Get your goat: So you want to move to the country and raise goats - A podcast about change
Get your goat: So you want to move to the country and raise goats - A podcast about change
Season 3 / Episode 42: Monica Kreuger's Journey of Change and Community Building
What happens when you leave the safety of a steady job to follow your passion? Monica Kreuger, the tenacious entrepreneur behind Praxis Global Info Brokers and the Praxis School of Entrepreneurship, navigated through this challenging path and has a wealth of stories to share with us. From her transformative journey to flourishing in a community-oriented approach, Monica's tale serves as a testament to the mantra, "Do What You Love and the Money Will Follow."
Monica brings to the table her exemplary knack for building strong networks that have become her pillars of support in achieving her goals. She tells us about her unique approach to community building and the anticipation of constant change - something that seems to be a constant in her life. Her insightful experiences in caring for aging family members while balancing her own family and work responsibilities will leave you pondering about your ways of handling change and how you can cultivate a support system within your community.
From finding joy in the simplest things in life to recognizing the importance of self-care, Monica's insights shed light on the importance of balancing personal and professional life for success. Join us as we delve into Monica's inspiring journey and how her belief in the power of community has shaped her life and business. Thank you for tuning in!
Welcome to. So you Want to Move to the Country and Raise Goats? This is a podcast about change. Change is all around us and sometimes we're ready for it and sometimes we're not. When it overwhelms us, well, we just want to move to the country and raise goats. This podcast features stories from people who have gone through change. We hope that their insights will help you better understand and deal with the changes in your life. I'm Peggy Kanick and, along with my co-host, katherine Greiba, we chat with insightful people with interesting change stories. We hope you enjoy our podcast.
Speaker 2:Monica Kruger is the owner of Praxis Global Info Brokers and she started this company nearly 35 years ago with her husband. Prior to starting her own company, she was working for the federal government and after 10 years she just knew there was more. She had read the book Do what you Love and the Money Will Follow, and Monica has been following this advice very successfully. But Monica describes how money isn't important to her. What's important is community and family With community. Monica describes how she thinks about community impact versus the impact you have as one person and uses the expertise of others to fill in the gaps. She has the most impactful way of supporting her family and I just know you are going to leave this podcast feeling a deep sense of admiration for Monica and all that she has done and continues to do. Well, today we're joined by Monica Kruger from her home. That's part of an eco village in Craig and I know Craig's a scratch, but I know there's a little bit of a story there. Monica, welcome to our podcast, really looking forward to our conversation today.
Speaker 3:Oh, thanks. I love talking to the two of you.
Speaker 2:Well, I know both Peg and I have known you for a number of years and there are parts of your story that I know and parts that I'm just learning about. But you and your husband have you know you very successful. You know school of entrepreneurs. You have your owners to practice group of schools, but you haven't always done that. In fact, I didn't know that you left a fairly secure government job to start a business, and that was over almost 34 years ago, and that must have been quite interesting to go from security of government to running your own business, and I would might even add that it wouldn't have been necessarily a commonplace business at the time. So tell us about, about that, monica, how you decided to make that change and what that was like.
Speaker 3:Well, I'd have to say first of all, I had 10 years working for the federal government and I really enjoyed my time there. I grew a lot. We spent four years in Toronto while my husband was getting his first degree in film and photography and I was able to work with Statistics Canada. That was fabulous. It was working with customers, like working with people, and how do they use the information, and I love numbers and I love surveys and all of that was a wonderful match for me. I had an excellent regional director there who helped me move up the scale pretty fast and then when we started having our children and my husband was finished his degree, we moved back to Saskatoon where we have family and a couple more kids and I was working with Industry Canada at that time. It was called many things before it landed on Industry Canada.
Speaker 3:I was working then in the planning and analysis area, so doing lots of reporting and researching and writing and coming up with great ideas. It was primarily a male dominated department and I was the sole female at the time in that area. I was also pursuing my masters at the same time and I really wanted to find a way to get this amazing amount of information that was in Industry Canada out to the storefront. Like how do we get this information into the hands of business owners, Because there was so much information this is before all automation that we have today how do we take this data that isn't necessarily in libraries and help business owners make better decisions?
Speaker 3:I've always loved business. I was in business early on my own as a teenager and before that making things, selling things. So I just love the concept of being in a business and I came up with an idea that I was allowed to kind of flesh out how to take this to the street level, did some pilot piloting of it and it worked well. People were interested in it and I wanted to take it to the next level. At that time the regional director was fairly new, but he was more of an older school Felt that I should be at home with my four children.
