The Other Side of Working From Home
Our move to Colorado was incredibly difficult, especially because both my dad and my step-dad had health issues – so I had a lot of guilt about leaving them. It was really rough. We moved in May, and my dad passed shortly thereafter in August. This evidently made the decision to move far more difficult- having to balance the quality of life for my children against the health issues of my parents. Ultimately, I chose the former.
We didn’t move here for business, politics, or taxes – but all those things have been a great benefit. We moved for the kids because we had no faith that California would handle Covid any better in 2022 than they did in 2021. If you played tennis, you had to initial the tennis balls and kick them to the other players if they weren’t your own. They even shut down the beaches, which were one of the only places people could safely exercise. People wanted to be outside, and they would walk in the alleys – it was crazy – people were in a smaller, more confined space than they would be on the beach. You couldn’t swim in the ocean by yourself. You couldn’t go out in a sailboat alone. I can only describe it as utterly absurd.
It’s been really interesting to see how this pandemic has been managed. In California it was a means of control – it was a constant spiral into whatever benefitted either political party, as opposed to the good of the people. Colorado has been really really different. In my business, I’ve had to deal with the cleaning restrictions, supply chain disruptions. I have a lot of reliance on supply chains and price spikes and when people could come back to work. I couldn’t run my business in California with all their restrictions.
My business has changed focus - I’m not looking at more commercial space, but have added residential space to my business. It’s been terrifying with all the businesses shutting down- I was worried I wouldn’t have a business to run after all this.
It’s been a major shift in the commercial real estate world– people would sign up to lease, our lenders want to be paid and then our tenants couldn’t pay or would want to get out of the lease. Our tenants want to have rent relief, but lenders aren’t giving any relief. Luckily, we’ve been in the suburbs, so it’s not been as bad as downtown center business districts.
I’ve also seen the difference in the people working for me, especially people just entering the workforce. For instance, I hired someone just out of college, and typically they have a period of what we would call “listen and learn,” in which you learn the language of business. I’ve found that being present in meetings is one of the best ways to learn how to function within the business world. However, with everything being online, it’s so much different with new hires.
It’s very frustrating, looking in the rear-view mirror, the amount of mentoring and businesses that have been compromised in the last 2 years. We know have young kids who should have been mentored, but now think they are masters of the universe but are just abrasive. It’s much easier to be abrasive when you are a block in a video call than when you are sitting across from someone. I’ve had to take people aside and meet in person to coach them. In my first job, my first job was listening and learning and get mentored. That’s been missing in the last 2 years.
Wherever possible, we tried to be a community resource. We turned a few of our locations into Covid testing spaces. It was winter, and they couldn’t do pop-up tent testing. We had a place we were going to demolish that had drive thru doors and we gave it over to drive-thru testing and shots. We brought covid-clinics into our buildings – and built the barriers that they needed.
We did most of it for $0 rent because it was the right thing to do. I’ve been through financial cycles that wiped out a lot of companies, but it was all financial. But this is worse – because it was everything. It was brutal- I have no idea what the future holds for me, or for my business. I can only hope things get better from here.
