Lori: Hello and welcome to Fine is a 4-Letter Word. My guest today is Suzanne Hopson. Welcome, welcome. We should start that over, but we won't. Welcome to the show, Suzanne.

Suzanne: Lori, thank you so much. I'm really happy to be here.

Lori: Let's jump right into it before I screw up any more words. you, I told you, oh yeah, fine, right. I told you we were gonna have fun today. Yeah, so tell me a little bit about the values and beliefs that you were raised with that contributed to who you've become.

Suzanne: That’s a big question. Yeah, so many in my family have this joke about me. They say I've been raised by wolves. And what does that mean? It's an affectionate term. I'll start out with that. But I grew up with two older brothers and I was in a neighborhood that had a lot of boys and not a lot of girls. And so there was dirt bikes and dirt and all kinds of things that I was exposed to at a younger age.

And, you know, even at that age, experienced some things like, well, why can't I do that? Well, they can do it, so why can't I do that? So one of the values that I know was instilled in me by my family was, you know, to never think that there wasn't something I couldn't do. And that would be a very limiting belief if I had that in my life. And so I probably went on the other side and thought I could do a lot. And as through life, I've learned, you know, maybe not. Might as well just kind of narrow that down to some specialties. But that was one of the biggest core, I think core values was not having self-limiting beliefs. And then I think probably another one was that you can't do anything by yourself. That, you know, while you need to be independent and, you know, confident that really to get anywhere in life, you need people and you contribute to people and their growth and where they're going. And so it's sort of a village mentality, I guess.

Lori: Yeah, I totally agree with that. And when you were talking about instilling the value that you could do anything, It popped into my head that a lot of people, you can do anything, but maybe not everything or not everything at the same time, right? Because you were talking about how you've learned maybe what you're good at, what you're not as good at and focused more on the strengths.

Suzanne: Totally, not to say that it didn't affect my confidence, right? I've had lots of instances where I thought I could do something and then very rudely by life found out I could not. So yeah, it's double-edged sword really.

Lori: Yeah, but I like the idea of the belief that you could and then you go try it out and then find out like, well, maybe I'm not as good at that as I thought I would could be, or I could be better if I wanted to put the time into it, but I'm not willing to. yeah. And I see nothing wrong with being raised by wolves. Wolves are cool.

Suzanne: They are, I've embraced my wolf.

Lori: Is that a spirit animal for you? Like a totem animal?

Suzanne: The panther is actually my my spirit animal and very fine line between that and the lion. So definitely of the cat. Strong cat family. Yeah, yeah.

Lori: Love that. I love that. Do you live with a house panther? Okay.

Suzanne: No, no, I have dogs. And that's just because no one else likes cats in the house. So I have to, you know, I have to go with the flow.

Lori: Okay. All right, gotcha. So talk to me about how those, maybe some of those things that you tested out to see if you were willing to, if you were good at them, if you enjoyed them and how did that work out for you? Like, sorry, not to cut you off, but you worked in corporate for a while before you went off on your own. Was that?

Suzanne: Yeah, for 30 plus years. Yeah. Yeah. And all the rest of my life, which was very busy and I've got lots of children and a couple of lifetimes really blended together in my history. but I think what I, I guess how this would relate to that mentality is, trying every seat in my industry. Basically sat in every seat except for service. I cannot really do much more than change a light bulb and plunge a toilet.

I'm from the multifamily industry, by the way. That's my background. And so, yeah, I sat in every seat and the one seat that I hadn't sat in yet that I felt I was finally ready for was entrepreneurship and owning my own company. And so now I'm in that seat.

Lori: Do you think it's important for somebody to spend time in a corporate environment to get experience before they go out on their own? Or is that not for everybody?

Suzanne: Hmm. That's a really good question. I have met serial entrepreneurs that I don't think ever would have survived in a corporate environment. They, from the get-go, knew that they needed to do this and they needed to run the show at a very young age. And so I do think that there is a profile for that person. So, but I do think, you for the majority of us who are not serial entrepreneurs it does lend to your business acumen by actually being in the seat. And for what I do, which is coaching business owners to grow and scale, it has proven to be very beneficial in my own business.

Lori: What was the impetus to your jumping off of the corporate boat, if you will, into entrepreneurship? Because you already mentioned that you'd been there 30 plus years. I have notes from our first conversation that said you wanted to become your own boss for three decades, and yet you hesitated.

Suzanne: Yeah. So it's a great question. And there was the perfect storm, which many people talk about. There's COVID and there's the job market. was a little political climate. There's been a lot of different things. And in my particular industry, real estate, it has been very interesting to see how everything in the world has impacted that.

