Welcome back.

In last week's episode, I discussed some of the changes and challenges we faced this past year at Team Broady but being surrounded by such an amazing crew has made all the difference. 

To give a brief history... Libby started working with Royal LePage back in 1988. Previously, she was a stay-at-home mom. At that point, with the prospect of putting four kids through university, our dad suggested that she needed to go back to work and real estate would be a good part time job with flexible hours. Yeah right! Within two years, she was among the top agents in the office, and since then she's never taken her foot off the gas! 

In the year 2000, my older brother Sean approached Libby and asked if he could come to work with her in real estate. She was skeptical at first but decided to give it a shot. Fortunately, things ended up working out well for them both.

In 2007, my sister Catherine decided to leave a career in teaching to test the waters in real estate. I arrived a little later to join the party in 2010, after making my best attempt at pursuing a career in music. It was then that the four of us decided to brand ourselves as “Team Broady”. 

In 2016, we began to hire new employees and we expanded the team beyond just family. Sean’s then girlfriend (now wife) Kim Windsor was the first to join us, followed by Desiree Ofter. We had our share of challenges, but the business continued to thrive and grow. 

 Working with family can be tough! We didn't always agree on every decision that had to be made, but we always found a way to get along and make things work. We didn’t always share the same goals or objectives and that was usually the root cause of any conflict we had as a team. There were some fundamental differences in opinion, but as a family, we learned to put those differences aside and make compromises when necessary. But sometimes... there's only so much compromise one can make before it becomes a real problem. 

 In January of 2019, Sean informed us that he no longer felt like he could continue working together with us as part of the family team. He had reached a point where he saw a different path for his business, and it didn't quite align with the existing business we all shared together. So he and Kim decided to break away from the pack and form their own, new team known as The Broady-Windsor Group.

You can imagine how hard this was for my mom Libby to take. After 20 years of working together with Sean, he was now leaving to start his own new venture. With so many shared clients with whom they had worked together in the past, this break-up was very confusing for all concerned. 
 
As difficult as all of this has been, we all support Sean and Kim whole-heartedly. We know it wasn't easy for them, but we also know that they will continue to be successful at what they do, and that their success won't take away from ours in any way. 

Now, to add to the complexity of this situation... there were two other family members who were in the process of taking their real-estate courses to become licensed agents. My older brother Scott, and Sean's daughter Megan. They had both made the decision to get into real estate well over a year ago - long before Sean and Kim informed us that they would be leaving the team. We were all excited that they would be joining Team Broady - adding once again to the strength and diversity of the business. 

For Libby, this meant she would be at the helm of a family real estate dynasty! Just imagine how proud that idea made her feel - working with all 4 of her kids and her eldest granddaughter all under the same banner - in a business she started over 30 years ago. Talk about a legacy!

But all that has changed now. Both Scott and Megan ended up choosing to join Sean and Kim. We fully respect and support their decision, despite how disappointing it was for us. 

So here we are, a family of real estate brokers divided in two! Team Broady on one side (Myself, Libby, Catherine, Desiree and Alex) and The Broady-Windsor Group on the other (Sean, Kim, Scott, and Megan)

This could be a reality tv show in the making, couldn’t it?  Move over Kardashians….. 

We almost have to be able to step back and have a good laugh about it. At the same time, I think we can gain a valuable lesson from the experience and stop kidding ourselves that our family is any more "normal" than any other family out there. There's no such thing as a "normal" family, is there? Normal is boring anyway!

We felt the need to write about this and explain things more clearly to our clients and to the public in general. We can only imagine how strange this must seem to someone looking at it from the outside. It's all a bit confusing.
 
But such is life! Forever full of mistakes, challenges, setbacks, and struggles. What matters is how we react to those challenges, what we can learn from our mistakes, and how we can grow as a result of our struggles. 

There are no bad guys in all of this. There are no good guys either. There are no offenders, and there are no victims. We are just a family going through some changes. Changes to which we must learn to adapt. We all have an opportunity to learn and grow.

At first, the emotions were raw and this caused a lot of hurt and a lot of pain between family members. But as time goes by, and the emotions cool down, one thing we can all agree on is that we care for each other very much. Our love as a family runs far deeper than any ties to business or public perception. None of that matters in the end. All that really matters is that we have each other...and nothing can take that away from us.

Signing off…...Capt’n Mark Broady