Speaker 3:Told me that on a party dance floor, oh lovely. And I realized, after being quite shocked, that this was not going to go anywhere and I needed to try and see what next steps were. I pursued all the way up the ladder. I talked to, you know, the union. I talked to everybody to say, like, what can I do here? And the process was basically at the end of the day in 1989. This was not a war. I was going to win, not a battle. I was going to win not a hill I could die on.
Speaker 3:So I talked to my husband. We had some conversations about what would be next, because I was making good money. He had started a business so I was really helping to float the startup of that photography company. So we had some really tough decisions to come to. You know, are we going to stay here and keep working in something I don't love, or are we going to try and take this concept and launch it in the private sector? That sounds like it was really easy. It really wasn't and we had 99% of the people we knew said don't quit, you're going to have this great pension, all of this kind of stuff down the road.
Speaker 3:But I had one person in that I was working with who gave me a book called Do what you Love, the Money Will Follow and it was written in 1989. And I went and got that. She gave me that book, I read it and it was just like this awe-inspiring wake up light bulb moment that said you have to love what you're doing. And I did love what I was doing and I loved working with people, which it didn't have that much opportunity to do with the second stint of government work and it was just like okay, this is speaking to me. I have to love what I do. This speaks to me because I know that I'm here to make an impact. I'm not making an impact here. I can't just stay somewhere for a pension. That made no sense to me. So I gave my notice, did all the paperwork and things that had to be done and stepped away from the job.
Speaker 1:So the risk of that decision? Monica, did that? Take your breath away a little bit.
Speaker 3:It did take my breath away, More from the perspective of listening to what other people were telling me. I'm very much love to hear other people's perspectives. I've had mentors, I've had coaches. I love to learn.
Speaker 3:So when people were telling me this wasn't the right thing to do, I really leaned on my partner, my husband at the time, who said you have to do this. This is not a healthy place for you to be. He'd been encouraging me to leave earlier and I just kept thinking I could fix it, I could make it happen, and I just couldn't. And I have to say that once I quit, once I left and the weight came off my shoulders, I got very sick. So I was sick for six weeks. I had walking pneumonia doctor. That got me into the doctor because you don't know that you're sick with walking pneumonia necessarily and they said it was lucky that I got in when I did. It's a disease you die from. So I didn't realize that was happening to me. And that's what comes from being in a place that you shouldn't be and doing what you don't love.
Speaker 2:And Marius Monica. So, having gone through that, have you paid attention to your body, Because there's probably were some signals that you were just ignoring. I'm not feeling great, just kept going. Having gone through that, has it helped you over the years to pay attention now?
Speaker 3:I am very aware, very body aware.
Speaker 3:There are certainly times that I'm not Like, certainly times during this beginning and running of the business where you know you're working through the night and things like that and not something you wanna do on a regular basis. But I had other things that I did a lot of. I had my dance groups, I had reading, lots of activity. I just made sure that I had a mixture of things. I still can't say I had any balance. I don't know that I've ever had balance, but I've had a mixture of things in my life. That and also keeping my connections open to my partner and good friends that are saying you need to stop, you need to rest, you're doing too much, You're not seeing what's happening and I really try hard to listen to people Tell me that because of that experience.
Speaker 3:So, monica, you have kids.
Speaker 1:I don't know how many children you have, like how many, four, four. So in the midst of all of this, you've made a decision, you've taken a leap of faith to leave your secure job to start a business. Then you get sick and, as you say, balance has never been something that you've been able to achieve, but you've been able to do it. It's something that you've been able to achieve, but you also had four children at the time. That must have really put a lot of pressure on you.
Speaker 3:Yes, really, we really have good support of families, so I think that's important. No-transcript ask for help. And we certainly asked for help from family. So Brent, my husband's family and my family would step in up to the plate and friends for sure. We did have daycare and we did have for a while an Annie, so we went to some additional kinds of supports. I'm not a person who thinks I can run a household 110% and be the magic cleaner and cooker and all those things. I'm quite happy and over the years have gotten really, really good at asking for help and paying for support, because there's no, there's no blessing in being a barter, there's just none, you know and even though the boomer years you know those of us who were born into the boomer years that's what we were taught.
Speaker 3:You know get her done, you can do it. You know be independent, you know all of that stuff. That's not how we run our lives now.
Speaker 1:I'm so interested in the comments you made about balance and how you've never really had it. You know we're inundated with you know in the media you must have balance. You know, reduce your stress, have to have balance in your life, and yet it would seem that you can come to a place of reckoning and acceptance about the lack of balance in your life and you can still get through it in a healthy way. Am I, am I making that up, or is that? Well, that's really good.