You know, deal flow has been very slow, almost to a standstill at one point. Things are picking up now, but, you know, there's increased costs to running and operating properties. And there's a lot of challenges and stresses on businesses. And so I found myself finally able to look at it at the business holistically. You know, usually whatever seat you're sitting in, you can't see everything. But as president of the company, I got an eye view into everything that was happening.

You know, it led to some experiences that, you know, were great moves for myself and for others. And, you know, even the owner of the company, I think was an outstanding move for him as well. So just a lot of experience around that that said to me, now you really need to be in control of your destiny because you really never know what's going to happen. You know, that are the of all the things that are outside of your control that can seriously impact your work life.

And so that's what really pushed me at that point. You know, it's easy to blame your boss or blame others for things that are not going well or right. And, you know, I'm not saying that everybody was perfect and I was the one that fault, but I will say this. I want to be in control of that. I want to own it. And whether that's a failure or a success, fully own it.

So that's why I did it. That's why I took the jump.

Lori: Yeah, I'm curious because you made mention of challenges in the industry and within the organization. Were those challenges shared with the workforce, with everybody else in the organization? Like were they made aware of them? How vulnerable were you and the rest of the leadership team?

Suzanne: Yeah, and this has been, you know, not just one company, but, you know, I think we've all not all of us, but some of us have experienced it. And especially lately, I think it's been more prevalent. And no, I think, you know, I love the name of the show. Fine, because not everything's fine, even though you have to act like it's fine. There was a lot of this that was not fine for me.

And so even with, you know, a team of people that you may have been peers with, aren't peers with anymore. There was a lot of, you know, home therapy with my husband at the counter and other mentors and coaches that I have in my life where I couldn't talk to anybody about it at work because I was the one who had to show up and be the example of strength. yeah, so it wasn't that.

Lori: I like your term home therapy.

Suzanne: Yeah, my husband and have a good routine. That's awesome.

Lori: I haven't heard that one before. I get that you felt like you had to show up and pretend everything was fine to be the strength, but in hindsight, do you think that you could have been more vulnerable with your team and would that have helped build trust?

Suzanne: Yeah, yeah. It's a really great question. There were a couple of people, one in particular. I really consider this person like my right hand. you know, we got to the point where we had to lay people off and this is happening in organizations now every day I look and I see this affecting in every industry, people that have been working in the same company for many, many years, really thought they were going to retire with that company.

And during that time in the evolution of having to go through this, and it's not the first time, I will say it was the most impactful time that I've had to do this. I was vulnerable to the point where I kind of lost my skittles one day. And I don't mean like yelling or crazy. I just mean crying. Like I couldn't hold back how emotionally charged having to do what I was doing meant.

And to all these people. I mean, just how, as a leader, you can affect people's lives so intimately. It's a huge responsibility. And I don't know, I am still in contact and friends and work alongside a lot of the people that I worked with before, but it was one of the hardest things I've ever had to do in my career.

Lori: I can't even imagine. This stress of having to do something like that, like you said, you weren't throwing fits and being angry, it shows up in different ways for different people. Like for you, it showed up as crying. For somebody else, it might show up as anger or frustration or outbursts. And it's interesting or takes another level of emotional maturity maybe to see through and to see how people are managing their emotions that way instead of just jumping to judgments like, well, they're just angry. They don't care. This is how their emotions are coming out.

Suzanne: Yeah, I love that so much, Lori. And I think that there's a lot of depth there and a lot to think about when you think about how people, even in those positions, are affected personally, professionally, by having to make those really tough calls. And they do not teach you how to do this well. I don't know that I've ever had a great example of how this went well.

And it's, I do, I, I say that, but I also think there's a lot of things not to do. Like they're very clear on, you know, to me and to others that you shouldn't do mass layoffs via email. Like that to me is a big, big no, no, right? First of conversations, the why is to the extent that you can give that why I think are all really important. but yeah, I agree with you. I think when we look at both sides of it, how our workforce has been affected and also how our companies have been affected culturally. It's pretty substantial all the way around going through this type of change.

Lori: Yeah, and that is something that is hard for people to wrap their head around, I think, because especially when you're working for maybe not as much now. Back in the day, you worked for a company and you worked for them for your entire career. My grandfather worked for GE for, I don't even know, 50-something years. Actually, we found papers after he passed. We found papers that he had kind of made his age younger than he was so that he could work longer because they had mandatory retirement back then. And so he may have worked 60 years. I don't know. But you went to a company and you worked there forever is what my point is.

