before diving back into the podcasting world. So I told my team, you know what? Let's just take a break this week and we'll come back in a couple of weeks. I also needed some time to wrap up some pretty big projects and to adjust to all the changes that have been going on, in our home, in our lives. It's, yeah, it's just been pretty full on.

Melissa LaPointe [00:02:57]:
So it's what it is. Leading me to the focus of today's episode. So I've had some time to reflect, and I wanted to share some of those reflections that I've had as a business owner this summer as a result of these house renovations. So reflection number 1. First things first, anytime we take on a major project, whether that be building out a new website, So it could be business related, you know, launching a new product or gutting a home. So anytime we have these major projects, it doesn't matter how well you think you've planned things out, how much prep time you've given yourself, the timeline never quite matches up how you think it will. There are going to be delays. There are going to be times where you're waiting on someone else.

Melissa LaPointe [00:03:59]:
There are going to be things happening that are just outside your control. Yes, it can be frustrating, but it doesn't have to derail everything. So I was reminded this summer of the importance of setting small goals and tracking your progress. Now this is something I do with my business. So every 90 days, this is a practice that we have established for, I wanna say, 2 and a half years now. So every 90 days, we set goals. We reconnect with our vision. We look at where we are going, where we've come from, and tracking our progress.

Melissa LaPointe [00:04:42]:
It's important to do that with our personal goals, with our personal projects, as well as our business projects. Because on the days where I felt like we were going backwards, I was able to look at our checklist and see all the ways that we had made progress in moving towards our vision. Sometimes, these little baby steps forward, they're not necessarily visible to the naked eye. So it's things that, you know, if you're looking at your project or, in my case, looking at our house renovation, Now I come at the end of the week and think, what the heck happened? Like, it looks like nothing's happened. How is this possible? But then that's when you realize, oh, wait, the plumbing, the electrical, the water softener's been hooked up. Like all these little things that make a big difference. You know, these are big pieces of the puzzle, but, you know, I would come at the end of the week and just see a big mess and no progress made in terms of aesthetics. And it really I definitely had a moment of, wait a second.

Melissa LaPointe [00:05:49]:
This is what you know, it's so important to do this with our business and let's make sure we're doing it with this project as well. So it applies to a lot of things. You know, we want things to happen immediately, especially when we learn something with our business. You know, it's like, oh my gosh, this makes so much sense. Yes. Let's do it that way. But then rolling out those changes, it doesn't happen overnight, and it can be quite frustrating. It can be quite slow going.

Melissa LaPointe [00:06:16]:
And again, it's important to break things down into these small bite sized chunks and track your progress. So that was a big reflection been off. And that's when I, you know, wait a minute. I've managed projects in many ways with my business. This is no different. Now speaking of projects, the second reflection I had when doing our renovations was on our decision to hire 1 primary contractor. So we hired 1 person to serve as project manager and basically run the show. She was the 1, so yes, it was a she and she was in charge.

Melissa LaPointe [00:07:05]:
So she was the main contractor. She has a small team and then she subcontracts out. But she's the 1 that came up with a tentative timeline. So she was in charge of the schedule, making sure deadlines were met. She was the 1 ordering the materials. She was the 1 monitoring the budget, keeping that on track. She was the 1 dealing with all of the subcontractors. So handling quality control, making sure they knew where they needed to be and who was doing what, so all those moving parts.

Melissa LaPointe [00:07:36]:
And when I had any questions or concerns, she was the person that I was connecting with. So I had 1 that's not to say I wasn't talking to the other subcontractors, but essentially, you know, in the ongoing communications, she was my person. Now when we first signed our contract to work together, I will admit that I was somewhat naive as to how much involvement I would still have with everything. So we've done house rentals before, but not like this. So we've done house rentals ourselves, but this is the only home that I've ever owned. And we gutted our bathroom 1 year, but we weren't even there. We actually did that on our honeymoon. So we were out of the country altogether when that renovation happened.

Melissa LaPointe [00:08:24]:
So any of these little renovations, for the most part, we've done ourselves. So this is the first big 1. And, again, I didn't realize I was thinking, oh, I'm hiring this person. I am gonna be able to take a step back. And yes, she definitely made our lives significantly easier, but bringing her on didn't mean that we could just walk away and be on vacation for the duration of this renovation. So I was the homeowner. And yes, my husband is the homeowner as well. But with me being the 1 working from home, though I'll talk about that in a moment, with me being the 1 self employed, managing, you know, in terms of communication, email, the paperwork side of things.

Melissa LaPointe [00:09:14]:
And I have more of a flexible schedule. So I was the 1 meeting with people more frequently. And I was in communication with my project manager, my main contractor, on a weekly basis for almost 3 months. So she really needed my input and we were just back and forth a lot. So she needed my input to keep the project moving forward. This is a lot like in business. So often when we're hiring on help or when we take on a project manager, if it's the first time doing it, we may go in thinking, so similar to what I did at the beginning. So being a little naive in terms of how much involvement we still need to have.

Melissa LaPointe [00:09:59]:
So we may go into it thinking, if I can just outsource this, if I can just hire this out, it's off my plate and I can move on to something else. But you can't just walk away. You're still the CEO. You're still the business owner. So even with hired help, even with outsourcing, it's still on you to make a lot of the decisions. It's on you to catch things that your project manager might miss. It's on you to approve expenditures or to approve the overall budget, and it's on you to support your team. So that was a good reminder.