Speaker 3:I'm not sure I believe in the concept of balance, and the reason I say that is that I think we're in constant flux as people anyway, we're constantly evolving. So what was a balance three months ago Isn't a balance today, and if you look for this balance, it's. You can't change. Like you know, the balance shifts my balance today. You know what makes me happy and not overstressed and all of those types of things. Today is quite a bit different than what it would have been a year ago or two years ago.
Speaker 2:And yet, you know, it sounds like you figured it out that, ok, I'm not the cooker and the cleaner and all of that, so I'm not going to worry about it, I'm going to let somebody else do it, and I think that's a bit of a secret ingredient to how we can become better is just there is just some stuff we're not good at, and nor should we do it and just carry on the things that we like and that we're good at, and there's no shame in that. There's no, in fact. That's what we need to be doing.
Speaker 3:I totally agree with you and I think that's part of what I really think is important that we need to be doing today, just in a broader picture, which is finding our community again. We don't have that really connected community and we need it. I have surrounded myself over my life with people who know what they're doing and who fill in ton of gaps that I don't have, and I just see them as part of my people.
Speaker 2:And those people will change. You know yeah, tell us more about that what it means to build a community. How does that look like? What do you do to do that?
Speaker 3:Well and it's something I didn't have, I would say, when I left my job is I didn't have that network. I was chatting with my husband about this earlier, and when I left the job to start the business, I didn't have that developed business network to step into. I had to start it, and that's a lot of work. Today I have a really wide network and people in all kinds of areas. Part of that's a feature of my age and having, you know, operated in the community for a long time. But I think it's also part of who I am, which is making these personal connections to me, builds me as a person. But I've also been told that vice versa that works right In relationships you're helping others build as well. So in our office, for example, we have a number of people that do a variety of different things. Some of them are employees, some of them aren't, but they anyone who isn't there. They have specialty areas that I don't have and I don't want to develop. I want to be able to connect with the people who have these specialty areas so that as a group we have much more ability to affect a difference in the community than one person trying to be all of those things. So this sort of fluid network. I kind of see it kind of floating right. Whatever you're working on, there's other people that can come into this group and can can make a bigger and more impactful difference in community.
Speaker 3:So if we think about community impact versus just individual impact or just business impact, we make decisions in a different way. We look at our resources in a different way. We look at our people in a different way, look at our money in a different way. You know, even in our own personal finances, we haven't done the save for your retirement plan. We've had, we have children, grown children, and we've tried to support them in the times that they need it. And we know, from from what we've done in terms of helping our parents, that they'll be also there to help us if we need it in the future. Certainly, we have some you know, some things set aside for us, some things set aside, but it isn't like the you know, the Freedom 55 plan or whatever people talk about and have millions setting aside for your retirement. That's not us. We've used our money and financial finances in a community way, helping our family and our broader family develop, because that makes more sense to do that now not as a person and a couple, all by ourselves.
Speaker 1:It seems to me too, monica, just listening to you talk about community and and how how you've utilized the expertise of others to to fill in gaps, that this is really enabled you to allow your curiosity to really take hold and take you in really interesting other directions. And I'm thinking that the whole community piece is what's allowed, that let's allow that to thrive.
Speaker 3:That's a really good point, peggy, I think. I think that's really true. We think about all the projects that we're working on right now. They're all. They're all in ways that we can give back. How do we create something that can have a life beyond our life here on this planet? And we're working on on this concept of a wallopini, right now out in in Craig and developing this pilot project around growing you know, growth greenhouses underground, and but we're doing that in mind of not just growing for ourselves but creating a process, kind of working out the kinks and then finding ways to share that in community so people can build them if they want in a small community or build them in their backyard or whatever, but they can take these concepts and spread them. So that's that's how we think about things all the time.
Speaker 2:You know, monica, it just sounds like that you've really understood that as we go through life, there is change and nothing is static. And even you know, tell us about because you've looked after aging parents and it's really. It sounds like you know for very good reasons, but also part of it is you're sitting an example for your children. This is how we do things in this family. We look after each other and when it's our turn, you'll look after us. So how, how, what was that like? Looking after aging parents and still running? You know business and being involved in community and building community and you know for children, even though they're they're grown very much in need of of you and your husband and you're part of them. Tell us about that caregiving that you went through.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and I not. I'm not sure that we ever. Well, I know we didn't plan early on that we would take care of parents as they needed it down the road. But this evolution, we evolve, you know, we become different people as time moves on and it just seemed like the natural thing to do. It didn't take a long time to decide that we would help our parents. In fact it was pretty quick.
