Next weekend

It’s Sunday, late morning. The kids are upstairs in the rare, suspicious version of getting along that you don’t dare interrupt. You’re at the kitchen table with your phone face-down and a coffee that has been cold for an hour. Looking at the week ahead — the shifts, the dance class, the contractor you keep meaning to call back, the insurance renewal you keep meaning to read — you’re doing the math you do every Sunday around this time. You are telling yourself you will get to the back office on the weekend. Next weekend.

I have stood in that kitchen. Not the same one. But the same one.

Colin and I sat at that table. At some point — I couldn’t even tell you exactly when — we divided our lives without discussing it. He took on the operations of the business. I took on the operations of the family. Both of us, I think, quietly wished we could do more in the other’s world. But when you’re growing, you don’t have that luxury. You just keep the parts of the machine running that are yours to run.

That’s still a dance we’re figuring out. It’s better now than it’s been. But nobody talks about this part when they’re talking about adding doors — the part where one person is building, and the other person is necessarily standing back, holding everything else together. The kids. The house. The schedule. The family obligations that don’t pause because you’re in the middle of a tenant dispute or a mortgage renewal.

To the person building, none of that can feel as urgent as building the thing. And of course — that doesn’t go over well with a broken dishwasher and a soccer practice at 6pm. That’s how it actually happens. And it is easy on no one.

The thing nobody tells you about this part — the part where you have three or four or six doors and a full-time job — is that the work itself is not what gets you. The buildings are fine. The buildings are appreciating. The rents are being paid, mostly on time, mostly without drama. You know how to fix a toilet and you know how to read a tenant and you know which contractor will actually call you back and which one is going to ghost you. You are good at the part you signed up for.

It’s the other part. The part that lives in your Gmail and three different spreadsheets and one folder on a laptop nobody has backed up and an enormous amount of room inside your own head. The part that doesn’t have a name yet — because nobody has bothered to name it for you — but that you feel every Sunday at this kitchen table, and every time your accountant emails in January, and every time your phone buzzes at 9:47 PM and you already know, before you look at it, that it’s a tenant and not a friend.

You are tired. Not the tired you’d say out loud. The tired that just keeps moving.

You are not disorganized.

I want you to read that twice. Because I think you have been carrying disorganized around like a private verdict for a while now, and I want to take it off you for a minute.

You are not disorganized. You are uninstrumented.

Those are different words and they describe different things. Disorganized is a story about your character. Uninstrumented is a description of your equipment. You have built a real, multi-property, corporately-held, partner-supported, kid-adjacent, shift-work-resistant business with no infrastructure budget, no team, no precedent in your family, and no industry support for a person at your stage. Of course the instruments don’t exist yet. There has never been time to build them. You have been too busy being them.

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I want to be clear about who I’m writing this for, because I think you have been read at by a lot of people who were not, in fact, reading you.

This is for the paramedic in Sarnia with two duplexes and a triplex she bought in 2019, who answers tenant texts in the truck between calls.

This is for the ICU nurse in Kitchener with the fourplex and the basement suite, whose shift schedule and her partner’s shift schedule have not aligned for a real weekend in three months.

This is for the Grade 5 teacher in Barrie with four singles in Sudbury that she manages from four hours away, doing the books at 11 PM on Tuesdays after report cards.

This is for the journeyman electrician in Guelph with three properties in St. Catharines, who has never once told the guys at work what he owns because he doesn’t want them to look at him different.

This is for the firefighter, the corrections officer, the federal employee, the power-line tech, the Grade 2 teacher whose husband is in the trades. The ones who, between them, have built something that does not have a name anyone has bothered to give it.

This is for anyone with a real job and a real portfolio, in any Canadian town nobody’s writing think-pieces about.

You are not a hobbyist. You are not just a small landlord. You are not not a real investor.

You are an operator who hasn’t claimed the word yet — because nobody handed it to you, and you are not the type to pick it up off the floor on your own.

I am handing it to you. It’s yours. You earned it sometime around door three.

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If you’ve read this far, you’ll see that this is a different kind of newsletter. The investment side of our business has been expanding over the past six years, and somewhere along the way we realized our systems stood out among the crowd. We want to be able to share that with our community. Starting now, each week you are going to receive at least one useful tool/skill/prompt that is going to move you forward in your business immediately. Not a multi-step, overwhelming product, but something that could change your business RIGHT NOW.

This newsletter exists because of what comes next. I’m not going to tell you everything yet — but I will tell you this: there is a version of your back office that doesn’t require you to white-knuckle it forever. The tools exist now that simply did not exist three years ago. And we’ve spent the last year figuring out exactly how they apply to you — not to a tech startup, not to a property management company with a staff of twelve. To you. At your kitchen table. With your cold coffee and your kids upstairs.

That’s what we’re building here, together.

Next Sunday, I’ll be back.

I’m glad you’re here.

— Nicole