Melissa LaPointe [00:10:35]:
Now as I'm moving forward and growing my business, looking at growing my team, what it is I need to be doing, how I can be supporting them, and still leaning into my role as a CEO. I can't, no, I can't just walk away altogether. I don't have to micromanage, but I still know it's still my team. At the end of the day, I'm still the 1 leading this ship, and making a lot of the decisions. So, yeah, that was another reflection that I definitely had throughout this process. All right. Reflection number 3, This concept that anyone can work online and as online business owners, you can be location independent and work from wherever. I was reminded this summer, while bouncing around without a home base for almost 8 and a half, 9 weeks, that not everyone can work online and not everyone can necessarily be location independent.

Melissa LaPointe [00:11:42]:
First, in order to work from wherever, it's helpful if you have a solid Internet connection. And this summer, that is something I did not have. So in the beginning of our reno's, they unexpectedly, or I wasn't expecting it, they disconnected our Internet. So when completing some of the house rentals, there were a few days that, I didn't have access to the Internet. Then we rented an Airbnb. So the 1st week, we actually had an Airbnb out so not in the mountains, but it was out on a lake. And we were supposed to have Wi Fi, but in fact, we did not. So that was an unexpected, time to disconnect.

Melissa LaPointe [00:12:26]:
We'll put it that way. I drove in 1 day to get a little it was an hour and a half out of town. So 1 day I did drive in, to at least connect with my data plan and get caught up on some things. Then we spent 2 weeks in a motel where the Internet connection was very hit and miss. So doing Zoom calls, there would be times we get disconnected or times I couldn't connect at all and I had to use my data plan. And at 1 point, a storm knocked out the Internet completely for 3 days. Then I flew across the country to spend time in Prince Edward Island. So we were in PEI for almost 3 weeks.

Melissa LaPointe [00:13:06]:
And PEI has really bad Internet service at a lot of places. My parents, like, I felt like it was it was worse than dial up at some time like, some point, to upload what was I trying to do? I was trying to upload a 20 minute audio file. It's nothing crazy. It was just a 20 minute audio file, something I had recorded for 1 of my programs. 3 hours, and I couldn't get it to upload. Finally, I had to just leave and go and do it somewhere else. There were times like not even my data plan was reliable. You hit these places where you just can't pick up a connection at all.

Melissa LaPointe [00:13:47]:
Again, it really forces you to slow down, which is a blessing in its own way, but it certainly made life interesting. I could tell you that. And in order to work and run an online business, it's also helpful to have somewhere to work or to record content, that's quiet and free of distraction. Oh, my goodness. I wish you guys could have seen some of the work conditions that I was trying to deal with in the last 2 months. I know, like, these are first real problems that I'm having. I get it. And a lot of times, I could just shake my head and laugh.

Melissa LaPointe [00:14:21]:
Like, what can you do? I've recorded content sitting in a closet at my in laws. I recorded a module for 1 of my programs while sitting on the bathroom floor of a motel. So I had towels around to try to block out some of the noise. And it was so hot, stifling hot, trying to record. Last week, I was recording content from my furnitureless bedroom. I had no blinds. I had to keep the windows closed. I had contractors, you know, they were putting up siding and there was no doorknob on the door.

Melissa LaPointe [00:14:57]:
I'd be rushing to wrap things up. I knew they were on their lunch break or the guy doing our siding would take a smoke break, and I'd run-in to try to record something before the banging would start again. It's been wild. So, no, not anyone can work online. There are some basic criteria you need to have in place. And the reality is not everyone has a quiet space for work, and not everyone has a solid reliable Internet connection. I'm grateful that things are settling down for us, and I've really learned to not take these things for granted. Last but not least, reflection number 4, dealing with change.

Melissa LaPointe [00:15:41]:
Even when it's something that you really, really want, when it's something you've been planning for months months, so even when it's a really good change, the reality is that change can be overwhelming and it takes time to settle in. In my case, I completely underestimated how overwhelming it would be at the end of the house panels, How overwhelming it would be for us to be moving in to our home, or moving back into our home. A new kitchen layout? New floors, new windows, different lighting, different textures, different entryway. Yes. This is exciting. We've planned for this, but it's also exhausting. It's a huge stressor on my nervous system. My son does not like change.

Melissa LaPointe [00:16:37]:
My poor dog doesn't know what's going on. We have packed and moved him so many times now. It's been a huge transition for everyone in my family. Now the same can be said about big changes in your business. So this could be with a new email system, it could be a new website, a new program, a new office space, or a new hire on your team. With growth comes change and this can be a really good thing. But be gentle on yourself. You need to give yourself time to adapt and you need to anticipate that your productivity levels might go down for a short period of time while you just figure things out.

Melissa LaPointe [00:17:22]:
That's okay. And it's only temporary. You're slowing down to then speed up. All right. So there you have it. These are some of my reflections this summer as we go through a pretty big transition in our home life, and considering I work from home, my business life as well. I've learned a lot this summer, and at the time of this recording, we are a few days away from officially wrapping up our house renovation. Well, okay.

Melissa LaPointe [00:17:59]:
We're officially, like, 98% away or 98% completed. So we still have some things. We still don't have furniture in half the house. We still have to do some things in the bathroom, finish installing our blinds, but they're not in yet. But we can see the light at the end of the tunnel. Like we're getting there. I'm going to take a little breather, get settled, and then off we go onto the next big project. But this time it's with my business.

Melissa LaPointe [00:18:29]:
So pretty excited about some of the things we have coming up. I'm not going to share too much about that quite yet. And it never stops. But this is the life that I chose, and I am so blessed to be doing what I love. Like I say, it is about the journey, not the destination. Alright. So that's it for today, folks. I know from my email inbox that a lot of you are going through big changes lately as well, personally and with your business.

Melissa LaPointe [00:19:04]:
And if you resonate with any of my reflections, I would love to hear from you. Take care, and I'll be back in a couple of weeks with another episode of the OT's Gone Girl podcast.