This first official experience allowed us to learn several aspects of entrepreneurship, including starting a business, managing it and expanding it, until it was sold ten years later.
During these years, I continued my studies in business administration, in addition to integrating the family business and thus, learning the different facets of business management. I was slowly beginning to realize all the possibilities that were opening up in front of me. I also developed a passion for architecture and real estate, a passion that I shared with my partner Maxime, and which led us to our first acquisition. It was a house belonging to one of our landscape maintenance clients.
This project was my first reference, at the age of 18, to initiate my real estate career and learn, step by step, the parameters of renovating a house until its sale. This experience was the first in a series of upgrades of buildings for resale, which led us, more recently, to the acquisition and management of rental properties.
As I became an investor and entrepreneur, I attended several conferences on the subject, read several books and received all kinds of teachings that led me to focus on growth objectives. This quest to get more and more return on investment had no end, and was taking me further and further away from the initial pleasure I felt when creating projects. Investment and business management had become a matter of numbers, and everything else was secondary. Performance expectations were very much present in me and around me. My perception of success was financial success, which I calculated from the mind, and the amount was never high enough.
The inspirations that really made me vibrate were always present, but they were becoming rarer and rarer, because if they were not profitable enough, they were not considered. I then slowly associated these inspirations with the fact that they were not viable, until I put them aside completely. And a belief was born: if I do a project I love, it will certainly not be viable, so better to make as much money as possible now, in order to put off these inspirations for later, when I will be rich enough to realize them… And then I would roll up my sleeves and put even more pressure on myself, in order to generate an even greater return.
This quest for financial independence was outside of me, as my freedom had become conditional on my financial success, and my financial success was dependent on my efforts to generate returns. So the feeling of freedom had also become a goal to achieve! Yet, real freedom was always, and still is, available inside me…