Suzanne: When? Yeah, five years at a time. I worked in the industry forever, but not at the same company. To your point, though, yeah, I mean, it's a lot. that is like the sweetest story. mean, I know that we tell people not to do that now. It's like, you know, please don't please don't do that.

Lori: Of course. Well, we don't have mandatory retirement now either.

Where I was going with that though is that change is inevitable and whether it is change within an industry, within an organization, like nobody can really expect to work their entire career for one company anymore. But people kind of, think, not necessarily want to. mean, people now are more like, well, companies aren't loyal to me, so I'm not gonna be loyal to them.

But I think there's kind of this deep down desire maybe to not have things change. Like people don't like change. And yet that's the entire nature of nature. Like everything changes. The leaves change on a tree, seasons change, everything changes. That's the one constant.

Suzanne: And Lori, this is such a hot topic right now that you're going to laugh because I know this was not staged at all, but this book I'm reading right now, The Five Ps of Change. Yes, I'm literally immersing myself in change management right now. And it's been a word that's been thrown around a lot. But I think you just hit it. This is the thing. This is the thing that we want it, but we don't want it. How do we deal with it physically, mentally?

You know, emotionally. It's just information wise, information change and overload. There's a lot of things that people are challenged with and I think you're absolutely right. don't, I think people want it, but I don't necessarily think they like it when it's going on.

Lori: Right, right, right. They buy into the idea of it. As long as it's not happening to me.

Suzanne: Yes, Exactly. Exactly.

Lori: So, two questions. One, what are the five P's of change, since you brought it up? I'm curious now. And two, do you think it's the responsibility of employers to help their employees manage through change? Or learn how to deal with it?

Suzanne: Yeah, no, it's great. I don't know the five P's because I haven't gotten into it. I just got my book yesterday.

Lori: Okay. Okay. okay. All right. Well, if anybody is listening wants to know what they are, go ask chat GPT.

Suzanne: Yeah, yeah, go ask her at GPT. But I do think, I think one of them that I had picked up on when I was reading the review of it was persistence. And that stood out to me as necessary to getting through the change. A lot of times, if you think about it, we give up. it's, we think it's rough, we can't see the other side, the vision of that's not very clear. But the persistency gets us, gets us there. We do it in other parts of our lives, not necessarily in the construct of change management. But that one stood out to me. How do you develop the grit to get through when you're under stress?

Lori: Yeah, yeah, because it is easy to take five steps and go, well, I don't see any difference. And they go, this isn't working. I always love the analogy of the gym because I've been a gym rat since I was 17. And you can't go to the gym for three weeks and expect to build giant biceps. It takes persistence.

And speaking of grit, you know those little neighborhood library, like those little wooden box library. Yeah, so I'm always walking around my neighborhood and I've found a whole bunch of them and the other day I found Duckworth, what's her first name? Duckworth, but she wrote that book, Grit. And it was in there and I took it because I've never read it yet. I haven't read it yet.

Suzanne: Yeah, well, let's see, no, now you're have to come on my podcast and share your thoughts about that book. Yeah, it's almost like an icky word right now, know, grit.

Lori: Well, when you think about it, it's like an irritant.

Suzanne: Yes, yes, it's gravelly. It's harsh. You know, it just doesn't have any of warm fuzzy feel to it. But I think there's something to it, whatever you call it, whatever that is that, you know, causes you to be able to get through it. It's the thing you rely on, the fuel, the fire, the whatever it is. And I like the word. I like it. It sounds like, I don't know, gritty.

Lori: Yeah, exactly. And if you want to think about oysters and pearls, like they need that grit to develop into pearls.

Suzanne: Yes, yes, that's so good. That is so good.

Lori: So going back to the other question I had was, you think it's the responsibility of employers to help their employees manage or learn how to manage through change?

Suzanne: That's a good question. I think it would be irresponsible of them not to. And I don't mean just to the employees. I mean to the business. Literally, you know, when you pour into your people, you are elevating your business at the same time. And if you were just looking at that, the bottom line, which is not what I'm suggesting, but if you did look at the bottom line, you would see that that's an incremental thing that gets in the way of accomplishing or executing on your plan.

And so, you know, when people are stuck in change that they can't tolerate or do well in, results will fail. And so why not? Why not pour into people and help them through something that they are not in control of necessarily? It's the company that's doing it. And give them some tools.