Speaker 3:My father-in-law had a mini stroke and I think he had had a couple of them before that. His wife, my mother-in-law, was in a wheelchair and they were living in an acreage, a lot to look after. Huge decision for them. But we said we need you to live with us because something could happen and if you can't get to the hospital and we're a little bit away, you know we would love for you to come and stay with us. We're in, we're in the country. So that was still good for them. They were able to still have their coffee on the deck and all of those kinds of things.
Speaker 3:But the process of moving them out was huge. So it's like you give this. You know we'd love to come be with us and then afterwards you're going. Oh my goodness, the impact of that decision was pretty major. But we had all our family, all our family pitched in. We went through this whole big house they had. We got stuff moved around and a lot of our daughter moved into that house for a while. So there was again a whole family. It wasn't us just taking care of our children, but they also were. You know, they're as active in participating in the development of this big family unit as well.
Speaker 1:That decision? You know you've got a comfortable life going on, you're used to having your own space and your own routine and to make that decision to invite people into your home. Did that take a long time for your husband and you to talk through and come up with what that was going to look like or what the impact might be?
Speaker 3:No, that's what I'm saying. It was just pretty fast. And then, because it was just, you know they helped both sets of parents, helped us in our businesses to start and you know his family helped with our children for the first summer that I had left the secure employment. They kept them at the acreage for the summers. Like there was just this kind of support even from their level and there really wasn't. It was a very short conversation, yeah.
Speaker 3:And then we just figured out. You know, we'll figure it out as we go along. That was kind of our process and it absolutely had an impact, absolutely. But there were lots of, you know, there were lots of good things from it. And then we had for three years we had one of our kids and their family move in with us as they were moving from Alberta to Saskatchewan. So the kids, the grandkids, had four generations that they were able to appreciate these different levels of living and learning. You know the great grandpa was greeted every morning by the little great grandchildren coming up to his room going good morning great grandpa, and he loved that. But they also had they took care of their parents. So my husband saw that in his growing up, so there was sort of that. I remember my Oma. So my dad's mom stayed with us for a while and then moved in with his sister. So it was kind of that in our history, but without us ever thinking about that, without us ever going. Oh, I guess we should do that. It just sort of happened.
Speaker 2:I mean just the way you describe it, Monica you talk about. It just sounds like you've been so open to the changes in life and that it is just the natural thing to do, and I think you have to have a certain openness around that to see what's going to come. But you must have peace of mind, also knowing that these decisions are the right thing to do because it's time, it's our time to do this.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, I think that's true, catherine, and I think we've kind of approached our whole lives that way. Both my husband and I have done that, where we may not always have completely figured out something, but we've always made it work. And whatever it takes, we've figured it out, we've made it work. So we don't have a lot of fear. That's not saying we haven't had fear. We don't have a lot of it so that it stops us from moving forward. We believe that there's again community, there's support, we have gifts and talents, we have energy, we have connections, and you build those so that you can grow. And I think that's just what we've done. We've not been super safe people. I guess we have a higher risk tolerance, to use a technical term, but I think it's more.
Speaker 3:The curiosity thing you were talking about, peggy, is that there's so many interesting things to do in life and I wish we had five lives. We're still going OK, we're going to get this and this. We've got to get to this stage. No, somebody else. If we bring people along, they'll continue the story. If something happens to us, somebody will finish the wall of peony. We've got people that are all kind of coming to these projects and we know that that will continue on if it's meant to. So I think the curiosity thing was a good point, peggy.
Speaker 1:I have a question how do you, what kind of advice would you give people who are interested in fostering that sense of community, I guess, and a foundation of it's got to be caring and love. I mean it really does, because now when we have our aging parents, we start looking at a residence to put them in right. Is there any piece of advice you could give to people or something for them to think about, moving forward, as to what might foster that kind of thinking, to maybe go down a different path than what we normally do now with our aging family members?
Speaker 3:I think you know, my mom's situation was different. She was in her own home till she passed with dementia, but my brother was living with her and unfortunately he passed in 2020. So we had to make decisions again on the fly overnight. What are we doing with mom? And there was no discussion that we would put her into a facility, which seems weird since I'm chair of the Luther Care community sport, but I felt again, reach out to the family. What are we wanting to do? How are we planning to take care of mom? Do we need to live in person?
Speaker 3:We did all the number crunching what would it cost to have her in a facility or to have a live in person?