I mean, think about it. If you could teach someone, you know, some abilities to be able to get through a tough time, you know, implementing a new department or, you know, layoffs, whatever that is, if you could help your team do that, how much faster you could come out the other side and more whole out the other side and people being loyal and knowing that they're not just showing up for a paycheck and a transaction, but this is a place where you know, people care about them and that they see their value.

Lori: Yeah, and you mentioned the bottom line and there's nothing wrong with bringing that into the conversation because businesses are in business to make a profit. And so if doing these things to help people manage change improves your bottom line, in addition to helping people on an emotional and physical and mental level, all of that is to the organization's benefit.

Suzanne: Totally, totally. you know, there are successful businesses out there that don't do anything like that for their people. And yeah, they still meet their bottom line results and that's great. But you know, I think if you really want to be a great company and the difference between meeting your obligations and, you know, kicking through the goal and just crushing it, it has to do with investing in your people this way. And I just don't know how you can be everything you can be in an organization if you aren't, you know, focused on that. It just doesn't make sense to me.

Lori: Yeah, well, and if you're not doing that and you're still profitable and you're still being successful, like you said, there are plenty of businesses that are doing that. How much more profitable could they be if they did that? Seems short sighted of them. Yeah. In our original conversation, we also talked about mentorship and some of the advantages and disadvantages that you've experienced in having mentors, having powerful mentors and of not having powerful examples. Talk a little bit about what your experience has been there.

Suzanne: Yeah. So I talked about my core values and how I'm, you know, wired a certain way, but when I was younger, that was not obvious to me. I didn't go out into the world with all of the self-confidence and inability. I just didn't, I didn't go to college and finish. You know, I didn't do a lot of things that a lot of other people do. I headed right out into the job market and started juggling three jobs and I had a small baby at the time and a marriage that didn't last over a year and all kinds of challenges at that time and really an immature way of looking at life. was very, I'll use the word Pollyanna and I hadn't really tapped into the wolf yet.

And so I found myself struggling to figure out what I was going to do. And, you know, that's when things happen. And it did. It happened. I had a mentor and I talk about her all the time.

She was at a property that I was living at and said, you know, why don't you try, you know, leasing? Why don't you try renting apartments and see if that's something that you would like to do? And she, we built such a rapport because she's so good at it. I basically told her my life story, which I don't usually do either. And she's like, Hey, you'd be great at this. And I wasn't, I was terrible at it. But she worked with me. She saw something in me that I didn't see in myself. And from that moment forward, I began to have these people just show up.

And I know some people will say, well, you put yourself in that spot. You took the risk. You pushed. You did this. But I know a lot of people that do that, and they don't. I feel lucky in this way. And so I had people that were owners, and I was down at the bottom of the totem pole, and they saw something, and they brought me in, and they taught me everything that they knew, and they believed in me. And that happened almost in every single company I have worked with.

There have been some other examples of people not to be like. Yeah, some terrible, terrible moments in my career where, you know, people took advantage of me and my vulnerability, if you will, and being young and kind of stupid about certain things. And so, you know, my dad always told me, beware of the flatterer.

And it's a really powerful statement because sometimes the people that are telling you that you're the greatest are the people that want to tear you down. So, you know, trying to balance that, you know, disappointment or experience that I had on that side of it was really hard for me. But I've always believed on the power of good people and, you know, people doing the right thing.

Because for the majority of my life that has been what has happened. And a mentor can make all the difference in the world. It's the mentor who I had when I was going through some of these more difficult times that said, you know, this is not your fault and you have to do this anyway. This is your job. And how do you reconcile that? And helping me through that, helping me understand the financial reasons behind all of it, because I was very emotional about it. You know, this was something I helped build and wow, you know, this is just

Why? And that was really helpful. And you know, I feel like too, and I use the word feel because it does conjure up a lot of emotion for me, but I really do feel like it is the way we get through life. And if we don't have people that are better than us, smarter than us, whatever, believe in us, it can be a really lonely path. So I'm really grateful for the good and the bad.

I think it's helped me tremendously with how I treat other people and try to open doors and make sure that I'm paying it forward because I had people do that for me.

Lori: That ties back to what you were talking about as one of your core values that you learned when you were growing up is that nobody does anything alone. And I've always said, you know, that term of a self-made whatever, it just rubs me the wrong way. Like grit, it rubs me like grit.

Even if you were raised by wolves, you didn't raise yourself. The wolves helped raise you.

Suzanne: They did, and I think of them every day in my mind, maybe not to their faces all the time, but yeah, now we have our cabittals.

Lori: But right, but as humans, we are wired to connect interpersonally, I say that all the time, and we were evolutionarily raised in villages, like we require other people to help us be humans, to help us be alive.