Speaker 3:We went through a number of scenarios and then again my daughter, who had lived in my parents in law home prior to it being sold, stepped up to the plane and said either one of the daughters said well, we could live there, like we could stay there and live with her, and so that we talked as to who would be the best suited at the time and they moved in and were mom's caregivers basically for the last two years of her life, and then I stepped in a couple of days a week gave them relief and then when my sister moved back to Saskatoon she was able to help as well. So it's just, it was a different situation but we were able to make it work with our family community and we certainly looked at resources in the community and use them as well. So we did have some home care we did. Once COVID released the dementia daycare program. We were taking mom to the day program. So we used facilities in the community. We looked for and found them and use them.
Speaker 1:So it sounds like it, you know, fostering a curious mind and openness to to trying different things, rather than the status quo of, you know, while we're going to find a facility for mom or dad. That seems to be really the message I'm getting is to open up your mind to to doing other things rather than the institutional approach.
Speaker 3:And I guess you would know as well, being entrepreneurs, that we've never we've rarely gone with status quo. The whole point of being in your own business right is to do things in a different way and to make life better for your community, for your clients, for the people that you work with. Your whole concept is how do we do things in a better or different way and I guess we applied that in in our home situation as well is is that whole innovation, that whole creativity, which is connected to curiosity directly? That is just part of our DNA. So when people say, well, it can't be done, we go well, I'm not sure that's the case. What if we try it this way or that way, or maybe that one thing can't be done? But what about this over here? Or the curiosity piece, question everything, does it have to be this way? Well, I'm pretty sure there's. There was something different before this, so there's going to be something different after this. What can we do?
Speaker 2:Sounds like your. Your kind of relationship with fear was healthy in that what is the worst that can happen, you know, and having a real healthy approach to managing risk or you know that worst thing. I did that also help you and your husband kind of have some, you know, I guess, comfort in the decisions that you were making.
Speaker 3:I think so. I would have to say, you know, I will never forget there was one time I was, I had such fear. I had such fear that it actually stopped me in my tracks. I was working out at the gym. This is when we were starting to get our house organized out here in Craig, and it was extremely difficult to find funding for a building in an eco village between Saskatoon and China. Like, regular banks were not interested because the land was a dollar, so that just made them their head spin. They didn't know what to do with that. And so we were really out like how are we going to do this? And it's a construction mortgage and so we have to have the money to put down.
Speaker 3:Like it was just like this whole thing. And I'm on my treadmill and I'm going and going and and all of a sudden my whole body just froze, like I couldn't move, I was like a statue and I was just in this. You know, I wasn't able to even see a scenario. I remember just getting stuck and I went to my old way of doing things with yoga and I just started to breathe. So I just started like okay, just breathe. Like nobody is dying here today. So just have a breath and think about it and think about it.
Speaker 3:And, and the very worst case scenario was we lose everything. Like this doesn't happen. We lose everything. And I just went, okay. If that happens, does that mean? What does that really mean?
Speaker 3:We're both very talented, very gifted, connected. We are not afraid to do anything. So if I, you know, I have to do a job I'm not liking or loving, I'll do it to put food on the like. There's nothing that we wouldn't do, okay. So if that's the case, and that's the worst case, and we still walk away and we have our lives and our children and everything else, what's going on here?
Speaker 3:And within about a week after that, we had a colleague say hey, I'll give you the money you need to start Pay me whenever, I don't care if it's 10 years, I don't want interest. I love what you're doing, we love you. Here's the money. I was like, okay, all right, and I should have known this was what my life was going to be like, because when I met my husband, he was a guy who had no fear. He would jump off of bridges onto tire tubes on the rapids, he would want it to skydive. He did you know what's hang gliding, like all these things that I thought were absolutely going to kill you? Well, that's kind of what our life has been like experiencing completely interesting off the wall, you know, hang gliding sometimes, sometimes jumping onto the rapids and hanging onto the tire tube, maybe not quite landing on it, but that's kind of been our journey. And you know what? We're still here.
Speaker 2:You know, monica, it's so every time I meet you. You're just so full of joy and you've just accomplished so much. And now you know I understand a little bit of where you're coming from is that you know that sense of community that we're in this for something bigger than ourselves, and it just shines through in you, your joyfulness and your approach to life. I gotta tell you this has been just a wonderful conversation. Thank you so much for joining us today.
Speaker 3:I appreciate that a lot. Thank you so much. Thanks for the invitation.
Speaker 1:Thank you, monica. Okay, if you've learned just one thing about change while listening to this podcast, please subscribe on Apple or Spotify and share with a friend. This episode recorded via Zoom Audio. Producers Peggy Kahnik and Catherine Greiba. Executive producer, kahnik, leadership Advisory. Theme music La Pompée, written by Chris Harrington, music publisher in Vato Market. For information on this podcast and to purchase some fabulous goat merchandise, please visit wwwgetyourgoatca.