Suzanne: Totally, totally. mean, that's, yeah, I think about people that are in isolation, even, you know, we, a more benign part of that, and I how benign it is at this point with all the evidence of mental illness coming out of COVID, but, you know, just that as an example of isolation has, you know, been a very big eye-opener to some, but there are lots of cases of that. And yeah, I totally agree with you. Isolation is stifling and people can't grow in that.

Lori: Yeah. We talked about a couple of the more challenging times that you've been through in your life, in your career, and how other people have helped you through that. Were there other tools that you incorporated in to help you manage? Like, I don't know. I don't want to put words in your mouth. outside of maybe outside of counseling, there other tools?

Suzanne: Oh yeah. Yeah, I'm an avid reader. I feel that music is also a really important aspect of my life that takes me out of the current mind space that I'm in. Reading does that too. I look for mind shifts, opportunities to shift my mindset. And some of it's post-it notes.

Okay, I'll pull one right here. This one's kind of silly. It does have to do with mindshifting, but how can AI help me with this today? Like just little things that I can put in front of myself to change the way I'm looking at the world at any given moment. Yeah, I mean the whole, I wrote this whole thing on my blog about the mindset shift of not yet and just putting that at the end of the sentence.

I didn't invent it, but it really was powerful for me for a while. Like I used that almost every day for a few months because I was learning so much building my own business. And I kept, you know, having the little posture come in there and say, well, you've never done it or why are you doing it at this age? Or who do you think you are that you can do this? And I just changed it and said, well, I haven't done this yet. I haven't done this part yet. I haven't done this, you know sold this product yet or whatever that was and just that was a little mindset shift. So that's how I do it. I go outside of myself because sometimes we're our own worst enemy. We just get into our own thing and ugh, can't get out.

Lori: And if you're just listening and you're not looking at the video where I'm holding up, like she held up some Post-It note, I've got a bunch of them over here I'm holding up. it definitely helps to keep you focused. Because your mind can run away and just having that little Post-It note with that question to remind yourself, what are you focused on right now? What could you be thinking about? Where I don't have it.

I don't know if it's on a post-it note. I'll have to put it on one. It's in my journal, but there was a, I'll have to put it in the summary or in the show notes or in the key takeaways, because I can't find it right now. But there's a question that I've been asking or keeping in front of myself as something to help keep me, yeah, here it is. Okay, what thoughts would help me overcome this?

Suzanne: Ooh, yeah. Super good. Super good. And it's a great coaching question for other people too. Like, is this real? That's another great one. You know, just asking yourself, is this a real thought? Is it true? Or is it just something you've said to yourself and made it true? You know, is it true? I love that. You know, there's a lot of little things that we can do to shift our mindsets.

But you have to be willing. think, you and you've probably experienced this with other people, you know when someone's not and they're just stuck. And not that we give up on those people ever, but it's, they gotta be ready. People have to be ready to hear all of that, that messaging that comes from the universe because otherwise they don't.

Lori: Yeah, and it's not necessarily giving up on them, but it's also not, when people are not ready, they're not ready. And so you're not giving up on them, but it's not like you're not putting more energy into it because they're clearly not ready. So let's go on to somebody who is ready. And when they're ready, if and when, they can come back.

Well, this has been such an amazing conversation. I've had so much fun here and you brought up the your love of music, which leads right into the question of is there a song that you a specific song that you listen to when you need an extra boost of energy?

Suzanne: Yeah, someone just asked me this the other day too. And it went right to the fight song. I mean, that song is just really inspiring to me. It gets me going. And that's probably the wolf, like just calling on all the grit I can at a moment where I need to get past something and get the energy for it. And that's a great song. And I never get tired of it.

Lori: It, that is a good song, Rachel Platten. I'll put that in the show notes if people wanna click on the link and go listen to it. And since you mentioned Wolf, Shakira has a song called, what is it? Isn't it called She-Wolf? Yeah. Yeah.

Suzanne: I think so. my gosh. That's right. I'll see. The universe is working. Telling ya.

Lori: Suzanne, if people want to continue a conversation with you, where is the best place for them to find you?

Suzanne: LinkedIn, I'm all over that. So yeah, just come see me, Suzanne Hopson. And yeah, reach out, DM me, I'd love to have a conversation.

Lori: Okay, cool, I'll put a link to that in the show notes as well. Thank you so much for joining me today on Fine is a 4-Letter Word.

Suzanne: Thank you. Thank you so much, Lori.